Pathway to Japanese Literature

“Goodbye”
“Au revoir”“Adieu”
“Auf Wiedersehen,” “tsai jian,” “aloha,” and so on—.

All these are foreign equivalents of “Goodbye,” but each carries prayers or wishes—whether “(until we meet again)” or “(God be with you)”—rendering them incomparably more humane and hopeful than the resigned tone inherent in Japan’s “Goodbye.”
“Goodbye” is a parting phrase quintessentially Japanese—steeped in defeatist acceptance of impermanence, reduced to mere acknowledgment of unavoidable separation, permeated by that unsettling ease in choosing death’s realm which has characterized the Japanese people until now.

“Life is nothing but partings” is a line from the Tang Poetry Anthology.
Mr. Ibuse translated this line as “Life is nothing but goodbyes,” while Mr. Dazai—in his posthumous commentary on *Goodbye*—quoted both the original verse and this rendering, stating something to the effect that *“truly, the fleeting joy of human encounters is brief and shallow, while the heartache of parting lingers long and deep; one might say we live solely through the sentiment of farewell.”* Yet within the hollow, desolate resonance of “Goodbye,” one finds none of the humanity that even these two characters for “farewell” might suggest.

(Bushido is found in death)—the Japanese people had been taught that when standing at life’s crossroads between existence and oblivion, choosing death constituted righteousness.
The Japanese people who would trustingly drink poison from hands bearing metropolitan sanitation armbands and perish en masse within moments.
(“I depart to follow my lord”)—the Japanese people who until Meiji’s twilight years—no, persisting through the Pacific War—clung to this junshi custom as virtue; a practice now reviled even by those they deemed southern barbarians.
The Forty-seven Ronin.
General Nogi.
The chaste wives of militarism.
Countless casualties of war deluded into seeing shattered jewels where mere tiles lay broken.
The Sakurada martyrs; Nakaoka Kon’ichi; Captain Amakasu; those so-called patriots of May Fifteenth and February Twenty-sixth.
To their ranks one might dare add Arishima Takeo; Akutagawa; Mr. Dazai.
Thus did “Goodbye”—with its shallow nihilism—prove perfectly suited as this foolish nation’s sole farewell phrase; a people deifying suicides and assassins alike.

(Seeing death as returning home) Yoseyai.
Assassination was naturally a sin against humanity—even suicide constituted such a crime.
Humans had to maintain trust and responsibility toward their loved ones and future generations, valuing life above all.
Though threatened by the specter of a Third World War and driven to recklessness by our defeated nation’s inferiority complex, we needed only look upon the innocent smiles of our compatriots’ women and children who still trusted us.
Humans knew nothing through current knowledge of where we came from or where we vanished—yet we could believe with tactile certainty, as if touching with our palms and seeing with naked eyes, in this vigorous current of human vitality: children perpetually birthing new life onward.
To believe in that unknown future of humanity and strive to lay foundation stones for their golden realm—no matter how painful, shameful, or repulsive—to live and endeavor became our obligation and responsibility.
It was also a virtue akin to selfless acts.
One must never casually bid “Goodbye” to this world.

The scant rationality remaining in me admonished my disordered emotional life with such warnings, but now—surveying myself and my surroundings with disgust—I found myself gripped by a desire: to bid “Well then, goodbye everyone” like that early Soviet poet Mayakovsky who supposedly loved prostitutes and the lumpen proletariat while aiding the revolution; to leave behind a suicide note; to press the cold muzzle of a pistol against my temple.

In present-day Japan, the senseless manner of death from the militaristic era was still romanticized.
The idiotic tragedy of three thousand officers and soldiers who had clung to the battleship Yamato like flies on flypaper as it sank to the bottom of the sea to their deaths had been written about uncritically as if it were a grand epic, and these accounts were beloved by hundreds of thousands of people.
Eiji Yoshikawa—a writer beloved by war criminals including Tojo, executed as vicious criminals against civilization and humanity, effectively a spokesman for their foundational philosophy—still retained a million devoted readers.
The fact that Miyamoto Musashi—a pre-modern man who had devoted his life to grueling training to defeat dozens of rivals with a single sword—was still read and revered as a hero among us compatriots even in this so-called atomic age—could this have been an unresolved miracle born from the Japanese people’s inferiority complex, jealousy, contempt, and animosity toward modern civilization?
Venal politicians and journalists, exploiting their compatriots’ ignorance and gullibility and further inflaming it, were trying to sell their fellow countrymen into slavery to a particular nation.

(Japan was defeated) The Japanese people—so unconscious of the wounds they had suffered in their own war that they still applauded the appearance of kamikaze planes in newsreels—were precisely why they harbored wicked delusions of profiting from a Third World War and, lacking all reason, swallowed whole the propaganda blaming everything—from a government minister’s nervous breakdown-induced suicide to delinquents placing stones on National Railway tracks—on Communist Party violence, while throwing themselves with the inevitability of blind flies instinctively hurtling toward excrement into ecstatic religions, Philopon, Adorm, carnal literature, panpan women, male prostitutes, et cetera.
And yet even amidst us—boundlessly ignorant, filthy, and shameless—one could not ignore the fact that children with futures, earnest laborers, and sincere democratic politicians also lived in great numbers.

Now, I acutely realized that I had become one of those Japanese—wounded by the times, boundlessly ignorant, filthy, and shameless—and so out of physiological disgust, I shut my eyes to this reality, ignored my own rationality that ceaselessly admonished me about life’s dignity and responsibility toward loved ones, and wished to bid “Goodbye” to this existence as swiftly as possible.

“Goodbye”
The Japanese language signifies a nihilistic parting—neither “May God ever be by thy side” nor any sweet wish for “until we meet again” contained within its void.
In the fact that only such hollow, desolate farewell words have survived, I perceive the most profound poverty of Japan’s history and society.

Before I say “Goodbye” myself, I should try to recall the many relatives and friends who have bid “Goodbye” to me before reaching this age of thirty-seven.
I was born in Akasaka, Tokyo in 1913, but from that time onward, my deceased father—already afflicted with chest ailments—moved residences repeatedly to Shibuya, Miura Misaki, Kamakura Zaimokuza, and Ubayasu, so that I have no memory of dwelling stably in a single place until around the age of ten.
Moreover, now a six-shaku-tall man weighing twenty kan—beset by Adorm addiction and sundry delusions but otherwise free of illness—I was in childhood so plagued by calamities and disease: whooping cough, diphtheria, typhus, dysentery, even a rabid dog’s bite, that dizziness would send me collapsing to the ground at times, confronting mortal peril around the clock.

