Pathway to Japanese Literature

Kohatsu stood up on the top board of the diving platform's framework. She raised her arm to shade her forehead and surveyed the cloud formations in the sky. The upper part of her right arm, lightly lifted in rectangular poise, bore a cocoa-brown sunburn. From the underside of her arm to her armpit, the skin transitioned like that between a fish's dorsal firmness and ventral softness—paling abruptly into supple whiteness that held both the lucid precision and tenacious resilience peculiar to those whose pedigrees had been sustained through generations rooted in urban soil, drinking its singular waters. Her face possessed a celestial beauty—slightly rounded at the jaw with lips blossoming like small flowers—yet the shadow from her upraised arm darkened its upper half, lending her large downturned eyes a faint bestial glint.

The balance between her right fingertips shading her forehead and her left wrist resting against her hipbone compelled Kohatsu into a masculine stance—the sort only weather-conscious professionals would assume. The flesh around this medium-built swimming instructor's midsection beneath the thin swimsuit still showed the desolation of underdevelopment, though her pelvic structure swelled slightly larger at the hips in a wasp-like formation. There lay hidden both maternal grandeur and an indomitable fighting spirit.

The azure sky remained stretched taut like a bell jar clamped from above, trapping warm air, while across the entire vicinity, blue-green reed beds trembled weakly in patches. It was merely a localized wind. The entire realm was a sweltering mass of stagnant heat. The Arakawa Floodway first split into two channels from north to southeast, then beneath Kasai River Bridge became a single broad flow that melted the estuary into the sea.

“What unfathomable weather this is!”

Kohatsu muttered.

The weather for the long-distance swimming event to be held in five days weighed on her mind. When she lowered her gaze westward—as if dull flames smoldered in the distance—the deluge of tiled roofs from the city's heart assailed her vision. These rooftops marshaled their main forces like fortress bastions along two fronts—Kiyosuna-dori and Hachiman-dori—radiating irregularly from Sunamachi 1-chome and Kamiōjimachō's gas tanks in three directions. The layered roofs of nearby buildings appeared to leap forward in surging waves while remaining utterly motionless. High-rises and factories jutted upward with shoulders crowded to irritation. Chimney smoke smoldered crimson in hundreds of streaks across a sky scorched white with dust.

Kohatsu raised her left hand from her hip to join the right arm shading her forehead, deepened her visor-like gesture against the glare, gazed—as if realizing anew—at the late summer heat haze rising like a prairie fire of culture, and heaved a deep sigh.

The father’s swimming area had been located on the Sumida River bank since his ancestors’ time. It had been driven out—driven out by the development of the city’s new culture—relocating to the Tatekawa waterway, then to the Onagigawa waterway, finally ending up in a side moat on the outskirts. And finally it had been driven into this lumber storage yard in Sunamura. The sorrowful trail of its successive defeats could be counted endlessly. But no sooner had they relocated than Tokyo was expanded and reorganized into Greater Tokyo, with Sunamura becoming Sunamachi in Joto Ward—undeniably within city boundaries now. This barely satisfied him—"Our Seigai-ryu is a swimming style cultivated by urbanites. “I will never allow it to be degraded to the countryside.” That statement satisfied her father’s vanity. Father intensely feared relocating to Edogawa Ward across the floodway that had become part of Tokyo. The name Kasai made her father—an old Tokyoite—utterly reject the very notion of being within city limits. Finally Father drew his line in the sand with the Arakawa Floodway as his last escape route, intending to defend to the death Seigai-ryu swimming’s final dojo.

In this manner, the summer swimming area had frequently changed river courses, but their residence had remained in Koami-chō, Nihonbashi Ward until just before this summer. Father’s regular occupation outside of summer was handling work such as wrapping paper for fabric bolts and Western-style paper. In addition to having a foundation in classical Chinese and Japanese literature, he had also studied some English. So he wrote addresses and invoices; Father frequently ordered catalogs from British textile companies. While reusing interior and cover designs, he added his own motifs, had artists draw them up, had printers produce them, and fulfilled wholesalers’ orders. He had also been handling flyer and advertisement copywriting using an assistant.

But the local textile guild progressed. The draftsmen too progressed. There was no longer any need for middleman wholesalers or an amateur father’s perfected design patterns. Father’s residence-attached office grew more desolate with each passing year. He had held out for a while, but after dabbling in various ventures ended up having the entire property taken from him. Before that he had already lost both the money and tools passed down from his ancestors. Therefore this summer under pretext of night watch duties the father and daughter were lodging at the swimming area.

Perceiving the fierce force of urban culture that relentlessly swept away both their swimming area and residence in the grey-flamed roof tiles, Kohatsu felt fear penetrate to the very marrow of her heart—yet as she continued gazing, this fear that deepened her sense of their family’s inevitable decline somehow transformed into a paradoxical nostalgia for that very ferocity. In the end, she had come to feel that one way or another, this very force might yet become something that could save her. Her own fluttering nostalgia toward that fierce force of urban culture seemed to seize even her body. Compared to this nostalgia, their sparrow-like physical play—mutually permitted since last summer with Kaoru, the son of an underpaid company employee near the swimming area—felt absurd; she even felt ashamed to recall it.

