Pathway to Japanese Literature

The vegetable had been washed by the elder sister Ochiyo's hands, drained in a bamboo strainer, and placed upon the cutting board at the room's center. For an amateur's household, the kitchen was remarkably well-equipped with every necessary tool. Yet it appeared slightly cramped.

The young cooking teacher Besshirō leaned back in his chair, paused with his cigarette in hand, and listened intently to the sounds outside. Outside, an early winter wind swept through the town’s clamor. It was a bustling yet desolate sound—what one might call the urban winter wind.

The younger sister Okinu had followed her elder sister like a child, peering at each and every one of her actions, but now stood by the cutting board, gazing intently at the vegetables in the bamboo strainer. The vegetable was small, shaped as if a Chinese cabbage had been shrunk to about the length of a middle finger. Yet the delicate plumpness of its stem and the sense of preciousness it exuded made one think it might belong to the category of grass sprouts—something akin to a butterbur shoot, perhaps. The momentum of droplets from the vegetables drained through the bamboo strainer’s mesh began to wane—their spreading across the still-new cutting board’s surface now slowing as they seeped into a map of wet wood grain. In the meantime, Ochiyo—who had been timidly carrying out tools likely to be used in cooking and spice containers from shelves, cupboards, and drawers to arrange them upon the cutting board—grew slightly uneasy at the sight of the cooking teacher remaining motionless even after she had finished laying everything out. She signaled with her eyes to her younger sister—who could speak more easily to the teacher than she could—to inform him that everything was ready. The younger sister pretended not to notice.

The young cooking teacher threw his cigarette butt into the wastebasket and stood up. He swept a piercing glance over the cutting board. He silently pulled out two or three tools deemed unnecessary and threw them to the far side of the cutting board. Then he transferred the vegetables from the bamboo strainer into the white porcelain bowl. His arrogant mannerisms—so stiff they seemed almost deliberately affected—also appeared rough and careless. The teacher positioned a spoon with his left hand above the vegetables in the bowl. He added salt, pepper, and mustard. He added vinegar. Then, when it came time to mix the vinegar in the spoon using the tip of the fork he had picked up in his right hand, he suddenly displayed a nervous demeanor. In the narrow spoon, the fork’s tip moved like a sewing machine. It was so nimble it seemed almost despicable, making one’s armpits prickle with unease. On the surface of the vinegar, ripples like crepe silk wrinkles rose endlessly.

The younger sister Okinu chuckled at his contradiction. Besshirō did not cease the movement of his hands, only his eyes glaring piercingly sideways. The elder sister felt a chill run through her core. The vinegar from the spoon was sprinkled evenly over the vegetables in the bowl.

The young cooking teacher once again positioned a silver spoon horizontally over the bowl, then poured oleo oil from a ceramic jar. “A ratio of one part vinegar to three parts oil.” Having made this solemn pronouncement, when he sprinkled three spoonfuls of oleo oil over the vegetables with the spoon, the teacher had once again adopted an arrogant, careless, and cold demeanor. The method of mixing dressed dishes was akin to a woman applying makeup—one had to strive to preserve the base ingredient’s freshness at all costs. An overmixed dressed dish was like a face thickly coated with white powder—its vital spirit failed to come alive.

“The way you mix tempura batter powder is no different.” Having uttered these words, Besshirō mixed the vegetables in the bowl with rough motions as if demonstrating his point. Yet despite this careless handling, the vegetables were stirred evenly from the bottom—a testament to his seasoned skill. The clusters of endive stems in the white porcelain bowl glistened with oil, sharply deflecting sunlight streaming through the windowpanes. Spiced vinegar perfumed the air like a visual stain of the vegetables’ pale yellow hue. Though early winter still reigned, a crispness lingered as though spring had already stolen in.

Besshirō next switched the spoon for a knife and roughly cut through the cluster of vegetables while they remained in the bowl. He peered at a suitably sized fragment of the portion and stabbed it forcefully with a fork. “Try eating this.” He thrust it before the elder sister. His manner resembled less an invitation to taste the dish than the gleaming blade a stage villain thrusts forth in threat. Ochiyo flinched and drew her chest back, then turned her face toward her younger sister in a deferential manner.

“Oh… Well then,” “Here goes.”

Besshirō transferred the fork to the younger sister’s chest level. Okinu gave a visible swallow in the depths of her smooth neck. Through the haze of her long lashes, she fixed her gaze on the fork, and the moment her pupils locked onto the fragment, she extended a small rounded fingertip to pluck the endive. Okinu’s small, elevated nose—its seed-shaped nostrils—widened with appetite. The fragment of endive was carefully crushed within Okinu’s mouth. At the moment the bitter flavor transformed into sap and was swallowed, the deliciousness that hollowed out her heart set Okinu’s chest aflutter. What vexed her was how a faint bitterness lingered afterward in her mouth like the shadow of a crescent moon. This faint bitterness lightly wiped away the clinging memory of lunchtime meat flavors, transmuting them into something nostalgically palatable. The endive fragment both achieved this effect and itself dissolved so softly that one scarcely felt having consumed it. Not even dregs remained.

“It’s frustrating, but it’s delicious though.” Okinu pressed the corner of her saliva-moistened lip with the back of her hand and said this. “It must be delicious. That’s why I say you should taste the food before complaining.”

Besshirō’s small eyes gleamed triumphantly. “Even the girl who’s always nitpicking others can’t say a word against how delicious my cooking is. How’s that? Admit defeat?” Besshirō pressed his attack and declared. Okinu gathered both sleeves to her chest and sharply turned her back on the young cooking teacher while,

“I’ll admit defeat for now.”

she responded with a laugh. Seeing that the usual verbal sparring between the young cooking teacher and her sister had concluded without escalating into further noisy arguments or deepening into a stubborn standoff of pride, Ochiyo felt relieved. As relief settled in, a desire to try tasting it welled up even in this elder sister.

“Well then, maybe I should try a piece too...” While saying this as if it were someone else’s affair, she gently guided her fingertips to the bowl, picked up a small fragment, and ate it. “Oh, it’s truly delicious.”

While wiping her mouth with the edge of her cooking apron—eyes vacant—Ochiyo’s face flushed slightly. Okinu peered over her sister’s shoulder into the endive bowl, “Mr. Besshirō, keep that aside for dinner now.” she said. When Besshirō—who had taken out a cigarette—heard this, he grabbed the bowl while keeping the cigarette clamped between his lips, stretched his arm out, and dumped its contents into the wastebasket. “Ah—!” “Cuisine is musical in nature—the same flavor can’t possibly linger until evening. It’s fulfilled in one moment and vanishes in the next.” “That’s precisely where cuisine possesses the quality that makes it the supreme art.”

Okinu gazed at the endive’s early spring hue still peeking out from the wastebasket while— “Besshirō is being mean.” She said this resentfully. “I’ll tell Father on you,” she glared at the young cooking teacher. Ochiyo, feeling she couldn’t remain silent either, placed a hand on her younger sister’s shoulder and glared at him. Upon receiving the four-eyed gaze of the young ladies, Besshirō—seemingly dazzled after all—blinked his small eyes and averted them. His demeanor grew ever more arrogant; stiffening his shoulders, he lit the cigarette in his mouth with a match.

“If you want to eat it that badly, make it yourselves tonight and eat it. And don’t you dare just make a carbon copy of what I did now. Add your own signature twist—originality’s the lifeblood of cuisine.”

He flung the paper bag—still containing vegetables—onto the cutting board before Okinu.

That this amateur-bred cooking instructor—with no particular academic background to speak of—insisted on concocting elaborate theories at every turn and affecting artistic airs was nothing short of ludicrous. Yet it remained undeniable that this young man had devoted both body and soul to food. The sight of him—a young man in a woman’s work sash, tinkering with the bran mixture in a pickling tub—was no ordinary feat, not something one could perform even if asked. Was he born with this extraordinary perseverance in cuisine, or was he clinging desperately to this instinct out of some deliberate resolve?

Fragments of words Besshirō had discarded resurfaced in Okinu’s heart. "The world changes and people come and go, yet human appetite remains unaltered." "Nothing is as honest as food—you know instantly whether it’s delicious or foul." “Deliciousness is a mystery”—though this could describe the allure between humanity’s other instincts and their objects, when Besshirō declared it, one sensed this particular flavor alone embodied that truth. Might this young man be a lopsided soul—his other temperaments, senses, and talents having their buds plucked away, his life forced to grow solely toward the realm of taste? When demonstrating cooking, Besshirō never performed taste-testing. His entire body had become an envoy of the tongue; through intuition of culinary movements’ order, execution, and rhythm alone, he could apparently discern whether flavors harmonized or clashed. A deformed genius—appetite singularly heightened—destined to contribute to human culture. They say geniuses are generally lopsided souls. Come to think of it, even this comely culinary youth possessed foolish beauty—a quality reminiscent of unglazed earthenware and artificial blooms. Perhaps because his carnal desires had fixated wholly on appetite, leaving ordinary human affections no quarter.

When Okinu—the younger sister who was usually the most talkative—became absorbed in such thoughts, any pretense of formal connection among the three vanished entirely: Besshirō did nothing but repeatedly blow cigarette smoke and lean back in his chair, while Ochiyo, seemingly unable to bear the discomfort of sitting frozen in place, began furtively tidying up the cooking utensils.

A gust of wind blew sand and dust against the windowpane, the sound standing out sharply.

“Even if he is a genius,” Okinu murmured as if to herself, then looked straight at Besshirō’s face. “For a man to be good at cooking—what a vulgar sort of genius.” She burst into laughter as though expelling pent-up emotions.

Besshirō glared resentfully at Okinu but seemed to swallow down whatever had welled up. “Well, guess I’ll head home.”

He stood up dejectedly, took his hat from the stove’s corner, and turned toward the elder sister who had risen to see him off. “Since I won’t be meeting Father today, take care of it and please keep things as they are.”

With that, he exited through the servants' entrance. Walking through the early winter town where gritty sand and dust crunched between the soles of his shoes and the unyielding earth, Besshirō began heading home.

There was considerable distance between Shiba Atagodai—where Araki Keisetsukan Hall stood, to which he went to teach cooking to the sisters—and Nakabashi Hirokoji in Kyobashi Ward, where his home was located. Yet he walked leisurely without even heading toward the nearest tram line.

