Pathway to Japanese Literature

New Year's Day

After eating New Year's soup and retreating to my study, three or four people arrived some time later.
They were all young men.
One of them was wearing a frock coat.
Perhaps because he was unaccustomed to wearing it, he seemed oddly reserved toward the melton.
The rest were all in Japanese clothes and, what’s more, still wearing their everyday attire, so there was nothing remotely festive about the scene.
This group gazed at Frock and said "Oh... oh," one by one.
It was proof that everyone was surprised.
I too, last of all, said "Oh..."

Frock took out a white handkerchief and unnecessarily wiped his face.
Then he kept drinking spiced sake.
The others were also heartily digging into the food on the trays.
Just then, Kyoshi arrived by carriage.
He wore a black haori over a black crested kimono, his attire impeccably traditional.
“You have a black crested kimono—I suppose it’s necessary because you perform Noh?” I asked. Kyoshi replied, “Yes, that’s right.”
Then he suggested, “Shall we sing one?”
I responded, “I’m afraid my chanting leaves much to be desired.”

Then the two of us chanted a piece called “Tohoku.”
I had learned it long ago and rarely reviewed it afterward, so parts of it were hopelessly unclear.
To make matters worse, even I could hear how unsteady my voice sounded.
When I finally finished chanting, the young men who had been listening began declaring in unison how awful I was.
Frock in particular said, “Your voice sounds wispy.”
These fellows didn’t know the first thing about Noh chanting to begin with.
I’d assumed they’d never grasp the difference in skill between Kyoshi and me.
Yet faced with their criticism, I had to admit even amateurs could make fair points—there was no avoiding it.
I lacked the nerve to dismiss their remarks as nonsense.

Then Kyoshi began talking about how he had recently been learning to play the hand drum.
The group, who didn’t know the first thing about Noh chanting, were requesting, “Please play one for us; we simply must hear it.”
Kyoshi then requested of me, “Well then, please do the chanting.”
For me—who did not truly understand what Noh accompaniment entailed—this proved both troublesome and intriguingly novel.
I agreed to chant.
Kyoshi had a rickshaw puller hurry off to fetch the hand drum.
When the drum arrived, they had someone bring a charcoal brazier from the kitchen and began roasting the drum’s skin over the clanging charcoal fire.
Everyone watched in surprise.
I too was astonished by this fierce manner of heating.
When I asked, “Is this safe?” he replied, “Yes, perfectly safe,” while flicking the taut skin with his fingertip to produce a crisp sound.
A rather good sound rang out.
“That should do it,” someone muttered as they lowered it from the charcoal brazier and began tightening the drum’s cords.
The man in the crested kimono fiddling with the red cords had an air of refined elegance about him.
This time, everyone watched in admiration.

Kyoshi soon took off his haori.
Then he embraced the hand drum.
I asked him to wait a moment.
First, since I couldn't figure out where exactly he would strike the drum, I wanted to coordinate our timing.
Kyoshi kindly explained that here he would give several vocal cues and there he would strike the drum in a particular way, instructing me to proceed accordingly.
I simply couldn't grasp it.
But were one to study it until fully understood, two or three hours would be required.
I had no choice but to give a perfunctory agreement.
At that point, I began chanting the Hagoromo piece.
As I chanted up to about half a line—"the spring haze lingers"—I began regretting that my start had been rather poor.
[My voice] was utterly powerless.
But if I were to suddenly rally midway, the overall rhythm would collapse—so remaining listless and indecisive, as I pressed on slightly, Kyoshi abruptly shouted a loud cue and struck the drum with a resounding *kan*.

I had never dreamed Kyoshi would come at me so fiercely.
The vocal cues I'd always considered elegant and unhurried now vibrated against my eardrum like battle cries from a life-or-death duel.
My chanting surged and ebbed two or three times with these cues.
Just as this turbulence began subsiding, Kyoshi roared another full-throated challenge from beside me.
My voice faltered unsteadily with each intimidation.
Then it shrank.
Before long, the listeners started snickering.
I too felt profoundly ridiculous at my core.
At that moment, Frock led the charge with a booming guffaw.
Caught up in the momentum, I burst out laughing alongside them.

After that came relentless criticism.
Frock's remarks cut deepest with their sarcasm.
Kyoshi smiled faintly and reluctantly synchronized his own chanting with his drumming, bringing the performance to a proper conclusion.
Before long, he excused himself—places yet to visit—and rode off in a rickshaw.
The young ones resumed their merciless teasing afterward.
Even my wife joined in disparaging her husband; when Mr. Kyoshi played his drum, they praised the splendid color of his underrobe sleeves that fluttered into view.
Frock instantly voiced agreement.
I found neither the hue of Kyoshi's underrobe sleeves nor their fluttering motion remotely appealing.

Snake.

When I opened the gate and stepped outside, rainwater filled the large horse hoofprints to overflowing. As I stepped on the earth, the mud's squelch clung to my soles. Lifting my heels felt nearly painful. Holding the hand bucket in my right hand made shifting my footing awkward. Whenever my steps grew precarious, I wanted to hurl away what I carried to balance my upper body. Soon I planted the bucket's base deep into the mud's bottom. Clutching the handle to steady myself as I nearly fell, I saw Uncle standing about two meters ahead. From behind his straw raincoat-clad shoulders hung the triangular net's weighted end. His hat shifted slightly then. From beneath its brim came what sounded like a grumble about the wretched path. The raincoat's shadow was soon whipped away by the rain.

When I stood on the stone bridge and looked down, black water was pushed up from between the grasses.
On ordinary days, long algae would sway drowsily along the bottom—never exceeding three sun in depth—over Kurofushi, creating a beautiful sight as they flowed; yet today, the water had turned murky from the depths.
Mud surged up from below, rain hammered down from above, whirlpools churned through the middle.
After watching the whirlpools for some time, Uncle muttered under his breath,

“We’ll get one,” he muttered.

The two of them crossed the bridge and immediately turned left.
The whirlpools wound their way through the blue-green fields.
Following the current's path—uncertain how far it would push onward—they had come about a chō.
And there they stood—just the two of them—lonely in the expanse of the fields.
All they could see was rain.
Uncle looked up at the sky from under his straw hat.
The sky was sealed darkly like the lid of a tea caddy.

From somewhere within that sealed darkness, rain fell ceaselessly.
As they stood there, there came a rushing sound.
This was the sound of rain striking the straw hat and raincoat they wore.
Then came the sound of rain striking the surrounding fields.
From afar, the sound of rain striking Kio’s Forest visible ahead seemed to mingle in as well.

Above the forest, black clouds were drawn to the cedar treetops, piling layer upon layer into the depths.
They drooped limply downward from above under their natural weight.
The tendrils of clouds now entwined around the cedar treetops.
A little longer, and they seemed about to plunge into the forest.

When I noticed and looked down at my feet, the whirlpools were flowing endlessly from upstream.
The pond behind Lord Kio’s estate must have been assaulted by those clouds.
The whirlpools suddenly seemed to surge with vigor.
Uncle watched the churning whirlpools once more,

"We'll get a bite," he declared with the conviction of one who had already hauled in his prize.
Before long, still wearing his straw raincoat, he descended into the water.
Despite the terrifying force of the current, it wasn’t particularly deep.
He stood with water reaching up to his waist.
Uncle settled himself mid-river—facing Kio’s Forest squarely upstream—and lowered the net from his shoulder.

The two remained motionless amid rainfall’s din, watching whirlpools surge toward them.
Fish must be passing beneath these vortices—carried from Lord Kio’s pond upstream.
If caught properly—he stared unblinking at water’s fearsome hue—a large one would be landed.
The water had been turbid from outset.
Surface ripples alone revealed nothing of what flowed below.
Still I waited—not blinking—for movement from Uncle’s wrist submerged at waterline.
Yet it refused to stir.

The rainfall steadily darkened.
The river’s color grew heavier.
The whirlpool patterns swirled violently down from upstream.
Amid the pitch-black waves surging sharply past, there flickered a glimpse of differently colored patterning.
Struck by sudden light that left no time to blink, this pattern gave an impression of length.
I thought this must be a large eel.

The instant I did, Uncle’s right wrist—gripping the net handle—jerked against the current, snapping upward from beneath his straw raincoat to shoulder height.
Something long slipped from his hand.
It traced a heavy rope-like arc through the dark downpour before striking the opposite embankment—where from the grass rose a foot-long coiled snake head.
Held aloft, it stared fixedly at us both.

“Remember this.”

The voice was unmistakably Uncle’s.
At the same moment, the coiled snake head vanished into the grass.
Uncle, face pale, was staring at the spot where he had thrown the snake.

“Uncle, was it you who just said ‘Remember this’?”

Uncle finally turned toward me.
In a low voice, he answered that he didn’t know who it was.
To this day, whenever I bring this up to Uncle, he answers that he doesn’t know who it was and makes a strange face.

Burglar

When he went out to the next room intending to sleep, a pungent smell rose from the heated kotatsu table.
After returning from the toilet, he warned his wife that the fire seemed too strong and that she needed to be careful, then withdrew to his own room.
It was already past eleven o'clock.
The dreams within the bedding were as peaceful as ever.
Despite the cold, there was no wind, and the fire alarm bell remained silent.
Deep sleep lost all semblance of itself, as though it had crushed the world of time.

Then suddenly I awoke to a woman's crying voice. When I listened, it was the voice of the maid called Moyo. This maid always lets out a crying voice whenever startled and flustered. The other day when she bathed the baby in our house, she said the baby had been overcome by steam and convulsed, letting out a crying voice for about five minutes. This was the first time I had heard this maid's strange voice. She spoke rapidly between sniffles. It was pleading, coaxing, apologizing, mourning a lover's death—nothing like the sharp, clipped exclamation of shock one would expect from ordinary surprise.

He awoke to this strange voice，exactly as he had described.
The voice was indeed coming from the next room where his wife was sleeping.
At the same time，a red light suddenly streamed through the sliding door into the dark study.
The instant this light reached the back of his now-opening eyelids，he concluded it was a fire and leapt up.
And then，he suddenly threw open the partitioning sliding door with a clatter.

At that moment, I was imagining the heated kotatsu table overturned.
I was imagining a charred quilt.
I was imagining billowing smoke and burning tatami mats.
However, when I opened [the door] and looked, the oil lamp was lit as usual.
The wife and child were sleeping as usual.
The heated kotatsu table remained exactly in its evening position.
Everything was exactly as I had seen it before going to bed.

It was peaceful.
It was warm.
Only the maid was crying.

The maid pressed down on the hem of the wife’s futon and spoke rapidly.
The wife woke up, blinking rapidly but showing no sign of rising.
I could hardly discern what had happened; standing rooted at the threshold, I vacantly surveyed the room.
The instant I did so, the word ‘burglar’ surfaced within the maid’s sobbing cries.
The instant those words reached my ears—as though everything had been resolved—I immediately strode across my wife’s room and burst into the next room while bellowing, “What the—!”
But the next room I burst into was pitch-dark.
The adjoining kitchen’s storm shutter had come off one panel, and beautiful moonlight was streaming in all the way to the room’s entrance.
I saw moonlight illuminating the depths of the residence in the dead of night and naturally felt cold.
I stepped out onto the wooden floor in bare feet and went all the way to the kitchen sink area, only to find the surroundings utterly still.
When I looked outside, there was nothing but the moon.
I didn’t feel like taking a single step beyond the doorway.

I turned back, went to my wife, and said, “The burglar has fled. Rest assured—nothing was stolen.”
The wife had finally gotten up by then.
Without saying a word, she carried an oil lamp into the dark room and held it up before the chest of drawers.
The double doors were removed.
The drawers were left open.
The wife looked at her own face and said, “It was stolen after all.”
I finally realized the burglar had fled after stealing.
I suddenly found it all utterly absurd.
When I looked to one side, the futon of the maid who had come crying to wake us was gone.
By that pillow stood another chest of drawers.
On top of that chest sat another utility chest.
Since it was year-end, I heard doctor’s fees and such were kept inside this one.
When I had my wife check it, she said this one remained untouched.
Perhaps because the maid had come crying out from the veranda side, the burglar had no choice but to flee mid-task.

Before long, everyone who had been sleeping in other rooms woke up and gathered.
Then they all began saying various things.
They spoke regretfully—some wishing they’d gotten up earlier for minor needs, others lamenting how they couldn’t fall asleep and had stayed wide-eyed until around two o’clock.
Among them, the eldest daughter, who was ten, declared that she had been fully aware of both the burglar entering from the kitchen and his creaking footsteps along the veranda.
“Goodness!” Miss Ofusa exclaimed in surprise.
Ofusa-san was eighteen and a relative’s daughter who slept in the same room as the eldest daughter.
I went back to bed and slept.

The next day, because of all this commotion, I woke up slightly later than usual.
While washing my face and having breakfast, the maid in the kitchen was making a fuss about having found—or not found—the burglar’s footprints.
Finding it a nuisance, I withdrew to my study.
I had barely been there ten minutes when a voice called out at the entrance.
It was an authoritative voice.
Since it didn’t seem directed toward the kitchen, I went out to answer myself and found the police officer standing before the lattice door.
“I hear a burglar got in,” he said with a laugh.
When he asked, “Were the doors properly secured?” I replied, “Well, not particularly well.”
“Then there’s nothing for it—if the seals are loose, they’ll get in anywhere. You must drive nails into every last storm shutter,” he instructed.
I responded with vague murmurs.
After meeting this police officer, I began feeling that the true culprit wasn’t the burglar, but rather the negligent homeowner.

The police officer headed to the kitchen.
There, he took hold of my wife and began writing down the lost items in his notebook.
“One shuchin maru obi—what’s a maru obi? If I just write ‘maru obi,’ will that make sense? Right, then one shuchin maru obi, and then…”

The maid was grinning slyly.
This police officer knew nothing of maru obi or haraawase.
He was an utterly uncomplicated yet amusing police officer.
He soon compiled a list of about ten missing items, noted their prices below, then emphasized that the total came to 150 yen before leaving.

It was at this moment that I first clearly understood what had been stolen.
The missing items numbered ten—all of them sashes.
The one who broke in last night had been a sash thief.
With New Year's just around the corner, my wife wore a strange expression.
Apparently the children couldn't change into their kimono even during the first three days of the New Year.
There was nothing to be done.

By afternoon, a detective came.
He went up to the tatami room and looked around thoroughly.
He even inspected the small bucket in the kitchen, muttering about whether they'd set up a candle in a bucket to work by its light.
"Well now, do have some tea," she said, seating him in the sunny tearoom to talk.

“Burglars generally come by train from areas like Shitaya or Asakusa and return by train the next morning,” he said.
“They’re usually not caught.”
“If we catch them, we detectives end up worse off.”
“Putting thieves on trains just wastes the fare.”
“If it goes to court, lawyer fees get wasted.”
“Confidential funds—apparently the Metropolitan Police Department took half.”
“The remainder was apparently allocated to each police station.”
“There are apparently only three or four detectives in Ushigome—” I had believed that with police power one could accomplish most anything, and felt terribly uneasy.
The detective explaining things also wore an uneasy expression.

