Pathway to Japanese Literature

I

At long last, I had managed to return to the hospital.
When I recall it now, those sweltering mornings and evenings spent here had already become memories from three months past.
In those days, they had extended a reed screen over six feet long from the second-floor eaves as a sunshade, darkening the veranda that blazed with heat.
On that veranda they had placed a maple bonsai received from Korekimi along with potted plants brought by occasional visitors - arrangements that helped endure both boredom and the oppressive warmth.
I would sometimes watch two naked men appear on the high inn's drying platform across the way; heedless of the midday sun, they'd perilously traverse railings or deliberately lie supine on narrow beams as they roughhoused - sights that made me yearn to someday regain such robust physiques myself.
Now everything had transmuted into the past.
In its fundamental uncertainty of never reappearing before my eyes, it was an evanescent past indistinguishable from dreams.

At the time of leaving the hospital, I had resolved to relocate following the doctor's advice.
But falling ill again at my new location, I never imagined returning to Tokyo lying on a stretcher.
Even upon returning to Tokyo, I could never have imagined—still less expected—that without passing through my own home's gate, remaining on that stretcher, I would again be destined to settle into that same hospital.

The day we left Shuzenji was rain; arriving in Tokyo was rain too. When helped down from the train, the faces of those who had come specially to greet me barely entered my vision. I could only manage eye-contact greetings with two or three among them. Before I could offer proper acknowledgments, I was already laid out on the stretcher. Tung oil had been applied to the stretcher against the twilight rain. With a sensation of being laid at pit-bottom, I occasionally opened my eyes in the dark. The reek of tung oil filled my nose. To my ears came the sound of rain beating tung oil and faint, fragmented voices of those attending the stretcher. Yet nothing appeared to my eyes. The large wild chrysanthemum branch Mr. Morishige had inserted into the shingen bag's mouth by my pillow on the train must have snapped during the disembarking chaos.

No wild chrysanthemums on the tung-oiled stretcher—

This is that scene condensed afterward into seventeen characters. I was carried up to the hospital's second floor still lying on this stretcher, then stretched my calmly emaciated limbs upon the white bed I had grown familiar with three months prior. It was a quiet night filled with rain sounds. In the building housing my hospital room, there being only three or four patients, with voices naturally tending to fade away, autumn here felt even more hushed than Shuzenji had been.

When I had spent about two hours comfortably beneath a white blanket on this quiet evening, I received two telegrams from the nurse. Opening one revealed the message: "Congratulations on your safe return to the capital." The sender was Nakamura Korekimi in Manchuria. Opening the other showed exactly the same congratulatory phrase without a single character differing from the first. While finding this coincidental similarity amusingly mundane, I wondered who had sent it and checked the sender's name. Yet there stood only "Steto," making no sense whatsoever. Only when seeing Nagoya listed as the originating office did understanding finally come. Steto combined the initials of Suzuki Teiji and Suzuki Tokiko—my wife's younger sister and her husband. Folding both telegrams together, I resolved that when seeing my wife's face tomorrow morning—she who would return—I would first share this story.

The hospital room's tatami were blue. The sliding doors had been re-papered. The walls had just been freshly painted. All furnishings stood in perfect order. It was so immaculate that I immediately recalled my wife's words—left when Deputy Director Sugimoto came again to Shuzenji for an examination—about replacing the tatami and keeping everything ready. Counting on my fingers from that appointed day, I found sixteen or seventeen days had already passed. Even the blue tatami seemed to have waited a good long while for someone.

Ah, how many cricket-filled nights have passed?

From that night onward, I resolved to make this hospital my second home for the time being.

II

On the evening of the eleventh day after returning to the hospital, when I asked Mr. Gotō during his rounds how the Director’s illness had been lately, he replied that while there had been considerable improvement for a time, with the recent cold spell… So I said, “Please give him my regards when you meet.”
That night I went to sleep without another thought.
Then the next morning, when my wife came and sat by my bedside, she said, “I must confess I’ve kept this from you—Director Nagayo passed away on the fifth of last month.”
“For the funeral services, I asked Mr. Higashi to attend as proxy.”
“His decline began in late August—precisely when you were in critical condition,” she added.

It was at this moment that I first realized both that my attendants had deliberately concealed the Director’s death from me and the significance of their having done so.
And so I compared all manner of things between myself—who had survived—and the deceased Director, remaining silent in a daze for some time.

The Director had been in poor health since that spring, so even during my previous hospitalization, we had never once met face-to-face over six weeks.
When he heard of my illness, he expressed regret through a message: "If only I were well enough myself, I would have devoted every effort to your treatment."
Afterward too, messages of concern were occasionally conveyed through the Deputy Director.

When I suffered a relapse in Shuzenji and the company specially arranged for Mr. Morishige to visit me in caregiving capacity, on that very evening when Mr. Morishige arrived saying he couldn't stay long due to hospital obligations, Director Nagayo went out of his way to send a telegram directly instructing him: "Make every possible accommodation for him."
The actual wording never reached my sleeping eyes, of course.
Yet the sound of those words I heard from Yukitori-kun at my bedside remains in my ears even now as a memory of goodwill.
It was a solemnly imperative directive ordering that I remain at that location for the time being and receive thorough nursing care—something that must have carried grave weight for Mr. Morishige.

It is said that Director Nagayo’s condition deteriorated at nearly the same time I fell into critical condition.
Two or three days after I had vomited copious amounts of fresh blood and was deemed by those around me to have no hope of recovery, Mr. Morishige returned briefly to Tokyo under the pretext of hospital business—in truth, to meet the Director one final time while he still lived—and then, some ten days later, made a second trip to Tokyo again on hospital business, this time to attend the Director’s funeral, or so it is said.

While the Director—who from the beginning had shown me goodwill and indirectly concerned himself with my treatment—was thus gradually approaching death during this period, I miraculously managed to safely traverse terrain where the breadth of my life had narrowed to something as thin as a silk thread.
When the Director’s death became permanently marked by a single tombstone, the root of my life that had persistently entwined around his bones began at last to form new blood-coursing cells about those cold remains.

After over a month during which the flowers offered before the Director’s grave had withered and been replaced time and again—advancing from bush clover, bellflowers, and maidenflowers to white and yellow chrysanthemums as autumn deepened—I returned once more to this gastrointestinal hospital the Director had founded, having amassed beneath my skin enough revitalized blood to sustain such a resurgence during that same period.
And during that interval, I had never yet come to know that the Director had died.
Until that bright morning when my wife came upon my return and confessed such-and-such, I had believed that the Director in Tokyo was fully aware of the progression of my illness.
And I had thought that once I recovered and left the hospital, I would go to express my gratitude.
I had thought that if I could meet him at the hospital, I would express my deep gratitude.

To those departing / To those remaining / Wild geese arrive

When I consider it, my safe return to Tokyo was nothing less than heavenly fortune. To regard this outcome as natural was merely the false bravado of still being alive. Unless I set aside thoughts of my own survival to envision too the state of those who lost their grip on life’s rope—unless I hold my fortunate self against their reflection—I cannot comprehend my own gratitude nor fathom others’ sorrow.

A night when just one wild goose comes beneath the moon

III

I learned of Professor James’s death on the morning after hearing of Director Nagayo’s passing.
Taking up a newly arrived foreign journal, I had flipped through five or six pages when the professor’s name suddenly caught my eye. Thinking he might have published some new work, I began to read—only to find, unexpectedly, that it was an announcement of his eternal sleep.
The journal was from early September, and as its item stated that he had passed away at sixty-nine on a past Sunday, when I counted on my fingers, it coincided precisely with the time when the Director’s condition was gradually deteriorating and those around him were furrowing their brows day and night.
It was also the time when I lost a large amount of blood at once and wandered between life and death.
I imagine that the day Professor James drew his last breath was likely the same day my own life—its pulse fluttering faintly at my emaciated wrist, barely there yet not entirely gone—kept the nurses in anxious suspense.

It was this summer that I began reading Professor James's final work, A Pluralistic Universe. When departing for Shuzenji, I resolved to finish the portion I had left unread and placed it in my suitcase along with five or six other volumes. However, from the day after arriving, I began feeling unwell and ended up being unable to go out at all. Yet while lying on the inn's second floor, I managed to read a little more each day for a day or two. Naturally, as my condition worsened, I had to abandon reading altogether—until the day of the professor's death, I never again had opportunity to take up his book.

While confined to my sickbed, when I took up Professor James’s A Pluralistic Universe for the third time—how many days had passed since the professor’s death? Looking back now, I was terribly weakened at that time. Lying on my back, propping both elbows on the futon, holding up a book of that size proved quite strenuous. Before even five minutes had passed, my hands would go numb from anemia, so I would try shifting my grip or rubbing the backs of my hands. But as my head appeared relatively unfatigued, I could comprehend what was written without difficulty. The confidence that my mind alone was now usable first emerged at this time after the major hemorrhage. Feeling pleased, I called my wife and said while explaining my reasoning, “Considering my body’s condition, my head remains remarkably sturdy,” to which she replied, “If anything, your head is too sturdy.” “During those critical two or three days, you were handled so roughly that you were made terribly weak,” she replied.

A Pluralistic Universe, of which about half remained, I finished reading with interest in roughly three days. Particularly from my perspective as a writer, I found it fascinating to read how the Professor consistently grounded himself in concrete facts and ventured into philosophical territory through analogy. I do not entirely dislike dialectic. Nor do I unreasonably detest rationalism. I simply found it pleasing that my usual literary opinions and the ideas the Professor advocated in his philosophy seemed to support each other through an intimate connection. What particularly delighted my head—where blood had yet to fully circulate—beyond measure was how the Professor raced through his introduction of the French scholar Bergson’s theories with the momentum of a cart rolling downhill. It was at this time that I greatly admired the Professor’s writing.

I still remember. I deliberately called Mr. Higashi—who was in the adjacent room—to my bedside and told him in an instructive manner that James was truly a master of prose. When Mr. Higashi failed to offer any clear response to this, I impertinently pressed him: “When you read Westerners’ books, do you truly grasp their distinctive qualities through their writing style as you read—this one’s fluency or that one’s meticulousness?”

Henry, the Professor’s brother, was a renowned novelist who wrote exceedingly dense prose. People say Henry composes novels akin to philosophy while William writes philosophy akin to novels—so much so that Henry’s works prove as difficult to read as the Professor’s remain lucid and accessible. Examining my sickbed diary, I find written in faltering script under September 23rd: “Finished reading James this morning. Believe I’ve read a fine book.” Nothing proves more regrettable than being deceived by a name or title into reading some trifling volume. This diary entry has indeed expressed the very inverse of that sentiment.

Director Nagayo, who had shown me various kindnesses in treating my illness, had died at some point without my knowledge.
During my illness, Professor James—who had cast variegated light into my desolate mind—had also died at some point without my knowledge.
I, who should express gratitude to both of them, am the only one left alive.

Rain on chrysanthemums—
repose within
my illness—

Chrysanthemum hues

(That there is no space here to elaborate on how Professor James' philosophical ideas prove fascinating from a literary perspective is something I deeply regret. Moreover, the first volume of Bergson’s works, which the Professor deeply admired, was finally translated into English and published by Sonnenschein. Its title is Time and Free Will (時と自由意思). The author’s position is naturally aligned with that of the late Professor as an anti-intellectualist.)

IV

When my illness was severe, I naturally lived each day as it came.
And each day transformed as it passed.
I too came to clearly perceive how my mind flowed away like water.
To confess, the phenomena in my brain—appearing and vanishing like clouds—were utterly mundane.
This too I recognized.
Amidst innocently accumulating experiences—shallow things unworthy of being called a once-in-a-lifetime grave illness, without even feeling shame—I recalled how I had wished to record each day's mental state for future reference.
At that time, my hands of course remained useless.
Yet days faded easily into nights and nights brightened effortlessly into days.
Thus the ripples of thought grazing past my mind would surface only to dissolve immediately.
Lying abed, I would watch my memories grow faint and distant shadows, yearning to summon them back.
There exists an account of scholar Münsterberg—when burglars entered his home and he later testified in court, nearly every statement contradicted the facts.
Even the memory of this precise, methodical scholar proves so unreliable.
That which we call "things worth recalling" naturally fades in hue as days accumulate.

Before my hands regained their use, many things had already been lost.
It would not be false to say that since acquiring the power to wield my brush, not a few things had slipped away.
It was for this reason that I resolved to record—albeit in disordered fragments—both the progression of my illness and the inner life arising alongside that progression.
Among my friends, there were those who rejoiced, saying, "Have you improved so much already?"
There were also those who worried whether I might not bungle such rash actions.

Among them,the one who made the bitterest face was Mr.Ikebe Sanzan.
The moment he heard I had written a manuscript,the immediately scolded me,saying,"That's unnecessary!"
Moreover,the voice was utterly brusque.
"I've obtained medical permission,"I argued,"so you might consider this merely an ordinary person's diversion against boredom."
While granting due weight to physician approval,"You still require friends' consent,"came Mr.Sanzan's retort.
When days later he consulted Dr.Miyamoto,the professor mediated:"Boredom-induced gastric acidity proves conversely detrimental"—thus securing my reprieve.

At that time I addressed Mr.Sanzan,

遺却新詩無処尋。
Listless, through the window facing distant woods.

The setting sun bathes the path, illuminating a distant monk.
Yellow leaves—a village hides a temple deep.

Hanging verses on temple walls, kindling Buddha's intent.
Gazing at clouds in heaven's expanse, cradling the zither's heart.

The supreme human joy lies in aging by rivers and lakes.
A dog's bark, a rooster's crow—both make harmonious sounds.

I left behind a poem that reads:
Technical merits aside—since I in the hospital had no temple to view from my window nor any zither in my room—this verse clearly diverges from reality; yet as an expression of my mental state then, it remains remarkably apt.
Just as Dr. Miyamoto warned that boredom breeds acid accumulation, I too have intimately known the excess acid of overexertion.
Ultimately, I believe humans must stand within leisure's realm to know happiness; thus did my present self's joy—grasping even fleeting respite—take form in these fifty-six characters.

Admittedly, in terms of style, it was indeed an old-fashioned one.
It could be said there was neither novelty nor originality.
It was neither Gorky nor Andreyev nor Ibsen nor Shaw.
Instead, this essence belonged to an interest those writers had yet to know.
Moreover, it resided in a realm they could never attain.
Just as we in this present age were surrounded by harsh realities of life, so too were we seized by harsh literature—an inevitably sad fact indeed. Yet if one were to observe human existence for three hundred sixty-five days without glancing aside, driven by this so-called 'modern spirit,' life would surely prove both constricting and dreary.
Occasionally, such old-fashioned charm might instead radiate a fresh layer of meaning onto our inner lives.
Through illness, I gained this trite happiness and overripe leisure, and for the first time felt as though I had returned from abroad to face plain rice.

"The reason I recall 'things to recall' is precisely because I forget them." Having barely survived and returned to Tokyo, I was already beginning to lose this tranquil state of mind that I had only just attained through illness. While still too weak in my legs to leave my bed, I myself was growing concerned that the poem I had left for Mr. Sanzan might already be the last work that would sing of this tranquil essence. "Things to Recall" might have been merely a plain and subdued personal account of reminiscences during illness, but within it I intended to surprisingly incorporate this trite yet uncommon essence; therefore I wished to quickly recall, quickly write, and together with today's new people and today's suffering people, cherish this ancient fragrance.

V

During my time in Shuzenji, I would lie on my back composing haiku and record them in my diary.
At times I even tried composing Chinese-style poetry by painstakingly matching tonal patterns.
And I wrote down every one of those Chinese-style poems as unfinished drafts in my diary.

I had grown increasingly distant from haiku over the years.
As for Chinese-style poetry, one might say I had been an utter outsider from the very beginning.
Whether poetry or verse, works created during illness—no matter how pleased their bedridden creator might have been with them—I of course did not think they would appear polished in experts' eyes (particularly by modern standards).