One reason was that even the tram fare was a matter of thrift for him, but he also had no urgent business to attend to. Another reason was his desire to traverse the peculiar backstreet known as Tunnel Alley.

It was doubtless a remnant of the early Meiji era’s feverish rush to import Western goods. Over the narrow alleyway, a brick-laid tunnel had been constructed wide enough that people seemed to be living atop it as if in two-story houses. From the horizontal windows cut into the walls beneath the tiled roofs, one could occasionally see children’s clothes and such hung out to dry on bamboo poles.

The mouse-gray tile roofs, the ochre walls, the crimson bricks of the tunnel—smoked and bleached until they had utterly lost their primary colors—would taste like rye black bread if rendered as flavors on the tongue, Besshirō always thought. And facing this hollowed shell of luxury stripped of its essence, the small two-story tenements clinging to both sides—with their dull sticky texture—reminded him even of salted thrush intestines. It wasn’t that Besshirō forcibly translated the scenic charm into flavors to savor, but whenever he came here, the aroma of rye and nutty scents permeating thrush intestines arose spontaneously. The great ginkgo tree of Sakumachō brushed against the tenements, appearing like a broom.

He entered this alleyway, passed through the tunnel, and until he turned onto the slightly wider street at the alley’s end, briefly forgot his checkered past, blazing ambitions, unmanageable world, and vexing current circumstances—slipping into a mist-laden state of mind. It was a merging of two sensations—the serenity of existing at the absolute bottom of a world with no further depths to plummet, and the feeling of his soul being seized by a nobility divorced from reality—neutralized into one. Besshirō wondered if this could be called wabi—or something akin to rustic austerity. While passing through this alleyway, he became conscious of himself transforming into an authentic human being—so visibly that it manifested in his very bearing. If he turned back and passed through the tunnel once more, would he be able to immerse himself again in that nebulous consciousness? The answer was no. The profound impression had been a one-time occurrence.

Even if he turned back and wandered through Tunnel Alley again, it was merely a street that felt like a shoddy imitation—filthy and chaotically blended with Japanese and Western elements. Thus, he only passed through once a day, on either his way to or from teaching at Keisetsukan Hall.

As he crossed the earthen bridge and began walking into Nishi-Naka-dori, lights were starting to come on here and there in the town. Besshirō walked the short distance from there to his home in Nakabashi Hirokoji, taking an unnaturally winding route. He would emerge onto main streets, then turn back into alleys, and cut through narrow lanes. At every key spot he peered into, there were food shops of varying sizes. As he passed by those shopfronts, he scrutinized with a sharp glance what special items each establishment had prepared that evening to lure in customers.

At one shop, from behind an oil-paper door adorned with a crest, red crabs and large clams were displayed out front. At another shop, within the show window, grilled skewers of snipe were arranged on a plate alongside red turnips and parsley.

“Everywhere—here and there—they’re still preparing the same old trite dishes.” “Nothing but witless fools.” Besshirō muttered this with an expression both exasperated and self-satisfied. And if it were me—he thought—he would search through the seasonal food almanac for unexpected yet fitting items. When they caught sight of him, voices called out from inside the food shops. “Hey, Mr. Besshirō! Step right in!” Yet their greetings seemed obligatory—merely perfunctory. Every shopkeeper had been worn down by his lectures laden with cutting critiques.

“Even if you tell me to come in, there’s nothing here worth eating for me.” “Well, this is just a humble Suiro eatery after all.” Many shopfronts were passed by amid such exchanges. To avoid having his lack of education exposed, he had developed a habit of aggressively confronting others. He knew it would eventually become grounds for being avoided, yet he couldn’t do anything about it himself. He approached his home, lonely.

When he stepped onto the narrow alley’s gutter board between the main street’s fabric store and tatami matting wholesaler, there came a faint sound—the sensed presence of something small bouncing upon the planks. When he looked up at the darkened night sky, the brim of his old hat slipped askew, and once again something small and cold brushed against his face. Is it sleet already? In an instant, the stark reality of his current circumstances—burdened by an ordinary wife and child passed down from Aunt Reiōhi, living in poverty—welled up in his chest. Now, just a few steps away from having to witness that stark reality before his very eyes, Besshirō felt not weariness but a surge of rage rising in his chest. Suddenly, the figure of Okinu—the younger sister at Keisetsukan Hall—floated into his mind's eye. She always wore a look of contempt and spoke bluntly, yet remained this mystifying presence that compelled him to dream of a young poem—delicate-textured, supple, lonely yet resonant—that defied written words.

"Why can't I live with Okinu whom I love so deeply, residing in a wealthy mansion where I might lead the life I desire?" "They instill in humans this craving to be liked, yet refuse to grant what it hungers for directly." "I don't know who did it—whoever fashioned this world is a contemptible wretch."

Bearing this resentment as he crossed the threshold, his voice when entering the house took on a gouging malice.

“Hey. Did you get the beer? You didn’t forget, did you?”

Facing the child under the five-candlepower electric light, his wife Itsuko—who had been eating dinner by feeding the child one bite and taking two for herself—hurriedly swallowed what was in her mouth to avoid being discovered. She pressed her sleeve to her mouth and came rushing out. “Welcome home.” “Atsushi was crying so much from hunger that I was feeding him dinner, so I didn’t notice your return. I’m sorry.”

Even as she spoke, she was dealing with the remnants of food caught between her molars and cheek, working them to the back of her mouth. "I’m asking if you got the beer!"

“Yes, yes.”

Itsuko slung Atsushi—still clutching his chopsticks—onto her back at an angle, then clattered in her geta over the sleet-slicked gutter boards to the liquor store on Higashi-Naka-dori to fetch the beer. With a rigid expression pushed to the brink of that tragic realm where one more jab would make him either flare up in anger or shed a tear, Besshirō sat cross-legged before the chabudai. The chabudai was strewn with a few small plates and bowls, rice spilling from a tilted rice bowl left haphazardly. Under the five-candlepower light’s dim illumination, the pitiful scene of havoc appeared like traces left when some animal—desperately devouring meager scraps to sustain its life—had been driven away mid-feast by an intruder.

“Disgusting.” Besshirō spat out these words and crossed his arms.

This Shiinsō residence originated when Araki Keisetsu—father of Okinu and her sister, a Chinese classics scholar—had found his shop’s premises cramped while operating Keisetsukan Hall on Nakabashi’s main street, where he sold art albums and rubbings; seizing the opportunity when a house went up for sale in this diagonally opposite alley, he purchased it, renovated it, and began using it as his residence. It even contained a modest garden, with the twelve-mat main parlor featuring a tokonoma alcove crafted from exotic wood that maintained an elegant air. Afterward, Keisetsu’s Chinese-Japanese dictionary became a success, and through his knack for profitable ventures, he gradually amassed wealth. He relinquished the main street shop to others, built a mansion on the scenic overlook of Shiba’s Atagoyama, and transferred the Keisetsukan Hall name there as well. The alley’s Shiinsō residence had remained shuttered for some time until Besshirō curried favor with Keisetsu and became something akin to an Araki family retainer; consequently, Keisetsu rented this Shiinsō to Besshirō along with a modest monthly stipend. However, this came with conditions. Maintain thorough cleanliness; avoid frequent use of the main parlor— Thus, the Besshirō couple designated the adjacent six-tatami room as their regular living space. When the couple had a child the year before last autumn, Keisetsu scowled in displeasure, complaining the house would become soiled.

"With just a paltry stipend, he’s blowing his own hot air." "I’ll have to make him foam at the mouth one of these days."

But then again, he couldn’t suddenly devise any significant scheme. The more he dwelled on such thoughts, the more wretched the scene before his eyes became. Besshirō clicked his tongue and turned his head back toward the kitchen table. With his hands in his pockets and palms pressed against his distended stomach, it growled around the pit of his stomach. “What the hell have those idiots at home been eating?” Simmered sweet potatoes tumbled out of the shallow dish, rice grains clinging to them. “What? They’re eating potatoes.” “Pathetic lot.”

Besshirō wore an expression of utter contempt, but he—who normally permitted his family only inexpensive fare—seemed somewhat heartened to see them adhering to his edicts. “Hmph, hmph, hmph. What half-assed way did they cook these potatoes?” “Let me give one a try.” He brushed off the rice grains clinging to the sweet potato and tossed it into his gaping mouth. It was surprisingly well-cooked.

“This’s good! They didn’t half-ass it.” Besshirō made an indescribably ticklish face.

Itsuko returned, sleet collected behind her bangs. With the hand not supporting the child, she presented two beer bottles she had brought. “For now, I’ve brought this much.” “The rest will be delivered by the young man from the shop, I’m told.”

Besshirō had always instructed his wife. When attempting to drink one bottle of beer，one must have three more prepared afterward． Only with such preparations in place could he drink down that one bottle with a sense of boundlessness and boldness． If one attempts to drink a single bottle when only that one exists，the awareness of its finite quantity weighs on the mind，making it impossible to even fully savor that sole bottle beyond its mere measured worth． It was ultimately a detrimental way to drink． Bottled beer，after all，doesn’t spoil，so there’s no harm in keeping extra on hand． Moreover，one should appropriately keep extra bottles on hand as a mental reserve． Now，Itsuko’s method of ordering beer from the liquor store aligned perfectly with Besshirō’s usual instructions．

“Good, good,” said Besshirō.

He commanded his wife to set up his dinner seating in the main parlor. This was an unusual occurrence.

His wife

“If—just in case—we were to dirty it, would that be all right?” she tentatively pressed, but her husband merely twitched his eyebrows and did not respond. Fearing that ruining this good mood would spell trouble, Itsuko retied the child to her back with a cloth strap and set about preparing the main parlor. On the tatami mats lay fully spread dirt-repellent shibugami paper; even the folding screens, framed scrolls along the lintel, and alcove ornaments bore dust-proof cloth bags over them. It was as though the parlor’s furnishings conspired to treat them—the residents—as a foreign species, striving with all their might to prevent being seen or touched, as if such contact were sacrilege. After this, being made to see so vividly the heartlessness of Keisetsu—the owner who had deigned to rent them this house—Itsuko burned with resentment.