When I thought to call a repairman to fix the locks, unfortunately year-end tasks kept them swamped and they couldn't come.
Before long night fell.
Since there was no help for it, I left everything as it was and went to bed.

Everyone seemed uneasy.
I was not in a good mood either.
This was because it had been publicly declared by the police that burglars should be handled independently at each household's discretion.

Even so, since it had only been yesterday’s affair, I convinced myself it was likely safe and settled into bed with eased nerves.
Then in the night’s depths, my wife roused me again.
"The kitchen’s been rattling for some time now.
It’s unsettling—please go check," she urged.
True enough, clattering noises persisted.
My wife already wore the expression of someone witnessing a burglary in progress.

I quietly slipped out of bed.
Moving stealthily across my wife’s room and reaching the sliding door partition, in the next room the maid was snoring.
I slid open the door as quietly as possible.
And then, I stood alone in the pitch-dark room.
There was a clattering noise.
It was indeed coming from the kitchen entrance.
In the darkness, I took about three steps toward the sound like a shadow moving, and there was the room’s exit.
The shoji stood closed.
Outside was immediately a wooden-floored area.
I leaned against the shoji and strained my ears in the darkness.
Soon, there was a clunk.
After a while, another clunk came.
I heard this suspicious sound about four or five times.
And then, I confirmed that this must be coming from deep within the cupboard on the left side of the wooden-floored area.
Resuming an ordinary gait and demeanor, I returned to my wife’s room.
When I said, “It’s just a mouse gnawing on something. Calm down,” my wife replied gratefully, “I see.”
After that, we both settled down and fell asleep.

When morning came and I washed my face again before coming to the tea room, my wife had placed the bonito flakes gnawed by mice in front of the meal tray and explained, "This is from last night."
I gazed at the bonito flakes that had been ravaged all night long, murmuring, "Ah, I see."
Then my wife said somewhat reproachfully, "While you're chasing mice anyway, you might as well put away the bonito flakes."
I realized for the first time at that moment that I should have done so too.

Persimmon.

There was a child called Kii-chan.
He had smooth skin and bright eyes, but his cheeks lacked the rosy vitality common among well-nourished children.
At first glance, he gave an overall sallow impression.
The visiting hairdresser had once remarked this was because his mother doted on him too much and never let him play outside.
Kii-chan’s mother was a woman who, in this age of bobbed hairstyles, unfailingly redid her old-fashioned topknot every fourth day, always calling her child “Kii-chan, Kii-chan” with the honorific attached.
Above this mother stood Grandmother Kirisage, who likewise called him “Kii-chan, Kii-chan.”
“It’s time for Kii-chan to go to his koto lessons.”
They kept telling Kii-chan not to go outside carelessly or play with the neighborhood children.

Kii-chan rarely went out to play because of this.
However, the neighborhood wasn't particularly upscale.
There was a salt cracker shop in front.
Next to it was a roofer's.
A little further ahead were a geta clog tooth repair shop and a cast-repair locksmith.
Yet Kii-chan's household was that of a bank official.
A pine tree stood planted within the fence.
When winter came, the gardener would arrive and spread dead pine needles across every inch of the narrow garden.

Kii-chan, having no other recourse, would return from school and, when boredom set in, go out to play in the back.
The back was where Mother and Grandmother starched clothes.
It was where Yoshi did the laundry.
In the evening, it was where the headband-wearing man would come carrying a mortar on his shoulder to pound rice cakes.
It was where they would sprinkle salt on pickled vegetables and pack them into barrels.

Kii-chan would come out there and play with Mother, Grandmother, and Yoshi.
At times, when there was no one to play with, he would come out all by himself.
At such times, he would peer through the low hedge into the tenements below.

There were five or six tenements.
Since the hedge base formed a three- or four-foot cliff below, whenever Kii-chan peered through it from above, he found himself perfectly positioned to look down.
With childlike delight, Kii-chan enjoyed surveying these tenements from his elevated vantage point.
When Mr. Tatsumi—who worked at the arms factory—sat stripped to the waist drinking sake below, he would report to Mother: “Mr. Tatsumi’s drinking sake again!”
When Genbō the carpenter sharpened his hatchet down there, he informed Grandmother: “He’s sharpening something!”
He matter-of-factly relayed whatever he observed—them fighting or eating roasted sweet potatoes.
Then Yoshi would burst into loud laughter.
Mother and Grandmother too laughed with apparent amusement.
Kii-chan particularly excelled at eliciting these reactions through his reports.

When Kii-chan peered into the back area, he would sometimes encounter Yokichi, the son of Genbō.
And then, about once every three times, they would have a conversation.
But given that it was Kii-chan and Yokichi, there was no way their conversations could ever go smoothly.
They always ended up fighting.
When Yokichi called up from below, “What’s with you, pale fatty?”, Kii-chan shook his round chin contemptuously from above, retorting, “Hey you snot-nosed brat! Pauper!”
Once, when Yokichi got angry and thrust a clothes pole up from below, Kii-chan was so startled that he fled into the house.
Next, when Kii-chan dropped a rubber ball—neatly wound with wool yarn—over the cliff edge, Yokichi picked it up but refused to give it back.
“Give it back! Just leave it alone! Come on!” Kii-chan pleaded desperately, but Yokichi stood defiantly holding the ball, glaring upward.
“You apologize! If you do, I’ll give it back,” he said.
Kii-chan retorted, “Who’d ever apologize to a thief?!” and went to his mother—who was sewing—before bursting into tears.
Mother became frantic and went to retrieve the ball from the front entrance, but Yokichi’s mother merely said something about it being “most regrettable,” so the ball never made its way back to Kii-chan.

Three days later, Kii-chan came out to the back again holding a large red persimmon.
Then Yokichi approached the base of the cliff as usual.
Kii-chan took out a red persimmon from between the hedges and said, “Shall I give you this?”
Yokichi glared up at the persimmon from below and retorted without moving: “What’s that for? What’s that for? I don’t want that!”
“Don’t want it? Then forget it!” Kii-chan pulled his hand back from the hedge.
Yokichi kept repeating “What’s your problem? What’s your problem? I’ll throw it!” as he edged closer to the cliff base.
“So you want it?” Kii-chan held out the persimmon again.
“Why would I want that?” Yokichi glared up at him with wide eyes.

After repeating this exchange four or five times, Kii-chan said, “Fine, I’ll give it to you,” and dropped the persimmon he was holding with a plop over the cliff edge. Yokichi panicked and picked up the mud-covered persimmon. And then, the moment he picked it up, he sank his teeth into it sideways.

At that moment, Yokichi’s nostrils quivered. His thick lips twisted to the right. And then he spat out a piece he’d bitten off with a splat. Gathering intense hatred behind his eyes, he said “Ugh, this bitter thing!” and hurled the persimmon he held in his hand at Kii-chan. The persimmon sailed over Kii-chan’s head and struck the storage shed out back. Kii-chan ran into the house while shouting, “Hey you! Endure your hunger!” After a while, a loud burst of laughter could be heard from Kii-chan’s house.

Brazier.

When he woke, the hand warmer he had hugged to sleep last night lay cold on his stomach. When he looked out through the glass door beyond the eaves, a heavy sky stretched about three shaku wide, leaden in appearance. The stomach pain seemed to have subsided considerably. Summoning his resolve, he got up from the floor - it was colder than he had expected. Under the window, yesterday’s snow remained untouched.

The bathroom glinted stiff with ice.
The water pipe had frozen solid, and the faucet wouldn't turn.
After finally managing a lukewarm wash, as I was pouring black tea into a bowl in the family room, the two-year-old boy began crying as usual.
The child had cried all day the day before yesterday as well.
Yesterday he'd cried nonstop.
When I asked my wife if something was wrong, she said it was nothing—just the cold.
There was no helping it.
Indeed, his crying sounded whiny rather than pained or distressed.
Still, if he kept crying like that, there must have been some unease bothering him.
As I listened, I gradually grew uneasy myself.
At times he became downright bratty.
There were moments I wanted to scold him sharply, but thinking him still too young for such reprimands, I held back.
The thought that today would bring another day like yesterday and the day before left me feeling out of sorts since morning.
With my stomach acting up, I'd recently made it a rule to skip breakfast; still clutching my teacup of black tea, I retreated to my study.

As I held my hands over the brazier to warm them slightly, the child kept crying somewhere in the distance. Soon only my palms grew hot enough to smolder. Yet from my back to my shoulders spread an unbearable chill. The very tips of my feet had turned so cold it verged on pain. With no alternative, I stayed perfectly still. The slightest movement made my hands brush against some frigid surface. Each contact stung my nerves like thorns. Even rotating my neck brought an intolerable sensation as my nape slid coldly against the kimono collar. I sat frozen at the center of my ten-tatami study, besieged by cold from every direction. This study had wooden flooring. Where one would normally use chairs, I'd laid out a rug and sat imagining it as conventional tatami. But the narrow rug left about two shaku of bare floor exposed on all sides - smooth planks gleaming starkly. Motionless as I gazed at those wooden boards, the boy continued crying. I found myself utterly unable to summon any will to work.

Just then, my wife came in to borrow the clock for a moment and said, "It's snowing again."
When I looked, fine snow had begun to fall unnoticed.
From the midst of a windless, murky sky, it fell quietly, unhurriedly, coldly.

“Hey, when we lit the furnace last year because the child was sick, how much did the charcoal cost?”

“At that time, we paid twenty-eight yen at the end of the month.”

I heard my wife’s answer and gave up on the parlor furnace.
The parlor furnace lay in the storage shed out back.
“Hey, can’t you keep the child a bit quieter?”

The wife made a face that seemed to say it couldn’t be helped.
Then she said.

“Osei-san says her stomach hurts and seems to be in quite a bit of pain. Should we ask Dr. Hayashi to examine her?”

I knew Osei-san had been bedridden for a few days, but I hadn’t thought her condition was that serious.
When I urged that we should call a doctor quickly, my wife agreed and left while still holding the clock.
As she closed the sliding door, she remarked on how cold this room was.

Still numb, I couldn't bring myself to work. To tell the truth, there was a mountain of work waiting—I had to write one installment of my manuscript, fulfill an obligation to read two or three short stories requested by an unknown young man, and keep my promise to introduce someone's work to a magazine with an accompanying letter. The books that should have been read over the past two or three months were piled in a towering heap beside the desk. For about a week now, whenever I resolved to work and sat at my desk, people would come. And they all brought some request or other with them. On top of that, my stomach ached terribly. In that respect alone, today was a blessing—no visitors yet—but no matter how I considered it, I remained too cold and lethargic to remove my hands from the brazier.

Then there was a carriage pulled up to the entranceway.
The maid came and announced that Mr. Nagasawa had arrived.
I stayed crouched by the brazier, looking up at Nagasawa from under lowered brows as he entered, and said, "Too cold to move."
Nagasawa took a letter from his pocket and read it aloud—something about how the fifteenth was the old calendar's New Year, so please make arrangements without fail.
As always, it concerned money matters.

Nagasawa left after twelve.
Yet the cold remained unbearable.
Resolving to revive myself with a bath, I grabbed a hand towel and headed for the entrance only to collide with Yoshida uttering, "Pardon my intrusion."
After ushering him into the parlor and hearing his litany of personal troubles, Yoshida broke into quiet sobs.
Meanwhile at the rear of the house, a doctor's arrival sparked some commotion.
When Yoshida finally took his leave, the child resumed wailing.
At last I went to bathe.

Only after getting out of the bath did I finally feel warm.
Feeling refreshed, I returned home and entered my study to find the lamp lit and the window curtains drawn.
In the brazier were fresh pieces of cut charcoal.
I plopped down heavily on the zabuton cushion.
Then the wife came from the back room saying, “It must be cold,” and brought me some buckwheat tea.
When I asked about Osei-san’s condition, she said that it might possibly be appendicitis.
I received the buckwheat tea and replied that if it seemed serious, it would be best to have her admitted to the hospital.
The wife withdrew to the tea room, agreeing that would be best.

After the wife left, it suddenly became quiet.
It was a night of pure snow.
The crying child had fortunately fallen asleep.
As I sipped hot buckwheat tea under the bright lamp, listening to the crackling of freshly stacked charcoal, red flames flickered faintly within the banked ashes.
Occasionally, pale blue flames emerged from the fork of the charcoal.
In this fire’s color, I felt warmth from the day for the first time.
And then I watched as the ash surface gradually whitened for about five minutes.

Boarding House

The first time I stayed at a boarding house was on a northern hill.
Having taken a liking to the compact two-story red-brick building, I paid the relatively high weekly rent of two pounds and rented a single back room.
The landlady explained that Mr. K, who currently occupied the front room, was touring Scotland and would not return for some time.

The landlady was a woman with sunken eyes, a snub nose, and sharply pointed chin and cheeks—a face so severe that at first glance, it defied conventional notions of femininity to the point where her age became indeterminable.
I wondered whether this sullen countenance might have formed through all these flaws—nervous irritability, spitefulness, obstinacy, mulishness, suspicion—relentlessly warping what had once been tranquil features.

The landlady had black hair and black eyes that seemed unbefitting of a northern country.
Yet her speech differed not in the slightest from that of an ordinary English person.
On the day I moved in, there was an invitation for tea from downstairs, but when I went down to look, none of the family members were there.
In the small north-facing dining room, I sat directly across from the landlady, just the two of us.
As I looked around the dimly lit room—as if sunlight had never reached it—a lonely narcissus was arranged atop the mantelpiece.
The landlady engaged in casual conversation while offering me tea and toast.
At that moment, on some impulse, she confessed that her birthplace was not England but France.
Then, moving her black eyes and glancing back at the narcissus in the glass bottle behind her, she said that England was cloudy and unbearably cold.
She likely meant to show that even flowers aren’t this beautiful there.

In my mind, I compared the sparse bloom of this narcissus to the streaks of faded blood flowing through this woman’s sunken cheeks, imagining the warm dreams that should have been seen in distant France.
Behind the landlady’s black hair and black eyes lay what must have been a hollow history of vanished spring fragrances from years long past.
I asked, “Do you speak French?”
Cutting off her own tongue-tip that was about to answer “No—”, she continued with two or three phrases in the smooth southern tongue.
It was so beautiful an accent that one wondered how it could emerge from such a bony throat.

That evening at dinner, a white-bearded bald old man took his seat at the table.
When the landlady introduced him saying, “This is my father,” I realized for the first time that the master was elderly.
This master spoke in an odd manner.
Even from brief hearing, he was clearly no Englishman.
So parent and child crossed the strait together to settle in London—this I now understood.
Then unbidden, the old man proclaimed himself German.
Having miscalculated slightly, I merely replied, “Is that so?”