In stark contrast, she had come to reassess Kaihara—the fifty-year-old lumberyard owner who, out of interest in her person, had allowed Father’s old-style swimming area to remain here free of charge in this lumber storage moat, taken care of students, rowed patrol boats, and all the while entangled himself with her from a distance. Had necessity begun to transform, even slightly, into preference? Kohatsu blinked rapidly at her own wrenching self-interest.

After all, she felt not a shred of vengeful impulse toward this fierce force of urban culture—her own enemy as much as Father’s—but rather trembled with fascination at its brute vigor. Could she be some perverse delinquent daughter afflicted by a severe inversion of values? But no matter what—the resting place for Father’s soul and hers lay nowhere but there: the city—the heart of Greater Tokyo—so it couldn’t be helped, there was no alternative……

“Ms. Kohatsu.” “It’s time.” “Please demonstrate the jade dive.”

Having loaded about ten drenched children aboard and rowed the farm boat closer beneath the rudder platform, Kaihara the lumberyard owner raised his voice. His Hida accent had adapted to Tokyo speech without seeming overly unnatural. “First show everyone the demonstration again—then I’ll have them practice.”

Clad in a swimsuit bearing the same Miyako-dori crest as Kohatsu’s—his body layered with fat like a minor tycoon’s—Kaihara had fully settled into his role as the swimming area’s assistant. Kohatsu answered more smoothly than usual. “Right now.” “Just wait a little.” But seeking respite from the suffocating emotions that had gripped her until now, Kohatsu looked once more toward the floodway. As her gaze traveled upstream across its surface where diamond-patterned ripples spread endlessly, she saw boats hoisting sails near the tower-bridge-style watergate straddling the levee boundary between Nakagawa and Arakawa waterways—their canvas taut as if straining for a race. Kohatsu’s voice steadied.

“I’m certain. There’ll be an evening shower tonight, but from tomorrow, the weather should hold for four or five days.” “Well, that’s about the size of it.” “The Long-Distance Swimming Event will go well.” After extending his palm to test the wind’s pulse, Kaihara nodded in agreement. When she removed the Seigai-ryu swimsuit—a surcoat-style garment roughly stitched with thick cords at the shoulders and sides to let wind pass through—Kohatsu’s vigorous body, clad in a clinging black swim shirt, was laid bare. In her posture when undertaking such duties, there appeared an inhuman perfection akin to an ivory carving—meticulously sculpted without a single stitch out of place, the pinnacle of craftsmanship. This girl possessed in her living flesh the serene beauty found only in human corpses. Kohatsu gracefully planted both feet at the edge of the rudder platform, extended her hands forward to shoulder height, arched her chest, and measured her breath. The sun disc dangling slightly to her left eye was cleansed by wind of the day’s decayed refuse, now merely emptily round like a peachy-pink basin.

In the reed beds that had begun to rustle continuously, one could see how the rising tide—now carrying abundant foam where gusts had flattened swathes of reeds in multiple wind-whipped streaks—lapped thickly against their bases in the calm’s aftermath.

According to Seigai-ryu protocol, the jade dive’s first movement began with standing at the rudder platform’s edge upon the preparatory command, adjusting one’s posture, and extending both arms forward. Pulling both hands back into the diving posture formed the second movement; the instant of leaping out became the third—three movements in total. Now Kohatsu silently commenced the “one” movement but immediately corrected herself mid-action, called out “two,” and assumed the diving stance. That was precisely the agile yet refined posture of a kingfisher peering at fish shadows from a stake’s height. Then from Kohatsu’s body—until this moment sculptural in its rigidity—an alluring aura began shimmering like a lunar halo; it tore open a single pocket of unnatural, artificial allure amid the surrounding windswept natural edges. In an eyeblink she shouted “Three!”, buoyed her body upward with inexplicable support to hover midair, then—as her posture inverted with visible swiftness—bent both legs back like a rudder, thrust her hands forward, kept her torso supple yet resolutely arched, and plunged soundlessly into the water.

Blinking as if dazzled, Kaihara watched every movement of the woman instructor’s demonstration.

“The form is elegant.”

He involuntarily let out a sigh of admiration and stared at the slightly dimming water surface about three feet above with an expression as if to devour it. Kohatsu—who at this turning point had come to despise her dreamlike first love with Kaoru out of single-minded determination to return to the city’s center and pin her hopes on the worldly capabilities of this fifty-year-old man—even in her unconscious demonstration of the jade-style dive, had laid a seductive trap for Kaihara. Kohatsu—who had been made to study new dance forms since childhood and maintained connections with revue girls—found it effortless to transmute that cloying essence of coquetry into modern, sprightly allure and slyly weave it into the classical Seigai-ryu diving forms. As her entire body plunged into the tepid water with a rush, becoming a single unified force, and every inch of her skin began to be caressed by the thick yet free, supple liquid—forgetting everything—Kohatsu began to revel in the “joy of a dolphin.” One time, Kohatsu described the fantastical joys of the underwater world to her only close friend from her girls’ school days—the literary scholar Ms. Toyomura—in fragmented, experiential terms. Then her friend introduced a precise literary expression related to that emotion.