While savoring the satisfying thrill of revenge, she stripped away every last one of these coverings. After securing a hand towel over the child’s eyes and nose to keep out dust, she briskly beat and swept through the parlor. Somehow sensing her husband’s mood tonight, she also replaced the light bulb with a 50-watt one. Standing in the brilliantly illuminated parlor and looking around, Itsuko felt refreshed for the first time in a long while. However, Itsuko—timid at heart—soon began to feel as though she were committing some secret transgression against the house’s owner, and could not linger in her survey of the room. She placed the zabuton cushion, set a beer bottle beside it, then withdrew to the adjoining tea room where she resumed the interrupted mother and child’s dinner.

During this time, Besshirō—who had been making noisy preparations with something in the kitchen—slid open the fusuma and brought out a portable stove bearing a ceramic pot. He brought out a jar mounded in a conical shape with white contents, a bowl containing a brown lump, a plate lying flat with white items, something fragrant, and a properly arranged lacquered dining tray. He brought out a soy sauce pourer, a personal salt dish, a flat soup spoon, and a tray laden with assorted items. On the fourth trip, he brought out a beer bottle opener and glass with the stiffly formal elbow posture of a samurai entering the parlor one-handed, then stripped off the strange covering cloth wrapped around his waist and flung it into the kitchen. When he shut the sliding doors completely, he walked through the parlor, came to the veranda area, and opened the glass-paned doors. The dark garden, under the electric lamp’s glow, brought forth the faint shadows of small artificial hills and ponds like low-relief carvings, while sparse sleet grazed vertically across their surfaces as it fell. Fortunately, there was no wind, so in the cold room, both the portable stove’s fire and the hibachi’s fire remained steady.

He sat cross-legged on the zabuton cushion, placed a hand on the beer bottle, and smiled while facing through the wall. “Hey, I’m begging you—don’t let the kid cry tonight.” He brought the first glass of beer to his lips and gulped it down in three swift draughts. He wiped the foam from his lips with his palm, then let out a satisfied “Ugh...” as he belched. To his wife Itsuko beyond the wall, this exaggerated manner of savoring seemed almost like playful mimicry of a rakugo storyteller’s gestures.

He next placed his hand on the lid of the ceramic pot resting on the brazier, let out a shout, and lifted it high. The aroma of boiled daikon rose as steam alongside simmering broth. “My craft flows smooth—now witness this skill!” He had delivered this with dramatic inflection, but apparently unable to withstand the lid’s heat—tsk, tsk tsk—he hastily set it down; even this Itsuko perceived through the wall. With droplets from what seemed a lid placed directly on them—weren’t the tatami mats getting damaged? Pushing aside her chilling worry, absurdity welled up in Itsuko. She stifled a laugh. The husband whom the world saw as arrogant and who acted a tyrant toward their family became gentle, innocent—almost childlike—only when engaged with food. She covered the child she was bedding down beside—lying close to lull them—to keep inexplicable tenderness from spilling into tears. She slipped her hand between the child’s quilted jacket and inner clothes, pulling them close. The dozing child’s body lay pliantly soft and cozily warm.

In the main parlor，Besshirō continued drinking beer with daikon dishes as his accompaniment. The ingredients were limited to a single，rather ordinary Nerima daikon he had managed to find in the kitchen，yet he had prepared this according to the formal structure of one soup and three dishes，and arranged it with due ceremony. Namely，for the vinegared dish he shredded the daikon，while for the simmered dish he sliced it into rounds and simmered them with bonito flakes. On the plate for grilled dishes，daikon was carved into small fish shapes and arranged. The pot served as soup substitute.

And thus he believed he had perfected the one-soup-three-dish menu. There was something obstinate about him. When encountering opulent ingredients he could be satisfied with a single variety, but when faced with meager provisions he demanded formal beauty. He knew of the lifestyle maintained by Fukuchi Gen’ichirō—the critic of civilization and enlightenment in early Meiji who later became playwright for the ninth Danjūrō, known by his pen name Ōchikusai. This Edo-born author of samurai stock would invariably arrange even his household’s paltry side dishes into the one-soup-three-dish structure when serving guests amidst direst poverty. Thus it was said cuts of salted salmon often found their way onto his grilled dish plates.

He would gather true stories and anecdotes related to cooking from various chefs while imparting his usual overbearing lessons, accumulating countless bits of knowledge through oral transmission. Whenever something came up, he would devise solutions by relying on that accumulated knowledge. He was, rather than original, more of a man with an excellent memory.

He gazed at the formally arranged meal while continuing to eat daikon scraps from the pot between sips of beer. Regarding this dish too, he possessed fundamental knowledge. This was said to be a food favored by Lord Saionji Tōan. When he had first heard this through others, he wondered—could the final taste to grace the tongue of that elderly lord, a man of such refined tastes alongside being a statesman, truly be something so simple? It had struck him as unexpected, yet it was an unexpectedness that carried conviction. And within him burned an earnest wish: to taste for himself—just once—the foods that so-called great people were said to have favored. This was at once a manifestation of his heroism and an exploration of greatness itself. To him, tasting someone’s favored foods and thereby tracing back to discern their true nature seemed the most honest and straightforward method of character assessment.

The pot’s simmered broth had been seasoned with his special homemade vegetable extract that he had prepared and stored beforehand. As early winter set in, the daikon had begun to plump up. Amidst the ginkgo-shaped pieces floating up from the pot’s bottom through seven or eight bubbles, he selected those he considered just right with his chopsticks. He dipped a corner of a piece into the pooled soy sauce in his personal salt dish, blew to cool it, and ate.

Raw and pure, the humble flavor possessed solely by nature’s essence melted delicately and softly each time a piece entered his mouth. There was a coarse scent of daikon root. It was unexpectedly sweet. “Ah, I see now.”

He uttered an admiring soliloquy.

He ate them one after another while blowing vigorously on the now-boiling pieces. It was closer in manner to sucking than to eating. There was the insatiable manner of a mole devouring its food.

All the while, he occasionally extended his chopsticks toward the mortar used for grating daikon but ultimately never touched the bowl of simmered daikon. Having finished eating and apparently savored his fill, he began closing the brazier’s vent and gazed out at the hail-strewn garden. Not much of a drinker, he sat cross-legged with his left elbow planted on his left knee, his upper body already swaying unsteadily. The frequent belching was no longer for show but the genuine article—the slowed gastric walls of his dilated stomach undulating back against the irritation of what he’d consumed. From time to time, a bittersweet viscous mass would rise up choking into his mouth. In it were mixed raw, half-chewed fragments of daikon. He would invariably perform this belching after meals, and had developed a habit of regurgitating without restraint even in others’ presence. Listening through the wall, Itsuko thought with irritation: He’s started again. Having grown accustomed to seeing his father do that after family meals, it was because Atsushi couldn’t help imitating him.

The belching was unpleasant, but to overcome that discomfort, he kept drinking beer and smoking—and through this act, an unreal yet beautiful unease arose within him. “At times like this,” he murmured, “it seems I can feel like a normal person—I can cherish my wife and child.” He often said such things to Itsuko. While layering quilts over her now-sleeping child, Itsuko wondered: “Then does he dwell in that turtle-like creature’s mindset—the nickname Keisetsu gave him—at all other times?”

Besshirō smoked a cigarette while contemplating the hail-strewn garden in what he called an ordinary state of mind. Night had fallen, and it felt as though the darkness had thickened. The wooden fence enclosing the garden remained invisible, leaving only an impression of endless dark stretching toward the horizon. Under electric light, the small artificial hill, thicket of branches, pond, and garden plants resembled nothing more than a flimsy stage set clad in tinplate and wire outlines. A devouring darkness that never disgorged. What if humans were caught in this terrible dark force—insensate yet infinitely digestive? Even weeping or screaming changed nothing; bodies dissolved like insects trapped in sundew—aware of their dissolution yet powerless—squealing jee-jee as they were consumed. Forever—

Besshirō never failed to envision death from time to time. The ferocity implanted within him—that even he himself could not contain—he would charge into society seeking, if nothing else, to make the world understand. Society would curtly rebuff him, refusing to treat it as someone else’s affair. He would bristle with rage, adopting a warrior’s demeanor as he charged onward. Even if they called him mad, this time his very body would be stripped away. Every trick in the book. When he had been rejected by society and left exhausted of all vitality, with only a leaden yet faintly itching ache lingering to the very marrow of his being, he would envision death. It was something that settled everything for him. When he lay himself down with the death he had envisioned and looked back upon his life, he could resign himself with startling ease—That was, in the end, all it amounted to. A resolute bitter smile would form on his lips. Without envisioning such death from time to time, how could someone as intense as himself have managed to live on in this world until reaching the age of thirty? he wondered.

The death he envisioned—which made him resign to life with the thought *That was, in the end, all it amounted to*—was itself rendered trivial in nature precisely through this act of resigning life to such thoughts. If life could be dismissed as *that was, in the end, all it amounted to*, then death too was merely *this is, in the end, all this amounts to*. He relished pedantic speech, yet he surely lacked both the disposition for deep contemplation and the mental faculty for it.

This came entirely from the sensation of experiences compressed to their limit, and precisely because of that, it remained unshakable. In his youth until early manhood, he had worked as a rubbing craftsman, and through this very sensation he had come to interpret phrases frequently found in those rubbings—such as "life and death as one" or "life is but a bubble's dregs." That was precisely why it had ultimately come down to "just go eat something tasty." Squaring one's shoulders against society wasn't such a burdensome act after all.

But the depth and viscosity of tonight’s darkness—this differed entirely from the resolutely resigned death he had perceived and grasped, and was charged instead with a mysterious force. The emptiness of despair and cruel love had merged into one, possessing a tenacity that would never be satisfied—even through eternal repetition—of licking away at whatever it captured until dissolved, only to recreate it in its original form and begin melting it down anew. Does such a force exist in this world? Besshirō, having until now devoured and tasted various foods, had come to feel that each food possessed a will and power that had brought it into being as such. Extending this to things beyond food—since they too carried a kind of taste in some sense—he came to feel certain such things must exist. But the taste of tonight’s darkness! There was nothing that so perfectly symbolized endlessness, infinity, and repetition. Humans have never felt satiated even after eating and eating the foods that insects adore. Is there not something that runs directly parallel to what those insects crave?