When I returned to my room and was reading a book, I found myself strangely preoccupied with the parent and child downstairs.
That old man bore no resemblance whatsoever to his angular daughter.
In the center of his face - swollen as if inflamed - lay a squat, fleshy nose with two narrow eyes set upon it.
There was a president in South Africa named Kruger.
He closely resembled him.
It was not a face that struck my eyes as clear or pleasant.
Moreover, his manner of speaking to his daughter lacked any warmth.
Though his teeth seemed ineffective and his speech mumbled, there was an underlying roughness to his tone.
When facing her father, the daughter's already severe countenance appeared to grow even more forbidding.
They were no ordinary parent and child - I went to bed thinking this.

The next morning when I went down for breakfast, in addition to the parent and child from the previous evening, the family had grown by one more.
The person who had newly joined the table was a ruddy-complexioned, amiable man of about forty.
When I saw this man’s face at the dining room entrance, I felt for the first time as though I were living in vibrant human society.
The landlady introduced the man to me as "my brother."
He was indeed not the husband after all.
However, their facial features differed so drastically that they could hardly be accepted as brother and sister.

That day I had lunch out and returned a little past three. Shortly after entering my room, I was summoned with a call to come drink tea.

It was cloudy again today.
When I opened the door to the dim dining room, the landlady sat alone by the fireplace with tea things at hand.
The coal had been lit, lending a somewhat cheerful atmosphere.
Looking at her face illuminated by dying flames, I saw it faintly flushed from the fire’s heat beneath a light application of white powder.
Standing at the room’s entrance, I came to keenly understand what might be called the loneliness of cosmetics.
The landlady cast a look as though she had discerned my impression.
It was then that I heard about her family’s circumstances from the landlady herself.

The landlady’s mother had married a Frenchman twenty-five years earlier and borne this daughter.
After they had spent several years together, the husband died.
Taking her daughter by the hand, the mother remarried a German.
That German was the old man from last night.
He now ran a tailor’s shop in London’s West End, commuting there day after day.
The child from his previous marriage also worked at the same shop, but parent and child got along very poorly.
Even living under the same roof, they had never exchanged a word.
The son always returned home late at night.
He would take off his shoes in the entryway, don tabi socks, sneak down the hallway so the old man wouldn’t notice, and slip into his own room to sleep.

Her mother had passed away long before.
When she died, she had taken great care to leave instructions about herself, but all of Mother’s property passed into the old man’s hands, leaving her unable to freely use even a single penny.
Since there was no other way, she ran this boarding house to earn her pocket money.
Agnes—

The landlady did not say anything further.

Agnes was the name of a thirteen- or fourteen-year-old girl employed at this house.
At that moment, I felt there was some resemblance between the son’s face I had seen that morning and Agnes.
As if on cue, Agnes emerged from the kitchen clutching toasted bread.

“Agnes, would you like some toasted bread?”

Agnes silently accepted a slice of toasted bread and retreated back toward the kitchen.

One month later, I left this boarding house.

The Scent of the Past

About two weeks before I left this boarding house, Mr.K returned from Scotland.
At that time, I was introduced to Mr.K by the landlady.
That two Japanese men had coincidentally met at a small house in London’s Yamate district—and yet, having never exchanged names—were made to bow through the mediation of a foreign woman whose status, background, and history remained entirely unknown strikes me even now as profoundly peculiar when I reflect on it.
At that time, this elderly gentlewoman was dressed in black.
Extending her bony, desiccated hands—"Mr.K, this is Mr.N"—but before she could finish speaking, she brought her other hand toward the opposite party—"Mr.N, this is Mr.K"—impartially introducing both sides with equal ceremony.

I was rather taken aback by how the elderly gentlewoman’s manner—so stern and imbued with solemnity—maintained such ceremonious formality.
Mr.K stood facing me, creasing wrinkles at the corners of his shapely double eyelids as he let slip a smile.
What I felt was less an impulse to laugh than a desolation born of contradiction.
Were one to undergo matrimonial rites arranged by spectral matchmakers—this must be how it would feel, I thought as I stood there.
Wherever that elderly gentlewoman’s black shadow moved, vitality seemed to drain away, transforming all into ancient ruins before one’s eyes.
Should one mistakenly brush against that flesh, one could only imagine the blood at the point of contact turning cold.
I half-turned my head toward the fading sound of womanly footsteps beyond the door.

After the elderly gentlewoman left, Mr. K and I quickly became close.

Mr. K’s room had a beautiful carpet laid out, white silk window drapes hanging down, splendid armchairs and rocking chairs furnished, and even a separate small bedroom attached.
What pleased me most was that the fireplace was constantly lit, crumbling the brightly glowing coal without reserve.

From then on, I decided to drink tea with Mr.K in his room, just the two of us.
During the day, we often went out together to nearby restaurants.
The bill was always paid by Mr.K.
Mr.K claimed to have come to survey port construction sites and had quite a bit of money.
When at home, he wore a maroon satin dressing gown embroidered with flowers and birds, looking thoroughly pleased with himself.
By contrast, my kimono—the same one I had left Japan in—had become thoroughly soiled and reached a thoroughly shabby state.
Mr.K said it was too much and lent me the money for new clothes.

Over the course of two weeks, Mr. K and I talked about various things.
Mr. K once said that he would create a Keio Cabinet.
It was apparently called the Keio Cabinet because it would be formed exclusively by those born during the Keio era.
When he asked me, "When were you born?" and I answered "Keio 3," he laughed and said, "Then you qualify as a cabinet member."
I recalled that Mr.K was indeed born in either Keio 2 or Keio 1.
By just one more year, I would have lost the right to participate in pivotal matters alongside Mr.K.

While we were having these interesting conversations, the downstairs family would occasionally come up in our discussions.
Then Mr. K would always frown and shake his head.
He said that a little girl named Agnes was the most pitiable of all.
Agnes would bring coal to Mr. K’s room every morning.
In the afternoon, she would bring tea, butter, and bread.
She would bring them in silence, leave them in silence, and depart.
No matter when one looked, she had a pale face and would offer only a slight greeting with her large, moist eyes.
She would appear like a shadow and vanish like a shadow.
Not once had her footsteps ever made a sound.

One time, finding it unpleasant, I informed Mr.K of my intention to leave this house.
Mr.K agreed and advised that while he himself had to rush about here and there for his investigations and thus didn't mind such conditions, someone like me would do better to settle down in a more comfortable place to study.
At that time, Mr.K said he would cross to the other side of the Mediterranean and was busily preparing his traveling gear.

When I was leaving the boarding house, the elderly gentlewoman earnestly entreated me to reconsider.
She even offered to lower the rent and said I could use that room while Mr.K was away, but in the end, I moved south.
At the same time, Mr.K also went far away.

Two or three months later, I suddenly received a letter from Mr.K.
He had returned from his journey.
It said he would be staying there for the time being and that I should come visit.
I wanted to go immediately, but due to various circumstances, I didn’t have time to make it all the way to the northern edge.
About a week later, when I had business that took me to Islington, I took the opportunity on my way back to drop by Mr.K’s place.

From the second-floor window, the familiar habutae curtain hung taut against the glass.
Anticipating the warm fireplace, maroon satin embroidery, armchair, and Mr.K’s lively travel stories, I eagerly entered the gate and rapped briskly on the knocker as if racing upstairs.
Hearing no footsteps beyond the door, I thought no one would answer and was about to knock again when it swung open of its own accord.
I stepped across the threshold.
There I locked eyes with Agnes gazing up at me apologetically.
At that instant, the boarding house’s smell—forgotten these three months—struck my nostrils like lightning in the narrow corridor’s center.
That odor contained all at once: black hair and eyes; a Kruger-like face; a son resembling Agnes; Agnes like her son’s shadow; and secrets coiled between them.
When this scent hit me, I vividly perceived their emotions, gestures, speech, and expressions in hell’s dark underbelly.
I could not bring myself to climb upstairs and face Mr.K.

Cat's Grave

After moving to Waseda, the cat gradually grew emaciated.
It showed no inclination whatsoever to play with the children.
When sunlight fell across the veranda, it would lie there.
Aligning its front paws and resting its square jaw upon them, it would gaze fixedly at the garden shrubs without showing any sign of movement.
No matter how boisterously the children played nearby, it maintained an air of indifference.
The children too had ceased paying it any attention from the outset.
As if declaring itself unfit for playmates, it treated its former companions like strangers.
Nor was it just the children—the maid merely placed three daily meals in a kitchen corner and otherwise paid it scant regard.
Moreover, that food was usually devoured by a large calico cat from the neighborhood.
The cat showed no sign of resentment.
It was never seen fighting.
It simply lay still and slept.
Yet there was an unmistakable unease in its manner of sleeping.
Unlike a creature lying stretched out comfortably to claim its share of sunlight—here there being no compulsion to move—even this description proved inadequate.
Having crossed some threshold of lassitude where stillness brought desolation yet movement deepened it further, the cat seemed to endure through motionless perseverance.
Though its gaze remained fixed on the garden shrubs, it likely perceived neither leaves nor trunk shapes.
Its bluish-yellow pupils merely stared vacantly at one spot.
Just as he went unacknowledged by the household children, he himself seemed not to properly recognize the world's existence.

Even so, he seemed to have occasional business outside that compelled him to venture out.
Then without fail, the neighborhood calico cat would chase him.
Terrified by this pursuit, he would leap onto the veranda, burst through tightly closed shoji screens, and flee all the way to shelter by the hearth.
The family only became aware of his existence during these moments.
He too likely became fully conscious of being alive solely at such times.

As these incidents multiplied, the fur of his long tail gradually thinned.
At first patchy depressions resembling holes appeared across its length; later bare red skin spread until it hung limp and pitiful to behold.
Utterly exhausted in every way, he would bend his body double and begin compulsively licking his sore spots.

When I said, “Hey, the cat seems to be acting strange,” my wife replied with utmost indifference, “Yes, I suppose it’s just old age.”
I left it alone as well.
Then, after some time, it began occasionally vomiting up its three meals.
Its throat formed a large convulsive wave, producing a distressing sound that was neither a sneeze nor a gasp.
Though it seemed to be suffering, there was nothing to be done—whenever we noticed, we would drive it outside.
Otherwise, it would mercilessly soil whether on the tatami mats or the futon.
The eight-tan zabuton prepared for guests had mostly been soiled by it.

“There’s just no helping it.”
“It must be a stomach issue—have it drink some Hōtan dissolved in water.”

The wife said nothing.
Two or three days later when I asked if she'd given it the Hōtan, she replied it was useless—the cat wouldn't open its mouth—then explained how feeding it fish bones made it vomit. "Then don't feed it!" I retorted sharply while reading.

As long as free from nausea, the cat still slept quietly.
By now it crouched rigidly as though only the veranda supporting its body offered comfort—a posture pared down to essentials.
Its gaze too had begun changing.
At first there was calmness within its desolation—distant things mirrored in its close focus—but this gradually shifted into unsettling motion.
Yet its eyes kept darkening steadily.
The sun dipped down and I thought I glimpsed faint lightning.
But they left it alone.
The wife too seemed unconcerned.
The children had naturally forgotten the cat existed altogether.

One evening, he lay prone at the edge of the children’s bedding; soon he let out a growl like that made when his caught fish was taken away.
At this moment, I alone noticed something was wrong.
The children were sleeping soundly.
The wife was wholly engrossed in needlework.
After a while, the cat growled again.
The wife finally stopped her needlework.
I said, “What’s wrong? If it bites the children’s heads in the middle of the night, that’ll be a disaster.”
“Nonsense,” said the wife, and resumed sewing the sleeve of her underrobe.
The cat growled from time to time.

The next day, it remained perched on the edge of the hearth and growled all day.
Pouring tea or fetching the kettle felt unsettling.
But when night came, both I and my wife completely forgot about the cat.
The cat died that very night.
By morning, when the maid went to fetch firewood from the back storage shed, it was already stiff and lying atop the old stove.

The wife went out of her way to view its corpse.
After that, contrary to her previous indifference, she suddenly began making a commotion.
She requested the regular rickshaw driver to buy a square tombstone and asked to have something written on it.
I wrote “The Cat’s Grave” on the front and inscribed on the back, “May an evening come when lightning strikes beneath this stone.”
The rickshaw driver asked, “Is it all right to bury it like this?”
“You can’t possibly cremate it either, can you?” the maid mocked.

The children also suddenly began doting on the cat.
They placed two glass bottles on either side of the tombstone and inserted many bush clover flowers.
They filled a bowl with water and placed it before the grave.
The flowers and water were replaced every day.
On the third evening, a four-year-old girl—I was watching from the study window at this time—came alone before the grave, gazed for a while at the plain wooden marker, then lowered the toy ladle she held in her hand and scooped up water from the bowl offered to the cat to drink.
And she didn’t do it just once.
The water droplets that spilled from the bush clover flowers moistened little Aiko’s throat multiple times in the quiet evening.

On the cat’s death anniversary, **the wife** would always offer a slice of salmon and a bowl of rice topped with bonito flakes before its grave.
To this day**, she has never forgotten.
However**, these days**, she no longer brings it out to the garden and usually just places it on top of** **the chest of drawers** in **the living room**.

Warm Dream

The wind struck tall buildings and, unable to pass straight through as intended, suddenly bent like lightning to come blowing down diagonally from overhead onto the paving stones.
As I walked, I pressed down the bowler hat I was wearing with my right hand.
Ahead stood a single driver waiting for customers.
Having apparently been observing this scene from his driver’s seat, the moment I removed my hand from my hat and straightened my posture, he raised his index finger upright.
It was a sign asking, “Won’t you ride?”
I declined.
Then the driver clenched his right hand into a fist and struck his chest violently.
Even from two or three yards away, I could hear the thudding sound.
London drivers warm themselves and their hands in this manner.
I turned around and glanced at this driver.
From under a worn-out stiff hat protruded frost-bitten thick hair.
On the right side of the back of his coarse brown coat—resembling a patched-together blanket—he stretched out that elbow, stiffening it until parallel with his shoulder, all while thumping his chest.
It was exactly as though some kind of machine were in operation.
I started walking again.

Everyone walking along the road overtook and passed me by.
Not even the women fell behind.
Holding up the backs of their skirts lightly at their waists, they hurried along, their high-heeled shoes clattering against the paving stones so violently it seemed the heels might bend.
When I looked closely, every face—every single one—was strained taut.
Men kept their eyes fixed straight ahead; women did not so much as glance sideways—both charging single-mindedly toward their destinations.
Their mouths were tightly pursed.
Their eyebrows were deeply knitted.
Their noses jutted sharply upward, their faces stretched long with tension.
And their feet carried them straight toward wherever business called.
It was as though walking these streets had become unbearable, remaining outdoors unendurable—as if failing to conceal themselves beneath a roof with utmost haste would brand them with lifelong disgrace; such was their bearing.