Therefore, while ordinary infants may seem utterly indifferent to death, in my case, merely imagining death even in broad daylight would torment me with such intense fascination and loathing.
To me in such a state, the first blood relative to bid “Goodbye” was my maternal grandmother who lived with us—I believe she died of illness around sixty—but through that instinctive human psychology that naturally erases terrifyingly unpleasant memories, I remember neither her cause of death nor her face in death.
My grandmother, a pleasure-loving Tosa woman who even past fifty enjoyed light makeup and playing the shamisen—gathering friends for Noh singing or competitive hanafuda matches—was the sort who found her own grandchildren bothersome; thus, her death left me not the slightest bit lonely.
I was exactly ten years old.
Made to sit at the head of my grandmother’s deathbed alongside solemn-faced adults, I watched as the white cloth covering her face—now unrecognizably shrunken and withered—was removed, and each person, starting with my father, pressed the moistened tip of a new brush to her motionless purple lips. Overcome with nausea so intense it made me retch, I hastily fled the scene and remember burying myself in my beloved kodan storybook in the inner children’s room.

The following year, I encountered that Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923.
My house only half-collapsed, but with neighboring homes fully destroyed—including my friend’s mother crushed to death while clutching her infant—numerous casualties emerged. After the violent tremors subsided, my older brother joined nearby men in excavating bodies, while my sister—three years my senior and far healthier and brighter than I—even went out to observe the scene. Yet there I lay prone on a door plank laid across the back lot, still sensing reality’s reverberations while immersing myself alone in Hakubunkan’s serialized kodan stories once more.
I, a coward, lacked the courage to confront those ugly, terrifying corpses and sought to forget the horrifying reality of the earthquake by escaping into the world of kodan stories' heroic figures.
It may share something in common with the psychology of a certain segment of the Japanese populace who now avidly read Miyamoto Musashi in an attempt to forget the agonies of defeat and the terror of inflation.

Yet there I was as a boy, still reading *The Thousand-Man Slayer* tales of Iwami Jūtarō even as the earth continued to quake—whether from the unbearable chasm between reality and romance, or more physiologically from the immediate aftermath of profound shock—I became dizzy, then vomited sour stomach acid through my mouth and nose until they overflowed.
Two or three days later, my grandfather—paralyzed by stroke, whom Father had just brought from our ancestral home in Tosa to care for him—died, whether from the earthquake’s shock or natural causes; and even Oe-chan, the fifteen-year-old girl brought from our home village to tend him, contracted the post-earthquake typhus epidemic and perished in agony.
Once before the earthquake, intending to amuse this dying grandfather, I had captured a dragonfly and made it perch on his rugged earthen-colored nose tip. The paralyzed old farmer showed only anger in his cold eyes, scolding me with his tangled tongue—"Hotaena!" ("Don't mess around!" in dialect)—whereupon the dragonfly bit fiercely into his nostrils before fleeing. As a boy torn between terror and a mad desire to laugh, I recalled this memory that brought such anguish; thus when that grandfather bid me "Goodbye," I felt rather relieved.
Of course, I have forgotten the face in death as well.
Oe-chan, accompanied by my oldest brother, died in a room at the isolation hospital, and her funeral was grandly conducted alongside Grandfather’s—but I felt a terror I wanted nothing to do with toward this girl my own age’s death, and her memory has been thoroughly erased.

Two years passed, and in the spring of my first year of middle school, my fifty-three-year-old father died of tuberculous peritonitis in the blink of an eye.
My older brothers and sisters seemed to retain only frightening memories of being scolded by our short-tempered, alcoholic father, but I, the youngest child, have vivid memories of being loved by him as if he were consuming me whole.
When I had just entered elementary school, there occurred a repulsive incident where my mother was threatened by a failed writer from her hometown and ran away from home for about a week.
My father’s love for me during that period—even now when I recall it—was violently explosive.
Every day upon returning from work, he would bring me extravagant gifts like a life-sized toy colt or an electric locomotive exactly as I wished; once—the sole such occurrence in his life—Father took me to Mitsukoshi in Nihonbashi.
Even under normal circumstances my stomach was weak—which made me all the more gluttonous—and being permitted to indulge in unrestrained eating and drinking proved unbearable.
I was riding on the shoulders of my father—his stern face with its Soseki-like beard terrifying me—when I unleashed a golden-smelling rain upon him.
Father didn’t get angry; he took me to the toilet and cleaned my bottom, but I didn’t fail to notice his moistened eyes at that moment—indeed, I felt an emotion beyond articulation.

My father was a man of other vivid memories where I was showered with raw, animal-like affection, yet precisely because he was such a father, I turned my back on his death—on his "Goodbye" to me—and strove not to respond. When Father died in the hospital and his remains were brought back by hearse the next day, I was terrified to look at his deathly face and, disregarding my brothers’ and sisters’ attempts to stop me, fled alone up into the back hills where Father’s tea room and various buildings of the Tōke family house stood. At the mountain’s summit stood a stone Jizo—an unconnected soul from Father’s Ekoin Temple, commemorating a seven-year-old girl who died in the first year of Ansei (1854) under the Buddhist name Shaku Seimyo Donyo. Though weathered by wind and rain, its features remained strikingly clear, enveloped in our family legend that faint weeping could be heard there each night. I stroked its head and tried to cry, but no tears would come. It was terror rather than sorrow that overwhelmed me.

Just before graduating middle school, I was suddenly bid "Goodbye" by a friend named Inoue.
Inoue was the only son of a widowed mother who ran a small sundries shop in Fujisawa Town—a shy and unremarkable boy by nature.
Until his fifth year, he had shown no particular distinction in either academics or sports, his performance uniformly average; yet upon advancing to that grade, he suddenly demonstrated exceptional mathematical prowess that astonished both teachers and classmates.
My middle school was nationally renowned for its Spartan education, with an event every Saturday afternoon compelling the entire student body to run a several-mile marathon. For someone like me—who grew faint merely contemplating such breathless races against crowds—I typically numbered among the regular stragglers and spectators. That day too, as I stood vacantly on campus awaiting the runners' return, it was not Izawa—the usual victor, a second-dan kendo practitioner and track team captain—but rather Inoue, small-framed and wiry, who unexpectedly led the pack with a record-shattering pace that combined speed with effortless composure.
Chest thrust forward in his white running shirt, white tabi-clad feet moving with nimble precision, his breathing maintained a crafted regularity like one steadily exhaling over something hot.

I was painfully astonished as if witnessing a miracle, but then within less than a month, when informed by the teacher that Inoue—who had taken two or three days off—had died, I felt an even more excruciating shock.
That Inoue had so excelled in academics and sports just before his death now seemed utterly hollow and trivial when he suddenly bid me “Goodbye.”