Could this be what one might call the cosmic appetite? Compared to this, human desire pales into insignificance.

“Damn,” he muttered.

For the first time in ages, he examined his own unpleasant past upbringing. He was born the only child of a prestigious large temple in Kyoto and lost his father at a young age. His mother had been a young common-law wife never legally registered; the temple itself was embroiled in disputes over its religious lineage; and its new head priest had unexpectedly come from elsewhere. Mother and child were left nearly naked when effectively expelled from the temple. All this resulted from his father—reputed as a serene, eminent monk—having disdained worldly affairs, yet for some reason his mother bore no resentment. "He was like a child himself—so he bears no blame." She relayed what might be called his sole testament—words spoken when their son was born. "When this child comes to understand the world, I'll likely already be dead from old age." "Having suffered, he may resent us—wondering why we brought him unasked into this agonizing *saha* world." "But when that time comes, tell him this." "It's no different for us—we too were cast unasked into this painful *saha* existence that makes parents suffer. We're even." These words had struck him as callous, yet left a peculiar resonance in Besshirō's heart—something beyond mere heartlessness.

At first, the temple disciples took turns sheltering their late master’s bereaved family in their respective temples to repay their debt of gratitude. However, this arrangement did not endure. Every temple contained families that made its dependent residents feel suffocated. The final place they burdened was the home of an elderly rubbing craftsman who had been his father’s Go rival. Though impoverished, life there proved easier since the old man lived alone as a widower.

His mother took care of the old man’s cooking and laundry, and he, having just graduated from higher elementary school, was apprenticed to him as a rubbing craftsman. The old man was an eccentric; when he went out to play Go, he wouldn’t return home for days—but more than that, when spring and autumn brought elementary school sports festivals, he was scarcely ever at home. He would comb through Kyoto’s city center and outskirts to seek out and watch them. He delighted in spreading word of things like “Today’s games at XX Elementary were perfectly coordinated” or “At △△ Elementary’s footrace today there was a child faster than any before.”

During the old man’s absences, he would work in the glue-smelling workshop making rubbings—though the ink’s hues might vary slightly, whether *senchitaku* or *ukintaku*, they were nothing but a merciless black that colored the past itself, a past that would never return to living beings. The character strokes on the rubbings—brought into that blackness, emerging through the cold white expanse—were far too desolate for the young Besshirō. “After the rain, go to the river and catch some small fish. I’ll cook them up nice and tasty for us to eat,” said his mother as she mended clothes.

Besshirō took a bamboo strainer, crossed the embankment, and went down to the river. At that time, there were still small fish in the Kamogawa River. Depending on the season, there were gobies, river loaches, dace—and after rainfalls, even crucian carp and eels would surface as unexpected catches. On this riverbank, a group of neighborhood children were already making a commotion as they fished. On the opposite embankment, a family gathering herbs had descended all the way to the water’s edge to forage. Along the embankment near the fork leading to Kurama, figures holding parasols had grown more numerous. Besshirō—a boy made timid by his circumstances, who shrank from others—avoiding these crowds, fished in a branch stream of the river that lay in the shadow of an embankment’s curve, using the uneven budding willows as a shield to conceal himself. Violets gave off a sweet fragrance. Tadasu no Mori Forest grew hazy and vanished from sight.

"Oh, I'm crying," he thought, and when he closed his eyelids, a water droplet fell onto the tin scraps with a plop. Deft as he was, he still managed to catch about a handful of small fish in that brief time. When he brought them back, the mother would skillfully cook them, and in the dim light of early spring evenings, while looking after someone else’s house in their absence, the two of them—mother and child—would have their supper. The mother disliked speaking to her son about her origins or circumstances. Yet she was stubbornly insistent on her appetite—even first thing in the morning, she couldn’t bring herself to pick up her chopsticks for a meal unless there was at least a bit of fish or meat. As if excusing this, she would say: “What can I say—I was raised however I pleased in a land where food was scarce!”

Besshirō had managed to gather only fragments of his mother’s background from others. In Osaka’s Senba district, at a prime location, there had been an old shop owner—a devotee who had deeply revered Besshirō’s father. After a strange succession of misfortunes, his shop collapsed, and leaving behind only his daughter, he too succumbed to a fatal illness. Though unskilled in such matters, Besshirō’s father had gone so far as to involve himself in financial affairs to assist them in various ways, but it ultimately proved futile. However, it was said that the ailing master—who had resigned himself to all being the work of past karmic sins—sent his daughter to the temple of Besshirō’s father (then living as a widower after losing his wife) so she might at least tend to his daily needs, thereby repaying years of kindness and eliminating those sins before passing away himself. Though she would not speak of other matters, even his mother would lament: “Here I am—having entered temple service to purge my karmic sins—yet I can’t even renounce something as base as appetite. It shames me deeply, but I suppose remnants of those sins must linger—there’s simply no helping it.” While occasionally letting slip this lament—though she claimed it minimal—she never ceased scavenging for food.

When Besshirō was a young man, he found himself increasingly requested to assist at various elegant gatherings. In this ancient capital whose citizens styled themselves as arbiters of refined taste, there were many so-called gatherings for koto music, go strategy, calligraphy, and painting. It began when he substituted for the elderly rubbing craftsman at an exhibition hosted by an antique dealer they frequented—this became the catalyst for Besshirō to start receiving requests from all quarters. The youth—his explosive talent veiled by social timidity—possessed an arresting quality. His delicately thin skin flushed sakura-pink from plump cheeks down to his chest carried both fragrance and moisture like new spring leaves. The sight of him wearing remade garments from the old craftsman’s antiquated kimono and hakama while orchestrating seating arrangements found particular favor among connoisseurs. People began playfully calling him Sen no Yoshirō—invoking the childhood name of tea ceremony founder Sen no Rikyū. Whether Rikyū had truly been such a beauty in youth remains unknown, but this Yoshirō—evoked through anecdotes of Rikyū’s precocious aesthetics like sweeping autumn gardens clean only to artfully scatter crimson leaves—had to be a beautiful youth like him. He accepted this jesting epithet readily, even coming to proclaim it himself with considerable pride.

He could eat stylish bento boxes, and this assisting role—which even allowed him to receive small amounts of tip money—pleased him. After receiving two bento boxes to eat and being served a bowl of matcha, he slipped through the red-and-white striped curtain encircling the tatami room to take a short rest. It was an engawa running along the garden. The sun shone brilliantly, and from the garden's fresh green leaves, drops of sunlight seemed to drip. The engawa was thoroughly illuminated and warmed. He lay spread-eagled on the engawa, stroking his full stomach as he began to doze off. The noon bells of Chion-in and Shōgo-in still had not ceased ringing. The Thirty-Six Peaks of Higashiyama lay softened as if squinting beneath a summer haze beginning to linger. Here on the engawa, there were no human figures. However, in the central corridor connecting the waiting room of the separate hall to the performance area, footsteps rumbled incessantly as if a line of carts were passing through. From the direction of that waiting room, preparations for the afternoon performance seemed already underway; the sounds of koto and kokyū being retuned against the shakuhachi reached his ears like spilled fragments of sound. A blind person’s nasally congested voice and young girls’ laughter mingled among them.

Young Besshirō, while encircled by such scenery and sounds yet unperturbed by them, deemed the brief moment of escaping to doze off alone a pleasant interlude. The morsel filling his belly, warmed by the sun’s rays—its savory essence melted like oil, moistening bone and flesh to overflowing—now seeped throughout his entire body, which he felt with sensuous richness. He felt his body had become gilded, transformed into something of worth. The thoughts—seething with suppressed fury in the depths of his heart—now felt like spices from within, stimulating and enhancing this abundant flesh to even greater richness. That sweetly thrilling scent of pleasure—a peony field must lie somewhere in this garden.

The old capital’s sky spread clear in cerulean. A single wisp of white cloud drifted lightly past—between peacefully closed eyelids, within a contented heart. That single wisp simultaneously passed into the dream of his nap, becoming a glistening swan that glided by on outstretched wings. The melancholy of early summer.

“Yoshirō-san, sleeping in a place like this.” “There’s something to do, so come on, get up now,” The tip of his nose was pinched. The beautiful middle-aged lady’s soft, supple fingers.

Besshirō gradually stopped returning home. Rather than endure a wretched life in the impoverished rubbing craftsman’s home with his mother—who resembled a palace lady turned female hungry ghost—wandering through gaudy, bustling banquets filled with young women made each passing day entertainingly bearable and far more agreeable. A single unwavering conviction took root at his core. The anxiety that life would prove perilous without seizing some singular vocation—a professional skill surpassing others to secure his standing—especially when fanned by those seething, furious thoughts lying dormant in his heart’s depths, ignited into flames of torment that left him no peace. Yet the more intensely he felt this scorching heat, the more he sought to scrub it away at the edges, plunging ever deeper into a world of chaos and flux. Through his innate dexterity during this time, he naturally acquired the skill to handle most hobbyist arts at a provincial beginner’s level. He had become the versatile Yoshirō. Every master’s household welcomed him. At Go institutes he served as a partner for novice guests; at koto houses, even without summoning a koto master, any slackened strings were tightened by him. At ikebana houses he prepared floral arrangements for young ladies; at tea ceremony houses he became a trusted advisor regarding tea preparation and kaiseki cuisine for both young ladies and wives. The rubbing craftsman performed tasks akin to a mounting artisan preparing stone rubbings into model calligraphy albums, as well as work resembling an engraving artisan carving rubbings onto woodblocks for printing. From there he naturally took up mounting work and swords alike, engaging in wood carving and seal engraving. He wrote characters by imitating Song dynasty rubbings as he saw them. Painting was where he excelled most—there were even times when he considered dedicating himself entirely to making his livelihood through this.

If requested, he would supply anything in time. Where in the world existed a place that wouldn’t welcome such a handyman?

He wandered about, unconsciously forgetting the sorrows of each passing day. His mother, convinced that Besshirō was out gathering knowledge for his studies and would soon grasp something significant, left him be with an understanding look; meanwhile, the elderly rubbing craftsman grumbled repeatedly about the lack of helping hands in his work, yet never delivered what could be called a proper scolding.