However, the value of the haiku and Chinese-style poetry I created during my illness, from my own perspective, had absolutely nothing to do with their technical execution.
Even in ordinary times when my spirits were low, so long as I remained confident in possessing at least enough health to endure daily trivialities—and so long as others recognized that I possessed it—I was a person engaged in a constant battle for survival, day and night.
If described in Buddhist terms, I was constantly subjected to the suffering of this burning house, restless even in my dreams.
At times urged by others, occasionally proceeding of my own accord, I might suddenly string together seventeen syllables or attempt to compose four-line verses following the kishōtenketsu structure—yet always with a lingering sense of incompleteness somewhere within, unable to wrap my entire heart without reserve and cast it fully into these poems and verses.
This phenomenon may have stemmed from the envious demon of real life clinging to artistic pursuits, or perhaps from becoming so fervently obsessed with verses and poems that one ended up tossed about by them, growing restless within what should have been a tranquil aesthetic realm. Yet even if countless excellent verses and fine poems had been produced, the creator's gained pleasure would have amounted only to the appraisal of two or three kindred spirits—subtract that appraisal, and what remained ultimately culminated in nothing but abundant anxiety and pain.

However, when I fell ill, the essence changed considerably.
When ill, I felt a step removed from the real world.
Others too, viewing me as having retreated a step from society, regarded me with leniency.
On my side arose the reassurance that I could manage without working full capacity, while on theirs existed the consideration that treating me as fully capable would be pitiable.
And thus, a serene spring that could never have been hoped for in times of health welled up from that space.
This tranquil heart was precisely my verses, my poems.
Therefore, setting aside questions of technical merit, the creator viewing these works as symbols of peace could not comprehend their true worth.
The verses and poems gained during illness were not tasks forced upon idleness to dispel boredom.
When my heart, having escaped real life's pressures, rebounded to its inherent freedom and gained substantial leeway, these became the heaven-sent patterns that spontaneously welled up and surfaced.
The unbidden arising of inspiration itself brought joy; the process of capturing that inspiration, dissecting it horizontally and vertically to shape it into verse or poetry brought yet another joy.
When finally completed at dawn, I felt as though I'd clearly created a formless essence before my eyes, making me even happier.
Whether my essence and form possessed true value or not, I had no leisure to reflect upon.

During my illness, I received kind inquiries from sympathizers in all directions, whether acquainted with me or not.
In my current weakened state, I could neither send sufficiently detailed thank-you letters to properly acknowledge each individual kindness nor report the process by which I ultimately did not die and have come to this day.
It was for this reason that I began writing "Things to Recall" at my bedside.
—By condensing what should have been sent individually to each person and publishing it only in a corner of the literary column, I aimed to inform those kind individuals who had expended time and care for someone like me of my current circumstances.

Therefore, inserting poems and haiku into "Things to Recall" was not merely intended to showcase my standing as a poet and haiku master.
To tell the truth, I even thought their being good or bad was rather inconsequential.
I would have been satisfied if the fact that I had been living under the sway of such emotions at that time could have been conveyed to the reader's heart in the swiftness of a glance.

Autumn river’s stake-driving echoes

This was a haiku that suddenly came to me about ten days after I revived.
The clear autumn sky stretching endlessly, the expansive river, the distant sound of stake-driving—I still remember how a mood corresponding to these three phenomena ceaselessly drifted through my faint mind at that time.

Autumn sky pale yellow and clear; cedar meets axe

This too expresses the same absorbed state through different words.

Parting now—a single thread of dream in the Milky Way

I neither knew its meaning then nor understand it now, but perhaps an association with parting from Tōyōjō—dimly circulating through this dream-like mind—unconsciously shaped itself into being through some trance-like process.

At that time, I loved only the poetic refinement called 'fūryū'—a sensibility scarcely found in Western terms.
Of that poetic refinement (fūryū), I particularly cherished only a certain essence that appears in the verses cited here.

Autumn wind—crimson throat Buddha

This verse felt more like raw reportage than crafted art, carrying a menacing air while lacking depth—from the moment it surfaced on my lips, an uneasy sensation took hold.

The man of refinement not yet dead;
In illness I grasp tranquility.

Daily mountain affairs.
Each morning beholds the blue-green mountain.

Poems lacking circled punctuation felt as forlorn as a shoji screen without paper, so I added the circles myself.
As for why someone like me—who doesn’t properly grasp tonal patterns and only hazily remembers rhyme schemes—would trouble myself to attempt techniques that only Chinese people would find effective, the truth is, even I don’t understand.
However (setting aside tonal patterns and rhyme characters), since the essence of poetry has long been Japanized through traditions extending from the imperial court era to this day, those of us Japanese of a certain generation cannot easily strip this away from our minds.
In ordinary times, caught up in daily affairs, I didn't even compose the simplest haiku.
When it came to poetry, I found it too bothersome and still didn't attempt it.
Only when viewing the real world from afar like this, with a distant heart free from entanglements, did verses naturally well up and poems emerge in various forms under inspiration’s sway.
And when I looked back later, that period turned out to be the happiest in my life.
If Japan were to invent vessels for poetic refinement other than these clumsy seventeen-syllable verses and awkward Chinese characters—well, that would be another matter. But barring such invention, I would always endure their clumsiness and awkwardness when encountering such times and occasions, finding joy in poetic refinement here without regret.
And I never considered it a regret that Japan lacked other suitable poetic forms.

VI

When my desire to read first began to sprout, Mr. Genmimi from Tokyo sent me a package containing Suikodō Kensō and Lives of the Immortals.
This Lives of the Immortals was a Chinese-style book in a protective case, so aged—or rather, so grimy—that its pages looked ready to tear with the slightest mishandling.
I picked up this grubby book while lying down and carefully examined each immortal illustration within it.
And then I took pleasure in comparing these immortals’ beard styles and head shapes with one another.
At that time, forgetting the distinctive traits arising from the artist's brush habits, I thought one must be such a flat-headed man to qualify as an immortal, or again speculated that without letting such sparse beards flutter in the wind, one would be unlikely to join their ranks, ceaselessly gazing at the common physiognomy manifesting in their appearances.
I also read the main text, of course.
I read while becoming delightfully aware of a leisurely state of mind utterly unattainable during my usual impatient hours.—I doubt there exists even one among today's youth who possesses both the courage and time to read a single page of Lives of the Immortals.
To tell the truth, even I in my advanced years first opened this book called Lives of the Immortals at this time.

However, regrettably, the main text did not flow with the same elegance as the illustrations. Among them were vulgar immortals resembling solidified masses of desire that had shed their earthly forms. Even so, as I read on, I gradually found portions that somewhat appealed to me. What struck me as most artless yet amusing was an immortal—though I’ve now forgotten his name—who took perverse delight in rolling hand grime and nasal filth into pills to give people.

Yet what drew my attention more than either illustrations or main text was the appendix at the volume’s end. This appeared to be a compilation of materials gathered from various sources—items labeled as longevity methods or health regimens—assembled together. Being ultimately precautions for immortal transformation, they differed from ordinary practices like deep breathing or cold baths—texts so abstract one couldn’t determine their comprehensibility—yet to my sickbed self they proved intriguing enough that I deliberately transcribed two or three passages into my diary. Examining the diary now reveals difficult classical Chinese phrases such as “If stillness becomes nature, mind dwells within; if movement becomes mind, nature dwells within...” meandering across half a page.

At that time, gripping the end of a dried-up fountain pen and swinging it once or twice to get ink flowing to the nib was exceedingly painful for me. In reality, it was more grueling than a healthy person swinging a six-foot oak staff with one hand. That even during such intense frailty I had the mental leisure to deliberately copy these mystical-sounding phrases strikes me as truly delightful even now. A feeling arose within me as though I had been granted to relive just once those childhood days when I frequented the temple library and heedlessly copied Sorai’s Ken'en Juppitsu. Just as my deeds of old were utterly meaningless beyond mere transcription, my post-illness deeds too proved nearly equally devoid of purpose. And in that very meaninglessness, I find a kind of value and rejoice. The fact that *Lives of the Immortals*—a text meant for devising longevity—came to be handled so casually by my convalescent self under such a leisurely state of mind (utterly unsuited for achieving immortality) was for me pure happenstance, a miraculous juncture unlikely ever to recur.

The old French painter Alpinie was already ninety-one or ninety-two years of age.
Even so, he appeared to retain ordinary vigor, for in a recent issue of *Studio*, about ten striking charcoal drawings had been featured.
In the preface by Shen Deqian at the beginning of *Guochao Liujia Shichao*, he specifically notes: "Written in Changzhou during the fifth month of summer in the Qianlong Dinghai year, at the age of ninety-five."
The splendor of longevity went without saying.
To live long and still retain full use of one’s faculties like these two was all the more commendable.

Having barely survived an attempt to die shortly after passing forty, I naturally had no idea how much longer I might live.
To my mind, living one day meant the fulfillment of that day; living two days meant the fulfillment of those two.
And should my mind remain functional through it all, I would have to call that an added blessing.
Heinzen had been rumored by society to have died twice.
Once they'd even composed an elegy for him.
Yet he remained alive nonetheless.
I heard that at the time, a certain newspaper had reported me dead.
Still, I did not die.
Thus I survived long enough to read Lives of the Immortals and recapture those innocent exertions of childhood.
For my enfeebled self, even this alone constituted immeasurable happiness.

Around that time I received a get-well message from an unknown person bearing the words "May Sensei not die, may Sensei not die." I rejoiced at having survived to read Lives of the Immortals while simultaneously rejoicing at having survived for this sympathetic young man.

VII

The sociological work authored by Ward had deliberately affixed the adjective "dynamic" to its title; this appeared to specifically clarify that it differed from ordinary sociology by being discussed dynamically.
However, when this book was once translated into Russian, the Russian authorities immediately banned its publication.
The author, struck by suspicion, inquired about the reason through a friend in Russia.
Then came his friend's reply: though he himself didn't fully understand, it seemed likely that with both "dynamic" and "sociology" in the title, the authorities had immediately—without further consideration—assumed it to be dangerous writing connected to dynamite and socialism, thus daring to commit this rash act.

Though not among the Russian authorities, I too had paid considerable attention to this term "dynamic". Not only had I long observed with dissatisfaction how general scholars remained unperturbed while handling research materials as if they were inanimate objects incapable of movement—never focusing on this single character—but I had also critically lamented how literary debates closely related to me appeared particularly susceptible to, and were indeed succumbing to, this very shortcoming. I had therefore wished to read this so-called dynamic sociology—the work that once alarmed the Russian authorities—for reference. To be frank, it felt rather embarrassing to confess my own shame, but this was by no means a new book. The binding style alone already bore an old-fashioned quality reminiscent of Spencer’s synthetic philosophy. Moreover, it was an astonishingly voluminous work—a massive tome spanning two volumes with approximately 1,500 pages—so even a week, let alone four or five days, would hardly suffice to read through it comfortably. Having no choice but to store it away until the right time would come, it suddenly occurred to me that this might make suitable reading material for my current disinterest in novels; thus I had it sent from home and finally resolved to dynamically study sociology in the hospital.

However, when I began reading it, the book proved to have an astonishingly grandiose and lengthy preface. And when it came to sociology itself—the very core—it was exceedingly incomplete, and what I had considered my much-anticipated cornerstone, the so-called dynamic aspect, was handled so roughly that it became quite disheartening. It is not my purpose now to critique Ward’s writings—I mention this merely in passing—but having trusted the author completely, persisting in the belief that the true dynamic principle would emerge soon, that a tidal dynamic culmination would appear imminently, I read through to the very last character on the final page of those 1,500 pages; when nothing approaching my expectations materialized from any quarter, I felt a letdown as anticlimactic as Halley’s Comet’s fated day of enveloping Earth with its tail passing uneventfully without a single change.

However, the journey was all the more varied and interesting precisely because I was compelled to take detours along the way. When I came to a section bearing the imposing title "Cosmogony," I could not help but recall the nebular hypothesis I had been taught by my teacher long ago in school and smile. And then I suddenly thought—

I was now finally beginning to recover from a dangerous illness and rejoiced in it as if it were a great fortune. Even as I healed, I could only wish to keep alive a little longer those renowned and precious people who were mercilessly dying. I felt grateful to my wife, the doctors, the nurses, and the young people who had cared for me. I harbored a deep sense of gratitude toward the friends who had taken care of me and all those who had come to visit. And I believed that something quintessentially human lay hidden here. The proof lay here—in this deep, intense pleasantness overflowing so profoundly that for the first time, there truly seemed to be meaning in living.

However, this concerns interhuman relationships.
Even if we are not regarded as the cosmic standard, this remains an internal affair of times when none beyond our present selves raise their heads to survey the world’s circumference.
When I consider humans leading their faint existence amidst this framework—grounded in the evolutionary theory spanning three eras of life as a whole and (particularly) the history of the solar system that operates mercilessly according to physical principles and expands without compassion—I cannot help but notice how the joys and sorrows of beings like ourselves are so insignificant as to be nearly meaningless.

When Earth's crust—having solidified over endless eons—acquired heat to melt, then further expanded into gaseous form while simultaneously other celestial bodies underwent equivalent transformations; when the spaces between the orbits they had followed separately until today became completely filled, our orderly solar system lost all distinction between suns and moons and stars, swirling like one great blazing firecloud. Reversing the imagination further, when I envisioned this nebula losing heat to contract, rotating as it contracted, and progressing while tearing off a fragment from its exterior, I arrived at the conclusion that our Earth’s past—which so distinctly arranged its seas, lands, and atmosphere—was nothing more than a single mass of blazing gas. If we stretch scientific laws from this barely recognizable present back to an unimaginably ancient past through flawless universal principles, mountains would indeed become mountains and waters waters without a thread out of place; yet the fate of us humans thriving through these mountains, waters, air, and sun's grace merely grasps a fleeting moment—a blink within eternity's unfolding cosmic history where conditions for our survival align—so rather than calling it ephemeral, it might be more accurate to deem our lives sheer happenstance.

In our ordinary lives, we live solely among people.
We have never once given thought to the air required for living, taking its existence as given.
Examining this mentality's core reveals we seem to assume air must exist simply because we are born.
Yet it is precisely this air's existence that allows human birth; in truth, air wasn't created for humans - humans were created for air.
Should even now some change occur in this air's composition - as Earth's history already foresees - should vibrant oxygen dwindle through bonding with terrestrial matter, should carbon be absorbed by plants into black coal strata, should our world cool completely like the gasless lunar surface - then we must all perish.
I cannot continue complacently celebrating my survival like present-me does, mourning distant deaths while cherishing friends and resenting foes, content merely with domestic affairs.

When we view evolutionary history advancing through inorganic and organic realms, penetrating both animal and plant kingdoms—developing without gaps like a single unbroken iron rod spanning ten thousand miles—and when we realize that we humans are but material filling a mere page in this grand chronicle, then the self-importance of those who presume themselves to have reached the pinnacle of a hundred-foot pole must abruptly fall away. We of the modern age, who know evolution theory and imagine the nebular hypothesis, taste a disillusionment more bitter than when the Chinese opened world maps to discover their land was not alone the Middle Kingdom; more bitter than when ominous Black Ships arrived to make Japan realize it was not uniquely divine; more bitter still than when humanity was compelled to accept Earth's displacement from the cosmic center through the shattering of geocentric doctrine.

The principle of evolutionary theory is that it does not concern itself with individual extinctions for species preservation.
According to scholarly examples, I hear that a single cod spawns a million offspring each year.
When considering oysters, that number is said to reach multiples of two million.
Of these, only a mere few survive to maturity; thus nature stands as an economically profligate wastrel and a morally terrifyingly cruel parent.
Though human life and death may seem momentous from our anthropocentric view, were one to temporarily adopt nature’s perspective—observing through its dispassionate lens—these events would appear as nothing more than inevitable developments, devoid of any rational basis for joy or sorrow.

When I thought this way, I became extremely apprehensive. Or I became utterly bored. So I deliberately shifted my mood and, while recalling Mrs. Ōtsuka who had recently passed away in Ōiso, composed a memorial poem for her.