If you call it a cushion, then everything is a cushion. If you call it a feather quilt, then everything is a feather quilt. But in the water—dissolved and free—

Something even better—love. Leaping unbroken, claws splitting— Thrash and rend—love. And so the dolphin narrows its eyes. Never again would it return to land. This was said to be a rough translation of a fragment from a Greek archaizing mad verse. Taking a concept with similar meaning from Lao-Zhuang thought, her father Keizō had always explained to Kohatsu that it was “the realm of Chaos Undivided.” When the pressure against her eyelids lessened, Kohatsu opened her eyes underwater. From her childhood, her father Keizō—who had intended to mold his only daughter into a swimming prodigy—had employed severe methods of discipline. He would place stones at the bottom of a large water-filled tub for young Kohatsu to retrieve, submerge into the Sumida River’s depths while carrying her on his back only to release her there and make her surface alone—all to strip away water’s terror and instill familiarity through redoubled application of their family’s traditional training methods.

Underwater was relatively bright. Maintaining its thickness in a ground-glass hue, it was neither bright nor somber. It was a reality stripped of sexuality. A world where dawn, if you could call it dawn, was eternal dawn; dusk, if you could call it dusk, was eternal dusk. It was a world that had once exposed terrestrial vitality to death, tanned away actual influence, and dissolved everything into illusion. Just as all colors and forms entering water are uniformly transmuted, human morality here too had lost its volatility and controllability. It was, so to speak, a world where good and evil had fused. Here in this place, Kohatsu—the city girl entangled in old-fashioned hypersensitivity of conscience—had her stubbornness, sorrow, and attachments stripped of their sexuality; in their stead, the simple, ungovernable freedom possessed by fish and turtles was revived. Kohatsu twisted her supple torso in the water, twisting and twisting, reveling endlessly in the soft, pliant sensations.

As Kohatsu scooped water up from the excavated vertical hole beneath the rudder platform toward the muddy shallows, the soil that had crumbled from the broken embankment along the shore formed an irregular slope, its shadow stretching dimly across the water’s bottom before her blurred vision.

This entire area had an abundance of algae and old reed roots, evoking the sensation of a dense jungle. Five or six thick old piles used for mooring lumber—repeatedly decayed and replaced—stood dimly like primordial stone pillars. She grabbed onto one of the pillars, and a pale figure was churning the water. It was Kaoru. Kaoru was far larger in build than Kohatsu. His jaw and cheeks were sharply chiseled into a face of well-proportioned beauty. Kohatsu suddenly seized Kaoru’s neck and shoulders, pressing her small white teeth against pale violet lips. Kaoru remained silent as she clung to him, legs pumping rhythmically while swimming obediently—but unable to match Kohatsu’s underwater endurance—he soon began showing anguish. Then he started wildly clawing at the water. At last he thrashed in desperate struggle. With practiced skill in handling near-drowning victims—parrying entanglement while deftly extracting another measure of this young creature’s vital essence—Kohatsu maintained control.

Keizō, her father who had gone to search for a rental house, returned, and at the swimming area after the rain, a dinner for just father and daughter began. Though the rental house would become necessary for them the moment the swimming area closed in a mere half-month, Keizō found it difficult to locate one of comparable value. The location still clung to the heart of the old downtown districts, and he seemed to head there daily in his search. Her father’s dignified face—now bearing a sparse beard since his return—appeared grotesquely distorted by excitement chafed raw against the city’s red dust and exhaustion. Perhaps the lingering effects of that shot of Western liquor he’d knocked back somewhere still coursed through his veins.

The father and daughter—city-bred gourmets—ordered each and every evening meal tray from places like Isetan and other restaurants in the Suzaki district. The young man delivering meal trays by bicycle would mutter complaints about the long distance, but these days—softened by Kohatsu’s beauty and the tips her father provided—he’d become all compliance. While cracking some newly practiced joke or other, he’d warm the soup bowls over a corner brazier, adjust their temperature just so, arrange the trays for immediate eating, then take his leave.

"I'd rather just kick the bucket than eat this swill." This was Keizō’s habitual denunciation of their trays when flavor proved lacking—but in these days when such words risked crystallizing into harsh reality mirroring their circumstances, even he found himself guarding against careless slips of this verbal reflex. Night after night, father and daughter approached their meals with sparse words, imbuing each supper with the pious solemnity of a "Last Supper." They had always been people of few words. Keizō strictly avoided voicing emotions—particularly his own. Such expressions were deemed distasteful sarcasms; the old men of Old Tokyo had long since abandoned any sincere urge to articulate them. For emotional conveyance, they employed either irony or circuitous symbolic language.

“With no neighbors around to pick at the flaws in our makeup—must feel refreshing.” This was both the sole apology from the father who had brought his daughter down into ruin and a consoling remark meant to soften their shared disgrace. Kohatsu was not unaware of her father’s feelings, but she found his “No matter what, you’re being too much of a sore loser” sadly grating. Tonight, once again bringing up the story of the abyss said to be found within the lofty Chinese classic Liezi, her father camouflaged his feelings toward his daughter.