The masters and senior disciples took him around to renowned restaurants in the city—Hyōtei, Tawaraya, and others—as if forming an entourage around him. Not only did he never lack fine food, but through his innate talent, he came to perceive the secrets of cuisine. As he went about this, something came to be noticed about Besshirō. While being welcomed in various places, he was never once shown what might be called respect. Born into a large temple; having experienced being positioned as the eldest son, if only in childhood; and seeming to have inherited the pride his mother held as the daughter of an old-established shop—his inherent nature was that of a man of haughty disposition. It galled him to be dismissed merely as "versatile Yoshirō." The seething, furious thoughts that lay dormant in the depths of his heart now seemed to have half arisen from that very source. He wanted by any means to be called *Sensei*.

To him—whose timid heart had been nearly stripped away by being jostled among the crowd—this new desire rising from his very core spurred him further toward activeness. He learned to handle people domineeringly and acquired the skill of contemptuously brushing them off with a sniff. He mastered the art of criticizing everything to assert himself. He took care to adopt an affected posture even in his personal bearing. He took out a hand mirror and gazed intently at himself. He lamented that the youth reflected there was too young and beautiful, lacking the dignified maturity befitting one called *Sensei*. He strained to make even his diction imposing and precocious. At his affectedly sudden change in demeanor, the timid ones began cowering and keeping their distance. The strong ones rebelled and reviled him. “What’s this? A stone-rubbing craftsman putting on airs!” And those who would call him *Sensei* were only the cooks.

“Yoshirō has changed.” “He’s become quite peculiar, hasn’t he?” became the general opinion among the cultured society. There had been a lover dwelling in his heart—pitiable as a dayflower—yet this fragile bond shattered beneath the weight of rumors, vanishing without ever bearing fruit. For a young person who had once yielded to this imposing and lofty exaggerated attitude, it proved exceedingly difficult to submerge themselves again and refine their very texture. Besshirō could not entirely claim ignorance toward himself regarding from what aspect of his being this misguided reputation had originated. “It’s because I lack education.” This fact was for him the most painful and galling self-reproach. And now, he pitied himself—this self who, due to unfortunate circumstances, had been unable to attend higher schools or follow an orderly course of study. However, taking this as resentment—when it came to determining where to direct the roots of that resentment—the matter proved too multifaceted and complex for him at the time to fully grasp. Rather than lamenting, there was no choice but to secretly study even while lagging behind and catch up. He assiduously endeavored to read books. But for a man like him—who through wit, intuition, and toil had already plucked only conclusions from the world’s generalities—how could texts tediously detailing their processes be regarded as anything but discourteously roundabout? He would grow drowsy the moment he opened a page. As he forced himself to keep reading, the bleakness gave him a headache, and he found himself yearning for something flavorful to soothe his throat. He stood up to hunt for delicious food.

In the end, he had no choice but to further hone his accustomed methods of learning through observation and hearsay. And until now, the manner in which he had awkwardly and modestly acquired knowledge was merely changed henceforth to a method of wresting it from others amidst the turmoil of clashing confrontations. Did he truly wish to earn something called respect to such a degree? Indeed. Before he consciously sought respite in culinary tastes, being addressed as Sensei had indeed held greater allure for him than any lover. Through this approach, he lost many old acquaintances but gained a small number of eccentric ones. In the world, amidst the clamor of clashing gongs and twisting cymbals, there do exist interactions akin to Chinese melodies where kindred spirits and friendship can resonate. The ones Besshirō gravitated toward were such older individuals—their hearts calloused by hardship, their emotional membranes thickened.

At that time, the owner of Maison Higaki—a modern Western restaurant in Kiyamachi—was also one of them. This chef who had returned from America harbored a peculiar yearning for art and the lives of artists, painting oil paintings during lulls in managing his restaurant. The room where he slept and lived was arranged like an artist’s studio. He would seize upon any customer to regale them with tales of New York’s literati village. This town, attempting to mimic Paris’s artistic quarters, possessed something bizarre and stimulating through its blend of American temperament and exaggeration born of longing. The owner recounted them with apostolic passion. He applied it to the restaurant’s facilities as much as possible.

The evening of the god of wine’s festival.

That youths drawn to novelty and young artists gathered at this shop—with its room of blue candles—was only natural. In this ancient capital, there lingered in young people's lungs an air heavy with nothing but desolation. To repel and shatter this required extreme counterforce. Thus Kamigata modernism came to be regarded generally as more discordant and potent than Tokyo's. Besshirō began haunting this establishment. Precisely because they saw through each other's weakness of lacking foundational knowledge, the fiery boasts they exchanged carried no oppressive weight. With carefree intuition, they could ascend to clouds and bridge the sky. By arrogantly overwhelming debate opponents—baring contemptuous fangs to gain adversaries who'd clash opinions unreservedly—they felt they could expend their full vigor. Meanwhile, employing cunning to pilfer knowledge through eavesdropping and wrest benefits brought them equal delight. While Besshirō trumpeted the mystical profundity of Eastern aesthetics, Higaki's proprietor extolled the visceral rawness of Western tastes. Thus knowledge was exchanged and stored within each other's arsenals.

The one point where their opinions always aligned was their art-for-art’s-sake attitude. They felt only through what they called art—something ascendable by intuition—could they reclaim themselves from being erroneously born into the lower classes to positions befitting self-respect. They boasted of their discernment’s height and breadth. In this matter, they permitted each other latitude. They lauded one another as those who could pass discerning judgment without discrimination across the Four Arts of zither, chess, calligraphy, and painting—extending even to women, theater, pottery, cuisine, and philosophical thought. “Aren’t we geniuses?” “Not geniuses.”

The owner of Higaki had a chest illness. His continued bachelorhood stemmed from this condition, yet his ardent passions imbued even the dim, hazy oils he painted and eclectic collections he amassed with an erotic scent. His gaunt frame—tall and marbled with bluish shadows—gasped ceaselessly under the torment of inner cravings finding no fulfillment. In contrast stood Besshirō: average in stature yet unnaturally robust, his physique permitting indulgence of every carnal appetite. Save for particular hungers, this very capacity to savor desires to satiation conversely granted him serenity.

The owner of Higaki took Besshirō along, leading him from the evening-cool pavilions of the Kamogawa River to the shadows of dark crimson lanterns in Miyagawachō, through both refined and vulgar amusements. There too, those who left gloomy regrets through excessive savoring and those who attained bright serenity through reaching saturation stood in stark contrast. Toward Higaki's owner’s shadowed lingering attachments, Besshirō sensed both instinctual shallowness and depth, while Higaki’s owner felt jealousy and awe toward Besshirō’s physique. The two men secretly thought, “That guy’s something else,” clicking their tongues in mutual astonishment.

The relationship between these two men—while marked by contradictions and hidden aspects, yet ultimately anchored in mutual recognition—became entangled like rope, its knots gradually tightening. For the prideful middle-aged artisan-turned-intellectual and the youth who, feeling threatened by society's properly educated classes, sought to sneer down from their isolated caste—they were matchless counterparts who relished cursing encroaching threats while entrenched in their solitary stratum. They grew lonesome unless meeting nearly every day.

While Besshirō consistently took an antipodal stance against the owner of Higaki, always asserting the profound loftiness of Eastern art when confronting him, there were elements he could unhesitatingly grasp when savoring what the owner of Higaki called Western art—works modeled after renowned masterpieces through reproductions and such. What the owner of Higaki had brought back were primarily works by modern French masters, but for those who had glimpsed such things only fleetingly through the interstices of Eastern discipline and morality, works that permitted instinct, permitted sensuality, permitted indulgence—nay, even permitted carnality—could only be met with astonishment. They were laid bare without shame or regard for appearances—embarrassingly so. “These things are anything but amateur work,” Though Besshirō addressed the owner of Higaki in this restrained manner, his physical senses applauded as though they’d found their spokesperson.

He found the Western food he increasingly ate while frequenting this shop delicious, and the Western cultural lifestyle he was told about by the owner through various conversations seemed both convenient and fresh.

Besshirō returned to the workplace of his upbringing with these perceptions and knowledge. He lectured on dessin to those involved in calligraphy and painting, invoking names like Van Gogh and Cézanne. To circles where tea ceremonies and flower arranging were practiced, he advocated holding tea parties, extolled the virtues of apéritifs, and uttered Western-coined technical terms like "composition" and "nuance." In the various arts of the East as well, there existed those inherent qualities arising from practical necessities—they differed only in name and tradition. Therefore, what Besshirō said was largely comprehensible even to those engaged in these traditional arts, and discerning individuals dismissed Western ideas as nothing special—yet the prevailing trend of seeking novelty under modernity’s banner turned its back on him with muttered criticisms like those heard “at the bamboo railings of the Aoi Festival.” While grumbling with jaded bitterness behind his back, the elegant society of this ancient capital found itself compelled to seek stimulation and ideas from him when they came around. His popularity was restored. He proposed outlandish notions—permitting encores for sankyoku performances, pairing nude statues with floral arrangements—but through innovations like chair-table tea ceremonies and incorporating Western dishes into kaiseki menus, he became the driving force beneath the eaves that popularized methods previously confined to select circles. He came to be called “Teacher” here and there.

He rode this momentum to force his way into the group of young artists gathering at Maison Higaki. His high-handed arrogance and crude manner inevitably clashed with these delicate-nerved intellectual youths. Though he thought he had overwhelmed and confounded them, he ultimately sensed a distinct thud of rejection in their silence. Indescribable though it was, this possessed an eerie power that carelessly shredded his courage to join modern youth’s ranks. He could not help but reflect.

It was a spring evening. On Higaki's second floor, a welcome party had gathered. They had arranged this dinner by inviting Madame—a female poet and Buddhist scholar—who happened to be visiting the ancient capital to lecture at a sect-affiliated girls' school. The painter husband accompanied her. Table speeches concluded briskly, giving the gathering an air of relaxed intimacy among acquaintances. Yet Besshirō had long nursed unresolved objections toward Madame's mannerisms—attitudes he'd observed through magazines. That someone engaged in art should shackle themselves to religion—Madame's advocacy of Buddhism felt akin to siding with the temples that had tormented him since childhood and endorsing his own wretched circumstances. Finally emerging from the circle of small talk, he interjected with sarcasm lacing his voice. Madame's girlish face—appearing to have matured without enduring hardship—provoked in him an urge to torment her somehow.