Throw in all the chrysanthemums into the coffin

VIII

From about two weeks before that unforgettable August 24th arrived, I had already been ill.
The constant flow of spa guests along the veranda made being seen agonizing, so even during stifling heat I kept the shoji screens perpetually shut.
Though I would order two or three seemingly palatable dishes from the old woman who came thrice daily with menu proposals, upon seeing the arranged plates on the tray an inexplicable revulsion would arise, leaving me wholly incapable of lifting my chopsticks.
Then nausea came.

At first, I copiously vomited a dark yellow-brown water resembling herbal decoction.
After vomiting, I felt somewhat relieved, so a small amount of something passed down my throat.
However, before the joy of having passed something could fade, I again became unable to endure the heavy, stagnant pain in my stomach.
And then I vomited again.
What was vomited was mostly water.
The color gradually changed until finally becoming a beautiful liquid like verdigris.
Moreover, under the terror and caution of being unable to send even a single grain of rice to my stomach, it abruptly and mercilessly flowed backward through my esophagus.

The blue substance changed color again.
When I filled the metal basin to the brim with a thick, darkened liquid resembling dissolved bear's bile, the doctor furrowed his brows and advised that if such things were emerging, it would be better to rest and return to Tokyo immediately.
I pointed at the metal basin and asked, "What exactly is coming out?"
The doctor answered with a disinterested expression, "This is blood."
But to my eyes, this black substance did not appear to be blood.
Then I vomited again.
The bear's bile now held a tinge of red, and as it passed through my throat, a pungent fishy stench struck my nose. Clutching my chest, I kept repeating to myself, "Blood—it's blood."

The reason Genjimi-kun, alarmed, specifically sent Mr. Morishige accompanied by Mr. Sakamoto to Shuzenji was that this notification had been relayed via long-distance telephone to the gastrointestinal hospital and then communicated directly to the company from there.
When Tōyōjō, who had rushed over from the annex, stood by my bedside and informed me that doctors and staff members were scheduled to come from Tokyo today, I felt utterly saved.

At this time, I was barely living with anything resembling a human’s complex vitality.
Morning and evening, I was tormented, harboring a chest that churned so fiercely it could admit nothing else but pain.
My brain, which had appeared more than sufficient to contain forty years' worth of accumulated experience, now seemed to make its sole function the deep imprinting of this singular, distinct pain every passing second.
Consequently, the contents of my consciousness were smeared with a monochrome of anguish, writhing and twisting day and night solely in the area three inches above my navel.
Day and night, within my own body, I felt the desire to swiftly cut out just this part and throw it to a dog.
If not that, I wanted to drive away this terrifyingly monotonous consciousness somewhere as quickly as possible.
If possible, I wanted to succumb to sleep right then, remain bedridden for about a week without awareness of time passing, and then—embracing a magnanimous spirit—snap open both eyes to the refreshing light of an autumn day.
At the very least, I wanted to return straight to Tokyo without being jostled by trains or loaded into carriages, enter a room at the gastrointestinal hospital, and collapse supine there.

Even when Mr. Morishige came, this suffering did not abate in the slightest.
Overwhelmed by sensations - as if my chest were being churned with a stick, as if my stomach were tracing layer upon layer of irregular great waves across its entire surface - I would rise from my bed while muttering "Shall I try vomiting?" and pour foul matter from deep in my throat into the golden basin near my face.
Even when this suffering had largely subsided thanks to Mr. Morishige, each movement still brought a foul belch that pierced through my nose.
The blood was ceaselessly flowing toward the intestines.

Compared to this anguish, I who lived through the unforgettable events of the twenty-fourth could not comprehend how I had found a place of peace and lived in tranquility.
When I later learned that those days of tranquility had in fact been the most perilous day of my entire life, I composed the following poem.

Engaku’s Zeng Shen encountered the Zen of staff and shout.
Where might the sightless one encounter destiny’s thread?

Blue mountains do not spurn commoners' bones.
Turn my head—Jiuyuan’s moon hangs in heaven.

IX

When I resolved to write about the unforgettable events of the twenty-fourth and faced my manuscript paper, I suddenly lost all motivation, so I turned my memories backward and retreated.

From the time I left Tokyo, my throat was severely painful.
While on the train, I received a telegram from Tōyōjō—who was supposed to come with me but had missed boarding—and during the approximately one-hour wait in Gotemba as instructed, I entered the stationmaster’s office to have the fare for an unused ticket refunded.
There sat a Westerner of such immense girth that one might measure his waist in feet, perched on a chair and busily inscribing something on the front of a picture postcard.
While addressing the stationmaster about the current matter, I could not suppress my curiosity at finding such an unexpected person in this unexpected place.
Then that large man suddenly stood up and asked, "Do you speak English?" so I answered "Yes" in a hoarse voice, barely audible.
The man then said, "Tell me which train I should take to go to Kyoto."
Under normal circumstances, such a simple matter could have been handled with ease, but for me at that time, having completely lost my voice, it proved exceedingly difficult.
Naturally, there were things I needed to say, and I would try to speak them, but those attempted words would fray into a thousand strands while passing through my throat, emerging from my mouth utterly devoid of luster and nearly useless.
I believe I managed to send this large man safely to Kyoto with the assistance of an English-speaking station employee, but I still have not forgotten the unpleasantness of that time.

Even after arriving in Shuzenji, my throat showed no improvement at all.
Through receiving medicine from doctors and using the homemade gargle Tōyōjō had prepared, I barely managed daily communication by employing only the most essential words.

Around that time, Prince Kitashirakawa was residing at Shuzenji.
Tōyōjō remained constantly occupied with those duties, so even from Kikuya's annex—merely a block away—he appeared unable to readily visit my lodgings.
Only after completing all tasks would he come beyond the mosquito net past ten at night to offer a brief greeting; this constituted his regular custom.

Whether this occurred during one of those nights or in daytime I can no longer recall, but on one occasion when we met as usual, Tōyōjō suddenly announced that His Highness had requested I deliver some manner of lecture. Hearing this unexpected royal summons, I was not a little astonished. Yet even had I been spared hearing it myself, I could not have summoned courage to speak before His Highness with such an unpleasant voice that I myself would rather not hear. Moreover, I possessed neither formal haori nor hakama. And above all, being of no official rank whatsoever, I could not begin to discern whether one such as myself ought presumptuously appear before His Noble Highness. In truth, it seems Tōyōjō himself—shrinking from bold action without precedent through personal discretion—had not formally accepted the request.

Scarcely had my pain shifted from throat to stomach when Tōyōjō, needing to visit his ailing mother in his hometown, returned to Tokyo for the time being, replacing someone who was leaving.
His Highness also departed not long after that.
And around the time the unforgettable twenty-fourth arrived, Tōyōjō once again traveled west along the Tōkaidō by train, knowing nothing of my condition.
At that time, he stole four or five minutes from the train’s stopover to specially write me a letter from Mishima.
Although that letter was lost en route and never reached the inn, it is said that when Tōyōjō went to take his formal leave, having received from His Highness—who had not forgotten about my illness—gracious words urging that should there be opportunity to meet me, I must be treated with utmost care, he specifically informed me, bedridden as I was, of this.

Now that my throat ailment had healed and my stomach's suffering had departed, I needed to humbly express my gratitude to His Highness.
I also needed to pray for His Highness's health.

X

The rain fell incessantly.
For days on end I spent listless hours groaning in my room, watching the bamboo gutter that ran straight down the cliff of the back mountain gleam blue and cold.
The sound of water that would begin invading dreams once people had fallen asleep - flowing some six feet below the railing - was now entirely drowned out by wind and rain.
Voices saying the water was rising or had risen began echoing in my ears from nowhere in particular.

The maid called Osen came and told how, since the Katsura River's waters had risen the previous evening, those in the small house before the gate had mostly prepared their belongings and come to entrust them.
She also told of how houses had been completely washed away somewhere, and how treasures from those houses had been dug up from somewhere else.
This maid, born in Ito, was an unrefined woman with the habit of calling out in a loud voice as if standing on a beach or in the middle of a field, but when I heard these old tale-like stories of uncertain truth in this mountain inn locked in rain, I felt as though I were a child reading fairy tales, somehow enveloped in an antiquated fragrance.
There was a peculiar charm in how she proceeded to narrate these tales without the slightest concern for clarifying where exactly houses had been washed away or treasures excavated - as if such vagueness were perfectly natural - a manner that seemed to transform the hot spring inn where I now stayed into a mountain village utterly divorced from the mundane world, where no news could penetrate save through rumor.

Amidst all this, that pleasant fantasy began manifesting as an inconvenient reality.
Mail and newspapers arriving from Tokyo all began arriving late.
The occasional items that reached me were drenched enough to make the ink bleed.
When I carefully opened the damp pages to avoid tearing them and first saw reports of floods now raging through the capital printed in vivid type before my eyes—though I cannot recall exactly which day this was—the news brought no joy to my ailing self, facing an uncertain future while anxiously monitoring each day's developments.
In midnight hours when stomach pain woke me naturally and my body found no place to rest in its bitterness, I could not help viewing with unease how transportation links connecting Tokyo and myself had been severed during that period.
My illness was too severe for returning.
Moreover, the roads were too badly damaged for anyone to come from Tokyo to where I stayed.
Nor was that all—Tokyo itself had already been submerged.
I tried envisioning my house crumbling with the cliffside and my children being swept away by the sea at Chigasaki.
Before the heavy rains began, I had sent a letter addressed to my wife.
In it I wrote I would return in four or five days since no suitable room was available.
I deliberately withheld news of my illness's relapse and suffering.
And so I lay there wondering whether that letter had even reached its destination.

A telegram arrived there.
It was a telegram that, after expending a formidable amount of time and labor to finally reach its intended recipient safely, made that very person startle ever so slightly even before breaking the seal.
However, its contents were nothing more than a message combining concern with ordinary correspondence, stating that we had come through this recent flood safely but inquiring about your situation.
Seeing that the originating office was listed as Hongo, I realized this had troubled Mr. Kusabira.

The rain fell with increasing intensity.
My illness steadily worsened.
At that moment around midnight, when summoned to take a long-distance call, I pressed my constricted chest and brought the receiver to my ear.
Only faintly could I discern that both the children in Chigasaki and our Tokyo home remained unharmed.
Yet everything else dissolved into utter incoherence - nothing but formless noise roaring against my eardrums like discourse with the wind.
So vague was this connection that I repeated the honorific "you" multiple times without ever realizing my own wife had placed the call.
Clarity first pierced my storm-vexed perception when at last there came into my hands a meticulous letter from my wife - she who had been too harried even to sit - truthfully detailing those flood-ravaged days.
Upon reading it, I felt such astonishment that my very illness slipped from mind.

Ill and dreaming - from the Milky Way comes flooding

Eleven

My wife’s letter was so lengthy that quoting it in full would be impossible.
It began by stating she had received notification of my illness from Tōyōjō and was consequently greatly distressed; though wishing to come nurse me, the trains being impassable left no alternative, so resolving to at least make a telephone call instead—yet finding even that connection unattainable within the day—she had an urgent message expedited and made the call from Mrs. Yamada’s residence at midnight.
It seemed she had been profoundly anxious about our children’s safety in Chigasaki as well.
Though Jikkangasaka faced no flood risk, she had specifically clarified—to reassure me—that should any emergency occur, arrangements were in place for the post office to notify our home by telegram.
She had also written that most low-lying areas in the city had suffered flood damage, with reports of Edogawa-dori Street submerged up to just below Yarai Police Box, forcing boat travel.
But by then, though arriving late, newspapers had come, so even without my wife’s correspondence, I had largely grasped the general situation.
What should have moved me lay not in society’s vague struggle against rain and floods, but rather in news of individuals intimately connected to me.
And within these documents I discovered how this deluge had tormented two such individuals to death’s very threshold.

One was a notification concerning the fate of my wife’s sister who had married into Yokohama.
The letter stated as follows:

"...Umeko had accompanied her youngest brother to Fukuzumi at Tōnosawa when, due to flood damage, Fukuzumi was washed away by waves—of sixty bathing guests, fifteen remained missing, their survival unconfirmed—with no means to act, return to Yokohama proved impossible as train service was suspended, and telephones required waiting a full day due to excessive demand..."

Afterwards, it described the complicated arrangements made to place a phone call, and how in the end the company’s errand boy or someone of that sort had walked all the way to Hakone to search for her, finally returning with her in a ghostly pitiful state.
Having read that far, I was astonished at my own ignorance—how I had listened two or three days prior to the inn’s maid recounting a folktale-like story about water rising somewhere, houses being swept away, and treasures from those houses being dug up elsewhere, all while failing to notice the terrifying fact intertwined with my own interests lurking beneath, instead amusing myself with formless dreams.
I also feared the formidable power of fate that imposes such ignorance upon humans.

Another thing that made my heart leap was news regarding Mr. Kusabira.
My wife, on her way back from handling errands with relatives in Hongo, had come from Yanagicho’s low-lying district to the street where Mr. Kusabira lived, intending to check on the flood situation. Thinking she had reached the right area, she peered in from the front only to find that the house she had long recognized lay completely crushed.

“When I asked, ‘Are the household members safe? Where have they gone?’ Mr. Ue from the firewood shop informed me, ‘Last night around twelve o’clock, the cliff collapsed, but fortunately no one sustained any injuries."
“He told me they had temporarily relocated to this area of Yanagicho, so when I went to Yanagicho to see, there in a rented house with its floor still not fully drained and soaking wet beneath—without even tatami mats or furnishings—only their belongings had been moved in.”
In what could only be described as a pitiful state, Ms. Otane came running out upon seeing my face.
“…Thinking they likely couldn’t prepare dinner, I ordered sushi and offered it in place of an evening meal…”

I had heard that Mr. Kusabira always feared landslides and therefore slept as close to the front of the house as possible; yet when it collapsed, though all others emerged completely unscathed, he alone sustained a minor facial injury. The particulars of that injury were also written in the letter. Reading this, I thought it fortunate indeed that he had escaped with mere injuries.

In the midst of torrential rains and floodwaters that swept away houses and crumbled cliffs, countless dreadful screams rose from the people of the capital.
In those same rains and floodwaters, two people deeply connected to me personally escaped unscathed.
And so I remained completely unaware of their disasters, spending my days gazing at clouds, smoke, and rain-threads in that distant hot spring village.
It was precisely when word of their safety arrived that my illness began gradually progressing toward peril.

Ask the wind—which leaf will fall first?

Twelve

On a certain evening of continuing rain, stealing a moment of respite from illness to descend to the bathhouse below, I found my gaze suddenly caught by the color of the wall where half-sheets of paper cut to about three feet in length had been pasted vertically in narrow strips, dimly illuminated in the lamplight's shadow.
While standing by the bathtub before wetting myself, I first felt compelled to read this peculiar something resembling an advertisement.
In the center was written "Amateur Rakugo Performance," with "Organizer: Hadaka-ren" noted below.
It specified the location as "at the mountain villa," adding the scheduled date beside it.
I immediately determined who comprised Hadaka-ren.
Hadaka-ren was a self-styled alias adopted by lodgers staying in the adjacent guest room.
Yesterday afternoon through the sliding door, I heard Taro Kaja and others deliberating at length until concluding with something like: 'We shouldn't do it here—wouldn't that be better?'
Though this plan naturally concerned me not as I lay abed, I couldn't help feeling this resolution had indeed lent distinctive character to the mountain villa event.
As I cross-referenced the bathhouse notice's date with Hadaka-ren's planning time while reflecting on yesterday's smoothly concluded rakugo gathering, I found myself compelled to celebrate Hadaka-ren's success—or at least that of its leadership core comprising lodgers from the neighboring room...

These lodgers were a group of five staying in one room.
Of these, when adding his wife and daughter to the man who appeared to be the oldest in his thirties, they already numbered three.
His wife was a refined and quiet woman.
The child was even quieter.
In contrast, the husband was exceedingly noisy.
The remaining two were both twenty-something youths, one of whom conducted himself more rowdily than anyone else in the group.

When anyone reaches middle age and beyond, should they conjure up their twenty-one- or twenty-two-year-old self before their eyes, amidst the clustering recollections they are certain to discover some mortifying fragment that could send cold sweat trickling down.
As I lay groaning in the adjacent room, compelled by circumstance to observe this young man's manner of speech and daily conduct, I found myself fearing anew - as if encountering it afresh - that insolent aspect of my own past self from twenty years prior, which I could not help but deem profoundly shameful within my life's course.