“An abyss has nine properties. Still water held motionless is also an abyss. A place where flowing water lingers and pools for a time is also an abyss. Water welling up from the depths to amass abundantly before flowing onward—that too is an abyss. Water that catches dripping, falling drops—that too is an abyss—”

The father had roughly organized the various conditions under which an abyss accepts water into nine categories, “This is called the Theory of Nine Abysses. Water may come with myriad transformations, but there is only one abyss that receives them all. If one attains the mindless state of this abyss, no matter how the world may change or attempt to direct us, we remain composed and unperturbed. At this point, in our Seikai-ryū tradition, we expound it through the maxim: A corpse floats effortlessly without added water. “Thus,” he said, “it embodies our breaststroke’s essence.”

“Is that Chaos Undivided’s brother or something you’re always going on about?”

Kohatsu mocked her father while using a post-meal toothpick. That she delighted in mocking others yet loathed being mocked herself was the very nature of an urban satirist—and for her father, the fact that this satirist was his own daughter grated on him intensely. He remained silent for a while, lacking even the energy to conceive a retort, “It’s not some sworn brotherhood or anything—it’s entirely one and the same.”

He said in a low voice, mustering every ounce of his strength. It was rare for Keizō to speak this earnestly to his daughter. Driven to desperation, he had no choice but to voice this much sincerity. Perhaps because of that effort, he abruptly assumed an awkward, aged expression and quietly wiped his sweat. Father unreeled the light bulb’s cord and went beneath the swimming area. There he remained for some time, rustling about in the shadows.

“Perfect twilight.” “Maybe I’ll go bead-line fishing.”

Having said that, he loaded his gear and rowed out in the field boat. Kohatsu watched her father’s departure with pitying melancholy, yet ultimately felt something bitter rise within her. Then—as precaution when staying alone—she locked the entrance per routine, switched off the light, slipped into the mosquito netting, and placed the peppermint-loaded water pistol by her pillow to deter potential intruders. When Kohatsu lay back and relaxed her body, the pistol’s peppermint exuded a heavy pungency. As that thickly aromatic mint permeated her nostrils and stung her eyes, Kohatsu had already begun weeping silently. Truly—what pitiful city-obsessed fools they were. Because of this obsession, Father was decaying wretchedly from frustration while she herself degraded from first love into some fifty-year-old man’s plaything… In the darkness where her self-interest glared wide-eyed and unblinking, one corner of Kohatsu’s heart remembered the sensation of Kaoru’s youthful flesh savored underwater that afternoon……

After a short while, Kohatsu sat up again. She opened the back window to check on her father. The night world after the rain had dissolved abundant moisture into its deep ink-black depths, and a glossy coolness lay richly over everything. Around the leaning rudder platform at ebb tide, the backs of young mullets darting frantically about glinted in the starlight. Father was in the reeds not too far away, burning a lantern and engaged in bead-line fishing. Threading numerous annelids from the sandbar onto a line, he dangled them into the water like a rosary. The small eels dwelling among the reed roots would latch onto it; he would gently lift the ring, lure the reluctant eels that kept nibbling downward up near the water’s surface, then swiftly scoop them up from the side with a hand net. Annelids somehow seemed like ugly, declining beings among insects—and even eels—were they not fish left behind by the era’s culture? Declining humans used declining insects as bait to catch declining fish for their amusement. That lamplight—what a poignantly pitiful scene it was. In the past, this method of catching eels had been nothing more than a pastime for Father, but now it was a desperate side job.

“Last night’s catch was rather excessive... “Quite inconvenient to manage,” Father remarked with affected nonchalance as he handed his haul to the eel brokers. Pitying their wretched father-child relationship yet hating herself for mentally tallying his nightly yield, Kohatsu felt tears pricking her eyes. The western sky stretched like a mirrored plane where gaudy lights from the night city’s revelries danced, collided, and shattered. Neon signs clustered thickest over zones of particular decadence—their luminous contours etching sharper geometries against the glow. Then came flashes of grotesque radiance—as if welling from earth’s bowels—that flickered sporadically across the heavens. With koto-like persistence and eschatological gravity, they transmuted the entire nightscape into hellish visages one moment before restoring its bacchanalian mien the next. It meant nothing. Just sparks between power lines and a Jōtō tram pole—yet as Kohatsu watched them flare, she willed: Let all joy beyond my reach perish in such instants. A limousine’s growl pierced the air then, braking sharply on the main street beyond.

The sturdy man’s footsteps came up toward the swimming area.

“Who’s there?” Kaihara stopped in the dim light, his posture somewhat bashful. “It’s me.” “It’s gotten a bit late, but let’s go out dancing in the city.” “Won’t you come out?”

“Why didn’t you come up the back ladder?” “Because I couldn’t very well have peppermint water shot into my eyes with a pistol, now could I?” Kohatsu twisted the light bulb and began preparing to go out. She took a kimono from the dresser and moved toward the Rococo-style half-length mirror tied with rope to an unfinished pillar. Using this ornately carved mirror—one of the few remaining possessions from their lost Nihonbashi residence—to apply makeup filled Kohatsu with desolation. The awareness of Kaihara waiting for her again made thoughts of Kaoru seep slowly into her flesh. But that was purely physical. At least now she had to convince herself of that. She mustn’t crumble. Everything had to be lived with an underwater mentality. I must devour whatever comes my way, turn it into nourishment, and become a robust fish. Kohatsu abruptly adopted a defiant mood and pressed the light bulb against her freshly made-up face.