The Madame assumed a slightly rude expression but swallowed her anger and replied, “No, that’s precisely why I haven’t told you to give it to someone who needs nothing.” Besshirō pressed harder with an aggressive retort, but the Madame merely repeated, “I cannot discuss such matters with someone who asks in that manner.” To Besshirō, it seemed as though some naive girl was stubbornly digging in her heels. The momentary void of awkward atmosphere soon filled with cheerful conversation from those around them, and no one appeared to notice him sitting there with arms tightly crossed, radiating discontent. His anger seemed to surge through every strand of his curly long hair. Moreover—as if deliberately provoking him—the Madame was persuaded to sing “The Four Seasons of Kyoto” or some such piece, joining in everyone’s entertainment. Though she sang softly, her voice flowed smoothly and brimmed with apparent delight. The painter husband clapped along with the assembled company.

Besshirō, who could not help but feel everything as contempt directed at himself, resolved that by any means necessary he would subjugate this Madame and make her acknowledge him. He spoke about Higaki’s owner, waited to intercept the painter couple upon their return, and earnestly requested they stop by the owner’s studio to view his works. That room also contained numerous pieces Besshirō himself had created.

He feigned humility and pressed the Madame for criticism. There stood framed calligraphic works and engraved plaques. The Madame—apparently fond of such pieces—studied them intently before turning to her husband. “Papa, it’s beautifully crafted, but doesn’t it overindulge in style?” The husband replied with affected sympathy. “Yes... All style.” Besshirō guffawed and made show of lingering, yet felt for the first time that someone had pierced his very core. That the painter husband branded his work “continental”—ambiguous whether praise or censure—bit deeply enough, but when even dimpled Higaki’s Owner echoed “Now you mention it, your art’s pure style!” as though endorsing this verdict, the bitterness curdled.

While his very core had been pierced, Besshirō once again tenaciously plotted his counterattack against the Madame. He invited the couple—who planned to remain in this ancient capital for five or six more days to tour the fading spring scenery before returning—to a homemade lunch. Just how much discernment does this Madame—who so carelessly dismisses my works as mere 'style'—truly possess regarding that very notion of taste? Testing her through food would be the most expedient approach. After all, beyond the home cooking prepared by the idle Madame’s own hands or the formalistic dishes from restaurants, she probably hasn’t eaten anything truly delicious. If it became clear that she lacked discernment, then her criticism of his own works would be nothing to fear; but if she did possess such discernment, she would likely bow her head in admiration of his culinary skill. In this way, he could conquer the Madame and make her acknowledge him.

Fortunately, the couple accepted the invitation and came.

The seating arrangement utilized a tea room borrowed from a renowned iemoto located below the Kamo River embankment.

He took charge of the couple’s banquet, commanding the assistant cooks under his tutelage whom he had summoned and the serving girls. He had thoroughly observed during the dinner course at Higaki’s welcome party the previous night what dishes the Madame selected and favored. He had occasionally listened as well. It wasn’t something he had done deliberately, but his instinct—possessing a spy dog’s sense of smell for human desires—had naturally activated. The Madame’s food preferences, when viewed from a professional perspective, could not be determined as those of an amateur or a professional. However, he had nearly grasped the nature of her cravings.

Besshirō prepared dishes to satisfy this craving of the Madame's—irrespective of menu conventions or categories like Japanese, Chinese, or Western cuisine. Ah, at that moment—what poignant affection for humanity welled up from the depths of his chest! There was no longer any competitive spirit there. The desire to conquer—of course, there was none.

If making that maiden-like woman widen her eyes and letting her innocently taste something transcending worldly satisfactions of the five senses—then it would be the dish’s own triumph. The existence of someone like him was irrelevant. Driven by that sentiment, he added to the menu such dishes as dismantling off-season crabs the Madame claimed to love and shaping bite-sized buckwheat noodles in Matsue style. Suddenly he recalled that childhood night—crying from colic fits, craving those Hōrai beans—how his monk father had trudged through midnight streets to buy them. Besshirō turned his face away to keep tears from falling on the kneading board. Was cooking ultimately an act of nurturing? And might those worthy of having nurturing fully expressed through cuisine be none but fools or children?

However, anticipating that the Madame might visit as a guest, Besshirō had swiftly procured and prepared specialty ingredients like moroko fish from Sakamoto’s Shisho River and sansho bark from Kurama, ensuring they would withstand even her discerning eye without shame. The Madame began eating reverently, as though handling something precious, all while expressing her gratitude. “How beautiful this dressed dish is!” “The texture of this shrimp yam is simmered to such delicate perfection.” Once the oil from the fried chicken began glistening on her lips, she simply said, “It’s delicious.” “It’s delicious,” she merely repeated, continuing to eat with single-minded focus. Besshirō, who had once again been tense about how things would proceed, felt his spirit wane—each clearing of the plates sinking heavily within him like diminishing weights.

The Madame was a hearty eater, but the painter husband was an even more voracious one. Everyone finished eating every last morsel, and as they picked up their green tea bowls, they said: “Thank you for the feast. “I must say to you, Chef—this is far more your true art.” Then, turning toward the Madame, he laughed in a manner that sought her explanatory agreement—not as sarcasm, but to have the Chef receive it as a critique born of genuine appreciation. The Madame also smiled, but her tone remained earnest. “I too—not in jest—truly think so. “This is splendid art.”

The moment Besshirō realized he'd hit the mark, he stiffened. However boldly he might usually speak, deep down he couldn't dismiss society's commonplace belief that koto, chess, calligraphy, and painting—arts deemed worthy of being called *sensei*—held higher status than cuisine. What society esteemed yesterday as lofty had been deemed mere taste; today, in what it considered lowly, that same essence was recognized as art. Whether through natural talent or cultivated skill—either way—he felt the final blow had been dealt to his life's work. What more remained to be said?

The Kamo River flowed with slightly swollen waters, its faintly murked current branching into countless channels across the riverbed as it coursed downstream. Though the green hues of flower-strewn banks blocked by gabions remained unchanged from times past, the fish had diminished now, with no children to be seen catching them. Over the hazy tips of budding willows along the embankment, the mid-spring sky alternated between clarity and cloudiness. The gurgling river sound, filtered through attentive silence within the seated gathering, transported this very setting to a nostalgic realm. Besshirō recalled his mother—truly the only one left in this world—who resided on the opposite bank downstream where the house’s roof remained hidden by the great bamboo field. His mother—like a court lady turned ravenous spirit—remained there fixated on savoring flavors while awaiting her only son’s return with whatever stable occupation he might secure.

He hadn’t returned home in some time, but perhaps the elderly master of rubbing craftsmen continued his efforts to forget the approach of old age by wandering through elementary school sports days, seeking out the innocent figures of children at play.

Besshirō, masking his feelings with laughter, recounted a childhood story of catching small fish in this riverbed with his mother for their evening meals. “I’ve eaten all sorts of delicacies over the years, but when I think back now, nothing I’ve tasted since has ever matched the flavor of those simmered small fish my mother made for me then.” Then, weaving in reflections from today’s cooking, he added, “So does the distinction between taste and art come down to whether care is present or absent?”

To this, the Madame did not immediately respond; first, she recounted the experience they had gained during their travels abroad at Foyot, a renowned Parisian restaurant. The dining room of that restaurant had been prepared with soft carpets and woolen fabrics so that neither door seams nor floor coverings would make noise. The colors had been desaturated. The ceiling and tabletop candlelight had also been adjusted. Everything had been arranged with care to focus on the dining experience. The waitstaff were elderly men of refined demeanor, stripped of any intimidating traits like burliness or masculinity—individuals who had likely ruined themselves in this profession yet now appeared to have mastered the art of transference between self and others, finding their own pleasure through their patrons'. The meal proceeded with Eucharist-like solemnity and rendezvous-like intimacy. Before the table now lay a pale amber soup, as if mirroring the clear sky of early summer. The elderly waiter—when had he approached?—stood holding a silver platter bearing sliced beef bones. Timing his movements to the precise moment when the guest's appetite stirred, the waiter gave a slight nod and scooped marrow from within the bone with a spoon. He carefully slid it into the broth's center. It resembled a maiden's youthful heart condensed into a jewel—tremulously translucent yet retaining a sediment of youthful moisture within. Could this be the Western counterpart to Japanese sea bream eye meat soup? The elderly waiter bowed respectfully, retreated several steps, and stood at attention. He waited piously as though praying for the guest's complete satisfaction in sipping this celestial nectar. The cuisine had naturally been refined. The service proved flawless. The courses through dessert left nothing wanting—so-called perfection of virtue and beauty—and thus the meal concluded amid admiration.

“And yet afterward, we were left with a slightly unpleasant aftertaste from being made to savor every last drop and manipulated.” “I hesitate to praise you to your face—it feels awkward—so I won’t say much. But if I may speak plainly: though today’s dish has its incongruities, I sensed an authenticity that shines through.”

Unexpected critiques continued pouring from the Madame’s mouth. Besshirō had never before heard words like “authenticity” applied to cooking. Authenticity—sincerity—these were concepts he’d always resented even hearing named, their very utterance grating against the warped heart shaped by his birth and upbringing. Were he to possess such qualities, wouldn’t he be swarmed like some odd-feathered fledgling—pecked bloody by a society lacking them? Frailty’s name was authenticity. Wasn’t art precisely about scorning such weaknesses within myself? About hardening through falsehoods rather than crumbling before truths? Typical of that poetess-artist—spewing moldy platitudes. The sort of critique any morality-drunk schoolgirl might parrot. Beneath contempt.

When Besshirō came to think this way, the couple’s authority vanished from his view, and he felt his shoulders and elbows swelling and jutting out defiantly as usual. “Ha ha ha ha! Is this what you call ‘authentic cuisine’?” The car arrived to pick them up, and the couple took their leave. When Besshirō asked where they were heading next, they replied they intended to visit Mibu Temple and view the Mibu Kyōgen. With a mocking grin, Besshirō remarked, “An ideal diversion for pious folks’ amusement.” The Madame frowned slightly and countered, “You may take it that way, but we feel as though we’re going to listen to hell’s music—that monotonous clanging from the Kyōgen’s instruments.” Her painter husband, evidently irked by Besshirō’s tone, snapped, “Listen—even if we’re pious folks, we’re people who’ve already trudged through hell once over. “But thinking that even paradise can’t serve as a refuge forever, we’re out walking to find hell again.” “Don’t take this so lightly,” he rebuked. The Madame took her husband’s elbow. “You mustn’t reprimand such a beautiful young man.” “You’ll damage the human artwork.” Whether finding her own words amusing, she laughed raucously and dashed into the car.