I trudged along, feeling somehow ill at ease in this city. When I looked up, the great sky—divided since time immemorial—stretched east to west as nothing but a narrow strip between edifices rising like fortress walls on either side. This strip had been mouse-gray since morning but was gradually deepening to kite-feather brown. Buildings stood gray by their very nature. As if exhausted by the warm sunlight, they shamelessly blocked both flanks. They had transformed broad land into a cramped valley floor’s shadow—piling third stories upon second, fourth upon third—so the high sun could never reach it. Diminutive figures moved through patches of that abyss, blackened and shivering with cold. Among those dark shifting forms, I was the most lethargic particle. Wind trapped between valley walls, its initial force spent, swept through the depths as though ladling up the very bottom. The black shapes scattered in all directions like minnows slipping through a net’s mesh. Even my dullard self was finally blown apart by this wind and took refuge indoors.

After winding around a long corridor and climbing two or three flights of stairs, there was a large spring-loaded door.
As soon as I leaned my weight ever so slightly, my body slid naturally and soundlessly into the vast gallery.
Before my eyes lay a space dazzlingly bright.
When I looked back, the door had closed behind me unnoticed, and where I stood now felt as warm as spring.
For a while I blinked to adjust my eyes to the light.
Then I looked to either side.
There were many people on both sides.
Yet everyone sat quietly and calmly.
Their facial muscles all appeared completely relaxed.
Even with so many people crowded together like this—no matter how numerous—it didn’t feel oppressive at all.
They were all harmonizing with one another.
I looked upward.
Above stretched a grand domed ceiling resplendent with vivid colors so intense they seemed to answer one’s gaze, within which brilliant gold leaf shimmered dazzlingly enough to make one’s heart leap.
I looked ahead.
Ahead ended at the handrail.
Beyond the handrail lay nothing.
It was a vast cavity.
I approached the handrail, stretched my short neck, and peered into the cavity.
There far below swarmed tiny people like figures from a painting.
Despite their great numbers, they appeared vividly.

This is what they mean by a sea of people.
White, black, yellow, blue, purple, red—every vivid color squirmed small yet beautiful in the distant depths, clustered densely like ripples across an open sea, as though scales of five colors had been arrayed there.

At that moment, these squirming figures vanished in an instant, and from the vast ceiling down to the distant valley floor, everything plunged into darkness at once.
The thousands upon thousands that had been arrayed until now were buried in darkness, and not a soul raised a voice.
As though this vast darkness had erased every last one of them, leaving neither trace nor form behind—a perfect desolation.

No sooner had I thought this than a square section at the distant bottom—directly before me—began dimly brightening as though emerging from the darkness, unnoticed until now. At first I took it for merely another pattern in the shadows, but gradually it detached itself from the gloom. When I became conscious of bathing in this soft light, I discerned opaque hues within the mist-like rays: yellow, purple, indigo. Soon the yellow and purple among them stirred into motion. I strained my optic nerves until they ached, staring unblinkingly at these shifting forms. Then the haze lifted completely from my eyes. Far beyond, against a sunlit sea glowing warmly in the distance, there emerged upon green grass a beautiful man clad in yellow robes and a beautiful woman with long purple sleeves trailing behind her. As the woman settled onto a marble bench beneath an olive tree, the man stood at her side looking down upon her. At that moment, drawn by a warm southern wind, tranquil music came slender and prolonged across distant waves.

Both above and below the hole erupted into commotion at once.
They had not vanished into the darkness.
In the darkness, they had been dreaming of warm Greece.

Impression

When I stepped outside, a wide street ran straight through before the house. When I stood experimentally at its center and surveyed around, every house within sight stood four stories tall and uniformly colored in the same hue. The neighboring houses and those across were of such similar construction as to be nearly indistinguishable; after walking a few paces past them and turning back, I could no longer tell which house I had emerged from. It was a strange town.

Last night I slept enveloped in the sound of trains.
By past ten o'clock, accompanied by horses' hooves and jingling bells, I raced through darkness as if in a dream.
At that moment, hundreds of beautiful lights flickered like scattered shadows across my vision.
I saw nothing else.
This marked my inaugural vision.

After pausing in this strange town two or three times to look up and down, I finally turned left and came to a crossroads after walking about a block.
Having carefully noted my bearings, when I turned right this time, I found myself on a thoroughfare broader than before.
Through this avenue passed countless carriages.
Every one bore people upon its roof.
Red or yellow, blue, brown, navy—these colored vehicles kept overtaking me unrestrainedly as they rushed past.
Peering into the distance revealed no end to the procession of hues.
When I glanced back, they advanced like a five-hued cloud.
As I stood arrested in thought—wondering whence these roof-borne multitudes came and whither they sped—a tall figure behind pressed against my shoulders as if to engulf me.
To my right, where I tried to shift aside, stood another towering form.
To my left likewise.
Each who received a shove transmitted it onward to those behind.
All maintained this silence.
All moved forward through natural compulsion.

It was at this moment I first became aware I had drowned in a sea of people.
I couldn’t tell how far this sea extended.
However, for all its vastness, it was an exceedingly calm sea.
Only, I could not get out.
Even when I turned right, it was packed.
Even when I looked left, it was blocked.
Even when I looked back, it was packed.
And so I quietly began to move forward.
As though nothing but a single thread of fate controlled me, tens of thousands of black heads moved forward in unison, step by step, as if by prior agreement.

As I walked, I thought of the house I had just left.
The strange town of uniform four-story buildings, all the same color—everything seemed to be far away.
I felt almost uncertain of where to turn or how to walk to find my way back.
Even if I managed to return, I likely wouldn’t be able to find my own house.
That house had stood darkly within the darkness last evening.

Anxiously lost in thought, I found myself pushed along by the towering crowd, reluctantly turning down two or three main thoroughfares. With each turn, I felt myself moving further away from the direction of last evening's shadowed house. Amidst this eye-straining multitude of people, I sensed an inexpressible loneliness. Then I came upon a long, gentle slope. This appeared to be a square where five or six broad roads converged. The human tide that had until now flowed in a single current gathered from various directions at the slope's base and began quietly swirling.

At the foot of the slope stood a large stone-carved lion.
Its entire body was gray.
Despite its slender tail, the deep head—with a mane coiled into a vortex—was as large as a four-to barrel.
With its front legs aligned, it lay sleeping amidst the undulating crowd.
There were two lions.
The ground below was paved with cobblestones.
At its center stood a thick copper pillar.
I stood amidst the quietly moving sea of people, raised my eyes, and looked up at the top of the pillar.
The pillar stood straight and tall as far as the eye could see.
Above it spread a vast sky stretching endlessly.
The tall pillar towered as if piercing through the center of this sky.
I couldn’t tell what lay beyond this pillar.
Once again pressed by the wave of people, I left the square and wandered down the street to the right with no particular destination.
After some time had passed, when I looked back, a small human stood all alone atop a thin pole-like pillar.

Human.

Gosaku-san had no sooner risen than she began fretting—"Hasn't the hairdresser come yet? Hasn't the hairdresser come?"
She had expressly arranged with the hairdresser the previous evening.
Having received assurances that there were no conflicting appointments and they would certainly arrive by nine o'clock, she had finally relaxed enough to sleep.
When she checked the pillar clock, only five minutes remained until nine.
So visibly agitated was she—wondering what could be delaying them—that the maid, unable to endure watching any longer, declared "I'll go check," and hurried out.
Gosaku-san hunched forward, peering into the mirror stand she had positioned before the shoji screen while standing upright.
Then she deliberately parted her lips, laying bare every one of her immaculately aligned white teeth.
At that moment, the clock atop the pillar began booming out nine o'clock.
Gosaku-san immediately sprang up, slid open the intermediary fusuma door, and demanded: "What's happening? It's already past nine!"
"You must get up now or we'll be terribly late!"
Hearing nine strike, Gosaku-san's husband had just propped himself up in bed.
The instant he saw Gosaku-san's face, he casually rose with a cheerful "Right-o."

Gosaku-san immediately turned back toward the kitchen, bundled together a toothpick, toothpaste, soap, and hand towel, and handed them to her husband with a “Now go quickly.”
“I’ll just shave my beard on the way back,” said the husband—who had layered a yukata under his meisen dotera—as he descended to the genkan.
“Wait just a moment,” said Gosaku-san as she rushed back into the inner rooms.
In the meantime, the husband began using a toothpick.
Gosaku-san took out a small noshi bag from the utility chest drawer, put silver coins inside, and brought it out.
The husband—unable to speak—silently took the bag and stepped over the lattice.
Gosaku-san gazed for a moment at the excess hand towel dangling behind her husband’s shoulder before withdrawing into the inner rooms again, sitting before the mirror stand, and once more examining her reflection.
She then half-opened the drawer of the chest of drawers and tilted her head slightly.
Before long, she took out two or three items from inside, placed them on the tatami mat, and pondered.
However, she left just one item she had retrieved and carefully put the rest away.
Then she opened the second drawer.
And thought again.
Gosaku-san spent about thirty minutes pondering, taking things out, or putting them away.
All the while, she kept gazing anxiously at the pillar clock.
When she had finally gathered the garments, wrapped them in a large turmeric-dyed cotton furoshiki, and pushed the bundle to the corner of the tatami room, the hairdresser entered through the kitchen entrance with a loud exclamation of surprise.
“I’m terribly sorry for being late,” panted the hairdresser while making excuses.
“You must have been terribly busy—how thoughtless of me to trouble you,” said Gosaku-san as she took out a long kiseru pipe and offered the hairdresser tobacco.

Since the hairdresser hadn't come, she had plenty of time to arrange her hair.
The husband bathed, shaved his beard, and soon returned.
In the meantime, Gosaku-san told the hairdresser she would have her husband take Mii-chan to the Yūrakuza Theater that day.
The hairdresser exclaimed, “Oh my! I’d love to join you!” After showering her with joking flattery, he left with a “Do take your time.”

The husband peeled back a corner of the turmeric-dyed cotton bundle and said, “You’re wearing this? That other one suited you better.”
“But I already wore that one to Mii-chan’s in the evening,” Gosaku-san replied.
“I see. Then this will do.”
When the husband added, “Maybe I’ll wear that wadded haori—it seems chilly,” Gosaku-san retorted, “Don’t be absurd! Wearing the same thing constantly…” and refused to produce the patterned wadded haori.

Before long, having finished her makeup, Gosaku-san put on a fashionable quail-patterned crepe michiyuki coat and fur collar, then went out through the front entrance with her husband.
As they walked, she hung onto her husband and kept talking.
When they reached the intersection, a large crowd had gathered by the police box.
Gosaku-san grabbed the feathered hem of her husband’s haori, stretched up on tiptoes, and peered into the crowd.

In the center stood a man in a stamped happi coat loitering aimlessly—neither properly standing nor sitting.
His discolored coat glistened coldly with moisture; he must have fallen repeatedly into mud.
When the officer demanded “What are you?” he retorted with a slurred tongue—“I-I’m human!”—puffing himself up.
Each time he did this, everyone roared with laughter.
Gosaku-san too looked at her husband’s face and laughed.
But the drunkard wouldn’t have it.
Glaring around with fierce eyes—“Wh-what’s so funny?” he stammered.
“What’s funny ’bout me bein’ human?”
He hung his head limply—“So what if I look like this?”—then suddenly shouted at full volume as if struck by inspiration: “I’m human!”

Just then, a tall, dark-faced man wearing a stamped happi coat came pulling a cart from somewhere.
He pushed through the crowd and said something in a low voice to the police officer, then turned toward the drunkard and declared, “Alright, I’ll take this guy away．Get on here．”
The drunkard，with a delighted expression，said “Thank ya kindly” as he plopped down onto the cart on his back．
He looked up at the bright sky，blinked his bleary eyes a few times，then muttered，“You fool．．．So what if I look like this？I’m human．”
“Yeah，you’re human．That’s why you’re staying quiet，”said the tall man as he securely tied the drunkard to the cart with a straw rope．
And then，like a slaughtered pig，he rattled off down the main road．
Gosaku-san，still gripping the feathered hem of the haori，watched the cart’s shadow being pushed away through the gap in the crowd’s attention．
And then，she rejoiced that she now had another story to tell Mii-chan when she went to see her．

Mountain pheasant

Five or six people had gathered and were talking around the brazier when suddenly a young man arrived.
A man whose name they had not heard, whom they had never met—a complete stranger.
Since he had no letter of introduction and requested a meeting through an intermediary, when they invited him into the parlor, the young man entered where many people were gathered, carrying a mountain pheasant.
When the initial greetings were finished, he placed the mountain pheasant at the center of the gathering and, declaring it had arrived from his hometown, presented it as a temporary gift.

That day was cold.
Immediately, they all made and ate mountain pheasant soup.
When dressing the mountain pheasant, the young man—still wearing his hakama—stood in the kitchen, plucked the feathers himself, divided the meat, and tapped the bones with a methodical knocking.
The young man was slight of build with an oblong face, his thick-lensed glasses glinting beneath a pallid forehead.
What stood out most was neither his nearsightedness nor his dusky mustache, but rather the hakama he wore.
It was Kokura-ori—a boldly striped, ostentatious garment too rare for ordinary students to ever obtain.
He rested both hands on this hakama and declared himself a man of Nanbu.

The young man came again after about a week.
This time, he carried a manuscript he had written himself.
Since it wasn’t very well done, they told him so without reserve; whereupon he said he would try rewriting it and took it home.
A week after returning home, he came again with the manuscript tucked in his bosom.
In this manner, every time he came, he never failed to leave behind something he had written.
Among them were even three-volume masterpieces.
However, they were the most poorly made.
I recommended what I considered to be his most outstanding works to a magazine once or twice.
However, they only appeared in print through the editor’s kindness and seemingly did not earn a single penny in manuscript fees.
It was at this time that I heard of his financial difficulties.
He said he intended to make a living by selling his writings from now on.

One time, he brought a curious item.
It was made by drying chrysanthemum flowers and hardening them into thin sheets like seaweed.
Declaring it Buddhist vegetarian mock pressed sardines, Kouji—who happened to be present—promptly soaked the preserved dish in hot water and drank sake while setting down his chopsticks.
Then there was also a time when he brought a branch of artificial lilies of the valley.
He said his sister had made it, twirling between his fingers the wire core running through the branch’s center.
It was then that I first learned he shared a house with his sister.
The siblings had rented a single room above a firewood shop—his sister attended embroidery lessons daily.
The next time he came, he left behind a collar accessory embroidered with a white butterfly at the storage room’s knot—still wrapped in newspaper—saying “I’ll give this to you if you’d care to wear it.”
Yasuno said “Please give that to me,” took it home.