“How about this?” she showed through the reed-screen window to Kaihara, who was peering in. “Splendid indeed,” he replied. “Now let’s go. I’ve secured permission from the Old Master.”

Kohatsu turned off the electric light, glanced back at her father’s light in the sandbar, then slipped away from the swimming area with Kaihara. Kaihara had taken Kohatsu out dancing seven or eight times over the summer, so he had come to know even minor details like her favorite foods. Crossing Kiyosu Bridge—its iron framework elegantly framed in the early evening—they ate chilled shiratama dumplings suffused with a coolly bitter aroma amid Ningyocho’s charming lights, visited one or two small dance halls in Tokyo’s eastern downtown districts, and Kaihara nonchalantly danced with Kohatsu.

In the dance halls of this neighborhood, the children of long-established shopkeepers came to dance after removing their work aprons. When Kohatsu occasionally partnered with a somewhat familiar face, "Oh, oh, thank you." They expressed their gratitude with feudalistic hand-rubbing, as if addressing a customer. Kohatsu found this endearing and endured the wood-chip-scented sweat as she danced with them.

Occasionally, they would even venture as far as the Ginza area. Then they would enter establishments of stature like the New Grand, Fūgetsudō, or Monami. Taking seats near the lodge there, this girl devoured the oppressively heavy, luxurious meat dish—unusually substantial for supper—with gusto. Kaihara, without showing any surprise, took Kohatsu at face value as a girl with such inclinations and escorted her to both kinds of venues.

When the moon hung over the high-rise buildings of Nihonbashi-dori Avenue, Kaihara unusually took Kohatsu to a restaurant overlooking the moat at Shinkawa-gashi that night.

“A teahouse?”

Kohatsu knew it was a reputable restaurant, yet deliberately feigned ignorance and asked Kaihara. Kaihara showed no sign of agitation. “I wouldn’t bring a young female instructor like you to such places,” he said. “But is it really okay to be out so late at this hour, I wonder?” “Well, since I’ve arranged a bit of funding there, we have some leeway.” Five or six chilled dishes were laid out, and as the hungry Kohatsu began eating without restraint, Kaihara was carefully drinking from a small bottle of beer. He began speaking intermittently about her father.

“Given how things stand with our Old Master, any recovery of his financial situation seems quite hopeless.” “In business, you must rein in rash impulses on one hand while goading sluggish ideas that cling to old ways into keeping pace with the times.” “That’s where the real knack lies.” “But our Old Master here possesses only both extremes, while being fundamentally devoid of any steady, balanced thinking in between.” “This makes him like a net with a hole right through its center—profits slip straight through.” Kaihara’s tone suggested he bore no particular ill will toward her father, yet conveyed not the slightest interest either.

“I don’t know anything about this, but are you still looking after my father financially these days?”

“No—when it comes to money, I won’t give the Old Master a single brass coin anymore.” “Since I know full well it’ll just vanish.” “And mind you, even the Old Master surely hasn’t forgotten how much trouble I’ve been saddled with since that time I stamped my seal as guarantor for him—though he hasn’t breathed a word about it since.”

Kaihara, trying not to let the sweat from his thick former-palace-carpenter wrists stain his cuffs, firmly rolled up his sleeves and directed them toward the electric fan while intermittently chewing on the remaining boiled beans. After Kohatsu finished eating for a while, she looked around the refined summer dining room—so characteristic of a Tokyo restaurant—with scrutinizing eyes. "You’ve had your indulgences, haven’t you?" she abruptly asked Kaihara, though from what association she couldn’t say. "When I was young, I did." "However, since marrying my current wife, I’ve joined the Fukuzawa sect—Kenzō, you see."

“Having lots of money must be amusing.” “Once you start thinking you have to use it effectively somehow, it stops being fun at all.” “I see.”

Kohatsu had finished the melon concluding the meal course and was skimming the bluish liquid pooled in its rind with her teaspoon’s tip. Their probing eyes met in a sudden moment. “Is there something you want to discuss tonight?” The obligatory question tightened her features. She had always appeared strikingly beautiful. That very dignity compelled Kaihara to face her squarely. Showing no remorse, “As these words come from a man of considerable years, I ask you to listen earnestly.” “This has been discussed with my wife—now that I’ve secured some standing in my modest way, I desire a child of quality and refinement.” “There’s one in my household, but bluntly speaking, they’re utterly worthless.” “In my line of work dealing with people, I can discern these things immediately.” “Bloodlines brook no dispute.” “For generations past, noble blood must have flowed—this manifests in descendants, you understand.”

“This is something I’ve discussed with my wife as well—” Kaihara reiterated in a ritual-like exchange,

“Ms. Kohatsu.” “In this world, even women of considerable intellectual standing have means—resorting to relying on others for financial support.” “I have absolutely no intention of toying with you, Ms. Kohatsu.” “I would like you to pour just a little of that bloodline you possess into the newly established genealogy of my household.”

Kaihara’s flat face—both jaws had swelled slightly—began to show a cunning look, like when seizing an advantage. But that too soon grew vague again, until it became a simple expression of timidity, and he awkwardly averted his gaze.