Next came my university years.
I was bid “Goodbye” by a literary friend named Kawai due to tuberculosis, and by a fellow comrade in our illegal activities named Ikeda—who, during our shameful ideological conversion, employed a violent method of using a razor to sever the artery in his own right wrist and immersing it in warm water—in that manner was I bid “Goodbye.”
In terms of sequence, Ikeda came first; it was during my first year in the faculty.
Ikeda was a conscientious communist, but like me, he was a large man and shared the same cowardly flaw.
Being a large man made him all the more sensitive to others’ gazes and prone to looking around anxiously, which exacerbated his acute awareness of our illegal activities—though these amounted to nothing more than holding weekly study meetings where we distributed *Akahata*, collected money, and handed it over to attending party members.
When he had gone to Shinjuku to see a movie, he was arrested by the Special Higher Police stationed at the station entrance on the grounds that his eyes looked suspicious.
Because there remained a Tsukiji ticket stub in his pocket, he was thrown into jail, and when his Waseda boarding house was searched, an un-disposed-of copy of Akahata surfaced.

Due to this, he was shuffled between Yotsuya and Totsuka police stations for twenty-nine days each, tortured nearly daily; yet clenching his teeth and maintaining ignorance to avoid burdening friends out of his own cowardice, he persisted until—through his brother-in-law lawyer’s efforts—he was released around the second month. That very day, he came straight to school and exchanged tearful smiles and handshakes with us comrades while chatting amiably, yet that night in his boarding house room, he committed suicide as previously described.
As ever, I was disgusted and anguished at seeing corpses, but this time—for the sake of appearances before my other friends—I rushed to the room where his body lay, like deliberately grabbing a snake I loathed to show off.
Ikeda had apparently chosen the least painful way to die: after ingesting a large dose of sleeping pills, he filled a metal basin with warm water and submerged his slit wrist into it.
As if all the blood had been wrung from his body, it overflowed the metal basin and soaked the entire tatami mat.
In exchange, his bloodless deathly face, like white wax, appeared as serene as if in a daze.
But in the depths of his eyes—like those of a dead fish—I recognized an anxiety and terror toward death, and yet still felt an inescapable aversion to the corpse.
The suicide note appeared to have been written after the sleeping pills took effect; scrawled incoherently, it conveyed something along these lines.

(With the same certainty that believing science necessitates a peaceful communist federation, one must believe the sun will cool, earth perish, and humanity die out someday. Ultimately, sacrificing oneself to build Utopia for doomed humanity proves meaningless. That is to say—since living itself seems meaningless—I die.)

I thought of Ikeda—dead at twenty-two without ever knowing a woman's love—as both fool and pitiable wretch, but his unflinching sincerity made me resent how it laid bare my self-indulgent ways; I labored to erase his suicide from memory. To Ikeda and my political ideals I offered a brusque "Goodbye," seeking instead to anchor life's purpose in literature's realm. Like children who shout "Goodbye!" at dusk—scattering heedless to homes where dinner squabbles and comic books eclipse playmates of moments past—with that same careless ease did I voice my self-absorbed farewell to politics and old comrades.

Now, Kawai—a new literary friend suffering from a chest illness—had from the very beginning foreseen his own imminent death.
He dwelled serenely in the impermanence expressed through verses like those of the Rubaiyat poet—(We are puppets; nature pulls...
"That is no metaphor—it’s reality," he would insist.
He dwelled serenely in this worldview of impermanence—as if singing lines from the Rubaiyat poet ("Once our little performance on this stage concludes, each of us will simply be placed into the casket of nothingness")—gazing upon nature, girls, and literature as beautiful things belonging to the far shore.
Kawai had already come to regard himself as a ghost, so we too could only care for him from afar as someone from another world.
Kawai kept it secret from us, vomiting blood countless times until, when death approached, he slipped back to the countryside to die.
To him like that, I couldn’t say “Goodbye” until the very end, and he too didn’t say “Goodbye” to us—thus we parted forever.
That is why even now, fifteen years later, I sometimes imagine Kawai alive—his slender, towering frame with that pale childlike face smiling—appearing before me to say, “Even though I’m dead, strolling through the world of the living is rather pleasant, you know.”
The blue of the sky.
The green of tree leaves.
The redness of flowers.
A sprightly girl.
A harried middle-aged office worker.
"There is meaning in everyone being alive."
I’m struck by the illusion that he might offer this candid observation: “To the eyes of the dead, everything appears beautiful simply because it’s alive.”

No sooner had I graduated from university and finally found employment than in Showa 12 [1937], the Japanese military clique’s aggressive war against China spiraled out of control; I was conscripted as a replacement soldier, received less than half a year of training in killing at my original unit, and was dragged to the North China front.
From that time onward, Japanese people began excessively exchanging “Goodbye” with family, friends, and lovers.
Japanese wartime morality was “Don’t expect to return alive.”
At deployments, farewells praying “until we meet again” were unthinkable.
Without exception, the “Goodbye” meaning “Since such is our fate, we bid farewell” became most fitting.
Moreover, women would append “forgive me” to their “Goodbye.”
“Please forgive me for having met such a fate”—they groveled even more abjectly before authority.
One could only be dumbfounded by such slavish language.

We who were sent off by such slavish language exhibited without reserve the cruelty of a slave army in China.
As implied by "Goodbye"—bereft of God at their side, and devoid of the hope for reunion with loved ones signified by the Chinese farewell "zàijiàn"—the army mindlessly lost their own noble humanity through wantonly injuring, killing, despising, and hating their fellow human beings.
We had Chinese soldier prisoners dig their own graves, then made them targets for trembling new recruits to practice bayonet charges on—half in jest.
Or even Chinese civilians whom we had been exploiting for menial labor—when tormented by boredom, we would split open their heads with bayonets for no reason or beat their bony buttocks with leather belts until they soiled themselves and the flesh turned purple.