Besshirō never met the couple again after that, but in his life, those two spring encounters had been like assaults from a passing demon. The sensation that some unruly wind had swept away his painstakingly designed pavilion—one uniquely his own—made him perceive through what passed for profound art that there must be something more. Yet now he wanted no part of musty things like religion, nor could he bring himself to pursue what the Madame called authenticity or sincerity; the very notion stank of cheap moralism, making him shudder until his flesh crawled. In the end, perhaps it would suffice simply to seize upon something offering spiritual peace and enlightenment. Did such a thing exist beyond death? Death—that inevitable nullifier of all things—if one anchored one’s resolve in this inescapable reality, lived believing life’s bloom lay in its transience, and devoted oneself utterly to one’s passions, then whatever expressions emerged would leave no room for debates over distinctions between flavor and art. “When cornered, I need only die.” From childhood through every hardship and adversity—never fleeing but wandering deeper into them, gasping through this limbo of being—Besshirō now believed his youthful mind had actively forged these nebulous perceptions into a coherent philosophy. As if endorsing this conviction, Higaki’s master’s death now displayed its exemplar before his eyes.

Higaki’s master had begun developing a cancer on the left side of the back of his neck about a year prior. At first, there was no pain. They had been administering X-rays and other treatments in accordance with the doctor’s opinion that it was better not to operate given its somewhat malignant nature. The cancer temporarily shrank, then swelled larger than before. Finally, the pain set in. The doctors, no longer able to conceal it, declared that lung cancer had manifested there. Even upon hearing this, Higaki’s master showed no surprise. “There are things I wanted to do but couldn’t—but compared to others, I’ve done quite enough.” “I suppose it’s time to settle my accounts around here.” He said this with a laugh. Then he began settling his personal affairs. After transferring ownership of his shop and resolving all debts, a modest sum of money remained. “I want to die in a lively place.” With that, he relocated to a back-alley shop in Kyōgoku. He hired a beautiful nurse and his favorite model’s daughter as regular attendants until his appointed time of death, and there he commenced what he himself termed the “genius’s death” endeavor.

He, who had been reluctant to sell, finally decorated the room with his favorite collection items. Even so, the narrow room was packed full, comparable to a small Jewish antique dealer’s shop.

He installed his accustomed canopied bed within that room. Though likely a fake, he claimed it had been used by a troubadour from Spanish royal territories who wandered to America during the Civil War era. Poems were indeed carved in Latin letters on the pillars. There he sat up and continued painting. The cancer would flare up with violent pain at times. The oral painkillers proved inadequate. He begged doctors to inject him with paralytic drugs. They refused to administer them, claiming it would weaken his body. The middle-aged man—his entire body turned bluish-black, with faint purple shadows now emerging across skin stretched over emaciated bone hollows—had his spine contorted by a swollen tumor on his nape, rendering him dwarf-like, a starving ghost. As it was midsummer, he lay naked—a sight whose unsightliness chilled all who saw him, utterly exposed. When agony struck, he would writhe on the bed in that state. Drenched as if waterlogged, his tall slender limbs twisted and rubbed together as he vainly tried to scrape away the pain—a spectacle resembling a snake struggling through difficult labor. However close their friendship, Besshirō disliked nursing his friend through suffering.

Suffering—even that of one’s own alone—was more than enough to handle. Particularly, unpleasantness had a way of taking root deep within human senses. For artists, it was poison. He wanted to avoid it as much as he could. So whenever Higaki’s ailing master’s torment began, Besshirō would slip out of the sickroom to drink tea or chat elsewhere. But his ailing friend no longer permitted it. “What a spineless—” “Watch closely—there’s a perverse thrill in seeing how far you can fall—” he gasped.

Besshirō clenched his hands until they hurt, causing greasy sweat to ooze across his entire body as he endured watching. Though death itself held no terror, the thought that there was something repulsive about the process leading to it flitted through his mind. But such notions gradually vanished as the ailing master’s agony deepened. Numbed and dazed by the sheer horror, something different surfaced in the depths of Besshirō’s mind. Behold—the thing writhing there was no longer a living creature. Was it corpse wax exhumed from Egyptian catacombs? A desiccated corpse hauled from Tibetan caves? Merely a substance long bereft of life’s breath. Moreover, its rhythmic movements resembled those of an ancient doll equipped with mechanisms too intricate for modern comprehension—delicate yet unfathomable. The bluish-black doll writhed and twisted with metronomic precision, jerking upward before collapsing into moans that feigned final breaths. The same sequence repeated endlessly. The model girl’s face, contorted between horror and involuntary mirth, peered grotesquely from her sleeve’s half-concealment. The nurse fanned him with a round fan, her grave expression tinged with suppressed anger.

Besshirō noticed. At the peak of this suffering, his ailing friend was trying to amuse himself. He was fashioning his body’s instinctive writhing against the pain into a dance by imposing desperate rhythm upon it. Was this meant to distract even slightly from his agony, or was his friend laboring to show him what he habitually called “peerless art”? The ailing friend danced again—twisting, jerking, convulsing—before collapsing with a feeble moan as though breathing his last. The motions mimicked Muslim prayer postures while actually synchronizing with the cheap band music drifting from the Katsudōkan theater.

What further shocked Besshirō was that while doing so, the ailing friend had someone prop up a full-length mirror against the opposite wall and was observing the effect of his own wretched dance reflected in it. To create a background that would accentuate the imagery, blue wall hangings, a vase, and even summer flowers had been arranged beside the bed so that his figure would appear within the mirror’s frame along with them.

A conventional anger burned within Besshirō. “Why are you doing such idiotic things for the patient?” Besshirō confronted the model girl. The model girl retorted discontentedly, “But he’s the one who tells us to do this.” The ailing friend shot a reproachful look, as if to say, “Don’t make such trivial accusations.” When his wish was granted one out of three times and he received an injection from the doctor, the ailing friend became cheerful and laughed breezily. His appetite stirred, he commanded Besshirō to prepare whatever dish he desired.

Since he had ordered things he usually favored—French onion soup with cheese baked in a pot, beef tongue hashed rice, a salad of snap beans with verjuice sauce—Besshirō found them easy to prepare. However, dishes like squeezing duck blood to boil the meat in its own blood, or chopping large eels into chunks and setting them in vinegar-infused jelly were firsts for Besshirō. Even as the ailing friend directed him from bed, getting the balance right proved quite challenging. When he stirred the duck blood in a cooking pan over an alcohol lamp, it attained a noble thickness and viscosity akin to shiruko powder. After seasoning this with salt and pepper, adding slices of duck meat, and simmering it briefly to eat, Besshirō found no bloodiness when he tasted it. “This is one of the signature dishes from a famous duck restaurant in Paris—first and foremost, it belongs to the realm of elaborate luxury cuisine,” the ailing friend said. “The eel aspic is a food peddled in places like the Italian immigrant slums—it’s what the lower classes eat,” he said. It was not delicious. Perhaps the ailing friend found pleasure in memories associated with those dishes—for even when they were prepared for him, he barely touched them, yet kept haphazardly recalling and ordering one after another. Besshirō ran about, searching for young domestic ducks resembling wild ducks during seasons when they were unavailable, and seeking out snap beans with supple pods from among those that had hardened after growing through summer. Perhaps attempting to relive long-past childhood memories, the ailing friend had him grill patterned pancakes on a frying pan and roast sweet potatoes on a hōraku griddle.

Besshirō rushed to fulfill these requests precisely because he believed them to be his ailing friend’s final wishes—yet when the friend, having amused himself with these diversions and still buoyed by lingering drug-induced cheer, would then labor to entertain himself by making Besshirō his playmate, even Besshirō came to resent him. The ailing friend ordered Besshirō to paint a human face with oil paints on the cancerous tumor swelling at the back of his neck—now so large that a ball seemed to peer through. “Let’s call some friends over and prank them by saying I’ve grown a human-faced tumor.” Even when Besshirō refused, he would not listen. Besshirō reluctantly took up the brush. When the bandage was removed, within the massive lump—now crocodile-skin colored from X-ray burns and ointment—there seemed to lurk a congealed mass of obsessive will that defied humanity. The tumor—its rounded form supported from within by a dense core of proliferation, covered by flesh and skin of moderate tautness—imparted a sensation that left one torn between the impulse to thrust a sharp scalpel into it and the realization that there was no recourse but to mockingly deride that stubborn congealing. The oil paint adhered well to the tumor’s skin. Through the touch of his brush tip mediated by paint upon this monstrous visage, he grasped how deeply his ailing friend loathed this tumor. And in the extremity of that loathing, he felt he understood why one had to divert one’s feelings with mischievous intent. “Draw it as a face that utterly mocks human suffering—make it look like a human face, not a tumor!” He applied a base coat to resemble a human face, added shading, and began sketching in the nose, mouth, and eyes. The ailing friend had clenched his teeth and endured up to this point, but with a stuttering “T-t-t-t-t-t,” he convulsed his body. He said: “I can’t bear this anymore. Enough... Just have them add the details once I’ve become a painless corpse.” Therefore, the human face painted on the tumor ended up with only one eye, and moreover, it was askew. Besshirō did not attempt to complete the face even after he died, just as his ailing friend had said. The face of the artificial human-faced tumor—glaring with its single narrowed eye while roaring with laughter—seemed to have gained deeper meaning through sheer coincidence. Why would there be any need to add another brushstroke to this face that gazes upon life’s adversities and the impermanence of all phenomena?

Besshirō stared fixedly at the unfinished face peering prominently from his ailing friend’s shoulder blade, muttered “All right” to himself, placed the corpse in the coffin, and had them cremated together.