Kohatsu paid no heed to Kaihara’s demeanor and sank into thought over his words. If he desires my charm, I will indeed give it. If he desires my body, I will indeed give it. Assuming there is a soul—if he desires it, I will indeed give that too. If it is a means for me to return to the heart of this city, I will indeed throw everything into sacrifice. But what of this fifty-year-old former palace carpenter’s ludicrous proposition? “Mr. Kaihara—why don’t you just say you want me straight out instead of talking about wanting a child?”

“Ah.” “I see.” “But I thought it would be too rude.” Looking straight at the face Kaihara had finally turned properly toward her, Kohatsu spoke in a desolate voice. “So you told that trite, transparent lie about wanting me to bear a child?” “I don’t think this is a world that cares about rudeness or shame anymore.” “Because they were caught up in such things, Tokyoites have been steadily overtaken by country folk.” “We have to desperately take back the city!” Kohatsu continued to speak with intense eyes. “For that, we’ll make any kind of deal.”

From Kohatsu's intense eyes fell two or three tears. Kaihara stood utterly discomfited, with nowhere to put himself. Kohatsu wiped her tears. Then she spoke again in a voice grown slightly gentler.

“But Mr. Kaihara—please let everything wait until after the Long-Distance Swimming Event, alright? I know full well how you phrase things.”

Two or three days of clear weather continued. Upstream must have seen considerable rainfall, for the floodway’s surface had swollen, its ochre hue intensifying. The tower-gate-style water gate of the Nakagawa Floodway’s embankment snapped firmly shut. The lumber moat where the swimming area was located and the bases of the reed beds in the vicinity had both swelled amply with increased water volume.

Maintaining an ordinary expression, Kaihara came to help at the swimming area every day. He took measures such as preventing the outflow of his own lumber and tying stones to the anchor of the diving platform. And while pretending not to watch, he was still keeping an eye on Kohatsu’s movements.

On the fourth day, Kohatsu took Kaoru—who had come—to a mound within reed beds slightly removed from the surrounding area. Like turtles sunning their shells in the wind, they lay sprawled side by side on the sand in their swimsuits. Kohatsu needled Kaoru.

“You—do I have to instigate everything myself? Are you cunning, or just spineless? Which is it?”

While Kohatsu’s words betrayed an intense earnestness at their core, her hands moved with playful affectation as she poured sand into the groove of Kaoru’s spine. “There there.” “I’ve been suffering today.” Kaoru brushed it away with his elbow, but Kohatsu ignored him and kept patting the sand poured along his spine to smooth it out. “You don’t look distressed at all.” “That time...in the water with you...it swelled up like this.”

Kaoru carefully presented the darkened corner of his lip. “Oh, so you’re angry about that?” “No—you’re so strong. I can’t bring myself to make casual remarks.” The scorching sunlight blazing down and the searing heat of the mound’s sand against her belly sandwiched Kohatsu’s body from above and below, plunging her into a suffocatingly sweet agony. Kohatsu chanted, “Clank-clunk, clank-clunk,” while saying this, she once again rested her round face atop her crossed forearms and assumed an appearance verging on sleep.

“What are you talking about?” “The sound of machinery belts.”

Exactly at the point forming a triangle with the swimming area and Tsukayama stood Kaihara’s lumber mill, its machinery idle and visible. “Whiiir, rip-rip-rip-rip-rip.” “This is the sound of a mechanical saw cutting wood.” “Stop joking around, alright.” “This is a serious matter.” “I know.”

“You know?” “What about?” “You’ll just get yourself bought off by Kaihara anyway, won’t you?” “Who’s going where?” “I know. Everyone does.”

“Who said such a thing?”

“No one said it.” “But I’m a man who can understand that much.”

Kaoru wiped his tears with arms as alluring as a woman’s. Kohatsu rested her head against Kaoru’s upper body—thickly beaded with sweat like grains of gold dust—and took his hand. She felt pity—and then, the voice of Kaoru, who had just proclaimed himself “a man,” struck her with the reassuring tenderness of a decisive male voice that seemed to have been bestowed upon her since ancient times, bringing her to bittersweet tears. “Forgive me?” “There’s no forgiving or not forgiving here.” “Kaoru, come with me.” “Let’s fall in love openly in the heart of Tokyo, shall we?”

Kohatsu’s tears trickled down the back of Kaoru’s hand and seeped into the scorching sand from between his fingers. Kaoru had been gazing at it—narrowing his eyes as though observing something cool—in rapt absorption, but suddenly his voice thickened into a deep, rough bass. “Well, Mr. Kaihara’s a decent man—he might even intend to look after us while turning a blind eye to whatever’s between you and me.” “But I hate it.” “No matter how much of a greenhorn fresh out of middle school I am, I can’t become such a spineless wretch.”

“Then what should I do?”

“I just can’t do it. “I mean, starting next month I’ll have to replace that poor decrepit old man as a clerk at an electric company in the outskirts, and Ms. Kohatsu is someone who has to live luxuriously right in the heart of Tokyo.” The incident at the restaurant after the dance—Kaihara had gone last night to confide in Kaoru’s father, his friend, about the nearly finalized arrangement to take care of Kohatsu—was something Kaoru finally disclosed to Kohatsu.