I recall the scene beneath the snow-buried city walls of Ronghe County in Shanxi Province—a middle-aged Chinese man stripped naked and covered in goosebumps, squatting before the grave he'd dug himself, roughly two shaku in diameter and three shaku deep, clasping his hands together as he bowed desperately to us with *"Aiya! Aiya!"* cries.
Toppa—the bucktoothed Osaka taxi assistant turned perpetual private first class—forced Okada, that hulking new recruit from a good family and university graduate, to grip the bayoneted rifle. "Stab 'im already! Do it in one go!" he roared. When he saw Okada turn ashen before their victim—eyes squeezed shut and trembling violently—Toppa smirked in frustration. "Gimme that! This's how ya kill someone!" he snarled, snatching the rifle with bloodshot eyes narrowed to slits. "Goddamn—"
"Goddamn it!" he bellowed, spraying spittle from his protruding teeth as he forced the Chinese man upright and drove the bayonet into his abdomen with a dull thud, lunging forward to thrust the blade five sun deep two or three times over. The Chinese man clutched his lower abdomen soundlessly and tumbled into the pit before him.
I broke out in goosebumps, my eyes growing hot as nausea welled up.
(Goodbye.
Unknown Chinese man—forever goodbye)

I engaged in battle with the Communist Eighth Route Army and once captured a brave fourteen- or fifteen-year-old Chinese soldier.
A rosy-cheeked, handsome youth with gallant features.
Even we—who would normally kill all prisoners captured in combat as troublesome baggage—took pity on his youthful beauty and decided to put him to menial work carrying our baggage.
However, he persistently refused to abandon his hostility toward the Japanese military; as we gasped our way along the precipice of the Yellow River’s banks during a march, he suddenly discarded his baggage and threw himself off the cliff.
A great earthen wall soaring three thousand jō in height, carved by millennia of wind and rain.
From the cliff edge—where even peering over would make one recoil at the icy gales blasting upward from below and the dizzying distance to the waterless marshland lying expressionless beneath—the fourteen- or fifteen-year-old Chinese soldier boy let out a bird-like cry and descended like a bird.
In the earth fissure—barely two ken wide yet vertiginously deep—where fierce winds ceaselessly surged upward from below creating powerful air resistance, the boy’s body swayed like a windblown leaf as it fell, shrinking to a black speck before being absorbed into the brown marshland below.
In his manner of death—a tragic grandeur akin to a young hawk rejecting domestication through self-destruction—I felt something profound; toward that boy who had become a black speck, I could only scream “Goodbye” within my heart.
(It was fate.)
Boy, it can’t be helped.
(Well then, goodbye. Please forgive me.)

Around that time, I delivered these farewells containing such pleas for forgiveness—"Goodbye"—to many Chinese people and even my own comrades.
On multiple occasions at the front lines, I fired precise shots at Chinese soldiers we confronted—careful not to displease my superiors—killing up to four and injuring around ten; yet after each battle, as I curiously prodded the face of a still-warm Chinese youth I’d slain with my military boot, I could only ever whisper “Goodbye” in my heart.
It stemmed from the resigned acceptance that it was not my hand that killed that young man, but rather the fate called war that struck him down.
For instance, while the French—who could utter farewells like *“Au revoir”* or *“Bonne voyage”*—refused to believe war resembled an inevitable natural disaster and persisted in unyielding resistance even under Nazi occupation, the pitiful Japanese nation—capable only of saying *“sayōnara”* even when parting from loved ones—could offer no resistance whatsoever against the military clique’s dictatorial revolution.

Intellectuals who by all rights should have led such resistance movements—in Japan’s case either adopted reclusive poses or conversely became military clique lackeys—were overwhelmingly common.
As a result, we underage members of Japan’s intellectual class were plunged into a pitch-black abyss of nihilism, despair, and resignation.

Among them were those who had fully become fanatical patriots, but even these youths—when sustaining survivable combat injuries—would valiantly shout “Long live the Emperor,” while those with mortal wounds would feebly whisper only “Mother... goodbye.” Observing this, I felt a peculiar anguish that mingled laughter and rage.

The aforementioned new recruit named Okada.
His father was an art dealer in Kyoto with branches even in New York; cherished as the only son, he had memories of being taken to America by his father, and as a rugby player at Kyoto University had been blessed with exceptional physical strength and a keen intellect—yet he could not adapt to the cruel, harsh atmosphere of the front lines, and before our eyes wasted away until even his mind deteriorated abnormally.
Throughout, I walked alongside Okada during marches with an almost fraternal affection, loudly recounting joyful student-day memories until even the jealous, bearded-faced squad leader barked, “Shut your trap!”—yet as days drenched in bloodshed and stoic endurance dragged on, killing and being killed, I gradually noticed Okada growing so reticent he could barely muster replies to me.

That Okada—one morning having forgotten his mess tin at the previous campsite and received two slaps from the squad leader—was forced that noon to blankly watch everyone else eat their meals as punishment.
The next morning when the squad leader discovered Okada had again lost his gas mask and field pouch, he beat him mercilessly on the buttocks with a rifle stock, reducing the hulking six-foot man to whimpering like a mouse.
His once robust seventy-five-kilogram frame withered to skin and bones before our eyes; the military uniform that had once strained against his physique now hung loose and tattered. Rosy cheeks and moist almond-shaped eyes that once brimmed with vitality now stretched taut over skin like a plucked chicken’s, cheekbones jutting sharply beneath dried-out pupils perpetually wide with terror.
At that time I myself survived only through ceaseless combat marches sustained by appetite and sleep’s primal comforts—thus facing Okada’s rapid decline stirred not sympathy but bestial superiority, contempt and instinctual hatred.
The next morning Okada had discarded his steel helmet and leggings somewhere, as if intentionally.

The bearded squad leader stripped Okada—now wild-eyed—naked while declaring “I’ll put some fight into you!”, then together with the senior private first class beat his palms, insteps, shoulders, and lower abdomen with leather belts until they swelled purple, before driving him into a nearby cold mud puddle.
Now reduced to nothing but teeth as large and white as a horse’s, Okada bared his purple gums, his entire body trembling, yet still clutching his testicles protectively with both hands as he screamed “Forgive me! Please forgive me!” while reluctantly submerging his shoulders in the water—we soldiers watched this spectacle with perverse amusement, our hatred for the weak twisting into entertainment.
Okada, during that day’s march, had at some point discarded his sword and ammunition pouch along with his belt, and had even lost his rifle—that very rifle endlessly emphasized as the soul of a soldier and His Majesty’s firearm.
That Okada, staggering at the squad’s rear and barely managing to walk, looked less like a soldier and more like a complete beggar; moreover, his face—contorted with fox-like madness—appeared to anyone who saw it as nothing but that of a lunatic or paranoid depressive.
Okada must have rejected the war with his entire being by discarding his weapons one after another.
War—with its arson, murder, assault, robbery, and rape committed without reason—is itself an act of madness beyond the endurance of ordinary minds. Among Okada, driven insane by rejecting it; the squad leaders who endured or even reveled in it before cruelly lynching him for his refusal; and us who watched with perverse fascination—who embodied true madness?
In Okada’s nerves—which couldn’t endure the madness called war—I now sense something rather healthy.