Apart from that, he visited from time to time. Every time he came, he would talk about various things—the scenery of his homeland, its customs, legends, the patterns of ancient festivals, and so on. He also mentioned that his father was a scholar of Chinese classics. He also mentioned that his father was skilled in seal engraving. His grandmother had served in the household of a former daimyo. She was said to have been born in the Year of the Monkey. She had been greatly favored by the lord, who occasionally bestowed upon her monkey-related items. Among them was a scroll by Kazan depicting a long-armed monkey. "I’ll bring it next time to show you," he said. After that, the young man stopped coming.

Then spring passed into summer, and on a day when I had all but forgotten about the young man—a day so sweltering that even sitting perfectly still in the center of a room far from direct sunlight, wearing only a single layer of unlined kimono while reading, felt unbearable—he suddenly appeared.

Still wearing that same showy hakama as always, he was vigorously wiping the sweat beading on his pale forehead with a hand towel.
He seemed slightly thinner.
"I beg your pardon for this imposition, but could you please lend me twenty yen?"
"The truth is, my friend suddenly fell seriously ill, so I immediately had them admitted to the hospital. But right now, the pressing issue is money—I’ve tried everything to raise funds, but I just can’t manage it."
"Having no choice, I came here."
he explained.

I stopped reading and stared intently at the young man’s face.
He said in a low voice, “Please,” keeping both hands properly placed on his knees as was his custom.
When I asked in return, “Is your friend’s family truly that impoverished?” the answer came: “No, not exactly—it’s simply that they live far away and cannot provide immediate assistance. That’s why I must ask this favor of you. In two weeks’ time, funds should arrive from back home, and I will repay you promptly then.”
I undertook to arrange the funds.
At that moment, he took out a hanging scroll from his furoshiki bundle and, saying “This is the Kazan scroll I mentioned before,” unrolled the paper-mounted half-cut piece to show me.
I couldn’t clearly tell whether it was skillful or crude.
When I checked the seal catalog, there were no similar seals to those of Watanabe Kazan or Yokoyama Kazan.
The young man said he would leave this here, so I declined, saying it wasn’t necessary, but he left it in my care without listening.
The next day, he came again to collect the money.
There has been no word from him since.
Even when the promised two weeks arrived, he showed neither hide nor hair.
I thought that I might have been deceived.
The monkey scroll remained hanging on the wall as autumn arrived.

During the tense autumn days when I wore a lined kimono, Nagatsuka came as usual to ask for a loan.
I had grown weary of lending money so often.
Suddenly recalling that young man, I said, "There's money owed—if you're willing to go collect it, then go. If you retrieve it, I'll lend it to you." At this, Nagatsuka scratched his head and hesitated briefly, but soon seeming to resolve himself, answered, "I'll go."
Then I wrote a letter instructing that the previous debt be given to this person, attached the monkey scroll to it, and had Nagatsuka deliver it.

Nagatsuka came again by carriage the following day.
The moment he arrived, he took out a letter from his breast pocket. Upon receiving and opening it, I saw it was the one I had written yesterday.
It remained unopened.
When I asked, “Did you not go?” Nagatsuka furrowed his brow into an inverted V and said, “I did go, but it was utterly hopeless—a truly desolate place, filthy you see. His wife was there embroidering, and he himself was ill... Given such circumstances, broaching the matter of money was simply out of the question. I reassured them there was no need for concern and only brought back the scroll.”
I was slightly taken aback. “Hmm, I see,” I said.

The following day, a postcard arrived from the young man apologizing for having told lies and confirming that he had indeed received the scroll.
I stacked that postcard with other letters and put them into the cluttered box.
And so I came to forget about the young man once more.

Before long, winter came.
As usual, I welcomed a busy New Year.
When I found a lull between visitors and was working, the maid brought a package wrapped in oiled paper—a round object that landed with a thud.
The sender’s name was one I had forgotten: that young man from before.
When I untied the oiled paper and peeled away the newspaper, a pheasant emerged from within.
There was a letter attached.
Due to various circumstances, I have now returned to my home country.
It stated his intention to repay the borrowed funds without fail around March when he would come up to the capital.
The letter had hardened with the pheasant’s blood and would not come off easily.

That day was again a Thursday—an evening when young people gathered.
I joined five or six others around a large dining table and ate pheasant soup.
Then I prayed for the success of the pale young man in his showy striped hakama.
After the five or six had left, I wrote this young man a letter of thanks.
In it I included the line: "Please do not concern yourself with the matter of last year's loan."

Mona Lisa

On Sundays, Ibuka would walk around peering into antique shops, his hands tucked into his sleeves and a scarf around his neck.
Among these, he would select the filthiest shops likely lined with relics of bygone eras, then rummage through this and that.
Since he was no tea ceremony practitioner, he couldn’t distinguish good pieces from bad, but by occasionally bringing home cheap, interesting-looking items, he secretly believed he might stumble upon a rare find about once a year.

Ibuka had bought just a kettle lid for fifteen sen about a month prior and turned it into a paperweight.
Last Sunday, he had bought an iron sword guard for twenty-five sen and made this too into a paperweight.
Today, he had set his sights on something a bit larger.
Wanting a decorative piece for his study—something eye-catching like a hanging scroll or framed artwork—he looked around and found a color-printed Western painting of a woman, covered in dust and propped sideways.
On a well pulley with worn grooves rested an unidentifiable vase, from which a yellow shakuhachi mouthpiece protruded, disrupting the composition of the painting.

A Western painting didn’t belong in this antique shop.
Yet its hues—transcending the modern era—lay buried in blackness within an ancient atmosphere.
It held precisely the character befitting this antique shop.
Ibuka appraised it as certainly cheap.
When he inquired and was told one yen, he tilted his head slightly. But since the glass remained unbroken and the frame undamaged, he haggled with the old man until settling on eighty sen.

Ibuka returned home carrying this half-length portrait on a cold winter evening. Upon entering the dim room, he promptly stripped the frame off, propped the painting against the wall, and sat down staring at it when his wife arrived carrying a lamp. Ibuka had her hold the light near the artwork and gazed intently once more at the eighty-sen painting. Within its overall somber blackening, only the face appeared tinged yellow. This too must have been due to the passage of time. Still seated, Ibuka glanced back at his wife and asked, "Well?" She raised her lamp-holding hand slightly higher and stared silently at the yellowed woman's face before finally declaring, "What a ghastly countenance." Ibuka merely laughed and replied, "Eighty sen."

After eating his meal, he used a stepping stool to drive a nail into the transom and hung the purchased framed picture above his head. At that moment, his wife thought the woman had a face that made you wonder what she might do. "Since looking at it gives me a strange feeling, you should take it down," she repeatedly urged, but Ibuka dismissed her with a "Nonsense! It's just your nerves."

The wife went down to the tearoom.
Ibuka sat at his desk and began his research.
After about ten minutes had passed, he suddenly raised his head and wanted to look at the painting in the frame.
When he set down his brush and shifted his gaze, the yellow-tinged woman in the frame was faintly smiling.
Ibuki stared intently at that mouth.
It was entirely due to the painter’s application of light.
The thin lips curled up slightly at both ends, showing a slight indentation where they curved back.
The closed mouth could also be seen as about to open.
Alternatively, the open mouth could also be perceived as deliberately closed.
However, he couldn’t understand why.
Ibuka felt something strange but turned back to his desk.

Though it was called research, half of it was copying.
Since it didn’t require much attention, after a short while, he raised his head again and looked at the painting.
There was still something about the mouth.
But it remained perfectly composed.
From narrow single eyelids within, calm eyes gazed down across the tatami-matted room.
Ibuka turned back toward his desk once more.

That evening, Ibuka looked at this painting time and again.
And gradually he began sensing his wife’s assessment held some truth.
Yet when morning came, he went to work wearing an expression that denied it.
Returning home around four o’clock, he found last night’s frame lying face up on his desk.
It had apparently fallen suddenly from the transom just past noon.
No wonder the glass lay shattered to pieces.
Ibuka flipped over the frame to examine its back.
The ring through which he’d threaded the cord last evening had somehow come loose.
Taking this chance, Ibuka opened up the frame’s rear.
There pressed against the painting’s back emerged a sheet of Western paper folded in quarters.
When he unfolded it and looked, something strange stood written in ink.

"In Mona Lisa's lips lies womanhood's mystery."
"Since primitive times, only da Vinci could capture this mystery."
"No one has ever solved this mystery."

The next day, Ibuka went to his government office and asked everyone what Mona Lisa was.
But nobody knew.
Then he asked what da Vinci was, but again, nobody knew.
Following his wife's advice, Ibuka sold this ill-omened painting to a scrap dealer for five sen.

Fire

Out of breath,I stopped and looked up—sparks were already streaking overhead.In the clear,deep,frost-laden sky,c ountless sparks flew forth only to vanish abruptly.No sooner had one vanished than vivid new ones would come sweeping in from behind—chasing,flickering—glowing to life across the expanse.A nd then they vanished abruptly.When I looked in the direction they came flying,i t appeared like a massive fountain gathered together—converged into a single root—dyeing the frigid sky without gaps.A large temple stood a few meters ahead.Midway up the long stone steps,a thick fir tree spread its quiet branches into the night,towering high from the embankment.The fire arose from behind it.L eaving only the black trunk and motionless branches behind,a ll else was crimson.The source of the fire must be atop this high embankment.A fter walking another quarter mile or so,i f I turned left and climbed the slope,I would reach the scene.

I began walking hurriedly again.
Everyone coming from behind overtook me.
Some called out in loud voices as they passed by.
The dark road came nervously alive.
I walked to the foot of the slope, and when I was about to ascend, it was staggeringly steep.
The steep slope was packed full of people’s heads, swarming from top to bottom.
The flames leapt and swirled mercilessly from the very top of the slope.
If I were caught in this whirlpool of people and pushed up to the top of the slope, I’d likely be scorched before I could even turn my heels.

After walking another fifty meters or so, there was another large slope that also curved leftward.
Reconsidering that ascending here might be easier and safer, I painstakingly avoided people at intersections until finally reaching the corner—when from ahead came a steam pump violently clanging its alarm bell.
As if threatening to trample flat anyone who didn’t yield, it charged through the crowd at full speed—amidst the clatter of hooves—and jerked the horse’s head sharply toward the slope.
The horse rubbed its foam-flecked mouth against its throat, pricked its pointed ears forward, then suddenly gathered its front legs and lunged headlong.
At that moment, the sorrel’s flank grazed the lantern of a man in a hanten work coat, gleaming like velvet.
The thick crimson-painted wheel spun so close it nearly brushed my foot—then the steam pump charged straight up the slope.

When I reached mid-slope, the flames that had been directly ahead now appeared diagonally behind me.
From the slope’s summit, I would need to turn left again.
While searching for an alleyway, I found what seemed to be a narrow lane.
Pushed by the crowd into its entrance, I found myself in utter darkness.
It was packed so tightly there wasn’t a finger’s breadth of space.
People desperately shouted at one another.
The fire burned clearly ahead.

After ten minutes, I finally passed through the lane and emerged onto the street. This street was also about the width of a row of tenements and already packed with people. As soon as I emerged from the lane, the steam pump that had earlier kicked off the ground and rushed up now stood motionless before my eyes. The steam pump had finally managed to bring its horses this far, but obstructed by a bend just a few meters ahead, it could do nothing but watch the flames. The flame blazed up from right before its nose.

Those pressed close by shouted in unison, "Where? Where?" Those questioned replied, "There! There!" But neither side could reach where the flames originated. The flames, gaining momentum, fiercely surged upward as if fanning the calm sky.…

The next afternoon, during a walk, curiosity to confirm the fire’s origin led me up that familiar slope. Passing through last evening’s lane, I emerged at the row of tenements where the steam pump had stalled, turned a bend a few meters ahead, and strolled about—only to find houses that seemed hibernating for winter lining the street in hushed silence. There was no trace of the burned site anywhere. The area thought to be where the fire had blazed up now showed only neat rows of cedar fences continuing uninterrupted, from one of which leaked the faint sound of a koto.

Fog.

Last night I heard crackling sounds above my pillow in the dead of night.
This was due to Clapham Junction—a major station—being located nearby.
At this junction over a thousand trains converge daily.
Breaking this down mathematically works out to roughly one train entering or exiting every minute.
When fog grew thick, each train approaching the station would emit firecracker-like signals through some mechanism.
This was because signal lights—whether green or red—became too dim to serve any purpose.

Crawling down from the bed and rolling up the north window blind to look outside, I found everything blanketed in fog. From the base of the lawn up to the six-foot height enclosed by brick walls on three sides, nothing was visible—only emptiness filled the space, frozen in desolation. The neighboring garden fared no better. In springtime warmth, this garden with its pristine lawn would see an old white-bearded man emerge to bask in sunlight, always keeping a parrot perched on his right hand. He would bring his eyes perilously close to the bird’s beak as if inviting a peck, while the parrot flapped its wings and screeched incessantly. When absent, a girl trailed her long hem across the grass, pushing a lawnmower back and forth without pause. Now this memory-steeped garden lay wholly swallowed by fog, merging seamlessly with my derelict boarding house’s grounds beyond any discernible boundary.

Across the back alley on the opposite side stood a tall Gothic-style church tower.
At the spire of that tower piercing the gray sky, the bell always rang.
Sundays were especially severe.
That day, not only was its sharply pointed spire invisible, but even the unevenly stacked stone body remained completely indistinguishable.
At one moment it seemed to take on a somewhat dark appearance, but the sound of the bell didn’t resonate at all.
The sound was deeply locked away within the thick shadow where the bell’s form remained unseen.

When I stepped outside, I could see about two ken ahead. When I traversed those two ken, another two ken or so came into view. Just when I thought the world had shrunk to a two-ken square, each step I took revealed a new two-ken square ahead. In exchange, the past worlds I'd passed through vanished as they were left behind.

As I waited at the crossroads for the bus, the mouse-gray air was sliced open and a horse's head suddenly appeared before my eyes. Yet the people on the bus roof remained half-submerged in fog. Braving the fog from my side, when I jumped aboard and looked down, the horse's head had already grown faintly blurred. When buses passed each other, I thought they looked beautiful only in that fleeting moment of intersection. No sooner had I registered them than they vanished into the murky air, becoming enveloped in a vast colorless void.

While crossing Westminster Bridge, something white fluttered past my eyes once or twice. Peering intently at its trajectory, I discerned a seagull flying faintly like a dream within the sealed atmosphere. At that moment Big Ben solemnly struck ten o'clock overhead. When I looked up, only the sound existed in the sky.

After finishing my business in Victoria and coming along the river past the Tate Gallery to Battersea, the world that had until then appeared mouse-gray suddenly plunged into darkness from all sides.
A heavy fog, dyed black as if dissolved peat had been thickened and poured around me, pressed against my eyes, mouth, and nose.
My coat was so damp it felt weighed down.
My breath caught from inhaling nothing but thin starchy air.
Underfoot felt no different from stepping on a cellar floor.