This man, for reasons unknown, constantly spoke in a booming voice as if delivering a street lecture and took pride in doing so.
And whenever the maid came, he would invariably unleash a series of dandyish remarks reminiscent of a regular patron.
Listening to this from the adjacent room—since it lacked both wit and humor—it could only be perceived as someone forcibly (and with great pride) shouting half-baked or quarter-baked witticisms in a thoroughly insipid manner.
However, each time the maid heard this, she would laugh with unnecessary profusion.
Her laughter hovered ambiguously between sincerity and flattery, yet she produced it with a terrifying quality as if her vocal cords were malformed.
Even I, preoccupied solely with my illness, was considerably troubled by this.

Part of Hadaka-ren were also in the lower guest room. Since there were nine in total, they referred to themselves as the Nine-Man Group. The Nine-Man Group stripped completely naked, went out onto the six-foot-wide veranda, danced, and jumped around all night. When I had to use the restroom and stepped outside the shoji screen, the Nine-Man Group, exhausted from dancing, sat cross-legged completely naked on the veranda. I stepped over obstructive buttocks and shins to relieve myself and returned.

When the long rains finally ceased and trains to Tokyo had nearly resumed service, Hadaka-ren withdrew to Tokyo en masse, all nine members acting in concert.

Replacing them, Mr.Morishige, Mr.Yukitori, and my wife came from Tokyo in succession.
And they rented the entire room where Hadaka-ren had stayed.
They also rented the entire next room.
In the end, they secured all four rooms of the newly built second-floor guest quarters as our own.
Under relatively quiet days, I lived by drinking milk from a feeding cup.
Once I was made to drink red juice welling up from a watermelon's base that someone had crushed with a spoon.
On the evening when fireworks rose at Kōbō-sama's festival, having slid my bed near the veranda edge, I lay watching the early autumn sky until nearly midnight.
And thus I unconsciously awaited the coming of that unforgettable twenty-fourth day.

Upon bush clover rests dew's weight - this ailing body

Thirteen

That day had been arranged for Mr. Sugimoto to come from Tokyo to conduct an examination.
I cannot recall what hour Mr. Yukitori went to meet him at Ōni, but believe it was past noon when the sun still illuminating the mountains had not yet sunk beneath their ridges.
This sun that lit the mountain recesses—since I lay confined to bed and room, having scarcely lifted my gaze to it from dawn till dusk—this statement in truth concerns an hour I envisioned by fixing upon that margin of sky spilling beyond the eaves.
Though I stayed in Shuzenji for two months and five days, I returned knowing nothing—which direction held east or west, which mountains led to Ito, which road reached Shimoda.

Mr. Sugimoto arrived at the inn as scheduled.
A short while before this, I received the feeding cup from my wife's hands and drank about one go of tepid milk through the slender glass mouth.
For since the bleeding occurred, maintaining absolute rest and adhering to liquid meals had become inviolable rules.
Moreover, since they were applying a treatment method that aimed to suppress ulcer hemorrhaging by restoring physical strength through maximal nutritional intake—I had no choice but to drink.
To tell the truth, having felt no appetite since morning, when shown the feeding cup containing a turbid white liquid so viscous it seemed immobile, I immediately anticipated that oppressively dense milk taste pooling heavily on my tongue—and felt revulsion before even lifting it.
When compelled, I reluctantly tilted the slender glass tube curved like a swan's neck and tried letting neither-water-nor-broth slide across my tongue.
After it flowed down my throat lingered an unclean clinging odor.
Half-meaning to cleanse my palate afterward, I had her bring me ice cream.
Yet instead of its usual refreshment—what had melted through my throat now sat strangely unsettled in my stomach like congealed wax.
About two hours later I underwent Mr. Sugimoto's examination.

When they received an unexpectedly favorable report from the examination stating that it wasn't so bad after all, Mr. Yukitori—who had previously heard from Mr. Morishige about the grave nature of the illness—in his joy immediately sent a telegram addressed to the company declaring "All is well."
The unforgettable 800-gram hematemesis struck back against this good news, occurring suddenly at dusk one hour after the examination.

Having vomited such a massive amount of blood at once, I felt as though I retained every minute detail from that twilight scene through the sunless midnight until dawn's brightening arrival. When time had passed and I read the diary my wife kept as personal notes, noticing an entry stating she had suffered cerebral anemia—my panicked wife having written it as "nōhinketsu"—and fallen unconscious, I summoned my wife to my bedside and heard detailed accounts of that time. I, who had believed myself to have received the injection with perfectly lucid consciousness throughout, had in truth been dead for thirty long minutes.

As dusk approached, I was suddenly assailed by an oppressive tightness in my chest. Overwhelmed by torment, I brusquely ordered my wife—who had been kindly sitting by my bedside—to move further away, declaring, "It's too hot and stifling here."
Even then I could not bear it, so disregarding the doctor's orders to remain still, I attempted to roll from my supine position onto my right side.
The unconscious state that leaves no trace in my memory is said to have resulted from cerebral anemia brought on by this effort to shift positions while lying down.

I apparently splattered the gushing blood thickly onto my wife's summer kimono as she, startled, tried to draw near to me in that moment.
Mr. Yukitori said in a trembling voice, “You must stay strong, Ma’am.”
When sending a telegram to the company, his hands had trembled so violently he couldn’t write the characters.
The doctor had apparently attempted to administer injections repeatedly.
When I later asked Mr. Morishige about the number, he answered that he remembered up to sixteen syringes.

Drenched crimson blood forms patterns within my abdomen.
Vomiting illuminates twilight’s ripples of splendor.

Nightfall finds me doubting this flesh is but bones.
Lying bedbound like stone, dreaming cold clouds.

Fourteen

When I opened my eyes, still turned to the right, I had vomited clotted blood into the Seto-hiki metal basin.
Because the basin had been pressed close to my pillow, the blood appeared vividly before my nose.
Its color was no longer the murky hue affected by gastric acid as in previous days.
It had congealed thickly on the white surface like some great animal's liver, I thought.
Then came Mr. Morishige's voice at my pillow suggesting a mouthwash.

I gargled silently.
Becoming aware that the anguish which had made me snap at my wife moments earlier had vanished without trace,
I thought first of all: What a relief.
Whether this basin-contained substance proved to be fresh blood or dregs mattered not at all.
With the calm of one who'd cast off his accumulated suffering in a single heave, I observed the commotion around my bed as though it concerned another.
They pierced my upper right chest with a large needle and injected copious saline solution.
That they resorted to saline injections suggested critical condition, I reasoned, yet felt no particular alarm.
Only the water leaking from the tube's tip to trickle down my shoulder displeased me.
I seemed to receive injections in both arms too.
This memory remains indistinct.

The voice of my wife asking Mr. Sugimoto, “Will he ever return to how he was before?” reached my ears.
I heard Mr. Sugimoto’s reply: “Indeed, with such ulcers we had managed to stop considerable amounts of blood before...”
Then the electric lamp suspended above the floor swayed unsteadily.
A single curved beam of light within the glass flashed swiftly like a sparkler.
Never since my birth had I felt light’s power so intensely and terrifyingly as at this moment.
Even in that fleeting instant, I thought this must be what it means to sear lightning into one’s eyes.
Suddenly the electric lamp went out, and I felt myself fading away.

I heard Mr. Sugimoto’s voice calling “Camphor, camphor.”
Mr. Sugimoto was firmly grasping my right wrist.
“The camphor works remarkably well – we’re getting a response even before finishing the injection,” Mr. Sugimoto said again to Mr. Morishige.
Mr. Morishige only answered “Yes” and gave no substantial reply.
They immediately covered the electric lamp with paper.

The surroundings fell completely silent.
Both my wrists remained constantly gripped by the two doctors.
With my eyes closed between them, they conducted this exchange in German – every single word of it.

“He’s weak.”

“Yes.”

“He won’t make it.”

“Yes.”

“What if we let him see his children?”

“Right.”

Until this moment I had been calm, but now suddenly felt vulnerable.
No matter how I considered it, I did not want to die.
Moreover, being in such a tranquil state of mind, there was absolutely no need for me to die.
The doctors, mistakenly believing me comatose, continued their frank discussion; meanwhile this clinging self—though maintaining closed-eyed stillness—found itself assailed by a half-uncanny dream.
Gradually it grew painful to lie there as third-party audience to such unreserved commentary on my own life and death.
In the end I grew somewhat irritated.
I thought they might have shown more ethical discretion.
If matters stood thus, I resolved to hold my own considerations.
—That even at death’s threshold humans could still contrive such stratagems—during convalescence I often smiled recalling that night’s defiance.
—Though having been wholly free from pain and maintaining calm repose, I must have possessed composure enough for such things.

I suddenly opened my eyes, which had been closed until now.
And in as loud and clear a tone as possible, I said, “I do not wish to see the children or anyone else.”
Mr. Sugimoto, as if nothing mattered to him, simply answered lightly, “Is that so?”
Before long, saying something about going to finish his interrupted meal, he left the room.
After that, spreading both hands out to either side—each one held fast by Mr. Morishige and Mr. Yukitori—the three of us reached dawn in silence.

The chill pulse preserved through dawn's approach

Fifteen

I believed without a moment’s gap that the self who had forcibly attempted to turn over to the right and the self who had recognized fresh blood in the metal basin by the pillow were continuous.
I was convinced that during that interval, awareness had come into play with not even a single strand of hair’s breadth of gap.
Some time later, when I heard from my wife, "That’s not the case—you had actually been dead for about thirty minutes then," I was utterly shocked.
Having fainted two or three times as a child through mischief, I had long imagined death to be roughly akin to such experiences; yet when I consider that I spent over a month proceeding as a matter of course—repeating that very experience throughout thirty long minutes without the slightest awareness—I feel an exceedingly strange sensation.
To tell the truth, this experience—whether it can even be called a first experience—is doubtful.
This—sandwiched between ordinary experience and experience yet so lacking in substance that it cannot hinder their connection in the slightest—I find myself at a loss for words to describe it.
I did not even have the awareness that I had awakened from sleep.
I did not even think I had emerged from yin to yang.
A faint wingbeat, the echo of something retreating into distance, the scent of a fleeing dream, shadows of old memories, remnants of vanishing impressions—of course I did not think I had passed through some numinous boundary only after exhausting every expression fit to describe humanity’s mysteries.
All that happened was that my chest tightened, and in the very next instant when I tried to tilt my head on the pillow to the right, I detected red blood at the bottom of the metal basin.
The thirty minutes of death that had slipped into that interval did not exist for me at all as a memory of experience, whether considered temporally or spatially—this is generally how it can be described.
When I heard my wife’s explanation, I thought death was something so fleeting.
And then I felt profoundly how abrupt and utterly disconnected was this contrast between life and death that had flashed so squarely and suddenly above my head.
No matter how I considered it, I could not accept that these two disparate phenomena had governed the same self.
Even if the same self had traversed two worlds in an instant, when I considered what relationship those two worlds must have possessed to grant me the freedom to leap immediately from one to the other, I could not help but be left bewildered and unmoored.

Life and death, much like fast and slow, big and small, hot and cold, are terms bundled together in daily use through their associative contrasts.
Even if we accept—as recent psychologists argue—that these two should be classified among ordinary associative contrasts like any others, when such abruptly disparate dual aspects confront us as easily as flipping one's palm, how could we possibly establish their relationship as entities of homogeneous nature?

If someone were to give me one persimmon with instructions to eat half today, half of what remains tomorrow, half of that new remainder the following day, and thus continue devouring half of whatever persists each subsequent day, then after some countable days of this consumption, I would inevitably either defy these orders to devour all remaining fruit at once, or reach the limits of my halving capacity and find myself folding hands to stare vacantly at some irreducible persimmon fragment.
If we permit the logic of imagination, then a single persimmon given under these conditions could never be fully consumed even if eaten over a lifetime.
In ancient Greece, when Zeno based his argument on the race between swift-footed Achilles and a slow-moving tortoise, declaring that no Achilles could ever catch up to it, this was precisely the principle he expounded.
If the individual consciousnesses constituting our lived experience were to lose half their substance each day or month in this manner—gradually approaching death without our awareness—we might find ourselves mocked by this non-factual logic that claims one cannot die no matter how near death draws. Yet by avoiding such intellectual dissonance as would have us plunge abruptly from one state to another, we could perceive the pathway from life to death as utterly natural and devoid of mystery.
That which dies abruptly and returns abruptly to me—no, that which people insist did return to me—brings nothing but chill.

Beyond the ethereal hues of heaven and earth.
Life and death alternate their hour.
Entrusted to darkness, it departs.

Whither does my heart roam?
Returning to seek life's origin.
Obscure depths remain unknowable.

Solitary sorrow vainly encircles dreams.
Solemn chords stir sorrow's breath.
Rivers and mountains—autumn already aged.

Gruel and medicine—my temples approach decline.
Vast desolation—the heavens yet remain.
A tall tree’s solitary branch remains.

Evening thoughts so tranquil.
Wind and dew slow to enter verse.

Sixteen

The tranquil night gradually dawned.
As shadows enveloping the room withdrew from the floor and receded into the distance, I could once again see the faces of those gathered at my bedside as usual.
The faces were their usual ones.
And my mind too was its usual self.
Lying on the bed with a body so calm I couldn’t discern where my illness resided—I who needed not move even slightly—never imagined death still lingered nearby.
When I opened my eyes, I gazed upon last evening’s commotion (even if not forgotten) like a past dream from afar.
Death having seemingly retreated with the surrendering night through sheer resolve alone, I basked comfortably in morning sunlight streaming through paper screens, my mood entirely free from care.
In truth, death—having thoroughly deceived my ignorant self—had apparently slipped into my blood vessels unnoticed, flowing while driving my meager blood in circles.
“When inquiring about his condition,” my wife wrote in her diary that morning, “[they said] it was critical, but if he remained perfectly still he might recover.”
I only learned later that no one had expected I would live until dawn.

Even now, I can vividly conjure before my eyes the color and shape of the blood vomited into the white metal basin. All the more so during that period, clotted sanguine matter like congealed agar constantly flickered before my eyes. And whenever I compared the quantity of blood appearing in my imagination with the resulting weakness, I could never suppress my bewilderment at how such hemorrhage could affect my body so severely. I had heard that if one loses half their blood they die, and a third brings coma. Even when placing on imagination's scales the volume of fresh blood I'd unknowingly vomited onto my wife's shoulder—adding this weight to death's side of the balance—I couldn't believe I'd survived through such desperate contrivances.

As soon as Deputy Director Sugimoto returned to Tokyo—he had left for Tokyo that very morning—
saying, "I would stay longer but must take my leave as I'm busy—though rest assured I'll arrange thorough care," he changed into a new collar and cravat before sitting at my bedside. At that moment, I recalled his appearance from midnight the previous day: wearing an inn yukata with sleeves too short, quietly sliding open the paper screen to ask Mr. Morishige about my condition with a hushed "How is he?"
Deputy Director Sugimoto—of whom my memory retained only that fragment—had reportedly turned to my wife as he departed and cautioned that should another hematemesis occur, she must abandon all hope of recovery.
The revelation that they'd anticipated this terrifying recurrence the previous evening—even resorting to morphine injections to prevent it—came as a complete shock when I later learned the full details.
So tranquil was my inner state that I might have remarked upon it; I spent that night in my usual frame of mind, free from pain.
—I've digressed.

As soon as Deputy Director Sugimoto returned to Tokyo, he personally telephoned the Nurses' Association and requested that two nurses be sent immediately to my location.
At that time, having urged them over the phone with warnings that they might not arrive in time if they didn't hurry, the nurses—even while traveling by train—persistently doubted my survival, wondering if it wasn't already too late.
They had discussed how disheartening it would be if, after going to such trouble, they arrived only to find themselves too late—this too being information I later heard directly from their own mouths during casual conversations with the nurses by my sickbed as recovery drew near.