Now, the squad leader—who cared only about his own merits—upon seeing Okada shambling along like a beggar with neither sword nor rifle, grew flushed with rage at the thought that if superior officers witnessed such a soldier, they would not only reprimand him but also reduce his points. He immediately ran back, reversed his grip on the rifle, and—
“Drop dead!” he roared, swinging with all his might across Okada’s left ear and cheek.
Okada’s mouth and nose were smeared with blood; spinning wildly, he collapsed spread-eagled in the mud at the center of the road.
“Mother… goodbye.”
Okada murmured those words like the chirping of insects and then didn’t so much as twitch again.
Noxious silver flies began swarming over the left ear, swollen a lurid reddish-purple.
We left Okada’s corpse as it was and continued our march.
At that time, since we were the rearguard squad at the tail end of the company, Okada’s corpse must have rotted by the roadside and been devoured by stray dogs, crows, and maggots—unless the Chinese buried it for us.
I walked on for a while before looking back, confirmed that Okada’s corpse lay faceup, and in my heart briskly said, “Goodbye,” to his spirit.

Over two months of field campaigns, I had bid these heartless “Goodbye”s to countless comrades; yet after returning to work at a munitions factory as the Pacific War unfolded—as Japan’s defeat grew imminent and Tokyo air raids intensified—even on the home front, opportunities multiplied to deliver similarly merciless “Goodbye”s to many compatriots around me. Among those people were memories such as this gruesome one: my factory’s women’s dormitory was struck by a direct bomb hit, and as many as thirty innocent girls—freshly arrived from Miura Misaki through labor conscription—perished instantly alongside my friend, a virgin dorm supervisor who had joined the company in the same cohort as me. And even in such moments, I—having become an unavoidable fatalist—would perceive it solely as their destiny and utter only a brisk “Goodbye.” At that time, we were gazing upon corpses daily and being told of our frontline comrades’ gyokusai (‘shattered jewel’ suicides), so we keenly felt our own lives might end at any moment. In such circumstances, my greatest anguish lay in imagining the fate of my wife and children—whose very existence I’d considered burdensome from the moment I acquired them, whom I’d subjected to nothing but futile hardship—should they lose me. But I—(my wife and children each had their own fate, different from mine)—(I’ll leave their fate to destiny)—with such simplistic belief, I became a dormitory supervisor at the factory and evacuated my wife and children to the countryside in Izu, yet even to them I had briskly uttered “Goodbye” in my heart.

That fatalism of mine from that time—the sense of parting from that single "Goodbye" I bid my wife and children—still lingers in my heart even now, four years after defeat; and even when I recently committed the folly of dismantling my own family, it influenced my psyche to some degree.
To put it hyperbolically, during that war I bid so many cold "Goodbyes" to close people that not only did I grow numb to the sorrow of parting—it became akin to the perverse psychology of a catatonic madman cherishing his own excrement; one could say I came to love precisely that parting grief which inflicted the greatest pain upon me, precisely because it was agonizing.

Up until now, I had spoken nothing but "Goodbye" to blood relatives and male comrades, but here I would recount the painful memories of bidding farewell to those women from whom parting proved most unbearable.
I could not doubt the established theory that the essence of novels lies in romantic epics.

Sickly from early childhood and timid in the real world, I knew life’s joys only through reading and its fantasies. Around the time I grew weary of adventure tales featuring heroes, warriors, and ninjutsu masters, the so-called Enpon boom era began; thus I became acquainted with modern Japanese novels since Meiji and works hailed as world literary classics—until imperceptibly, to live was to love.
Man is saved only by the eternal feminine.
I came to harbor a secret, fervent wish to once in my lifetime obtain a lover whom I could seriously love and be loved by.

However, up until Japan's defeat, I initially possessed too intense a political consciousness, and after withdrawing from politics, my self-awareness grew too acute—I remained incapable of experiencing love where mind and body aligned.
In Shōwa 11 [1936], at twenty-four years old during my impulsive marriage, I maintained friendships with three women who might be considered lovers.
One worked as a company typist—a proud young lady of leisure who paraded her professional school education—yet though she burned with desire for me, a tall literary youth, she kept flaring her nostrils in irritation and scheming to create opportunities for me to court her first. This grated on me unbearably, and driven by the perverse pleasure of wounding her pride, I discarded her to wed an unremarkable, uneducated boarding house daughter who'd only completed elementary school.
After my marriage, this petite typist seemed to spiral into dissolution; having slept with two or three university students, she abruptly quit her job and crossed to the continent to wed someone like a Manchukuo cavalry captain. Yet I felt nothing but instinctive male revulsion toward her expression—nostrils flared with egotism, eyes glittering—so unlike the absence of such disgust with male friends, where we consciously avoid ego clashes. Thus my "Goodbye" to her carried instead a sense of emancipation.

Another female friend worked as a bar hostess—an abandoned wife whose renowned painter husband had fallen in love with an equally renowned female painter—raising a frail seven-year-old boy with spinal caries while living in wretched circumstances above that bar; yet I liked her far more than the woman I had made my wife.
Her face—kittenishly mischievous and energetic—was covered in freckles, her makeup applied with such crude strokes that the stick rouge spilled beyond her lips; yet I loved how her seemingly fragile body revealed lithe strength when naked, and was drawn to those long-lashed black eyes that always seemed moist with passion.
Moreover, I—who had once abandoned communism and felt criminal-like shame—could feel sorrowfully nostalgic empathy for how she bore the wound of being an abandoned wife, honestly displaying her pain while wanting me to soothe it.
That she combined both harlot’s and maternal instincts made her seem to me the very image of a woman to be yearned for.
The memory remains unbearably nostalgic—how when I casually crossed my legs in the train seat during our picnic outing, revealing my sockless feet; how whereas the former typist would have frowned at this and the woman I married would have pretended not to notice, she instead burst into innocent laughter, then at the next station pulled me by the hand to disembark, bought navy-blue socks at a nearby Western goods store, and right there had me put them on as if dressing a child.

I cannot forget how that woman would apply thick makeup in vulgar imitation of prostitutes, buy a large bouquet, bury her face in it under the public gaze on the bus, and exclaim “What a lovely scent!” in a voice like a weeping child.
At that time, I was becoming aware of women’s inescapable menstrual filthiness, yet felt I could intuitively grasp even the convoluted psychology behind her single-minded devotion to flowers—a beauty so intense it pained me.
Nor can I forget that clear day with her—white acacia blossoms perfuming blue riverbanks upstream as we floated a white boat; how after rowing strenuously until drenched in sweat, I casually bared my upper body; how she across from me suddenly flushed crimson, thrashing about as she cried “Stop! How shameful! Put your undershirt on right now!” while violently pummeling my naked chest.