I stood dazedly within this oppressive tea-brown murk.
I felt as though a great many people were passing by my side.
But unless shoulders actually brushed against mine, I couldn’t be sure whether anyone was truly passing by.
At that moment, a single point in this boundless hazy sea flowed dully yellow, about the size of a bean.
I moved about four steps toward it as my target.
Then, a face appeared in front of a shop window.
Inside the shop, the gaslight was lit.
The inside was relatively bright.
People were behaving as usual.
I finally felt relieved.

Having passed through Battersea, I headed toward the hill without needing to grope my way, but the hilltop was lined with nothing but closed shops.
Countless similar alleys run parallel, easy to lose one’s way among even under a clear sky.
I felt as though I had turned left at the second alley.
I felt as though I had walked straight for about two chō.
From there onward, I became completely lost.
In the darkness, I stood all alone, tilting my head.
The sound of footsteps approached from the right.
No sooner had I registered this than it came to within four or five ken (~7.2–9 meters) and stopped.
Then they gradually grow distant.
In the end, they became completely inaudible.
After that, there is only silence.
I stood alone in the darkness once more and thought.
How on earth can I get back to the boarding house?

Hanging scroll

Grandfather resolved to erect a stone monument for his late wife by her third death anniversary.
Yet relying on his son’s meager earnings, he could barely manage daily expenses, let alone save a single sen, and spring had come once more.
With an imploring look, he told his son, “Her memorial day is March eighth too,” to which the son merely replied, “Ah, was it?”
Grandfather finally determined to sell their ancestral hanging scroll to raise funds.
When he consulted his son—“What do you think?”—the son agreed with maddening casualness: “That should be fine.”
The son worked at the Shrines and Temples Bureau of the Ministry of Home Affairs, earning forty yen monthly.
Supporting a wife and two children while tending to Grandfather made for exhausting work.
Had the old man not been there, they would have long converted that precious scroll into something liquid.

This hanging scroll was made of silk fabric about one shaku square and had taken on a smoked-bamboo hue over time.
When hung in a dark parlor, it became so dim that one could not discern what was painted.
Grandfather claimed this to be a hollyhock painted by Wang Ruoshui.
And so, once or twice a month, he would take it out from the cupboard, brush the dust off the paulownia wood box, carefully remove its contents, immediately hang it on the three-shaku wall, and gaze at it.
Sure enough, as he gazed at it, there was a large pattern resembling old blood within the soot-stained surface.
Areas that might be suspected to be traces where the verdigris had peeled away also remained faintly.
Grandfather would forget entirely the over-lived world he felt he had inhabited too long as he faced this indistinct Tang-dynasty painting relic.
At times he would blow smoke while staring fixedly at the hanging scroll.
Or he would drink tea.
Otherwise he would just be staring.
When the child came over asking “Grandfather, what’s this?” and tried to touch it with their finger, the old man—as if only now noticing how much time had passed—said “You mustn’t touch that,” then quietly stood up and began rolling the hanging scroll.
Then, the child asked Grandfather about the candy bullets.
“Mmm, I’ll buy you some candy bullets, so don’t misbehave,” he said as he slowly rolled up the hanging scroll, placed it into the paulownia wood box, stored it in the cupboard, and then went out for a stroll around there.
On his way back, he stopped by the neighborhood candy store, bought two bags of peppermint-filled candy bullets, and saying “Here are your candy bullets,” gave them to the children.
Because the son had married late, the children were six and four years old.

The day after consulting with his son, Grandfather wrapped the paulownia wood box in a cloth and left early in the morning.
When four o'clock came around, he returned carrying the paulownia wood box again.
As the child came to the entrance asking "Grandfather, where are the candy bullets?", the old man said nothing, entered the parlor, took out the hanging scroll from the box, hung it on the wall, and began staring at it vacantly.
After showing it to four or five antique dealers, they all complained about the lack of an artist's seal and flaking paint—apparently none treated the scroll with the respect Grandfather had expected.

The son told him to give up on antique dealers.
Grandfather agreed that antique dealers were useless.
About two weeks later, Grandfather went out again cradling the paulownia wood box.
Having secured an introduction this time, he went to show it to a friend of his son's section chief.
Again, he returned without bringing any candy bullets.
The moment the son came home, Grandfather accused him as if it were his moral failing—how could anyone entrust anything to such a blind fool when everything there was counterfeit?
The son responded with a wry smile.

In early February, a favorable opportunity arose by chance, and Grandfather sold this scroll to a departing art enthusiast. Grandfather immediately went to Yanaka and commissioned a splendid stone monument for his deceased wife. He deposited the remainder into postal savings. About five days later, he went out for his usual walk but returned home two hours later than usual. At that time, he was holding two large bags of candy bullets in both hands. Because he remained concerned about the sold hanging scroll, when he went to request one more viewing, he found it quietly hung in a 4.5-tatami tea room with a sprig of crystal-clear wintersweet arranged before it—or so he recounted. Grandfather was treated to tea there, it is said. “It might be more secure than me keeping it,” Grandfather said to his son. The son replied, “That may be so.” The children ate nothing but candy bullets for three days.

Empire Day

It was a south-facing room.

About thirty children, their black heads aligned as they gazed at the blackboard with their backs to the bright side of the room, looked up when the teacher entered from the corridor.
The teacher was a short-statured man with large eyes and an emaciated frame, his beard growing in patchy and unkempt from chin to cheeks.
And the collar of the kimono that brushed against his rough jaw appeared darkly stained with grime.
Because of this kimono, his neglected beard, and the fact that he had never once scolded anyone, the teacher was mocked by everyone.

Soon, the teacher took the chalk and wrote "Empire Day" in large letters on the blackboard.
The children all pressed their black heads against their desks and began writing their compositions.
The teacher straightened his short frame and surveyed the group, then soon left the room along the corridor.

Then, a child sitting in the middle of the third row from the back stood up from their seat, came to the teacher's Western-style desk, took the chalk the teacher had used, drew a line through the character 記 in 記元節 written on the blackboard, and wrote 紀 next to it in bold strokes.
The other children watched in silent astonishment without laughing.
After the child had returned to their seat and some time passed, the teacher came back into the room.
He then noticed the blackboard.

"It seems someone has corrected 'ki' to 'gi,' but writing 'ki' is also acceptable," he said while looking around at everyone again.
The entire group remained silent.

I was the one who corrected 'ki' to 'gi'. Even today in 1909, whenever I recall that incident, I cannot help but feel a vulgar sensation. And I cannot help thinking how much better it would have been had that been the principal everyone feared instead of that old-fashioned Mr. Fukuda.

儲口

“That region produces chestnuts, you know.”
“The market rate was roughly four shō per ryō.”
“When I brought them over here, they cost 1 yen 50 sen per shō.”
“So when I was there, we got an order from the port for about 1,800 bales.”
“If things went well, it’d fetch over 2 yen per shō, so we jumped at it.”
After preparing 1,800 bales and hauling them to the port myself—the buyer was Chinese, shipping them to their homeland.
Then a Chinese man came out and said “Good,” so I thought we were done—but he wheeled out this huge barrel by the warehouse, six feet tall if an inch, and started filling it with water.
“I had no earthly idea what they were doing.”
That barrel was massive—took forever to fill.
“Burned nearly half a day.”
Then they started ripping open the bales and chucking chestnuts into the water. I stood there dumbstruck—only later did I realize how cunning those Chinese operators were.
“See, when you dump chestnuts in water, the good ones sink proper. Only wormy ones float.”
“Those bastards scooped out the floaters with bamboo sieves, marked ’em defective, and docked the weight from our shipment—outrageous!”
“I watched sweating bullets.”
“Seventy percent had worms—total disaster.”
“Took a huge loss.”
“—Worm-eaten?”
“Too damn maddening—I trashed ’em all and left.”
“But being Chinese, they probably shipped every last bale home anyway, playing dumb.”

“And then there was also a time when I bought Satsuma potatoes.”
“At four yen per bale, for a contract of two thousand bales, you see.”
“But the order came on the fourteenth of the month—mid-month—and they said it had to be done by the twenty-fifth, so no matter how hard we tried, there was no way we could gather two thousand bales.”
“Since it was utterly impossible, we tentatively refused.”
“To tell the truth, it was regrettable.”
“Then the trading company manager said, ‘While the contract does state the twenty-fifth, we absolutely won’t enforce it strictly,’ and since he urged me repeatedly, I ended up being persuaded.”
“—No, the potatoes weren’t bound for China.”
“It was America.”
“Seems there really are folks in America who eat Satsuma potatoes after all.”
“Strange how things work out—so we promptly began purchasing.”
“From Saitama toward Kawagoe, you see.”
“But on paper it may be two thousand bales—actually cornering the market proved quite an undertaking.”
“But after great effort, when I finally took the promised bales there past the 28th—there was this truly cunning fellow—turns out the contract had a clause stating that in case of significant deadline violations, we’d have to pay eight thousand yen in damages.”
“But he went and applied that clause and absolutely refused to hand over the payment.”
“Though I did take a deposit of four thousand yen.”
“While all this dragged on, they’d already loaded the potatoes onto the ship—leaving me powerless to act.”
“So infuriated was I that I paid a thousand-yen security deposit, applied for physical seizure, and finally had those potatoes confiscated.”
“But there’s always a bigger fish—they paid an eight-thousand-yen deposit and sent that ship out regardless.”
“So it finally came to trial—but with that clause in writing, nothing could be done.”
“I cried before the judge, you know.”

“The potatoes get taken for nothing, I lose the lawsuit—there’s nothing more absurd than this! Please, just try putting yourself in my position for once.”
“The judge seemed quite sympathetic to me deep down, but with how legal power works, there was nothing he could do.”
“I finally lost.”

Procession

When he suddenly raised his eyes from the desk and looked toward the entrance, the study door had opened halfway without him noticing, revealing about two shaku of the wide hallway.
At the hallway’s end, a Chinese-style railing blocked the way, above which stood a glass door shut tight.
Sunlight fell straight from the blue sky, slanting along the eaves and passing through the glass to brightly tint just the front portion of the veranda before warmly flooding all the way to the study doorway.
When he stared at the sunlit spot for a while, as if heat haze welled up in the depths of his eyes, thoughts of spring grew abundant.

At that moment, within this gap of about two shaku, something appeared as if stepping through the air, roughly the height of the railing. A red silk cord patterned with white arabesques was tied into a loop and slipped from the forehead over the hair, within which a flower resembling a crabapple had been inserted encircled by green leaves. Against the black hair, the pale red bud stood out distinctly like a large droplet. From just below the relatively rounded chin, forming a single fold, a solitary purple piece fluttered lightly all the way to its edge. Neither sleeves, hands, nor feet were visible. The shadow passed through the sunlight that had fallen onto the hallway as though slipping through. From behind—

This time, it was slightly lower.
Draped from crown to shoulders in thick crimson fabric, it bore a crisscrossed bamboo leaf pattern across the excess pooling down its back.
In the torso area, a single leaf—a solitary remnant of green left behind amidst the charcoal-ash color—could be seen.
The bamboo leaf pattern was so large.
It was larger than the feet placed in the hallway.
When the red feet flickered and moved about three steps, the low one passed soundlessly through the doorway’s width.

The third hood was a white and indigo Benkei lattice.
The profile that appeared beneath the brow was round and swollen.
The center of one cheek was as deep as a ripe apple.
Beneath tea-brown eyebrows—only their roots visible—the area suddenly sank, and from an unexpected spot, a round nose slightly surmounted the swollen cheek, its tip alone protruding beyond the face.
From the face down, it was entirely wrapped in yellow stripes.
It trailed its long sleeves over three inches along the edge.
It planted a sesame bamboo cane higher than its head as it approached.
The tip of the cane bore clustered thickly with luminous bird feathers that glinted in the bright sunlight.
The yellow-striped sleeve-like lining trailing along the edge shone silver-like—and this too passed by.

Then, immediately after, a pure white face appeared. Starting at the forehead, swept over the flat cheeks, and rose from the jaw to the base of the ears—it was as still as a wall. Within it, only the eyes held life. The lips, layered with crimson, reflected the light in blue. The area around the chest appeared dove-colored, while below, down to the hem, the rest scattered the gaze; within this, they cradled a small violin and solemnly bore a long bow. After passing by in two steps, they placed a square piece of black satin on their back, and the gold-thread embroidery at its center suddenly caught the light.

The last one to appear was utterly small.
It looked ready to tumble down from beneath the handrail.
Yet it had a large face.
Even among these, its head stood especially large.
It appeared wearing a five-colored crown.
The dot at the crown's center seemed to tower high.
Its body was clad in a tube-sleeved robe with lattice patterns, from which lavender-gray velvet tassels hung triangularly down its back to below the waist, and it wore red tabi socks.
The Korean round fan held in its hand measured nearly half its body's size.
On the fan, swirling comma patterns were lacquered in red, blue, and yellow.

The procession passed quietly before him.
When the open door sent desolate daylight into the study’s entrance, making the veranda feel a four-shaku width of loneliness, suddenly from the opposite corner came the sound of a violin being played.
Then, small throats gathered and burst into laughter.

The house's children took out their mother's haori jackets and furoshiki wrapping cloths every day to play games like this.

Long ago

Pitorokuri Valley lay directly beneath autumn.
In the midst of October sunlight that dyed the visible fields and woods in warm hues, people slept and woke.
The October sun wrapped the quiet valley air midway through the sky and did not fall directly to the ground.
Yet it did not flee to the other side of the mountains.
Over the windless village, it always settled calmly, hanging motionless in a haze.
Meanwhile, the colors of the fields and woods gradually transformed.
As sour things turn sweet before one notices, the entire valley took on the patina of time.
Pitorokuri Valley, at this moment, reverted to a past of a hundred years, two hundred years ago, and effortlessly assumed the patina of desolation.
People, their faces lined with age, watched clouds drift over the mountain ridges.
The clouds turned white at times, gray at others.
At intervals, they revealed the mountain terrain through their thin undersides.
Whenever seen, they carried the feel of ancient clouds.

My house stood atop a small hill, ideally situated for viewing these clouds and this valley.
Sunlight from the south bathed the entire house wall.
How many Octobers' suns had shone here? At the western edge where everything lay withered in mouse-gray hues, a single rose vine clung to life, bearing several flowers caught between the cold wall and the warm daylight.
The large petals, rich with undulating waves of eggshell color, remained open as if flaring from their calyxes, hushed and stilled here and there.
The fragrance was drawn into the faint sunlight and vanished within the air of two ken.
I stood within those two ken and looked up.
The rose vine climbed higher and higher.
The mouse-gray wall towered straight up to the very limit that the rose vine could not reach.
Where the roof ended, there still stood a tower.
The sun descended from the depths of the haze even further above.

At my feet, the hill plunged into Pitorokuri Valley, the distant expanse below stretching out flatly filled with color.
The ascending slope on the far mountain was layered in tiers of overlapping birch leaves turned yellow, forming countless gradations of shaded inclines.
Through the midst of this bright yet desolate atmosphere suffusing the entire valley, a black streak snaked horizontally.
The peat-laden stream water took on an antiquated hue as though dye powder had been dissolved in it.
It was only after coming to these mountain depths that I saw such a stream.