In the midst of being abandoned by nine-tenths of everyone, I—knowing nothing—lay dazedly like an infant cast into the wilderness. A painless existence brought me no torment. I simply acknowledged this solitary fact: that I lay there living without suffering. Through unforeseen illness and the meticulous protection of those around me, this reality made me feel I had retreated one step from life’s buffeting winds to safer ground compared to health’s tenure. In truth, my wife and I dwelled at a mountain’s base where survival’s cruel atmosphere could not directly penetrate.

A tranquil sickness in the village moist with dew

Seventeen

As a coward’s privilege, I have long believed myself qualified to encounter supernatural beings.
In my blood flows an abundance of ancestral superstition even now.
When the flesh of civilization withered under society’s sharp whip, I always believed in ghosts.
Yet like those who fear cholera but never contract it, like a child who prays to God only to be cast aside, I have passed these days without ever encountering such mysterious phenomena.
A curiosity strong enough to find it regrettable would occasionally arise, but in ordinary times, I always accepted as natural that such encounters did not occur.

If I may confess, eight or nine years ago when I read Andrew Lang’s *Dreams and Ghosts* in bed, I gazed chillingly at the lamp’s glow before my nose.
About a year ago as well, drawn by the title *The Mysterious Psychic Force*, I went out of my way to order a book by Flammarion from abroad.
Recently I also read Oliver Lodge's *Life After Death*.

Life after death!
Its very name was already peculiar.
Our personalities remain and continue to act even after we die; given the opportunity, they exchange words with people on earth.
Meyer, who was famous for his research on spiritualism, seems to have indeed believed this.
Lodge, who dedicated his writings to Meyer, also appears to share the same view.
The posthumous work by Podmore that came out just recently likely belongs to the same school.

In mid-nineteenth century Germany, Fechner had already argued that consciousness should exist within the Earth itself.
If one says that stones, soil, and minerals have spirits, I am not one to hinder that assumption.
However, I think there should at least be some imagination as to what nature Earth’s consciousness might possess if one departs from this assumption.

Our consciousness has a threshold-like boundary line—darkness below and clarity above—a notion that appears consistent with what modern psychologists generally recognize and that seems perfectly reasonable through my own experience. Yet even if mental phenomena active with the body were to exhibit such workings, I cannot accept that my consciousness in darkness constitutes what might be called posthumous consciousness.

That the great contains the small and perceives them, while the contained small know only their own existence yet remain as indifferent to the whole they collectively form as horses and oxen are to one another—this was the conclusion James reached by disentangling and recombining consciousness's contents.
Similarly, that an individual's entire consciousness, while being contained within a greater consciousness, considers itself isolated without awareness of this existence—this convenient assumption for spiritualism he derived through such analogy.

Assumptions are at people’s discretion, and at times serve as the vital energy necessary for research. However, with mere assumptions alone, even I—who, as a result of cowardice attempt to see ghosts and dream of supremely mysterious things due to superstition—cannot subscribe to their theories with conviction.

A physicist calculated molecular volumes and asserted that ten million cubed—a number with twenty-one zeros following one—could fit into a cube (one millimeter in both length and height) not even reaching the size of a silkworm egg. The number obtained by cubing ten million is an enormous figure—a one followed by twenty-one zeros. Even we who possess the right to indulge our imagination find it no easy task to conjure this number—a one followed by twenty-one zeros.

Even in the material world of phenomena—even numerical results published by reputable scholars through meticulous procedures—we could only nod in agreement with a mathematical mind.
When it came to mental phenomena where even quantitative measures proved useless, it went without saying.
Even were physicists' crystalline knowledge of molecules to find some opportunity to illuminate our inner lives, my mind would ultimately remain my mind.
Unless I could experience it myself, no theory—however meticulous—could ever hold power over me.

I died once.
And thus experienced death exactly as I had always imagined it.
Indeed, I transcended time and space.
Yet this transcendence meant nothing of substance.
I lost my individuality.
I lost consciousness.
Only the fact of this loss remained clear.
How could I have become a ghost?
How merge with some greater consciousness?
Cowardly and steeped in superstition, I can only await others to solve this mystery.

Lighting welcoming flames—for whom does the sheer summer haori wait?

Eighteen

What astonished me was the transformation of my body. On the bright morning after the commotion, driven by some necessity, when I tried to bring my hands—which lay on either side of my ribs—up to my face, my own arms suddenly refused to move as though their owner had changed. Disliking the trouble of involving others, I forced my elbow to serve as a cane and managed to begin rising from my wrist, but the effort and time required to trace a short arc through mere inches of air proved far from easy. Having finally summoned strength in my muscles yet lacking vitality to pull higher, I abandoned the attempt midway; when trying to let my arm fall back, even that proved difficult. Of course, had I simply relaxed my grip, natural weight would have returned it—but imagining how violently that collapse might reverberate through me filled me with such terror that courage to release never came. I remained stranded with arms that could neither lower nor rise nor sustain themselves midair—conscious yet helpless. When those nearby finally noticed and, placing their hands over mine, gently guided them to my face before carefully returning both arms to the bedding, I could scarcely fathom how my very self had become so hollow. Reflecting later, I concluded this must be ordinary hematemesis’ effect—like a rubber balloon pierced suddenly, its air rushing out with a whoosh as the skin contracts violently. Yet a balloon merely shrinks. Unfortunately, my skin enveloped not just blood but many large, long bones. Those bones—

I had never been so aware of my bones' hardness since birth as at that moment.
My first memory upon waking that morning was truly the voice of bone pain permeating my entire body.
This pain kept pounding me dully, as if I'd drunkenly picked a violent fight with multiple opponents one night, been thoroughly beaten down, and left unable to move my hands or feet.
I even thought this must be how cloth feels when beaten on a fulling block.
To properly describe such an identity-crushing state of defeat, only one term from society's lower strata sufficed: "beat down."
Whenever I tried moving my body even slightly, my joints creaked.

The narrow futon that had demarcated my world until yesterday had suddenly constricted further.
To me now—having lost even the capacity to move beyond a single portion of that bedding—the futon that had felt cramped until yesterday loomed impossibly vast.
The points where my world made contact had dwindled to mere shoulders, back, and the soles of elongated feet—my head lay pillowed of course.

That I could inhabit this pared-down existence—a privilege unimaginable even last night—must have been what those around me imagined in their hearts.
Pitiable it seemed even to me who comprehended nothing.
With only these touchpoints against bedding constituting my world—unchanging touchpoints—the relation between self and existence grew starkly simple.
Utterly static.
Therefore safe.
Long lying in this cotton-lined coffin—the sensation of one deceased who neither emerges nor is assailed—if such wraiths might feel—differed little from my own state then.

After a while, my head began to go numb.
I felt as though the bones of my lower back were reduced to mere bone and laid out on a plank.
My legs grew heavy.
Thus, even within my solitary narrow world—now guaranteed safety from social perils—a corresponding measure of suffering arose.
And yet, to escape that suffering, I had no ability to move even an inch beyond.
I had no awareness whatsoever of who was sitting by my pillow or why.
The figures of those who occupied spaces beyond my sight to nurse me were, to me, like those of gods.

I lay perfectly still on my back in this tranquil yet pain-filled small world, occasionally letting my eyes dart to places beyond my reach.
And then I would often gaze at the long string suspending the ice bag from the ceiling.
The string, together with the cold bag, twitched with a sharp pulse over my stomach.

Morning chill—
these living bones
not moving

Nineteen

I was at a loss how to describe this state of mind.

When sumo wrestlers—who trade in strength—locked arms at the start of a match, their figures standing at the ring’s center appeared unexpectedly calm and composed.
Yet within less than a minute, their stomachs heaved in terrifying undulations without respite.
And hot beads of sweat streamed down their backs in countless streams.

Their posture, which appeared most secure, was the result of effort that barely sustained these undulations and sweat.
The stillness symbolized conflicting blood and bone barely achieving equilibrium.
This was called the harmony of mutual destruction.
When considering how much spirit they had to expend to maintain this state for twenty or thirty seconds, those watching would feel cruelty for the first time.

As animals driven by self-preservation, humans—viewed from life-sustaining fundamentals—found existence as grueling as this sumo wrestling.
We, as masters of peaceful households, endured tensions matching sumo bouts in daily efforts to forge a peace of mutual destruction between ourselves and society—all to provide at least food and clothing for ourselves and families.
Were one to step outside and mirror my laughing face; were one to find within that laughter a self brimming with violence; were one to imagine the terrifying stomach waves and back sweat accompanying this laughter; finally, were one to confront the bitter truth that our desperate efforts—like Ekoin Temple matches—must persist lifelong without hope of resolution in under a minute; then we might say we live day by day, month by month, draining vitality to neurasthenia's brink.

The world, when viewed solely from the standpoint of self-reliance, was entirely an enemy.
Nature was a fair yet cruel enemy.
Society was an unjust enemy possessing human compassion.
Were one to extend this opposition between self and others to extremes, even friends became enemies in some sense, and family likewise enemies in some sense.
Even I who thought this way found myself becoming my own enemy countless times each day.
Those who continued battling past exhaustion while growing desolately old in solitude could only be called pitiful beyond description.

I kept hearing a voice telling me not to repeat these hackneyed grumbles.
I can still hear it.
To disregard that voice and repeat these hackneyed grumbles was not solely because I felt this so keenly—it was because this deeply felt sentiment had been suddenly overturned by the onset of illness.

I who had vomited blood was no different from a sumo wrestler collapsed upon the ring. As for courage to fight for self-preservation—that was gone—but I hadn't even possessed the awareness that without fighting I would die. I lay on my back, daring shallow breaths, gazing upon the terrifying world from afar. Illness surrounded my bed like a folding screen and warmed a cold heart.

Until now, if I didn't clap my hands, even my maid wouldn't show her face. If I didn't ask others, nothing got done. However much I tried and fretted, matters often remained unresolved. When illness came, everything changed completely. I lay there. Simply lay there silent. Then came the doctor. Came an employee. Came my wife. Finally came two nurses. All arrived without any exertion of my will—they came of their own accord.

A telegram stating “Rest assured and focus on your recovery” arrived from Manchuria the day after I vomited blood. Unexpected acquaintances and friends came to my bedside one after another. Some had come from Kagoshima. Some had come from Yamagata. Others had postponed impending marriages to come. I asked these people why they had come. They said they had all learned of my illness through the newspaper. Lying on my back, I gazed at the ceiling and thought everyone in the world was kinder than myself. Into what I had only perceived as an inhospitable world, a warm wind suddenly blew.

I—a man past forty, a man whom nature had sought to eliminate, a man without notable history—had never dreamt this busy world would lavish such effort, time, and kindness upon me. In reviving from illness, I revived in spirit.
I thanked my illness.
I also expressed gratitude to those who unstintingly devoted such effort, time, and kindness for my sake.
And I earnestly hoped to become a good person.
And I vowed in my heart to regard as eternal enemies those who would destroy this felicitous thinking within me.

On horseback, youth grows old.
In the mirror, white hair renewed.

Fortunate to live in the Son of Heaven’s realm.
Wish to be a subject of peace.

20

Dostoevsky, who was gaining renewed respect in influential circles as an artist surpassing Turgenev, had suffered epileptic seizures since childhood, as is well known.
When we Japanese hear "epilepsy," we merely associate it with white foam, but in the West they had since ancient times revered it as a sacred affliction.
At the moment of being seized by this sacred affliction, or slightly before, it was said that Dostoevsky would be overcome by a subtle pleasure akin to what ordinary people might first attain upon hearing grand music.
I heard it described as a state of perfect harmony between self and external world—as if slipping from the edge of a celestial body and falling through infinite space.

I, who had never contracted the "sacred affliction," had unfortunately reached this age without ever having been seized by such a state even momentarily. Merely five or six days after the massive hematemesis—whether that time had fully passed or not—I would occasionally fall into a certain mental state. From then on, I repeated this same condition nearly every day. I eventually came to anticipate it even before its arrival. And so I secretly tried to imagine the inexplicable joy that Dostoevsky—with whom I had little connection—was said to have experienced. For whether imagining or recalling that, my mental state had transcended the ordinary. The astonishing opium world meticulously recorded by De Quincey also rose in my associations. Yet when I considered that his bewitchingly beautiful narratives—sufficient to dazzle readers' minds—were artificially born from base materials of dull hues, suddenly comparing them to my own mental state became repugnant.

At that time, I found even ten consecutive minutes of conversation with others to be a nuisance. The airwaves that became sound and resonated in my ears transmitted to my heart, making my tranquil mood feel increasingly disturbed. Keeping my mouth shut while recalling the old adage that silence is golden, I simply lay on my back. Thankfully, between the room's eaves and the third-story roof across the way, a blue sky was visible. It was the season when that sky—washed by autumn dew—gradually heightened its dome. I made silently gazing at this sky part of my daily routine. This vast sky, devoid of events or substance, tilted its quiet shadow to imprint itself fully upon my heart. And thus there remained nothing within my heart either. Nor anything else. Two transparent entities aligned perfectly. When they merged, what lingered within me was a mood one might describe as ethereal.

A tranquil corner of my mind gradually blurred at its edges, and the hue of consciousness illuminating that corner grew faint. Then a haze resembling a veil began spreading lightly and evenly across the entire surface. And thus my overall consciousness grew faint throughout. It was not as dense as an ordinary dream. Nor was it as cluttered as ordinary self-awareness. Nor was it a heavy shadow lying between them. To say that the soul leaves the body would already be a misstatement. It was a state where the spirit permeated even to the finest nerve endings, lightly purifying the interior of this clay-formed body while rendering it remote from tangible fleshly sensations. I became aware of what was happening around me. At the same time, I came to realize this awareness was of a special kind—ethereal and devoid of earthly taint. Just as water seeping beneath floorboards naturally causes tatami mats to rise, my heart—together with its residing body—floated up from the futon. To put it more accurately: though the hard futon pressing against my hips, shoulders and head had vanished somewhere, my mind and body continued floating serenely in their original position. I have heard that the joy Dostoevsky experienced before his seizures was of such nature that one might stake ten years—or even a lifetime—on a single instant. Mine was not so intense. Rather, it merely imprinted an ecstatic trance and subtle charm lightly yet deeply across every facet of daily life. Therefore I did not experience the melancholic backlash Dostoevsky suffered. From morning onward I frequently entered this state. I often tasted this drifting sensation in the afternoons as well. And whenever I awoke, I would hold that pleasant memory as if it were a memento of happiness.

The state Dostoevsky attained was, physiologically, a prophecy of the very illness that was about to befall him.
My interest, attenuated to a half-life, appears to have been merely the result of anemia.

Lying supine, I was like a mute.
Silently I beheld the vast sky.

Vast sky, clouds motionless.
All day long, indistinctly identical.

21

The same Dostoevsky was also a fortunate man who, though dragged to death's very threshold, barely managed to turn back.
However, the calamity that endangered his life was not a nefarious illness like in my case.
He became an enemy of the machine called law crafted by human hands and was about to have his heart pierced through with a resounding blow.

He discussed current events at his club.
"If unavoidable, there is only revolt," he shouted.
And then he was arrested.
After eight long months exposed to the dim light of his prison cell, he was led out beneath the pale sky and made to stand upon a new execution platform.
To receive his own sentence, having endured twenty-one winters and stripped down to a single thin undergarment, he waited for the official pronouncement to conclude.
And then suddenly, the sentence of execution by firing squad struck his eardrums.
“Am I really going to be killed?”—these were the words he, unable to trust his own ears, asked the fellow prisoner standing beside him. …He waved a white handkerchief as a signal.
The soldiers lowered the gun barrels whose sights they had aligned.
Dostoevsky thus managed to avoid swallowing the hot lead bullet forged by law.
Instead, he spent four years in the Siberian wilderness.

His mind journeyed from life to death and back again to life, tracing three sharp vicissitudes in less than an hour.
And these three segments were connected at uncompromisingly sharp angles, all three of them.
Even that change alone was an astonishing experience.
When one who firmly believes themselves to be living is suddenly told they must die within five minutes; when after being irrevocably sentenced to death, they grasp their remaining five minutes of life to meet impending demise while consciously counting down four, three, two; when the death they thought imminent suddenly somersaults to be renamed new life—I think someone as high-strung as myself could not endure even one of these three metamorphoses.
In fact, one of Dostoevsky’s fellow prisoners who shared his fate went mad on the spot because of this.