Now, at that time—no, even now—in my interactions with children, I strain to avoid harming them, becoming hypocritical if need be.
In short, I maintain a vague faith in humanity’s future—which is precisely why I dread tainting children with my soiled hands.
To me, children feel akin to taboo entities.
Even then, I desired her enough to consider marriage, yet her possession of a seven-year-old son afflicted with spinal caries made even such ardor hesitate.
When during this period her former husband located her workplace and reached out seeking their return, I—consulted by her—became convinced the boy required his true father’s presence; reflexively equating love’s pinnacle with unrequited sacrifice, I relentlessly exhorted the reluctant woman with antiquated feudal maxims—“Endure for the child’s sake,” “A chaste wife serves no second lord”—until forcibly returning both to that man’s custody.

To say "Goodbye" to that woman in a corner of a coffee shop required tremendous courage on my part.
I panicked and confessed the secret I’d resolved to keep until the end—“Truthfully, had you been willing, I would’ve married you even with your child”—then she broke down crying unrestrainedly before thrashing about demanding, “Why didn’t you say this sooner?”, which made it all the more impossible for me to utter “Goodbye.”
And in the end, driven by my twenty-four-year-old self’s simple vanity—or rather, hypocritical trust in humanity—which had convinced me that sacrificing myself would bring happiness to her family, I uttered “Goodbye” to her at a nearby station entrance.
Agitated by the sorrow of parting, she kept stashing the train ticket in absurd places only to forget them, repeatedly opened and slammed the trunk lid until its contents spilled out, then—when the train arrived—ran down the platform clutching her child’s hand, tearfully glancing back at me again and again.
The words she finally said to me with a kitten’s sorrowful face were, once again, “Forgive me. Goodbye.”

Within less than three months, I went drinking to the bar where she had worked, and from one of her former hostess colleagues learned that even after she returned with her child, her painter husband had remained intimate with his former woman painter lover, turning their household into a living hell.
As a result, the boy with spinal caries died one morning about a month after returning home, having fallen from the veranda onto a garden stone.
Having contracted what they called galloping tuberculosis from the shock, she died during less than ten days of hospitalization—I was told this in my daze, and once more said “Goodbye” to her in my heart.
That woman had left behind as habit those unconscious words “Forgive me” in apology to me at the end—but I came to realize that the one who truly needed to apologize was myself, who out of male egotism and simple vanity had failed to keep her by my side despite loving her.

At that time, I still clung to communist ideals even as Dostoevsky and Shestov dominated literature; amid a social climate of military dictatorship and escalating war, my living philosophy of action was a grotesque amalgam of humanism, Japanese feudal ethics, and shallow nihilism.
I wanted to know a woman’s love before dying in battle and was eager for romance and marriage, yet at the same time despised my own selfishness in being willing to abandon war widows.
I detested the strong feminine ego of that leisured young lady typist, yet calmly endured my own strong masculine ego that had simply driven someone I loved to an unfortunate death.
In the depths of my heart lay desperate prayers yearning for the eternal feminine, yet on the surface of my emotions, all women seemed interchangeable—marriage but a lottery ticket. Thinking brusquely that if my youth was fated to perish meaninglessly anyway, I might as well bestow it upon the poorest girl, I ended up together with the ordinary daughter from the boarding house where I stayed in what resembled a reckless tryst.

From that girl’s early life—having lost her father young, been raised bouncing between relatives’ homes, returned after elementary school to her mother who ran an amateurish boarding house, assisted with chores while becoming a bank clerk, then over roughly ten years rising to office staff renowned within the bank as a master of the abacus—I had fantasized only about convenient notions: that as a girl hardened by hardship, she would devote herself to me tenderly and blindly revere my intellectual talents. Overriding objections from both our blood relatives, I conducted a proper Shinto-style wedding in form if not in substance, yet within less than a month of living together, I learned how utterly my rose-tinted delusions had betrayed me.

The notion that an impoverished, oppressed girl—having been loved by an educated youth with a future through formal marriage—would feel salvific gratitude and devote herself blindly to loving him proved to be popular novels’ lie. In reality, a poor ignorant woman grows so wounded by society that she becomes warped and distrustful, adopting a feral stray-cat disposition. I would naively parade my talents before my wife’s seething resentment only to be bitten; even an offhand suggestion that I’d rescued her provoked scratching. Not a single day passed without regret for having made her my wife.

Amidst the unending war deployments, the military’s desolate atmosphere fostered my illusion that even such a wife appeared angelically kind during rare meetings or when sending care packages. For her part, she clung to the ignorant sorrow and pride of a soldier’s spouse, so not only was our household’s collapse temporarily forestalled—the very mobilizations and evacuations resulted in four children being born. Yet when defeat came and peace dawned, what might have ended a decade earlier as tragedy between two became—blinded by war’s storm and prolonged ten years—a catastrophic rupture bearing four children as unbearable victims.

When Japan surrendered, I was dismissed from my company, yet though I resolved to devote myself at last to my long-cherished literary life, my wife—a woman hardened by hardship—detested poverty and risk, doubted my ability to sustain us solely through my pen, persistently urged me to seek employment again, and poured cold water on my resolve.
At such times, the fatalistic conviction I had clung to as salvation during the war—(my fate and my family’s being separate)—would resurge within me. From memories of having been bid so many “Goodbyes” by close ones that I grew numb, I—absurdly sustained by that Saigyō Hōshi-like impermanence worldview born of wartime chaos—became gripped by the desire to kick my children from the veranda’s edge, renounce secular life, and wander this world as an ascetic. Yet after half a year elapsed—when I joined the Communist Party, assumed permanent duties at N City’s district committee office, and began living separately from my family as a single man—a fragment of that desire came to fulfillment.

And then about a year passed.
My love for my wife and children, my compatriots, and humanity itself—perhaps defiled by the blood of war—helplessly transformed from distrust into hatred. Finding perverse comfort in the consciousness of being a traitor and criminal, I left the Party and drifted rootlessly before returning to my family.
Yet I remained haunted by vivid memories of bidding "Goodbye" to this very wife and children during the war, and having despaired of glimpsing the eternal feminine in my wife, I found myself driven by the desire to carve out a destiny separate from them should opportunity arise—to grasp some solitary happiness.
Precisely during this period, I went up to Tokyo and one night formed an intimacy with an unfortunate woman named Rie.