Kaoru’s weak, passive resignation blanched his face with tragic solemnity under the blazing sun. “It’s not like it’s anything conclusive…” Kohatsu said, but her voice trailed off at the end as though spoken by someone else.

Kohatsu had been agonizing until today over how to disclose her arrangement with Kaihara to Kaoru. Moreover, even she herself was still tormented by a heart that couldn’t fully resolve matters with Kaihara—but when Kaoru broached it first, her mind instead settled into tranquil stillness. And within this increasingly uncritical state resembling collapse, a cool boundary-line eventually emerged. The Nine Abysses tales from her father’s lips; Greek rhapsodies her friend had translated—that world of Chaos Undivided lurking beneath water… *I don’t care anymore*… She imagined crystalline clarity after washing everything away. Tears on Kohatsu’s tear-stained face dried as distant reed-rustling whispered furtively at her ears. Kohatsu grew sleepy once more.

Kaoru rose from lying prone. From the shallow hem of his waist-only swimsuit, scattering beautiful sand as he went, he began walking—a figure of a well-built boy. Kohatsu gazed up at it for a while as though it were a marvel in broad daylight. Kohatsu was suddenly assaulted by a sorrow that felt like being struck down. Kohatsu was assailed by a sensation as though the sole misattached growth upon her flesh had been torn away and carried off to a world from which there would be no return.

Kohatsu also hurriedly stood up. Kohatsu chased after Kaoru and wound her arm tightly around his.

“Kaoru—but Kaoru, you must come to the long-distance swimming event, okay? Let’s swim our hardest together. If that’s how we must part, then let us part.” “Yeah.” “You’ll come for sure, right? For sure.” “Yeah, yeah.”

And now, watching Kaoru wither and trudge away so sluggishly—past all care for herself or the world—Kohatsu was overcome with sorrow. Kohatsu sat back down on the sandy spot and watched Kaoru’s retreating figure. Into the windless and silent reed beds, Kaoru’s figure vanished away.

Kohatsu could not sleep. Due to the suddenly thickening atmospheric pressure—stifling and muggy—and perhaps also because she had been tossing restlessly, a sorrowful vitality that made stillness impossible kept prodding her drowsiness awake from within. Beside her, her father’s alcohol-reeking snores seemed to catch in his throat, struggling. Father’s asthma, which had once subsided in middle age, had recently begun to flare up again. The recent climatic irregularities seemed especially agonizing tonight. It seemed he wouldn’t even be able to attend tomorrow’s long-distance swimming event… But to Kohatsu, such things didn’t matter—she was preoccupied with how she would disclose to her father the issue with Kaihara that loomed after the long-distance swimming event. Even as the painful emotions from Kaoru lingered on, whenever she looked at her father, she had to consider his feelings as well... Kohatsu felt a weariness of heart that she could not bear alone. Her father imagined his daughter as a mystical maiden—seeking to satisfy the patriarch’s instinct of an old family to worship its own idols—but how would he address the problem with Kaihara? His daughter was a superhuman swimming genius. This pride had been both his lifelong ideal and his sole undertaking. For this reason, after Mother’s death, Father had endured privations without taking a second wife, but in secret, he was being demanded by Kaihara—whom he derided as a country bumpkin—to make [Kohatsu] his mistress, and should he learn of her romantic involvement with Kaoru as well, Father’s last vestiges of pride and hope would be utterly stripped away.

It was not something to be carelessly disclosed...

But Kohatsu had often witnessed in the downtown district how weak-willed city dwellers could transform into calculated villains once flipped. Wasn’t Kaihara precisely anticipating this to keep Father complacent? It wasn’t impossible Father might prove unexpectedly brittle and tumble into that snare himself. Did I actually want Father to fall? Was there truly no survival path for us except through wishing for his collapse...?

Wharf roaches rustled noisily on the floor outside the mosquito net. Had a field mouse crawled up along the pillar? Kohatsu chased them away by striking the floor two or three times with her fan. Her father, half-asleep and not summoned by the noise, responded “Huh?” and turned over—a hollow voice. —A pitiful father and a pitiful daughter.

Kohatsu gently repositioned the thin futon her father had removed and draped it over his chest.

As Kohatsu lay wide-eyed in the darkness, she found herself stroking her own body with both hands. And she began contemplating this flesh of hers—this body inclined toward particular predilections. Kohatsu remembered herself as a child—how she’d hated sweets, stubbornly refusing to eat anything but salt rice crackers. I’ve come to think my body might possess a constitution that cannot endure contact except of one specific kind. I don’t believe I love Kaoru so deeply in my heart. Yet why does parting from Kaoru’s flesh grieve me so? Though I find more reliability in Kaihara’s character—a man weathered by life’s hardships far beyond this simple boy’s meager merits—it’s precisely my body that recoils from him ever more fiercely. Lately, this truth has crystallized with excruciating clarity.