Nevertheless, as I entered convalescence, lying upon my sickbed, I often found myself thinking of Dostoevsky.
In particular, I visualized the final scene of his reprieve from the death sentence.
——The cold sky, the new execution platform, his figure standing upon it, his form trembling in nothing but a thin undergarment——all were reflected in the vivid mirror of imagination.
Yet the momentary expression when he alone realized his execution had been stayed simply refused to come into clear focus.
Moreover, I had assembled all these scenes solely to catch a glimpse of that fleeting expression.

I had tried to die by nature's hand.
I had actually been dead for a brief while.
When I later recalled those memories and filled their gaps with details heard from my wife, then looked back at the complete picture finally formed, I could not help being struck by what might be called a shuddering dread.
In proportion to that terror, the joy of retrieving a life lost at nine fathoms with but a single basketful proved equally extraordinary.
Because this terror and joy accompanying death and life overlapped like two sides of paper, through association I found myself constantly recalling Dostoevsky.

“If that final passage had been omitted, I could never have remained sane,” he himself recounted.
For me, fortunate enough not to have endured tension sufficient to drive one mad, it might be more apt to say I could not fathom the scale of his terror and joy.
Precisely for this reason, no matter how I strain to imagine it, that pivotal moment’s expression—what one might call the brushstroke that brings the dragon to life—remains blurred, refusing to take clear shape before my eyes.
In how we apprehended fate’s capricious grasp, Dostoevsky and I differed as fundamentally as poetry from prose.

Nevertheless, I could not stop imagining Dostoevsky.
And I persistently sketched and erased, again and again, the cold sky, the new execution platform, his figure standing upon it, his form trembling in just a thin undergarment.

Now this mirror of imagination had imperceptibly clouded over.
At the same time, my joy at having revived was growing more distant from me day by day.
If that joy had always been by my side—Dostoevsky was a man who never forgot to feel gratitude for his own happiness throughout his life.

22

While dozing, I had drifted into a dream before realizing it.
Then, at the sound of a carp leaping, my eyes snapped open.

The second-floor room where I slept was directly above a courtyard pond where carp were kept in great numbers.
These carp would inevitably make a loud splashing sound in the water about once every five minutes.
Even during daylight hours, their noise would occasionally reach my ears.
At night it grew particularly severe.
Amidst the complete silence—the neighboring room, bathroom below, third floor across the way, even the mountain behind—I found myself constantly awakened by this sound.

I could no longer recall when I had first learned the English expression "dog's sleep," but only during this period did I come to understand its meaning through direct experience.
Each night I suffered torment from this canine restlessness.
No sooner would I finally manage to fall asleep and feel grateful for it than my eyes would fly open again, leaving me to lie there time after time longing for dawn's arrival, wondering whether the sky had yet begun to pale.
The duration that a bedbound person spends merely being alive through utterly silent midnights proves unexpectedly vast.

——A carp sliced through the water with force.
By the sound of its tail striking the waves I had drawn, I awoke.

The room was illuminated by a light darker than twilight.
The electric light bulb hanging from the ceiling was completely shrouded in black cloth.
Faint illumination seeped through the fabric's weave, barely lighting the eight-tatami room.
In this dim lamplight sat two figures clad in pure white garments.
Neither spoke.
Neither stirred.
Both kept their hands on their knees and sat perfectly still with shoulders aligned.

When I saw the orb wrapped in black cloth, I recalled the tip of a mourning banner sheathed in gauze-wrapped gold leaf. The nurses in white robes, faintly illuminated by light from this funereal sphere related to mourning insignia, appeared like spectral paper dolls in their quietude and decorum. And whenever necessity demanded, those dolls would invariably stir without uttering a sound.

I emitted no voice. Issued no summons. Yet even so, should there arise the slightest alteration in my recumbent posture, they would unfailingly move. Whether I fidgeted hands beneath blankets or shifted shoulders right to left—my head (that head perpetually numb upon waking)—or perhaps awakened because of that numbness—even slightly shifting that skull across pillow linen—or legs (those legs frequently rousing me from slumber)—due to lifelong habit occasionally stacking limb upon limb until drifting toward torpor—the underlying bone would creak like weight from a pickling stone compressing takuan radish—thus compelling me to endure sharp pain and leaden weight while repositioning limbs—in all such instances without exception, those white-garbed forms moved in response to my alterations.

At times they seemed to anticipate my motions and stir preemptively from their station. At others—though I moved neither hand nor foot nor head—the instant exhausted sleep released me and eyelids fluttered open—white robes already hovered near my face.

I comprehended nothing of the white-robed woman's inner state. Yet that white-robed woman fathomed my psyche perfectly. She transformed like shadow conforming to substance's contour. She labored as echo answering its source's vibration. Beneath wan light seeping through black fabric's weave—terrifying it was—how that pure-white-clad woman moved ahead of my flesh's intent—furtive yet methodical—as though enacting my mind's unspoken will.

Holding this eerie sensation, I opened my eyes and gazed at the room's ceiling dimly mirrored in my vision. Then I saw the electric bulb shrouded in black cloth and the woman in white garments illuminated by light seeping through that black fabric's weave. Almost before I had truly seen her, the white-clad figure moved closer to me.

Autumn wind wails through ten thousand trees.
Mountain rain shakes the tall tower.

Sick bones keen as sword.
A lone lamp pales, longing to grieve.

23

I felt profoundly ill at ease with my existence in a society parched of goodwill.

When people fulfilled their appropriate duties toward me, I was of course grateful.
But duty, in the sense of being faithful to one's work, was not a term that took people into account.
Therefore, while I felt grateful for receiving the benefits of fulfilled duty, I found it difficult to direct feelings of gratitude toward those who had performed their obligations.
When it came to goodwill, every single action and gesture of the other party worked with me as its purpose, so every single one of those actions and gestures resonated within me, a living being.
There existed a warm thread connecting us there, and it made the mechanical world feel dear.
Rather than riding a train that flashed through a district in an instant, being carried on someone’s back across a shallow stream carried deeper sentiment.

In a world where even duties are not sincerely fulfilled for one by others, and in a world where one does not properly fulfill even one’s own duties, it was excessive to list such luxuries.
Though aware of this, I keenly felt my own awkwardness existing in a society parched of goodwill.—In something someone had written, there was a line: ‘Since this world is too harsh, I’ve temporarily pawned my conscience, much like economizing on a private car.’ But pawning was after all merely a temporary expedient for managing liquidity.
The majority today seemed to possess scarcely even the innate goodwill that should have been pawned.
However I might contrive means, I could not bring myself to redeem it.
Though realizing this, I still felt ill at ease with my existence in a society parched of goodwill.

The youth of today make "self-assertion" their fundamental principle in everything they do—whether putting pen to paper, opening their mouths, or taking action.
To such extremes had society been pressed.
To such extremes was society abusing the youth of today.
"If one were to accept 'self-assertion' head-on, there would be many small but detestable objections."
Yet it was contemporary society that had driven them to dare pursue this "self-assertion" without reservation.
Particularly the current economic circumstances.
Behind "self-assertion" lies anguish as tragic as hanging oneself or leaping to one's death.
Nietzsche was a weak man.
He was a sickly person.
He was also a lonely student.
And thus Zarathustra proclaimed.

Although I might interpret things this way, I still constantly felt ill at ease with my existence in a society parched of goodwill.
Despite behaving awkwardly toward others, I felt awkward myself.
And then I fell ill.
And during my severe illness, I forgot this awkwardness somewhere.

The nurse put fifty grams of gruel into a cup, mixed it with bream miso, and carried one spoonful at a time to my mouth.
I felt like a sparrow chick or a crow chick.
As my illness receded, the doctor prepared meal plans for me approximately every five days.
At times he would create three or even four variations, compare them to select what seemed most suitable for me as a patient, then discard all others.

Doctors were a profession.
Nurses were also a profession.
They received both courtesy and compensation.
It went without saying that they were not providing care for free.
If one were to interpret them as being faithful to their duties solely for monetary gain, it would be a thoroughly mechanical affair—hollow and superficial.
But if one were to infuse half a measure of goodwill into their duties and view their actions through the patient’s eyes, one could not tell how immeasurably precious those deeds would become.
For it was through this measure of goodwill they brought that the patient suddenly came to life.
At that time, I interpreted it thus and felt glad alone.
I thought the doctors and nurses who were interpreted in this way must have been pleased.

Unlike children, adults possess the dubious ability to scrutinize a single thing as though deconstructing it into ten or twenty constituent elements—hence they rarely absorb unrestrainedly those pure emotions that ought to form life’s foundation. How many times in a life can one truly feel happy, truly feel grateful, truly feel precious—count them, and there are hardly any. Even if impure, I wished to preserve this emotion from that time—the one that added vitality to me—exactly as it was, deep in the very center of my heart for a long time. And I keenly feared that this emotion would soon transform into nothing more than a fragment of memory—for I felt profoundly ill at ease with my existence in a society parched of goodwill.

The world inherently teems with troubles.
Buffeted by the winds of the world.
Lofty autumn grieves temples white.

Ailing decline—dream visage flushed.
Birds depart; heavens boundless.
Gazing at clouds; the way unending.

Precious remain my bones.
Take care not to recklessly polish ※（石＋龍）。

Twenty-Four

When I was a child, there were fifty or sixty paintings in my house. At times before the tokonoma alcove, at times inside the storehouse, and at times during the seasonal airing, I would look at them in turn. Then crouching alone before the hanging scrolls, I found pleasure in passing the time in silence. Even now, rather than watching plays with their chaotic colors like an overturned toy box, I find it far more pleasant to be before my favorite paintings.

Among paintings, those Southern School works employing color were the most fascinating. Regrettably, there were few of those Southern School pieces among the scrolls stored in our family's storehouse. Being a child, I naturally had no means to discern the quality of paintings. When it came to likes and dislikes, I was simply happy if the composition displayed natural colors and shapes that pleased me.

My artistic taste, having had no opportunity to cultivate connoisseurship, grew thereafter without undergoing any particularly new changes.
While there may have been the pitfall of loving paintings solely through landscapes, I managed to avoid the reproach of appraising paintings based on names.
Just as with the poetry that arose in my tastes around the same time as the paintings, I felt no obligation to consider works that displeased me—no matter how renowned the master or celebrated in their era.
(I divide the content of Chinese poetry into three parts, deeply loving one while vigorously criticizing another.
Regarding the remaining third, I hold no opinion on whether to like or dislike it.)

One time, upon seeing a house—of course depicted on a painting scroll—that had a blue rounded mountain behind it, plum trees planted in the garden glittering in spring light, and a small river flowing right before its brushwood gate, winding gently along the fence, I said to the friend beside me: "Just once in my life, I’d like to live in such a place."

The friend stared fixedly at my earnest face and said with apparent sympathy, "Do you have any idea how inconvenient living there would be?"

This friend was from Iwate.

I indeed felt ashamed of my own naiveté for the first time, while resenting how my friend’s practicality had tarnished my poetic sensibilities.

That was something that happened twenty-four or twenty-five years ago.
Over those twenty-four or twenty-five years, I too had unavoidably become gradually practical, like my friend from Iwate.
Rather than descending cliffs to fetch water from mountain streams, I came to prefer installing plumbing in kitchens.
Yet sentiments reminiscent of Southern School paintings would sometimes assail my dreams.
After falling ill and lying supine, beautiful clouds and skies were continuously painted across my heart.

Then Mr. Komiya sent me postcards printed with Utamaro’s nishiki-e prints.
I became entranced by how these hues had naturally mellowed and darkened over time, gazing at them unwaveringly—but when I flipped one over, there was some nonsense written about wanting to be reborn as one of those humans depicted in them, sentiments utterly alien to my present state. Disgusted by such a garish dandy, I asked those nearby to convey my response: that what I loved was autumn’s warm palette and the natural fragrance emanating from those colors.
But when Mr. Komiya himself came to sit by my pillow and began expounding some antiquated theory—that while nature was fine, it must be nature existing as humanity’s background—I seized him and berated, “You greenhorn!”
To that extent did I, in my illness, yearn for nature.

The sky had cleared completely, as if sinking to its own depths. The high sun illuminated every reach of blue within sight. I lay alone in silence, warmed by the earth's reflected glow. Then I saw countless red dragonflies swarming before my eyes—and wrote in my diary:
“Rather than people, sky; rather than speech, silence...
Alighting on my shoulder—this longing for others / red dragonflies”

This describes the scenery after returning to Tokyo. Even following my return, beautiful visions of nature continued to hold sway over me for a time, just as they had during childhood.

Autumn dew descends on the southern stream.
Yellow flowers splendidly illuminate visages.

Desiring to journey along the distant stream.
Yet I return with the clouds.

25

My wife brought her mouth close to my ear and said, “The children are here—go see them.”
Lacking the strength to move my body, I shifted only my gaze in that direction while maintaining my original posture, and saw the children sitting about six feet away from my pillow.

The alcove attached to the eight-tatami room where I lay was positioned near my feet. My pillow-side was half-blocked by the fusuma sliding doors partitioning the adjacent room. Through the gap between the fusuma doors opened left and right, I saw my children across the threshold.

Perhaps because straining to see what lay beyond the partitioned room above my head required unnatural effort, the figures of the children sitting there appeared unexpectedly distant. Under the duress of this forced glance, the face reflected in my eyes was so distant that it would be more apt to say I gazed upon it rather than met it. I saw no trace of the children beyond this glimpse. My eyes immediately returned to their natural angle. Yet within this brief glance's span, I saw everything.

There were three children.
They were made to line up in single file at the center of the adjacent room—twelve-year-old followed by ten-year-old followed by eight-year-old.
And all three were girls.
They had been ordered by their parents to spend a summer at Chigasaki for their future health; until yesterday, these five siblings had been racing along the seashore.
Upon receiving news of their father's critical condition, they had been escorted by relatives on this deliberate journey up from Komatsubara's sandy depths to visit him at Shuzenji.

But they were too young to understand what "critical condition" meant.
They knew the word death.
But the terror and dread of death had never cast even a shadow in the depths of their young brows.
They couldn't imagine how their father's body, seized by death, would change from that point onward.
As for what consequences might befall their own fates after their father died, they couldn't possibly conceive such things.
They had simply been accompanied by others to visit their father's sickbed, riding the train all the way to his place of convalescence.

Their faces showed no sorrowful expression suggesting this might be our final meeting as parent and child.
They wore looks of innocence surpassing even a family farewell.
There among various people sat all three in specially assigned seats - appearing to ache from maintaining proper decorum in that solemn air.

I saw them only through strained effort of a glance.
To drag these small uncomprehending souls from afar and seat them dutifully by my pillow struck me as cruelty itself.
Summoning my wife, I instructed that since they'd come this far, they ought at least be shown about the grounds.
Had I then suspected this might be our last encounter, perhaps I'd have gazed longer upon their forms.
Yet upon my own illness I felt none of that peril perceived by doctors and attendants.

The children soon returned to Tokyo.
About a week later, they each wrote get-well letters, placed them in a single envelope, and delivered it to my lodgings.
The twelve-year-old Fudeiko’s letter, written in clumsy sōrōbun style with blocky characters, read: “Grandmother performs her hundred-prayer ritual to Shakyamuni Buddha each day without fail—rain or wind notwithstanding—praying daily for Father’s swift recovery. There is also the matter of Aunt Takada making pilgrimages to some shrine or other. As for Kiyomi, Mume, and myself—the three of us replace the water and offer flowers daily at the cat’s grave while praying earnestly for Father’s full recovery.”
The ten-year-old Tsuneko’s was ordinary.
The eight-year-old Eiko’s was written entirely in katakana.
When filled in to make it legible, it read: “How is your illness, Father? I am living safely, so please rest assured.”
Father, please recover quickly from your illness and return home soon without giving thought to my matters.
I go to school every day without fail.
“And please give my regards to Mother,” she writes.