Rie was one of those war widows who had fled her malicious in-laws—mother-in-law and sisters-in-law—before the official notice of her husband’s death in battle arrived, leaving her disowned by her own family and reduced to living alone as a panpan woman in an air-raid shelter amid the ruins. Yet a sincere young man from a former enemy nation fell in love with the steadfastness of her affection and built her a shack with four-and-a-half tatami mats in one room, six in another, even adding a kitchen and bathhouse. There they nurtured a blissful love nest for about a year—until neighbors’ jealousy led to their being reported to the authorities. The young man, who had reciprocated her love, was forcibly repatriated to his homeland, while Rie, now working as a dancer and barmaid to survive, found herself gradually defiling both heart and body once more.

In Rie, I saw traces of the woman—who could be called my first love—abandoned by that renowned painter husband.
Rie too was my favored type of woman—one who blended maternal love with a courtesan’s passion.
She laid bare the scars inflicted by men and her era without concealment, yearning for me to caress them.
This gratified my masculine pride while simultaneously salving my sinner’s conscience.
Though differing from that woman through her artistry in cosmetics and amorous expressions, Rie resembled her in possessing both a petite vigorous physique and the paradoxical fusion of mature female biology with girlish trust.
With that earlier woman, youthful fastidiousness and her existing family had constrained physical indulgence; but in Rie’s case existed a middle-aged man’s unshakable creed toward carnal desire—through this we became entangled, and after satiating ourselves with our bodily compatibility, our hearts too intertwined. Thus with Rie, this tainted woman, I believe I first experienced love where heart and flesh became one.

Unlike my wife and children, thinking of Rie as a woman with whom I might bid “Goodbye” at any moment made me all the more drawn to her. Though I worried about my four children’s future and felt dizzying anxiety around the clock, the stronger that anxiety grew, the more intense became the pleasure of embracing her. Thus for three full years I remained stuck fast to her—sending only living expenses to my family while cohabiting with Rie.
Behind Rie’s explosive devotion toward me lurked her pathologically intense self-love as a defiled woman—a reality thrust upon me that left me overwhelmed with helpless frustration.
Considering societal criticism, my children’s future, and the happiness of both Rie and my wife, I wanted to bid Rie “Goodbye” as soon as possible.
The more I tried to do it, the more I found myself bound to her by pity for Rie’s body.
The torment of sleepless nights persisted until I eventually became an addict of Adorm, that powerful hypnotic.

Eventually, my senior blood relatives gathered for a family conference attended by my wife, children, and Rie.
I was compelled to separate from Rie, while my wife and children relocated to Tokyo.
Rationally I accepted this outcome, yet emotionally I couldn't bring myself to casually utter "Goodbye" to Rie's wretched solitude—she who would be scorned even by my own kin as a defiled woman and left utterly alone in this world.
"If only farewells promising 'until we meet again' were permissible in this turbulent Japan—"
But I couldn't endure the terror that Rie—now alone after our separation—might be instantly swallowed by this world's hellish cacophony and vanish without trace.
Though separation and oblivion form humanity's shared destiny, precisely for this reason I loathed those wartime Goodbyes uttered so lightly, refusing to the end to say "Goodbye" when parting from Rie.
To outsiders it may have seemed decadent filth, but to me that love life—kindled by premonitions of parting with Rie until it burned with life itself—appeared as beautifully single-minded as a Greek pastoral romance.
I wanted to remain with Rie until death.
Yet even so, I lacked the courage to say "Goodbye" to my four unfortunate children.

The agony of being torn between two loved ones.
Adorm addiction.
Vagrancy aimed at abandoning both Rie and the children.
Because of this, I even entered a psychiatric hospital.
Driven by a lawless, deranged desire to claim Rie's life as my own, I drank myself senseless on Adorm and alcohol until one day I seized a weapon and stabbed her lower abdomen.
I who had tenderly cherished Rie—who had sought to wipe clean even the invisible wounds of her heart and bodily defilements—how could I have perpetrated this idiocy of actually marring her jade-like flesh?
Perhaps this was modern man's pathological perversion—a sacrilege.
If deeming a harlot's flesh sacred was itself perverse, then my obsessions and distortions became doubly, triply twisted.

Because of this, I was confined by the police for about two weeks and then placed in a psychiatric hospital for approximately two months.
During that time, Rie was hospitalized in a surgical ward and barely managed to survive.
I was deemed not criminally responsible due to unconsciousness during the act, was not prosecuted, and was released from the psychiatric hospital about a month earlier than Rie.
During that time, my family completely disintegrated.
My wife became a day laborer.
The wretchedness of my eldest son being entrusted to my older sister, my second son and eldest daughter to my oldest brother’s house, and my third son to my wife’s older sister and her husband.

And so here I was—unable to even say “Goodbye” to that wife and those children, let alone to Rie whose livelihood I had destroyed through my own harm; instead feeling bound for life to stay with this woman I had both loved and hated so intensely.
So I separated from my wife, married Rie, drew up concrete plans to take custody of my second son and eldest daughter, transferred my residence documents to Rie’s address, and first brought my seven-year-old eldest daughter to live with us.
There, I had intended to say “Goodbye” bluntly and coldly to my wife and the other two children.
And with Rie, I resolved to stay together until death as an obligation, determined never to say “Goodbye” forever.

Then, strangely enough, I found myself unable to endure it all—the fact that my wife now regretted having ruined that woman’s life for my sake; the pity I felt for the two children I was releasing from my care; Rie’s insensitivity as she flared her nostrils and casually made my seven-year-old eldest daughter call her “Mom”; the way her body—still unhealed from the lower abdomen I had wounded—moved slowly and laboriously as if to display its condition, her slender neck craning while she turned her blank face with deliberate slowness; the lifelong moral responsibility to care for her that pressed upon me each time; her self-love—all of it.

In short, during the time I truly felt I had to bid Rie “Goodbye” someday, I couldn’t bring myself to do it no matter what; yet once I became conscious of a moral obligation that made saying “Goodbye” to her impossible, I suddenly found myself wanting to hurriedly say “Goodbye” to her instead.

And so now, along with my seven-year-old eldest daughter, I had bid "Goodbye" to Rie—already about half a month had passed.
In the past, when I wandered under a moral obligation to part from Rie, I was tormented by the desire to see her again at least once—whereas now, driven by an obligation not to abandon Rie while wandering from place to place with my seven-year-old eldest daughter, I found myself wanting to bid her a cold, curt "Goodbye."
Just as I had once hurriedly averted my eyes from the wretched corpses of relatives, friends, comrades-in-arms, and Chinese people to utter a cold "Goodbye" that desired neither divine salvation nor hopes of reunion, now I said only "Goodbye" to Rie as well and wished never to meet her again.
Just as I had once striven to forget the corpses of those close to me as quickly as possible and seemingly succeeded, I now wanted to erase even my memories of Rie.
But bidding her “Goodbye” proved staggeringly more agonizing than with family and friends, demanding prolonged effort.