Afterwards, the master arrived.
The master's beard, illuminated by the October sun, was turning seventy percent white.
His attire was equally unconventional.
He wore what they called a kilt around his waist.
It was a coarse striped fabric like a rickshaw's lap blanket.
He had tailored it into a lantern-style hakama cut to the knees with vertical pleats, so that his shins were barely concealed by thick woolen tabi boots.
Each time he walked, the pleats of his kilt swayed, flashing glimpses between his knees and thighs.
It was an old-style hakama that did not shy away from revealing bare skin.

The master had a small fur pouch resembling a wooden fish hanging before him.
At night he would draw his chair near the fireplace and gaze at the crackling red coals while taking out his pipe and tobacco from this wooden fish.
Thus he would puff away through the long nights.
The wooden fish was called a sporran.

Together with the master, he descended the cliff and entered a dimly lit path.
The leaves of Scotch firs—evergreen trees—had clouds clinging to their shredded-kelp-like surfaces as though they wouldn’t fall even if brushed away.
A squirrel scurried up one of their black trunks, its long bushy tail swaying. No sooner had it done so than another dashed across ancient moss grown thick with time before vanishing from sight.
The moss remained swollen and motionless.
The squirrel’s tail brushed against dusky indigo earth like a ritual whisk before disappearing into shadows.

The master turned sideways and pointed at the bright valley of Pitorokuri.
The black river still flowed through its center.
He said that if one traveled about three and two-thirds miles north upstream along that river, there lay the gorge of Kirikurankii.

When the highlanders and lowlanders fought in the Kirikurankii gorge, corpses became wedged between the rocks, blocking the water pounding against them.
The river that drank the blood of highlanders and lowlanders changed its color and flowed through Pitorokuri Valley for three days.

I resolved to visit the old battlefield of Kirikurankii early the next morning.
When I emerged from the cliff edge, two or three beautiful rose petals lay scattered beneath my feet.

A voice.

It had been three days since Toyosaburo had moved into this boarding house.
On that first day, in the dim evening light, he had moved like a hurried shadow—busy unpacking his belongings, organizing his books, and other such tasks.
After that, he went to the town bathhouse and immediately fell asleep upon returning.
The following day, having come back from school, he sat at his desk and tried reading for a while; but whether due to his sudden change of surroundings, he found himself utterly unable to focus.
Outside the window, the rasp of a saw persisted without cease.

Toyosaburo remained seated as he reached out and opened the shoji. Right beneath his nose, the gardener was busily cutting down paulownia branches. Without compunction, he kept sawing off quite large limbs from their bases and dropping them down until the white cut surfaces had grown numerous enough to stand out conspicuously. At the same time, an empty sky began spreading wide, gathering from afar toward the window. Toyosaburo propped his cheek on his hand at the desk and gazed absently at the autumn sky high above the paulownia tree.

When Toyosaburo shifted his gaze from the paulownia tree to the sky, he was suddenly overcome by a profound emotion.
As that profound emotion gradually subsided, a nostalgic memory of his hometown appeared like a single dot in one corner of his mind.
Though distant, the dot appeared as clearly as if placed upon his desk.

At the foot of the mountain stood a large thatched house; ascending about two-thirds of a mile from the village brought one to where the road ended before his gate.
A horse entered the gate.
With a cluster of chrysanthemums tied beside its saddle and a bell jingling, it disappeared into the white-walled compound.
The sun shone high on the roof ridge.
The trunks of pine trees that thickly veiled the mountain behind all glistened.
It was mushroom season.
Toyosaburo caught the scent of freshly picked mushrooms on his desk.
Then he heard his mother's voice calling "Toyo, Toyo."
The voice seemed very far away.
Yet it rang as clearly as if held before him—his mother had died five years prior.

Toyosaburo started and shifted his gaze.
Once more, the tip of the paulownia tree he had just observed appeared before his eyes.
The branches striving to grow had been abruptly truncated at one spot, their forked bases knotted and strained into an unsightly contortion.
He suddenly felt himself pressed bodily against his desk.
Peering beyond the hedge that separated him from the paulownia tree, he saw three or four dilapidated tenements.
A frayed futon lay exposed beneath the autumn sun, its cotton padding spilling out unceremoniously.
Beside it stood a woman in her fifties, staring fixedly at the paulownia's crown.

She stood wearing a kimono with fading stripes here and there, a thin obi tied around it, her sparse hair wound around a large comb, staring blankly at the paulownia treetop visible through the branches. Toyosaburo looked at the old woman's face. That face was pale and swollen. The old woman revealed narrow eyes from behind puffy eyelids and squinted up at Toyosaburo. Toyosaburo suddenly lowered his gaze to the desk.

On the third day, Toyosaburo went to the flower shop and bought chrysanthemums. He had wanted ones like those that bloomed in his hometown garden and searched for them, but finding none, reluctantly accepted three stems bound with straw that the florist offered, arranging them in a tokkuri-shaped vase. From the bottom of his trunk, he took out a small scroll inscribed by Hoashi Banri and hung it on the wall. This was something he had specifically brought back for decoration when returning home years earlier. Then Toyosaburo sat on the zabuton cushion and gazed at the scroll and flowers. At that moment, from the tenement houses beyond his window, a voice called "Toyo, Toyo"—a voice whose tone and timbre perfectly matched his kind mother from home. Toyosaburo instantly threw open the shoji screen. There stood the pallid, swollen-faced old woman he had seen yesterday, autumn sunlight sinking onto her forehead as she beckoned a twelve- or thirteen-year-old snot-nosed boy. With the clatter of opened shoji, the old woman turned her puffy eyes upward to stare at Toyosaburo from below.

Money

After reading five or six novels in succession—each like an enlarged photographic plate of some lurid tabloid story—he grew thoroughly disgusted.
Even while eating, his financial struggles seemed to surge into his stomach along with the food.
When his belly swelled, it tightened unbearably, leaving him in genuine distress.
So he put on his hat and went to Kukokushi’s place.
This Kukokushi was a strange man—conveniently fashioned for such occasions of conversation—something between a philosopher and a fortune-teller.
He was the one who had dismissed the Kanda fire by declaring that in infinite space there exist conflagrations larger than Earth scattered about, and that it takes a hundred years for news of such fires to reach our eyes.
Still, it remained an indisputable fact that Kukokushi’s house had escaped burning in the Kanda fire.

Kukokushi was leaning against a small corner brazier, incessantly writing something in the ashes with brass fire tongs. “How about it—still lost in thought?” When asked this, he made a bothered face and replied flatly, “Yeah… just thinking a bit about money right now.” Having gone to the trouble of visiting Kukokushi only to be subjected to yet another lecture about money, he fell silent. Then Kukokushi said, as if he had made a great discovery:

“Money is a demonic entity, you know.”

Finding Kukokushi’s aphorism trite as epigrams went, he merely replied, “I suppose so,” and disengaged. Kukokushi drew a large circle in the brazier’s ashes and jabbed its center. “Suppose the money’s here. This transforms into anything—clothes, food, trains, inns.”

“How trivial,” he said. “It’s perfectly obvious.”

“No, you don’t grasp it.” Kukokushi drew another circle. “This circle—”

“This can turn someone into either a saint or a sinner.”
“It can lead to paradise; it can lead to hell.”
“It’s far too versatile.”
“That’s why civilization’s lack of progress is such a problem.”
“When humanity becomes a bit more advanced, it’s perfectly clear they’ll start imposing restrictions on money’s fluidity.”

“Why?”

“It must be done—for example, dividing money into five colors—red money, blue money, white money—would work.”

“And then what would you do?”

“What do you mean, ‘What would I do’? Red money would only be valid within red zones. White money will only be used within white zones. If it goes beyond its designated zone, we’ll make it as useless as broken roof tiles—imposing strict limits on its use.”

If Kukokushi had been a stranger and launched into such talk from the very first meeting, I might have taken him for a philosopher with abnormal brain tissue—or some such eccentric. However, since Kukokushi was a man who imagined fires larger than Earth, I listened to the explanation with some relief. Kukokushi’s answer was as follows.

“From one perspective, money is a symbol of labor. However, since that labor is by no means homogeneous, using the same money to represent it and treating all forms as interchangeable leads to grave error. For example, suppose I mine ten thousand tons of coal here. Since that labor is merely mechanical, even if you convert this into money, that money should only qualify to exchange with the same kind of mechanical labor, shouldn’t it? However, once this mechanical labor transforms into money, it suddenly gains boundless supernatural power and is rapidly exchanged for moral labor. And thus, the spiritual realm is thrown into chaos entirely at its whim. Isn’t it an utterly inconvenient demonic entity? So we must color-code it and make people at least somewhat aware of its limits.”

I agreed with the color-coding theory. After a while, I asked Kukokushi:

“It may be wrong to buy out moral labor with mechanical labor, but those being bought out aren’t too pleased either.”

“Hmm, perhaps,” he said. “When you see money as all-knowing and all-capable as it is now, even the gods surrender to humanity—there’s just no helping it.” He paused. “Modern gods are barbaric, you see.”

I returned home after having such a conversation with Kukokushi—one that wouldn’t earn a penny.

Heart

Hanging a freshly washed hand towel on the second-floor railing, I looked down at the spring-bright town—and there passed by outside the fence a hooded clog repairman with a sparse white beard.
He had tied an old drum to his carrying pole and was striking it with a bamboo spatula—clang clang—but the sound, like a memory that had suddenly surfaced in my mind, was sharp yet somehow hollow.
When the old man came to the gate of the doctor across the street and struck the same dull spring drum with a clang, a small bird flew out from the pure white plum blossoms blooming overhead.
The clog repairman, without noticing, turned along the blue bamboo fence toward the opposite direction and disappeared from view.
The bird flew down to beneath the railing with a single flap.
The bird remained perched on a slender pomegranate branch for a while but, appearing restless, shifted its posture two or three times—then, upon suddenly glancing up at me leaning against the railing, took flight.
The moment the branches above rustled as if smoking, the small bird was already perched on the railing's crossbar with its beautiful legs.

Since it was a bird I had never seen before, there was no way to know its name, but its coloration profoundly stirred my heart. Its wings resembled a bush warbler's yet with deeper tones; its chest bore a smoke-stained brick hue, fluttering as if ready to take flight at the slightest breeze. It occasionally let soft ripples spread around itself, remaining perfectly still and quiet. Thinking it a sin to startle it, I stayed leaning against the railing without moving a finger for some time; but since the bird seemed unexpectedly unperturbed, I eventually mustered my resolve and quietly drew back. At the same moment, the bird fluttered up onto the railing and came right before my eyes. The distance between us was no more than a foot. I half-unconsciously extended my right hand toward the beautiful creature. Gathering all of its soft wings, slender legs, and rippling chest as if entrusting its fate to me, the bird flew peacefully from across into my waiting hand. I looked down at its rounded head from above and thought, This bird... But try as I might, I couldn’t remember what came after "This bird...". Yet deep within my heart, the rest of it lurked, seeming to cast a faint haze over everything. If some inconceivable force could gather and focus clearly upon these things dyed deep into every corner of my heart, their form—I think—would surely prove identical in color and substance to this bird held in my hand at this very moment. I promptly placed the bird into the cage and gazed at it until the spring shadows lengthened. And then I wondered what feelings this bird had as it looked at me.

Eventually, I went out for a walk.
With cheerful abandon and no particular aim, I passed through several neighborhoods until reaching a bustling thoroughfare. There, the street turned right and left endlessly, strangers emerging from behind other strangers without end.
No matter how much I walked through these bustling, cheerful streets filled with carefree people, I could scarcely imagine at what point I made contact with the world or why that very contact left me feeling a certain constriction.
Encountering thousands upon thousands of strangers was pleasant, but merely pleasant—the gazes and features of those people never properly registered in my mind.
Then came a sound like a temple bell striking eaves—startled, I looked over to see a woman standing at an alley's mouth about ten meters ahead.
What she wore or how her hair was arranged—none of it registered.
The only thing that registered was her face.
Her face—the eyes, mouth, nose—defied separate description. No—eyes, mouth, nose, brows and forehead fused into one visage crafted solely for me.
A face that had stood here since a century past, every feature equally awaiting me.
A face that would lead me anywhere for a century to come.
A face that spoke without speaking.
The woman silently turned around.
When I caught up and looked closer, what I'd taken for an alley proved a narrow passageway—so dim and cramped even my usual self would hesitate.
Yet the woman silently entered it.
She remained silent.
Yet she told me to follow.
I contorted my body and slipped into the alleyway.

A black curtain fluttered gently.
White characters were left undyed.
Next came an eaves light positioned low enough to graze one’s head.
In the center was depicted a three-tiered pine, and below it was a book.
Next came a glass box filled with lightly baked arare.
Next came a square frame hung under the eaves, containing five or six small pieces of calico arranged within it.
Then came a perfume bottle.
Then the alleyway came to a stop at a pitch-black earthen storehouse wall.
The woman was two shaku ahead.
No sooner had I registered this than she abruptly turned to face me.
And then she abruptly turned right.
At that moment, my mind abruptly shifted into the same state as the bird from earlier.
And then, following the woman, I immediately turned right.
When I turned right, an alleyway longer than before—narrow and dimly lit—stretched on and on.
I followed the woman like a bird through this narrow, dimly lit alleyway that stretched endlessly onward, moving wherever her silent thoughts led.

Change.

The two of them shared desks in a two-tatami room on the second floor.
The vivid image of those tatami mats' dark reddish sheen remains etched in the back of his eyes even now, over twenty years later.
The room faced north, and before a small window less than two feet high, they sat in such a cramped posture that their shoulders touched as they conducted their preparatory work.
When the room grew dim, they would resolve to brave the cold and open the window shutters.
At such times there would be a young girl standing absently behind the bamboo lattice in the house directly below their window.
On quiet evenings both her face and figure appeared strikingly beautiful.
At times he would think how beautiful she was and gaze down at her for a while.
But he never said anything about it to Nakamura.
Nakamura also said nothing.

He had now completely forgotten her face.
Only an impression remained—that she might have been a carpenter’s daughter or something of that sort.
Of course she was born to those living in poverty within tenement houses.
The place where we two slept and rose was itself part of an old tenement so dilapidated not one roof tile remained.
Downstairs mixed student servants and administrators—some ten people—boarded together.
And so they ate meals while still wearing geta sandals in that wind-exposed dining hall.
The food cost two yen per month but proved thoroughly unpalatable in return.
Even still they served beef broth once every other day.
Of course this meant just enough for grease to float slightly and meat’s aroma to cling faintly to chopsticks.
Thus students endlessly grumbled that administrators were cunning rogues who refused them decent meals.