I rather hate my own body—while frantically trying to satisfy one side of life’s desires, it rebels against the means (being bought by Kaihara). The body that tormented me with contradictions and selfishness now filled me with loathing.—This body... this self... if only they would vanish entirely... Kohatsu savagely twisted a part of her own body like a child. Whether from pain or misery, tears akin to resentment streamed smoothly down. Twisted again... twisted again... Then her thoughts gradually sloughed away, and her head sank effortlessly toward the depths of darkness.

Kohatsu woke early in the morning. The sky hung yellow and turbid, the atmospheric pressure heavier still than the night before. Her skin beneath the single layer of sleepwear held a thin chill. Has autumn arrived too soon?

Kohatsu muttered to herself and peered out the window. Mist. Looking closer, the mist was thickening into an ashen mass from the water’s surface. The nearby reed beds lay collapsed under heavy dew.

Today was the day of the Seigairyu Swimming Area’s long-distance swimming event.

Kohatsu was heavy-hearted. Her body felt weary all over. However, since Father—the old master—had suffered severe dizziness after breakfast and become unable to enter the water, Ms. Kohatsu was chosen as the leader. From around ten o'clock, the mist changed into rain mist. Listless rain began falling sporadically. Kohatsu was listlessly attending to the students gathering little by little, but when Kaihara—acting as an assistant—began busying himself with preparing the patrol boat with an unperturbed expression, she felt a strange resistance and became unnaturally cheerful.

“Everyone.” “It’s all right.” “It’ll clear up any moment now, I tell you.” As Kohatsu waved a small red flag and began walking ahead, the group of students—their gathering made sparse by the rain—started chattering even more cheerfully than during their usual large numbers.

Kaoru too joined them midway. Along the wet road, the long-distance swimming event group walked to the edge of the Kasai River. From there, they would slip into the Arakawa Floodway’s waters and, escorted by boats, make their way down to the sea.

Kohatsu entered the water at the front. The male and female students formed two lines and followed after. In the line, each skilled swimmer held a small marker flag and swam at the front. The water’s murkiness had cleared considerably, but fragments of grass leaves and lumber still drifted mixed with bubbles. They had chosen a day of spring tide, so the current inevitably carried the small group of long-distance swimmers out to sea on the ebb tide’s momentum. The faintly visible banks glimpsed through the mist were their sole anchor. Right after Kohatsu, Kaihara swam up holding a marker flag. Kaoru would occasionally swim out to Kohatsu’s side. He swam in silence. The students would each be promoted one rank if they successfully swam the entire course without once boarding the boat to rest during today’s long-distance swimming event. They followed along eagerly, shouting “Heave-ho! Heave-ho!” in unison.

Ahead, a flock of white birds that had been floating on the water flapped their wings and rose. When a student, emboldened, began cutting through with an overarm stroke within the line, Kaihara bellowed loudly. “You’ll wear yourself out—quit using that overarm stroke!”

As they grazed past the reed beds on the west side of the river mouth, the municipal sewage treatment plant came into view through a gap in the mist.

By the time they reached this point, the tide had receded considerably, and when the tall children stretched their legs, their toes now and then touched the sandy bottom.

Kohatsu turned back and said.

“Come on, everyone—overarm strokes from here on out!”

Before long, the group swam from the fan-shaped estuary into the boundless expanse of water and sky. Kohatsu swam on and on, pulling away until—whether she was advancing or retreating alone—she began to feel she was merely moving her limbs through an infinite void. Kohatsu swam recklessly because she was excited. At first, her heart leaped whenever Kaoru’s body appeared by her side. But as that sensation intermingled with Kaihara’s loud voice calling out to Kohatsu, the combined impression from both sides gradually grew more unpleasant. As this excitement akin to antipathy wore down her mind and body, even seeing Kaoru’s flesh became a raw burden. Kaihara’s bellowing had become a nuisance. Kohatsu began swimming recklessly. She swam without even heeding the line of students. As she did so, a strange resolve settled into her.

Throw away every last trivial thing—become a newborn human fresh from the womb. If what confronts me is fate, then I shall press forward to its very roots; if it is circumstance, then I shall corner it at the seed that can no longer be divided—let us fight this duel without pretense. To attempt this challenge, you must never set a purpose. You must never act with calculation. All I can do is stake my entire being on a single throw. From there, you will find a sound life that can truly rise again. Now, spare nothing. Now, throw away everything you possess—discard every last thing—

Chaos Undivided…………

Chaos Undivided………… Chaos Undivided…………

The world into which Kohatsu pressed forward with single-minded focus was that of Chaos Undivided—beyond the white-turbid waves stretching toward unknowable horizons.

“To where I can swim no more… onward… ever onward… Let none of you follow.” Though she never voiced it aloud, Kohatsu raised her head amidst the swelling waves and recognized two men following through the churning water behind her. Kaoru kept silent, slicing through with overarm strokes; Kaihara bellowed desperately between his own frantic strokes. “Idiot… How far will you go… Idiot, lunatic… Kohatsu… Ms…. Ms. Kohatsu… Idiot… Idiot…”

It was the very midst of a wind-whipped sea beneath driving rain. By now, not even the shadow of a single man pursuing her remained visible in the churning waves behind Kohatsu. Tears streaming from her gray ecstasy, she continued cutting through with overarm strokes toward the white-turbid infinite waves—onward and onward.

(September 1936)