While lying down, I set aside a page of my diary and wrote on it: "While I'm away, you must obediently listen to Grandmother's words. When the time comes, I'll send you souvenirs from Shuzenji." Then I immediately mailed it to my wife.
The children were playing calmly even after I returned to Tokyo.
The Shuzenji souvenirs had probably already been broken.
When they grow up, if they ever have the chance to read this text of their father's, what would they feel?

A grieving heart—autumn has arrived.
Vomited blood—bones yet remain.

When will this illness lift?—
The setting sun—returns to one village.

26

Fifty grams amounted to only two and a half shaku in Japan.
To think that with only that meager amount of beverage, this body had managed to endure throughout the day—I found myself both pitiable and endearing.
It also seemed absurd.

I reverently drank fifty grams of kudzu gruel.
Then I received injections twice daily—morning and evening—in both arms.
Both arms were covered with needle marks.
The doctor asked me which arm to use today.
I didn’t want either.
The injection preparations—dissolving the medicinal solution in a dish, drawing it into the syringe, meticulously wiping the needle, blowing fine bubbles of medicine from the needle’s tip to inspect it—were immaculately clean and pleasant to observe. Yet having that needle thrust into my arm and the medicine forcibly injected was unbearably unpleasant.
I asked the doctor what exactly that kite-brown liquid was.
Mr. Morishige answered with something like “Bunberun” or “Bunmerun,” unsparingly causing pain in my arm.

Eventually, the two daily injections were reduced to one.
That single one was also discontinued after a while.
And then the amount of kudzu gruel gradually increased.
At the same time, my mouth began to feel persistently clammy.
I had to constantly rinse my tongue, jaw, and throat with cool beverages; it was unbearable otherwise.
I requested ice from the doctor.
The doctor feared the danger of hard fragments slipping into my stomach.
While gazing at the ceiling, I recalled when I was twenty and had suffered peritonitis.
At that time, they had prohibited all beverages as harmful to my condition.
Having obtained permission only for cold-water gargling from the doctor, I made them let me rinse countless times within an hour.
Each time, ensuring others wouldn't notice, I quietly swallowed some gargled water into my stomach, finally easing the searing thirst.

Lacking the courage to repeat my past stratagem, I would crush ice between my teeth to moisten my mouth, then faithfully spit out every last fragment.
In exchange, I arranged to have them let me drink a sip of Hiranosui mineral water several times a day.
The sensation when Hiranosui rushed down from my esophagus to my stomach with a gurgling sound was refreshing.
However, as soon as it passed through my throat, I immediately wanted to drink again.
I clearly remember those times when, at midnight, I would often have the nurse pour Hiranosui mineral water into a Western-style cup and drink it with evident gratitude.

The thirst gradually subsided.
And then a hunger more terrible than thirst began ravaging the stomach.
Lying in bed, I would conjure countless variations of beautiful meals through imagination, arranging them before my mind's eye for amusement.
Not only that—I would prepare multiple servings of the same menu and take delight in having imaginary friends partake of them.
When I think back now, there wasn't a single dish that would please ordinary people.
Even to myself in such a state, I could only visualize meals that held little appeal.

When Mr. Morishige, saying I must have grown tired of kudzu gruel, went to the trouble of having rice sent from Tokyo to make rice gruel for me, I—who was tasting rice gruel for the first time in my life—had great expectations.
But when I took my first sip and was shocked by its unpleasant taste, I refused to touch rice gruel ever after.
Instead, the joy I felt upon receiving a piece of Casino Biscuit remains unforgettable to this day.
I even sent the nurse all the way to the doctor’s office specifically to express my gratitude.

Eventually, I was permitted to eat rice porridge.
The deliciousness now remains only as a cold memory—so I cannot recall it with true vividness—but I certainly did click my tongue in disbelief, wondering if such a delicious thing could exist in this world.
Then came oatmeal.
Then came soda biscuits.
I gratefully ate everything.
And I repeatedly appealed to Mr. Morishige as if it were daily routine—saying I wanted to eat more.
Mr. Morishige finally came to fear approaching my sickbed.
Mr. Higashi went out of his way to visit my wife and informed her: "It's absurd—the Professor maintains such a proper demeanor yet constantly talks about food like a child."

As spring trickles into my bowels—the taste of gruel

27

Eucken was a scholar who directly advocated what he called "spiritual life."
As appears customary among scholars—who feel compelled to dismantle all other "-isms" before advocating their own theories—he denounced without exception every preexisting doctrine influencing modern existence, all in preparation for renewing his so-called spiritual life.
Naturalism was denounced; socialism was assailed.
When all -isms had been expounded away as having lost their right to exist in his view, he finally produced the four-character term "spiritual life."
And thus he declared that the defining feature of spiritual life was freedom—"freedom," he repeatedly proclaimed.

If one were to ask him what exactly this "free spiritual life" entails, he would never provide a straightforward answer such as "It is simply this."
He merely arrays splendid words in orderly fashion.
He intricately layers convoluted reasoning in winding, overlapping coils.
There may be a scholar-like deftness in this approach, but the layperson entangled in its spirals can only stare blankly.

When I attempted to translate the philosopher’s words into terms comprehensible to common people for a moment, Eucken’s so-called free spiritual life would likely amount to this: we ordinarily labor for food and clothing.
Work done for food and clothing was passive.
In other words, it contained the suffering of compulsion that permitted no exercise of personal preference.
Work imposed externally in such a manner could not be termed spiritual life.
If one was to live spiritually at all, it had to be something active that voluntarily advanced toward where no obligations existed.
It had to be a life conducted freely through one’s own will, unbound by constraints.
When interpreted this way, no one could call his spiritual life trivial.
Comte had regarded ennui as a cause promoting social progress.
Rather than finding work through extreme ennui borne of necessity, one had to say the truer way of living lay in how an irrepressible force within coiled and accumulated until—through natural momentum—it emerged as life’s pulsation from that vitality which could not be contained.
Whether in dance, music, or poetry, one could state without issue that all art’s value resided there.

However, whether the spiritual life that scholar Eucken formulated in his mind could actually exist as fact in this world was naturally an entirely separate matter.
Just imagine whether Eucken himself could have led a purely unadulterated free spiritual life—isn't that answer self-evident?
Before entrusting oneself to this ceaseless mode of existence, one must first have already established oneself as an occupationless idler.

If a tofu shop owner only turned the millstone on mornings they felt inclined and absolutely refused to grind beans when disheartened, their business would never survive.
If they went even further—selling tofu only to people they liked and refusing all disagreeable customers—their business would become even more untenable.
For all occupations to be viable as such, they must light the lamp of fairness in their shop.
When you rephrase the seemingly virtuous term "fairness" from its reverse side, it merely possesses an ugly essence of being mechanical.
The life of steam trains that depart and arrive without a minute’s delay and what is called spiritual life must indeed be polar opposites in nature.
And so, ordinary people are compelled by heaven to live—to the fullest extent—by blending these two extremes in ratios of seventy-thirty or sixty-forty, adjusting them for personal convenience and societal accommodation (that is, to remain faithful to their profession).
This is the norm.
Even when those who happen to love art make their beloved art their profession, it is only natural that the moment that art becomes a profession, their true spiritual life is inevitably tainted.
For as an artist he strives to create works true to himself through natural inclination, while as a professional he must present works that are well-received and sell in large quantities.

Eucken’s so-called free spiritual life—already likely to become inflexible depending on individual temperament and education—proves to have such a narrow range of applicability when viewed against modern social structures.
He who expounds this as a grand doctrine universally applicable and practicable—one might harshly criticize him as having contracted the scholar’s chronic malady of unification—yet for someone like me, who happens to love literature, has made it my profession, yet simultaneously detests literature as a profession, it cannot help but capture my attention and has ample power to stimulate critical thought.
I, who had fallen gravely ill, bathed in the light of this spiritual life for the first time since my childhood days of depending on my parents.
However, this lasted only one or two months.
As my illness healed and as I was gradually thrust back into the real world, I found myself unable to help but envy Eucken, who could so skillfully bring such discussions into the public sphere.

28

When I first left school, there was a time I lodged at a temple in Koishikawa.
The priest there practiced divination as a side job, so it was common to see divining rods and hexagram sticks in the dimly lit room beyond the entrance.
Perhaps because it wasn't an officially advertised business, there were days when four or five people came seeking divinations, and nights so quiet you couldn't even hear the rustle of hexagram sticks being handled.
Since I placed little importance on divination and naturally remained unconnected to the priest in this practice, our interactions amounted to nothing more than me occasionally catching fragments of his matchmaking advice through the sliding doors—remarks like "It'd be better to follow the person's own wishes"—while we passed long periods facing each other without exchanging a word.

One time, on some pretext when our conversation strayed into the priest’s domain of physiognomy and directional fortunes, I asked half-jokingly, “What does my future hold?” The priest fixed his gaze on my face, studied it intently, then replied, “Nothing particularly bad lies ahead.”
To say there was nothing particularly bad was tantamount to declaring there was nothing particularly good either—in other words, it was like pronouncing that your fate was utterly ordinary.
Since there was no help for it, I remained silent.

Then the priest said, "You won't be present at your parents' death."
I answered, "Is that so?"
Then he said, "Your physiognomy shows you'll keep moving westward."
I answered again, "Is that so?"
Finally, the priest advised me to grow a beard under my chin and purchase land to build a residence.
I wanted to retort that if I could afford land and a house, I wouldn't be lodging here.
But wanting to understand the connection between chin hair and real estate, I asked about it.
With a solemn face, the priest explained: "If we divide your face vertically, the upper half is too long and the lower half too short."
"Therefore it lacks stability."
"So if you grow a beard under your chin to balance the proportions, your face will settle properly and stop shifting."
I found it faintly absurd how this physical critique of my haphazard features could dictate my fate so easily.
And so I replied, "I see."

Within a year, I went to Matsuyama.
Then I moved to Kumamoto.
From Kumamoto, I set out again for London.
I kept journeying westward exactly as the priest had said.
My mother died when I was thirteen or fourteen.
Though in Tokyo at the time, I failed to attend her deathbed.
The telegram announcing my father's death reached me during my Kumamoto years.
Viewed thus, the priest's prediction about missing my parents' final moments proved to be somewhat accurate.
As for the beard beneath my chin - shaved daily without respite from that day to this - whether land and residence would ever accompany its growth remains uncertain still.

However, as soon as I fell ill at Shuzenji and took to bed, my cheeks began to grow rough. After five or six days of this, each hair became pluckable individually. After a while longer, the beard hairs grew to completely conceal my jawline from my cheeks. The beard had grown to such an extent that for the first time in seventeen or eighteen years, the priest’s advice now showed signs of being useful. My wife said, “Why don’t you just grow it out properly?” Half-convinced, I kept stroking that area repeatedly. However, when day after day of unwashed, uncombed hair threatened to engulf my head in the filthy misery of oil and grime until I could no longer endure it, I finally called a barber one day and had him apply the razor to my face while I lay there, his work incomplete though it was as he tended to my head in this recumbent position. At that moment, I cleanly lost my qualification to become the owner of land and a residence. Those around me clamored, exclaiming again and again, “You look younger! Younger!” My wife alone said, “Did you really go and shave it all off?” with a slightly regretful expression. Even after her husband’s full recovery from illness, my wife still desired land and a residence. Even I, had it been guaranteed that keeping my beard would secure land and a residence, would have preserved that jaw as it was.

After that, I always shaved my beard.
Each morning I would rise early in bed and gaze at the mountaintop barely visible between the third-floor roof across the way and my room’s shoji screens, then stroke the smoothness of my cleanly shaven cheeks and feel pleased.
It appeared they had either relinquished land and residence for the time being or meant to preserve them as a pleasure for old age to be kept until much later.

When the traveler stirs from dreams, a lone bird calls.
Through the night mountain rains; at dawn comes clear skies.

Atop a solitary peak, the hue of a lone pine.
The crimson dawn’s glow spreads lush and bright.

29

I had known even before going that Shuzenji served as both the village's name and the temple's own. Yet it had never occurred to me that they would strike a drum there instead of ringing a bell. When I first heard this had completely slipped my memory. Even now, an imagined drum sometimes booms—boom upon my eardrums. Then I inevitably recall last year's illness.

Along with last year's illness, I recall the new ceiling and General Ōshima's campaign poem displayed in the new alcove. I vividly remember those days when I read and reread that poem countless times from dawn till dusk. The new ceiling, the new alcove, the new pillars, and the shoji screens so fresh they resisted smooth opening—these I can still clearly visualize before me. But General Ōshima's poem, though pored over endlessly day after day, now appears merely as black lines racing uniformly across white silk like a blank wall, their heads and tails abruptly severed. Of its verses, I can recall nothing beyond the opening two characters: "swords and spears."

Whenever the imagined drum boomed—boom—boom upon my eardrums, I recalled all these things. When I looked back on that time amidst all these things—lying perfectly still on my back, distracting myself from hip pain while wearily awaiting dawn—the sound of Shuzenji Temple’s drum always resounded abruptly in my ears' depths through some indescribable association.

The drum produced the most inelegant, most desolate sound—having severed both beginning and end—then hurled only its middle portion violently into night's darkness with blunt reverberations. With one brusque thud, it abruptly ceased. I strained my ears. The night air, once stilled, showed no inclination to stir. After a considerable while, just as I reconsidered whether it had been an illusion, another thud resounded. The charmless sound vanished into night like a stone dropped into water, leaving no trace of movement on the utterly still surface. Unable to sleep, I waited like an ambushing soldier fixated on the next sound's arrival. That next sound proved equally reluctant to come. At last came a resonance as parched as the first and second—though 'resonance' feels ill-suited—and after a sound like some impertinent dot struck heavily to obscure original script within black air had pounded my earlobes and departed, I found myself contemplating night as something interminably long.

It was the time when nights were growing longer.
The heat gradually subsided, ushering in a season when on rainy days one had no choice but to layer a haori over a sailor-collar shirt or boldly don a lined kimono from morning to fend off the chill.
On days when the sun sank below the mountain ridge, daylight grew shorter than even ordinary brief days, curtailing noon itself until lamps were lit with ease.
And yet the night stubbornly refused to dawn.
I came to dread each night - those interminable nights that gnawed relentlessly into daylight.
When I opened my eyes, it was always night.
When I considered how many more hours I might continue like this - buried alive in this silent night while still breathing - even I myself could no longer endure my illness.
I could no longer bear to look at the new ceiling, the new pillars, and the new shoji screens.
I could least endure the hanging scroll with large characters written on pure white silk.
Ah, if only dawn would come soon, I thought.

The drum of Shuzenji Temple would boom at this very moment.
Then, taking deliberately sparse intervals as if to prolong my anticipation, it began dotting the dark night here and there.
As five minutes passed, then seven, this rhythm gradually intensified until finally the drumbeats pressed in more densely than raindrops from an evening shower—what this signaled to me was that sunrise could not be far off.
What pleased me most was when, some time after the drumming ceased, the nurse finally rose and opened just the corridor shutters of my room.
The outside always appeared dim.

Having gone to Shuzenji Temple, I doubt anyone studied its drum as meticulously as I did. As a result, even now I sometimes experience on my eardrums what seems an illusion—that abrupt thud without resonance, as if something had been severed clean through. And thus I find myself reliving a certain inexpressible emotion.

Dreams entwine the starry river; Dewdrops glisten in dim seclusion.
In night's depth, form and shadow grieve beneath a dim lamp.

My sickbed lies near Shuzenji Temple.
A single sparse bell toll already marks nine autumns.

30

The day after resolving to part the mountains and gaze my fill upon the valley filled with lilies, I collapsed upon my sickbed.
At that moment, imagination beheld the endlessly blooming white flowers scattered like Go stones.
In the depths of green that sought to dimly envelop them, a heavy fragrance sank, while leaves overlapped oppressively as if awaiting each moment to be swayed by the wind.
From the whiteness, size, and fragrance of a single bloom that a guest at the inn had brought from the mountains and placed in a vase some days prior, I envisioned in my mind an improbably vast painting.