“Sayōnara” (since fate dictates we must part thus)—the melancholy Japanese phrase.
Thus until today at thirty-seven years old, I had bid “Sayōnara” to several dear ones on multiple occasions—but now it seemed my turn had come to bid “Sayōnara” to this world.
The method did not necessarily require suicide or renunciation into monastic seclusion.
No—even without consciously uttering “Sayōnara,” I now harbored this sensation of being dead while alive, much like Kawai once had.
Rather than Saigyō, Sōgi, or Bashō themselves, I thought it their lesser disciples—those sustained by impermanence’s intensity, sorrow, and solitude—who had wandered through life as living corpses; a state manifest not only in nationwide pilgrimages or hermitage existences but equally in the outwardly dutiful lives of diligent samurai and conversely in the dissolute ways of hatamoto clans’ second sons.
For even the beauty of Mutsuiin Katsu Tarōzaemon Kokichi’s memoir—father of Katsu Kaishū—lay in that sorrow of viewing the living world through dead eyes.

When I think about it, I realize I died long ago.
Was it since that sickly childhood when I avoided reality's terrors and fled into romantic fantasies?
Or from the shame of repeatedly deserting the communist movement that believed in science, humanity's future, and the greatest happiness—or perhaps from that time when I not only made no effort to stop the war but was conscripted into invading China, actively surrendering to perverse urges to kill Chinese soldiers, torment civilians, and abandon comrades?
Having detested even familial separations—having ignored death's solemn realm so completely that I've yet to bid farewell to my own deceased father—do I now conversely lack understanding of the living's rights?
Or does this stem from my own raging self-love—this egotism that can only sustain affection if both wife and mistress share my dread of parting?

In any case, within my psyche, something had crumbled and collapsed without my noticing.
The concepts of balance and unity essential for the living were lost.
I had intended to bid this world "Goodbye" once more, yet upon trying to utter it, realized I had already—unbeknownst to myself—bid "Goodbye" long before.
What torment—or perhaps absurdity—was this?
“Sayōnara.”
(It had been a fate that must needs be thus.)

No!
If only a Japanese farewell phrase containing a prayer—"until we meet again"—could become our words of parting.
Even in Japan’s dialects, there seem to be many farewell phrases with meanings like "see you again" or "take care."
However, as one of Japan’s dead, I want to protest with unbearable anguish that our language has confined its representative farewell to “Goodbye” alone.
To have “Goodbye” dismissed so perfunctorily is unbearable.

Every last one of the dead must hold a secret wish to someday reunite with their beloved ones, sleeping in some corner of their graves.
In Malay, I have heard that when parting, the person departing says “Slamat tinggal” (“May happiness be with those who remain”), and the one seeing them off offers the words “Slamat jalan” (“May happiness be with you on your journey”). In Japan as well, during the Manyo era, there must have been such simple words of farewell.
I feel I have encountered phrases like "(May you find happiness)" in poetic exchanges and traveler’s songs here and there, and in the sentiment of "I long for my beloved; since we must part," I sense a simple, earnest sorrow of parting.

In comparison, "Sayōnara" is too cold.
Abolish this as the Japanese language of parting and invent a new phrase.
I did not start writing this novel with such a purpose.
In the place where the Japanese phrase "Sayōnara" has originated, grown, and persisted lies the dark history and society of Japan's people.
For some time yet, the word "Sayōnara" will likely continue to be used by the Japanese.
There exists an inherent necessity behind this.
In that inescapable sorrow, I wanted to confront it by entwining memories of having bid "Sayōnara" to those dear to me.
That I myself could harbor contradictions, inconsistencies, and conflicting emotions in fragmented disarray—the self-evident realization of being one of those schizophrenia patients incomprehensible to the living—hardly required deliberate emphasis or grand proclamation.

All other mental illnesses merely possess quantitatively greater abnormalities than those of ordinary people, but schizophrenia differs qualitatively and remains incomprehensible to normal individuals; one pathologist has criticized such patients as 'already living corpses.'
Schizophrenia first becomes indifferent to the world and others, loving only oneself.
They first love their own genitals, then ardently adore their own filthy excrement.
They refrain from even discarding their feces and urine outside, wrapping what they have once excreted like treasures to preserve it with care.
Even saliva—should it rot in their mouths and emit a foul odor—they try not to spit out.
Following this infantile, animalistic state of existence accompanied by what Freud called golden worship comes a vegetative life.
Just as tree branches, once bent by human hands, remain forever curved, so too does this patient never attempt to straighten their arm after someone bends it.
This illness remains incurable even today, its cause still unknown.
After repeated advances and retreats, the patient lives on like a plant, gradually withering away from the head downward.

From my tangible awareness of being among the dead, I simultaneously felt both an attraction to these patients and a repulsed hatred.
They—while naturally succumbing to that illness—had bid life “Goodbye” before realizing it, and once becoming patients, it mattered little when they died.
In a psychiatric hospital room, they neither disturbed anyone nor were disturbed themselves; breathing, eating, sleeping, waking—then dying suddenly within that existence, unnoticed by all.
Though finding them insufferable and loathsome, I also sympathized with—even envied—their state of being already dead.
There was something perversely satisfying in how even they refused to clearly utter “Goodbye” to reality.
Though recognizing this as irrational and illogical myself, even while believing I was some divine messenger, I still harbored no desire to bid “Goodbye” to the living world.
Even now, moments would strike when—abruptly—a Bolero-like rhythm of savage vitality would resound in my ears: a crisp early autumn afternoon; white acacia blossoms perfuming the riverbank; a white boat adrift on blue waters that drew in my heart and body, swaying them with glutted contentment toward self-obliterating rapture—and before that figure lightly plying an oar, this fantasy would revive.
For having blasphemed that god, there existed a Medieval legend that even the “Flying Dutchman”—condemned to eternal wandering as a ghost ship captain denied rest—might find redemption through a woman’s selfless love.
Thus it seemed only fitting that I—this tawdry counterfeit corpse from defeated Japan’s medieval aftermath, presumptuously posing as the dead—should remain haunted by such tales, secretly believing another day might yet come when such days could recur, yearning for that moment of my own resurrection.

(Well then—until that day—Goodbye.)
I am most certainly living somewhere.
(No matter how living might be a painful, unendurable herculean task—)

(November 1949)