Nakamura and I were teachers at this private school.
Both received salaries of five yen each and taught for about two hours a day.
I taught geography books and geometry in English.
When explaining geometry, I often found it troublesome when lines that should have met simply wouldn’t.
However, as I drew the intricate diagram with thick lines, those two lines overlapped on the blackboard and merged together, which delighted me.

In the morning when they awoke, they would cross Ryogoku Bridge and commute to Hitotsubashi Preparatory School. At that time, the tuition for the preparatory school was twenty-five sen. The two would jumble their monthly salaries together on the desk, deduct twenty-five sen for tuition fees, two yen for food expenses, and some amount for bath money from the total, then put the remaining cash in their pockets to go around eating soba, zenzai, and sushi. When their shared funds ran out, both of them stopped going out entirely.

On our way to the Preparatory School while crossing Ryogoku Bridge, Nakamura once asked, "Do those Western novels you're reading have any beauties in them?" I answered, "Yeah, they do." But what novel that was and what kind of beauty appeared in it—I have no recollection whatsoever now. From that time on, Nakamura became a man who didn't read novels or such things.

When Nakamura became champion in a rowing competition and won, the school gave him some money; with this he bought books, to which a certain professor added an inscription stating they were presented in commemoration of such-and-such. Nakamura said, "I don't need any books myself—I'll buy whatever you like." And so he bought me Arnold's essay and Shakespeare's Hamlet. I still have those books. It was then that I first tried reading Hamlet. I didn't understand a word of it.

Upon leaving school, Nakamura immediately went to Taiwan.
After that, we never met again until we happened to bump into each other right in the middle of London.
That was about seven years ago now.
At that moment, Nakamura had the same face as always.
And he had a lot of money.
I wandered around various places with Nakamura.
Nakamura, unlike before, did not ask whether the Western novels I was reading featured any beauties.
On the contrary, he initiated various conversations about Western beauties.

After returning to Japan, we never met again.
Then at the end of January this year, he suddenly sent a messenger telling me to come to Shinkiraku in Tsukiji for a talk.
Though instructed to arrive by noon, it was already past eleven.
And on that very day, an unusually fierce north wind was blowing.
When I stepped outside, the gale threatened to sweep away both hats and rickshaws.
I had urgent business requiring resolution that afternoon.
I made my wife call to inquire about postponing until tomorrow, but just as she was explaining how tomorrow would bring departure preparations and other busyness...the line went dead.
However much we tried, the call wouldn't connect.
"It must be this accursed wind," my wife said upon returning with frost in her expression.
Thus we ultimately failed to meet.

The Nakamura of old became president of Mantetsu.
The me of old became a novelist.
I had no idea what the president of Mantetsu actually did.
Nakamura probably never read a single page of my novels either.

Mr. Craig

Mr. Craig had made his nest like a swallow on the fourth floor.
Even if one stood on the edge of the paving stones and looked up, they couldn’t even see the window.
As one ascended gradually from below, just when their thighs began to ache slightly, they finally reached Mr. Craig’s gate.
Even though it was called a gate, it had neither doors nor a roof.
A black door less than three shaku wide had nothing but a brass knocker hanging from it.
After resting briefly before the gate and knocking the lower end of this knocker repeatedly against the door panel, someone inside would open it from within.

The one who opened the door was always a woman. Perhaps due to nearsightedness, she wore glasses and perpetually looked astonished. Though she must have lived in this world a considerable time—being about fifty—she remained astonished still. She had such large eyes that one felt guilty even knocking on her door.

When I entered, the woman would immediately vanish. What followed was an attached parlor—though at first I hadn't thought of it as such. There were no particular decorations to speak of—just two windows lined with books. Mr. Craig was usually stationed there. Upon seeing me enter, he would say "Ah" and extend his hand.

It being our customary signal to shake hands, I would take his hand—though he never once returned the gesture. Since my own grip wasn't particularly pleasant either, I often thought we might as well abandon the custom—yet he would still say "Ah," extending that hairy, wrinkled hand with its usual passivity. Habits are curious things indeed.

The owner of this hand was Mr. Craig, who accepted my questions.
When I first met him and asked about payment, he glanced out the window and said, “Well… How about seven shi per session?”
He added that if it was too much, he could lower the rate.
Thus I had settled on paying the full amount monthly at seven shi per session, but Mr. Craig would sometimes unexpectedly press for payment.
“You’ve received funds—couldn’t you pay now?” he’d say.
I would take gold coins from my Western trousers’ hidden pocket and hand them over with a curt “Heh.” Mr. Craig would accept them with an “Ah, pardon,” spread his characteristically passive hand to gaze at them on his palm, then tuck them into his own trousers’ hidden pocket.
The trouble was that he never gave change.
If I tried carrying over the excess to next month, he’d press me again within days—claiming he needed books.

Mr. Craig was from Ireland, and his words were exceedingly difficult to comprehend.
When he grew slightly flustered, his speech became as incomprehensible as when a Tokyoite quarrels with someone from Satsuma.
Given his rash and excessively excitable nature, whenever matters grew complicated, I would resign myself to fate and focus solely on observing Mr. Craig’s face.

There was nothing ordinary about that face.
Though his nose was characteristically high like a Westerner’s, it bore an angular ridge with overly thick flesh.
In this aspect it closely resembled my own, though such a nose fails to give a clean favorable impression at first glance.
Instead, its wild disarray exuded an unrefined charm.
His beard grew in a truly pitiable tangle of black and white.
Once when I encountered Mr. Craig on Baker Street, I mistook him for a coachman who had forgotten his whip.

I had never seen Mr. Craig wear a white shirt or collar.
He always wore striped flannel and plush slippers, stretching his feet so far into the fireplace they nearly touched the flames, occasionally tapping his short knees—it was then I first noticed the gold ring on his passive hand—sometimes rubbing his thighs instead of tapping as he instructed.
Truth be told, I never understood what he was teaching me.
When I listened, he would drag me into his pet topics and never let me escape.
These favored subjects shifted with seasonal changes and weather patterns.
At times they even migrated between polar opposites from one day to the next.
To put it harshly, it was nonsense; to phrase it kindly, literary salon talk. But looking back now, there was never any chance of receiving proper lectures neatly packaged at seven shi per session—Mr.Craig had been perfectly reasonable all along, making me the fool for resenting this.
To be fair, Mr.Craig's mind—as amply represented by that beard of his—did seem somewhat disordered and tilted askew, so perhaps it was better that even had I paid more, I wouldn't have received proper lectures in return.

What Mr.Craig excelled at was poetry.
When reading poetry, his face and shoulders would quiver like a heat haze—it was no lie.
They truly quivered.
Instead of reading to me, he would end up reading alone and enjoying himself, which ultimately meant a loss for me.
When I once brought something called Swinburne's Rosamond, Mr.Craig said "Let me see that," read aloud a few lines, then immediately closed the book on his knees, deliberately removed his pince-nez, and sighed: "Ah dreadful—has even Swinburne grown old enough to write such poetry?"
It was at this time that I remembered wanting to read Swinburne’s masterpiece Atalanta.

Mr.Craig considered me like a child.
He would frequently ask me trivial questions like "Do you know such things?" or "Do you understand those matters?"
Just when I thought this settled into a pattern, he would suddenly pose a profound question and abruptly shift to treating me as a peer.
Once when he read Watson’s poem before me, he asked: "Some say this resembles Shelley while others claim it’s entirely different—what do you think?"
No matter how I might consider it, Western poetry had to first appeal to my eyes before passing through my ears—otherwise I couldn’t grasp it at all.
So I gave an evasive response.
Whether I answered that it resembled Shelley or didn’t—I’ve now forgotten.
What struck me as odd was how Mr.Craig then slapped his knee and declared he thought likewise—leaving me thoroughly mortified.

One time, leaning out the window and looking down at the people bustling far below, he said, "You see how many pass by? Not one in a hundred understands poetry—pitiful creatures."

"The English are truly a people incapable of comprehending poetry."

"Compared to that, the Irish are remarkable."

“Far more refined.—Indeed, those like you and me who can appreciate poetry must be considered fortunate,” he said.

I was deeply grateful that he included me among those who understood poetry, but his treatment grew proportionally colder still.
I never detected anything resembling emotional connection in Mr.Craig.
To me he remained merely an old man who spoke with mechanical precision.

But there was such an incident.
Having grown thoroughly sick of my boarding house, I thought perhaps I could ask this teacher to let me stay at his place. One day after finishing the usual lesson, when I made the request, Mr.Craig immediately slapped his knee and said, “Very well—I’ll show you my rooms. Come along!” He proceeded to drag me all around—through the dining room, the maids’ quarters, the kitchen—giving me a complete tour.
After all, it was just a corner on the fourth-floor back, so it couldn’t be spacious.
After two or three minutes, there was nothing left to see.
No sooner had Mr.Craig returned to his original seat and refused with “You see what sort of house this is—I can’t possibly let you stay anywhere here,” than he abruptly began discussing Walt Whitman.
“Long ago, Whitman came and stayed at my house for a time—he spoke very rapidly, so I couldn’t understand him well, but it seems it was indeed Whitman who had come—and when I first read his poetry, I felt it was utterly worthless, but after reading it over and over, it gradually became interesting, until finally I came to greatly cherish it.
“So...”

The matter of being allowed to stay as a student had completely vanished into thin air.
I simply let things take their course, responding with noncommittal “uh-huhs” as I listened.
He was talking about how Shelley had quarreled with someone or other, voicing his objection that quarrels were unacceptable—since he liked both parties, it was most improper for two people he favored to be fighting.
“No matter how much I protest, there’s nothing to be done—they quarreled decades ago.”

Mr. Craig was a careless man, so he often misplaced his own books.
And when he couldn’t find them, he would grow terribly flustered and summon the old woman from the kitchen with an exaggerated shout, as though a fire had broken out.
Then the old woman appeared in the parlor with an equally exaggerated expression.

“Wh-where’s my Wordsworth?”

The maid, her eyes still wide as saucers, scanned the bookshelf once more—yet despite her apparent shock, she proved remarkably efficient, immediately locating Wordsworth.
Then, saying “There, sir,” she thrust it before Mr. Craig in a mildly reproachful manner.
Mr. Craig snatched it away, tap-tapping the grimy cover with two fingers as he began, “You see, Wordsworth...”
The maid retreated to the kitchen, her eyes widening even more in astonishment.
Mr. Craig continued tap-tapping at the Wordsworth book for two or three minutes.
And so, despite having gone to the trouble of having someone search for *Wordsworth*, he ended up not opening it at all.

Mr.Craig would occasionally send letters.
The characters were absolutely impossible to read.
After all, they were only two or three lines - I had time enough to examine them repeatedly - yet no matter how I tried, I couldn't decipher them.
Whenever a letter came from Mr.Craig,I concluded there must be some impediment preventing our lesson,and thus spared myself from reading them altogether.
Occasionally,the flustered maid would write on his behalf.
At such times,the meaning became perfectly clear.
Mr.Craig had secured himself an efficient secretary.
He would sigh,lamenting his poor handwriting.
Then he'd remark that I was far more skilled at penmanship.

If a manuscript were written in such handwriting, I couldn't help worrying what sort of thing would result.
Mr.Craig was the publisher of the Arden Shakespeare.
I often wondered how those characters could possibly merit being transformed into movable type.
Mr.Craig, despite this, nonchalantly went about writing prefaces and adding notes as usual.
Not only that, but there was an instance where he told me to look at this preface and made me read the introduction he had attached to Hamlet.
When I remarked that the subsequent section was interesting, he requested, “When you return to Japan, you must introduce this book.”
Arden Shakespeare’s Hamlet was a book that provided me with immense benefit when I gave lectures at the university after returning to Japan.
I doubted there existed anything as thorough and well-organized as those Hamlet Notes.
However, I did not feel it so keenly at the time.
However, I had already been astonished by Mr.Craig’s Shakespeare research even before that.

Turning at a right angle from the parlor, there was a small six-tatami study.
The truth was, Mr.Craig had made his lofty nest at this fourth-floor corner, where in the innermost recess lay a treasure most precious to him.
Lining up about ten blue-bound notebooks—each roughly eighteen inches long and twelve wide—Mr.Craig would meticulously transcribe phrases from paper scraps into these volumes without leaving gaps, deriving lifelong pleasure from accumulating them bit by bit like a miser hoarding holed coins.
It did not take long after arriving there to realize these blue notebooks constituted the manuscript for his Shakespeare dictionary.
To complete this work, they said Mr.Craig had relinquished his literary chair at a Welsh university and carved out time to visit the British Museum daily.
Having abandoned even his academic post, small wonder he neglected Shichishi's disciples.
Within Mr.Craig's mind, this dictionary loomed and swelled ceaselessly through all hours.

I once asked Mr. Craig, "With Schmid’s Shakespeare glossary already in existence, are you still creating such a thing?"
Then, with an expression that could not conceal his contempt, Mr. Craig said, “Look at this,” and showed me his own copy of Schmid.
When I looked, even Schmid’s two-volume work—every single page—had been thoroughly blackened without a single spot left untouched.
I said "Huh" and gazed at Schmid in astonishment.
Mr. Craig was extremely pleased with himself.
"If I were merely creating something on par with Schmid," he said, "I wouldn’t be going to all this trouble." Then, aligning his two fingers once more, he began rhythmically tapping the pitch-black Schmid.

“Just when did you begin such a thing?”

Mr.Craig stood up and went to the opposite bookshelf, searching intently for something, but then—as was his habit—began calling impatiently in that vexed tone of his, “Jane! Jane! Where’s my Dowden?” inquiring about Dowden’s whereabouts even before the old woman emerged.
The old woman came out again, startled.
Then, just as usual, she scolded him with a tsk-tsk and started back, but Mr.Craig paid no heed to her reproach and hungrily opened the book, muttering, “Hmm, here it is.”
“Dowden has properly listed my name here.”
“It says here, ‘Mr.Craig, who specially studies Shakespeare.’”
“This book was published in 1870...s, and my research predates that by far... I truly had to hand it to him for his perseverance.”
“Incidentally,” I then asked, “when will it be completed?”
“How should I know? I’ll just keep at it until I die,” said Mr.Craig as he returned Dowden to its place.

I stopped going to Mr. Craig’s place some time after that.

A little before I stopped going, Mr.Craig said, “Do you suppose Japanese universities might need Western professors?”
“If I were younger, I might go myself,” he said, his face taking on an expression that somehow conveyed the impermanence of things.
Sentiment showed on Mr.Craig’s face only at this moment.
When I tried to comfort him by saying, “But you’re still young,” he replied, “No no—you never know what might happen.”
He became strangely despondent, muttering about being fifty-six already.

About two years after returning to Japan, an article appeared in a newly arrived literary magazine stating that Mr. Craig had died.
It had merely added two or three lines noting he was a Shakespeare scholar.
I set down the magazine at that moment and wondered whether that dictionary had ultimately gone to waste without ever being completed.