I was reminded of how just a month prior, when we had placed those gladioli in the alcove, Mr. Aishū first taught me that what the Bible calls 'lilies of the field' are what we now refer to as gladioli—though we both agreed they felt entirely different from wild lilies.
Even to someone like me with little connection to the Bible, the gladiolus—arranged like hinoki fans into some tropical exhibition—seemed far too overpowering to convey any profound, subdued elegance.
Gladioli don't matter.
The faint flowers I had envisioned saw autumn arrive before I had a chance to witness even a single bloom.
The lilies were crushed along with the dew.

People would enter the back mountain for those who were ill and pluck several stalks of wildflowers from here and there within reach.
The back mountain was close enough that one could immediately ascend via the corridor from my room.
If only the shoji screens were kept open, even while lying down I could gaze at a portion filling the space between the veranda and transom right before my eyes.
That portion consisted of rocks and grass, and a small path that wound its way up along the base of the rocks.
I watched as figures ascending the mountain for my sake—from departing the veranda's height to reaching that of the transom—would first conceal themselves from view, then reappear from an opposing position until finally vanishing beyond my line of sight, perceiving this progression as a grand metamorphosis.
And then I watched with a distant gaze as those same figures descended once more in twists and turns from above the transom.
They were invariably dressed in coarse-striped rental yukata, and on sunny days would wrap hand towels around their cheeks.
The figures, who seemed ill-suited for traversing mountain paths, would suddenly appear by rocks clutching flowers in a comically mismatched manner that felt almost theatrical to this bedridden observer.

What they gathered and brought were wild autumn grasses of remarkably subdued hues.

One hushed midday, when long pampas grass had been arranged as though lying prostrate across the tatami, a single cricket—of unknown origin—came to rest quietly amidst the stems.
At that moment, the pampas grass seemed to bend under the insect's weight.
And then faint green reflections upon the newly applied silver surface of the sliding door panel—blurred and indistinct as if haloed—drew in one's gaze, thereby further stimulating the sensation of movement.

The pampas grass would usually shrivel quickly.
Even the relatively long-lasting Patrinia flowers lacked sufficient color to be worth gazing at.
When at last I wearily recalled the loneliness of autumn grasses, I saw for the first time the blazing crimson petals of what they called Shukōki hibiscus.
When someone gave coins to the elderly caretaker and told her to pick more, she apparently refused, saying, "I don’t need coins—these flowers are entrusted items, so I can’t give them away."
When I heard this story, I desperately wanted to see where these flowers bloomed, what kind of old woman was keeping watch over them, and what expression she wore.
The petals of the Shukōki hibiscus burned brightly, only to scatter by the next day.

Cosmos flowers said to bloom abundantly along the Katsura River's banks occasionally brightened the sickroom too.
Among all flowers, the cosmos remained simplest and longest-lasting.
Observing their thin, orderly petals and their aloof blooming manner that seemed to float detached from worldly concerns, I remarked that cosmos resembled dry sweets.
"Why?" someone inquired.
It was much later that we received chrysanthemums reportedly cultivated by the caretaker of Noriyori's tomb.
The gravekeeper had apparently offered to lend potted chrysanthemums.
I wanted to see this caretaker's face too.
Eventually they brought something called akebi from Hatakeyama Castle ruins and arranged it in a vase.
It bore the hue of a faded eggplant.
Then a bird pecked one hollow—as the vase's grasses and flowers gradually changed, the season at last deepened into late autumn.

A day mirrors three springs' enduring span.
The mind follows wilderness streams to void.

Bedside, a single flower.
In quietude, a brief slumber.

31

In my youth, I lost two older brothers.
Since they had both been bedridden for a long time, when they died, each bore upon their flesh the shadow of illness they had endured to the bitter end.
Yet the hair and beards that had grown long during that extended period remained jet-black and thick even after death, like lacquer.
Their hair wasn't particularly remarkable, but their beards—unshaven and growing in what seemed an unwillingly disheveled, grimy manner like old men's—were pitiful to behold.
I still remember the color of one brother's thick, robust beard.
At the time of his death, his face appeared pitifully emaciated and shrunken, yet in stark contrast, his beard alone grew with such vigor as to surpass that of a healthy man in his prime—an uncanny contrast I found both eerie and pathetic.

As I lay between life and death amid the uproar over my critical condition, several uncanny days passed in an ambiguous realm that defied categorization as either existence or oblivion. When the boundary between survival and extinction grew slightly clearer, driven by a desire to confirm my own being, I first took up a mirror to examine my face. There, my elder brother's countenance—gone from this world years prior—suddenly grazed across the chilly reverse of the glass before vanishing. Cheekbones protruding with spiteful prominence; sallow blue-yellow skin stripped of human ambiguity; sunken eyes devoid of movement's latitude; hair and beard growing with unbridled abandon—by any measure, these were relics of that brother.

Yet though my brother's hair and beard had remained jet-black like lacquer until death, silver streaks had begun to appear here and there in my own. When I considered this, my brother had died before white hairs could emerge. Were I to die now, perhaps that would leave me better off as mere dregs. While white hairs encroached upon my temples and cheeks yet I spared no ingenuity to prolong survival, compared to those men in their prime who mercilessly abandoned this world at its zenith, I seemed almost embarrassingly reluctant to relinquish life. In the expression reflected in my mirror lingered not only a sense of transience but also shame at having failed to die properly. I recalled too that time when reading *Virginibus Puerisque* - nodding in agreement at its claim that people never lose their youthful temperament however aged they grow - and felt a desire to return to that very moment of understanding.

"The author of *Virginibus Puerisque* was no liar—a man who, though tormented by prolonged illness, maintained his cheerful disposition admirably until the end."
"But regrettably he died while his hair remained black."
"One cannot help suspecting that had he lived to sixty or seventy years of age, he might not have been able to make such definitive pronouncements."
"When I was twenty, I perceived an immense gulf between myself and thirty-year-olds—yet when thirty came, I found my sentiments unchanged from my twenties; at thirty, while acknowledging profound differences upon meeting forty-year-olds, reaching forty myself and looking back revealed I still lived with the same temperament. Thus accepting Stevenson’s words as truth, I had navigated life until now—only to confront in my sickroom mirror, so unlike my usual healthy self, a moment when no youthful shadow remained: there I recognized external signs of aging decline sprouting in scattered white hairs."

Compelled by white hairs—should I resolutely cross old age's threshold, or conceal them to keep wandering youth's streets? Such thoughts hadn't yet come when I first faced the mirror.
To such an extent that no further thought was needed, I in my ailing state saw young people distantly.
Before falling ill, when dining with a friend, he gazed at my closely cropped sideburns and asked whether I was shaving them progressively higher, troubled by white hairs encroaching from there.
At that time, I still possessed sufficient vigor to merit such a question being posed.
Yet having fallen ill, I had grown so resignedly composed that I wanted to make these white hairs my banner.

Does the I of today, healed from illness, live on through the mind that prolonged my sickbed self? Or have I returned to the youth before my illness, when I sat at table with friends?
Am I truly inclined to walk the path Stevenson described? Or do I intend to refute his words—he who died in middle age—and finally advance into old age?
Those who waver between white hair and life must appear ridiculous in the eyes of young people.
But even they—these young people—will eventually face a time when they stand between the grave and the fleeting world, finding themselves unable to decide their path.

Peach blossoms on horseback—youth's hour.
Laughing astride silver reins—willow boughs swept aside.

Green waters still journey distantly onward.
Moonlight arrives to illuminate temples like threads.

32

At first, I simply lay there gazing vacantly at the sky.

After a while, I found myself wondering when I might return home.
At times I felt an urge to go back immediately.
Yet when I considered how one who lacked even the strength to sit up in bed could endure being jostled on a train for half a day's journey, this self yearning for home seemed rather foolish.
Therefore I never once asked those nearby when I might return.
Simultaneously, autumn wound through countless days and nights to pass before my heart.
The sky began arching higher and bluer above me.

When they finally deemed it safe to move me, they summoned two additional doctors from Tokyo to confirm their assessment, and their conclusion was that I must wait another two weeks.
From the day after their pronouncement, I suddenly grew reluctant to abandon both the ground where I lay and the room enclosing me.
I willed that these promised two weeks might turn as slowly as possible.
There had been a time during my years in Britain when I detested it with all my being.
I had detested Britain with the same obstinate vehemence that Heine once did.
Yet standing on the brink of departure and surveying London’s human sea swirling with unknown faces, I began sensing within their russet-hued atmosphere a gas suited to my very breath.
I tilted my head back toward the sky and stood motionless at the town’s center.
Now I—destined to leave this place in two weeks—could only lie with my ailing body and remain solitary upon my bed.
I lingered upon the great straw mattress—one shaku five sun in height—specially crafted for my convalescence.
I stood arrested by carp slicing through water that fractured the garden’s quietude.
I stood arrested before a wagtail traversing dew-slick roof tiles, its tail swaying near and far.
I stood arrested by the vase at my pillow.
I stood arrested by water’s ceaseless murmur beneath the corridor.
Thus lingering among these encircling presences, I waited as ordained for two weeks to pass.

Those two weeks came like any ordinary two weeks—without the eager impatience of anticipation, nor the anticlimactic sense of insufficiency—and departed like any ordinary two weeks.
And thus they left me with that drizzling dawn as their final memento.
When I, peering through the dark sky, asked if it was rain, someone answered that it was.

With the purpose of transporting me, they fashioned a peculiar contraption and carried it into the tatami room.
It measured nearly six shaku in length, yet was barely two shaku in width—a narrowness verging on insufficiency.
A part of it had been designed to curve upward away from the tatami mats to a height of about one shaku.
And then they wrapped the entire thing in white cloth.
I was carried and, leaning my back against the arched front section while stretching my legs out along the flat portion, thought: This is a funeral.
Though it’s improper to speak of funerals for the living, lying upon this white-shrouded thing—neither quite a sickbed nor a coffin—I could only interpret it as being buried alive.
I kept repeating the phrase “second funeral” under my breath.
For I thought that while everyone must have their funeral performed once, I alone absolutely had to undergo the ceremony twice.

When I was carried out of the room, it went smoothly, but as they descended the staircase, the platform tilted and I nearly tumbled from the stretcher.
When they reached the entrance, a crowd of fellow lodgers stood lined up, seeing off the white stretcher from both sides.
All waited with the quiet restraint of a funeral procession.
My stretcher passed through their midst and was carried out beneath the rain-laden eaves.
Outside stood many spectators.
Soon they passed the stretcher vertically into the carriage and supported it between the front and rear seats facing each other.
Having taken measurements beforehand, they had prepared it so the stretcher fit snugly into the carriage.
The horse began moving through the falling rain.
Lying there, I heard rain striking the canopy.
Through the cramped space between driver's seat and canopy, I gratefully glimpsed fragments of large rocks, pine trees, and water.
Each time I saw bamboo groves' hues, persimmon leaves' crimson, taro foliage, hibiscus fences, and smelled ripe rice's fragrance, I recalled with newborn joy—ah yes, this season should hold such things.
Imagining what new realm might await at my destination—ready to unfold and revive my drowsy old memories—I took solitary delight.
Yet all vanished—the straw mattress where I'd lingered until yesterday, the wagtail, autumn grasses, carp, and small stream.

When all things cease, a breath revives.
How could this remnant life compare to dying embers?

Wind sweeps through ancient ravines, autumn's voice arises.
The sun sets over secluded bamboo, twilight hues arrive.

Do not speak lightly of three months lingering in the mountains.
Who could have known that beyond the gate, the whole sky would open?

Do not delay your return beyond the Chrysanthemum Festival.
Lest wandering spirits dream of old moss.

Thirty-Three

The experience of spending New Year's in the hospital occurred only once in my lifetime.

When dusk had deepened until shadows of pine decorations danced before my eyes, I first began to regard myself—poised before this singular experience—as something uncanny. At the same time, I found it strange that this thought operated solely within my head without transmitting the faintest tremor to my heart's beating.

Lying upon my white bed, I earnestly contemplated fate's whimsical measure in thus binding together myself, the hospital, and the approaching spring. Yet when I sat upright to face my desk or settled at my meal tray, I entrusted my heart entirely to this feeling of here being my home, finding nothing strange in it whatsoever. Thus even as the year waned and spring drew near, no particular emotion rose within me. It was because I had stayed so long in the hospital, had put down such deep roots in a patient's existence.

When New Year's Eve finally arrived, I thought about buying two small pine trees and setting them up at the entrance to my hospital room.
However, I thought driving nails to support the pines would mar the beautiful pillars, so I abandoned the idea.
The nurse said she would go out front and buy some plum branches instead, so I decided to have her do so.

This nurse was a woman who had remained constantly by my side from Shuzenji until I left the hospital half a year later.
I made a point of calling her by her real name—Miss Machii Ishiko, Miss Machii Ishiko—each time.
At times I would mistakenly invert her family and given names, calling her Miss Ishii Machiko.
The nurse tilted her head and said, "It does seem better to correct it that way."
In the end, I eventually cast aside all restraint and ended up dubbing her "Weasel."
One time, on some occasion when I said, "Your face resembles something," she replied, "It probably doesn't resemble anything decent," so I concluded that since any human resemblance must first be to an animal.
When I tried to convince her that trying to resemble anything else wouldn't easily result in resembling something proper—and since she shrieked "Then resembling a plant would be disastrous!"—it finally settled on "Weasel."

Ms. Machii the Weasel soon returned carrying two branches of red and white plum blossoms.
She inserted the white one before Zōtaku’s bamboo painting, tossed the red one into a thick bamboo tube, and placed it atop the closet door.
The Chinese narcissus I had received from someone during this time also emitted its pale fragrance incessantly from between spiraling, elongated leaves.
Ms. Machii consoled me, saying, “Your condition has improved considerably, so you’ll surely be able to celebrate with New Year’s soup tomorrow.”

The New Year’s Eve dream settled upon my pillow as it did every year.
After contracting such a grave illness and spending months becoming part of the hospital’s fabric, to think I would end up celebrating zōni here—the Roman letters spelling “IRONY” appeared vividly spelled out in my mind.
Nevertheless, without any poignant sentiment piercing my heart, the spring of my forty-fourth year dawned naturally from the south-facing veranda.
And just as Ms. Machii had predicted, though only in form, a single small piece of mochi appeared New Year-like through this patient’s eyes.
While recognizing some significance in this bowl of zōni soup that illuminated my existence—yet feeling not a shred of poetic sentiment—I unceremoniously gulped down the small mochi piece in one plain bite.

By the end of February, when plum blossoms had begun scattering before my sickroom, I obtained the doctor's permission and became once more a denizen of the wide world.
Looking back, during my hospitalization there were not few who shared a corner of fate with me yet perished without ever gaining their chance to see that wide world.
One patient from northern lands saw his condition gradually worsen after admission until his attendant son grew anxious; forcibly taking him home on New Year's Eve only for death to claim him mid-journey before the train reached its destination.
The neighbor one room over became aware of his own approaching demise and declared that death meant nothing if one resigned oneself to it—passing away with such meek pathos it inspired pity.
When the violent coughs of an ulcer patient at the far end dwindled daily until I thought him stabilized and inquired with Ms. Machii, I learned he had quietly expired from frailty unnoticed.
Then there was a terminal cancer patient who despite his hopeless state would feign vigor—the instant he glimpsed doctors during rounds he'd sit bolt upright and hike up his hem.
Because he kicked and struck his attendant wife until she wept in washrooms where nurses spied and consoled her—this too I recall Ms. Machii recounting.
A man with esophageal stricture wandered lost though hospitalized—summoning moxa therapists to apply treatments, gathering seaweed to brew tonics—desperately striving to cure his incurable cancer......

I had slept under the same roof as these people，received the same provisions，and together welcomed the same spring.
Now，over a month after being discharged，when I sweep up the past and lay it out before my eyes，the word 'irony' emerges ever more vividly in my mind.
And before I knew it，this irony acquired a tangible reality，the two becoming inextricably entwined.
Ms. Machii the Weasel，the plum blossoms，the Chinese narcissus，the zōni soup—all these ordinary scenes have vanished entirely，yet why does only the contrast between my former self and present self remain so vividly?