Before the pain could leave the ailing friend, the injections continued. Having become unable to consume anything but liquids, he lay on the bed gasping for breath. Besshirō, finding that it resembled the dried fur seals on the night stall’s sign advertising sea otter sales, could only think that people truly do change. The ailing friend stopped taking anything by mouth, and the pain seemed to have vanished as well. The doctor announced that the end was near. The nurse and the model girl began tidying up to leave, their teary eyes blinking. It was often unclear whether the ailing friend was drowsily asleep or awake. However, hearing what sounded like murmuring deep in his throat, Besshirō leaned in close—only to find him singing a song. Besshirō had never once heard his ailing friend sing this kind of song. When he strained to discern the faint melody, it turned out to be a lullaby. “Hush-a-bye oh, hush-a-bye hush-a-bye”

Knowing that Besshirō’s face had drawn near his own, the ailing friend forced a smile. And when he tried to piece together the meaning of the words uttered between gasps, this is what they amounted to. “Looking around everywhere, everything’s been cleared away—it’s as if there’s nothing at all.” “No matter how much I searched, I couldn’t find anything among my belongings to give you—I was at a loss.” “Ah yes—there’s an Aunt in Tokyo all alone.” “This hasn’t disappeared—it’s still here.” “It’s faintly visible, hazy in the distance.” “This, I’m giving to you.” “This is a fine one.” “Since I’m giving it to you, make her your Aunt.”

The ailing friend died.

In Kyoto, aside from old business contacts or companions from his social circle, there remained not a single soul who could be considered kin. When he inquired with the Aunt in Tokyo, her reply—citing advanced age and assurances of proper funeral arrangements—compelled Besshirō to take charge and see the cremation through to its conclusion. Carrying these remains, Besshirō journeyed to Tokyo. Though Higaki’s Master—Tokyo-born—had become virtually severed from familial bonds, his family temple and cemetery still stood in the Akasaka-Aoyama district. While this concerned the household head’s affairs and he had transported the bones at the Aunt’s behest—she wishing them interred in the family grave—Besshirō settled into her house in Tokyo’s working-class quarter. After completing the burial and during what he intended as a month-long stay to tour the capital before returning to Kyoto, he found himself already transformed into his Aunt’s captive.

This Aunt had originally been a cooking instructor at a girls' school, where during its pioneering era she taught all manner of home economics-related subjects among others. Even after being dismissed from the school for becoming outdated, this instead became her means of livelihood, and she opened a private academy where she took in girls from the working-class district to instruct them in pre-marital etiquette. Aunt herself was an unfortunate woman within her own family; having lost her husband early, then gradually losing about four children until only a daughter of marriageable age—what had been her youngest child—remained to manage the academy's miscellaneous affairs. An anemic, docile woman, she would be scolded by Aunt and made to run errands, and while being called "Big Sister" by the academy's student girls, she seemed faintly looked down upon. She was the sort of girl who would grow flustered whenever spoken to.

Long ago, when her nephew Higaki’s Master became an orphan in his childhood, the Aunt had taken him in and raised him among her own children until his boyhood; but after Higaki’s Master ran away from home and wandered even to foreign lands, cutting off all communication, she claimed to have lost all affection or resentment toward this nephew. However, she said that if left unattended like this, the Higaki house would be left without an heir. Higaki’s house was the main family lineage, and the Aunt had married out from that house into a branch family. Aunt declared, “I don’t care if my own household falls into ruin—but I want to preserve the Higaki main family lineage, if only in name.” Thus began their discussion. “If you wouldn’t find it too disagreeable—” “Take my daughter as your wife, give one of the children to the Higaki household, and let us restore their family heritage—if only in name.” “Thus, for me it would fulfill filial duty to the main family lineage, and for you, it would stand as a profound gesture of devotion to your dear friend.” “First of all, the daughter I wish you to take is Higaki’s one and only cousin.” “Would this not also be a certain connection ordained by fate?”

When Aunt first broached this matter, Besshirō dismissed it with a laugh. That close friend—who had soared through life immersed in artistic fervor before perishing—met his end in a manner as profoundly resonant as raw wood revealing itself to be empty space: after the music of his existence had faded, only lingering emotions remained, yet their resolution carried the peculiar beauty of an essence dissolving into void. In contrast to that ailing friend’s life and death, the Aunt’s proposal was far too commonplace—a matter of mere worldly obligation. No matter how they’re spliced together, they won’t extend the ailing friend’s lifetime. As for the youngest daughter the aunt spoke of, she held no appeal whatsoever for me. “But even if you say that—” Besshirō could only make a baffled expression and hold his head with one hand, but the Aunt’s persuasion continued relentlessly without pause. “You should establish yourself here in Tokyo.” “Tokyo is a fine place,” she said, appraising Besshirō’s talents before hastily securing handyman work for him at Keisetsukan and three or four other influential households—thus casting another anchor to keep him moored there. Aunt had become closely acquainted with Keisetsu through having taken in his elder daughter Ochiyo into her academy for training when Keisetsukan was still located in the working-class district.

What an utterly passive and characterless woman she was. Besshirō had ultimately been ensnared by this very peculiarity of Itsuko—the aunt’s youngest daughter and cousin to Higaki’s master—in that specific sense. For someone like Besshirō—a man whose tyrannical barbs protruded even into life’s trivialities—a woman as insubstantial as unbleached cotton, stripped of willpower, posed precisely the danger of becoming effortlessly entangled and smothered. Besshirō’s frustrations toward the world, born of perpetual discontent, manifested as despotic commands that rained upon whatever lay within reach. She would unfailingly respond with a startled look of sorrowful compliance—“Yes, yes”—bending at the waist in scurrying half-steps to fulfill his demands. The sight of her—never once contemplating her own debased role yet quivering in anticipation of his next decree—came to feel to Besshirō like conducting static electricity: contemptible yet perversely satisfying. Even when pierced through by the jagged edges of curses and mockeries he spitefully hurled at existence itself, she merely endured without mercy—suppressing even whimpers that might betray suffering. A complexion of fine-grained skin serving as her sole asset; a vapid, chill fragility exuding melancholy; an obtuse honesty incapable of kindling even resentment.

Meanwhile, the Aunt continued her persuasion without letting up, a faint smile playing on her lips. While Besshirō thought, “What’s the point?” Itsuko became a necessary presence in his daily life. They entered into a relationship equivalent to marriage. Dragging his feet yet thoroughly adhering to the Aunt’s wishes, Besshirō ended up becoming a Tokyo resident and calling Itsuko his wife. And just as Higaki’s Master had deliriously uttered before dying—“I’m giving you the Aunt.” Besshirō would occasionally ponder the strangeness of how the words—“Make her your Aunt”—had unfolded exactly as scripted.

He couldn’t claim to never think of his birth mother left behind in Kyoto or the elderly rubbings artisan who had supported him until near adulthood. Yet given Besshirō’s present circumstances—and precisely because his ties to them were rooted in such profound karmic bonds—to dwell on these connections brought only anguish. For Besshirō, now ablaze with ambition to stake his claim in this sprawling metropolis, maintaining a familial closeness that could be easily donned or shed—merely addressing another’s aunt as “Aunt,” though she was indeed his dear friend’s—made the weight of responsibility feel light. This old woman, with her lax sense of duty and readiness to handle affairs, proved convenient. Yet Besshirō found it repulsive to consider how Higaki’s Master—who in life had seemed to live wholly by his whims, treat death as mere play, and pass through existence like an improvisational verse—had in death’s delirium left behind a single mundane thread in this world, winding it around his friend, only for that thread to reveal itself as unexpectedly warm and pregnant with meaning.

Among the three or four influential households in the working-class district that the Aunt had arranged for him, Besshirō had become most deeply entrenched with the master of Keisetsukan. The master of Keisetsukan was an Edo-born Chinese classics scholar who in his youth had undoubtedly been among the new thinkers of his era. Through lectures and writings, he gained considerable renown. He wore oilcloth Chinese robes and even attended meetings on continental policy. His theories grew outdated, and partly due to his wife’s unnatural death, he severed all public connections, writing marketable kanji dictionaries and exam guides that he self-published. With the proceeds, he purchased rental properties and land parcels while exploring other lucrative ventures. He became a man of modest means.

He lived as a widower. After withdrawing his elder daughter Ochiyo from the tutoring academy, he made her take on the role of housekeeper while treating his younger daughter Okinu as a cherished object. Keisetsu’s peculiar disposition further ensured that this scholar-merchant household received scarcely any visitors apart from those like Higaki’s Aunt. Though a newcomer, Besshirō struck Keisetsu as an unmanageably novel monster. Regarding refined pursuits like music, chess, calligraphy and painting, he could discuss most matters knowledgeably while simultaneously—through his manner of speaking that planted paradoxical triggers at every turn—unexpectedly rousing Keisetsu’s enthusiasm until the man leaned forward intently, imparting a lively rhythm to their exchanges. When it came to culinary taste particularly, Besshirō substantiated his expertise by physically preparing dishes. Possessing uncanny psychological insight into eccentrics, he attuned this middle-aged gourmet’s palate through that very angle, manipulating his appetites like piano keys. Keisetsu—a widower with ample leisure—spent entire days beneath blazing skies wearing a traveler’s helmet, puffing breath as though fat smoldered within him while pruning potted plants, obsessing over pets, and losing himself in macabre collections. At times he would fly into maddened rages against a society that showered him with hollow material gains while forgetting past reverence—fuming at being branded a scholar-merchant. This resentment’s backlash mingled with and intensified his obsession with food.

While Keisetsu tormented the elder sister Ochiyo with household drudgery while indulging the younger sister Okinu in lavish modern attire—even sending her to the French Catholic girls’ school in Shiba’s high district—his smug satisfaction undoubtedly stemmed from favoring Okinu by nature, yet it still seemed born of his obsessive tendency to push all things to extremes. He had fixated on turtle cuisine even before Besshirō’s arrival, managing turtle stew somehow but failing repeatedly at steamed turtle—a testament to his limited skill. Besshirō effortlessly demonstrated selecting firewood for hot ashes to bury cotton-wrapped turtles, regulating the ashes’ heat, and timing the steaming—all with practiced ease. When Keisetsu tore into the finished dish with raw soy sauce, he proclaimed it incomparably delicious. Until then called Yoshiro from his Kyoto days, Besshirō now found Keisetsu fixated on addressing him thus while arbitrarily bestowing the name Besshirō. The sisters too grew accustomed to this appellation. The possessive Keisetsu provided Besshirō’s household with meager sustenance and housing, compelling refusal of other employments.

From the moment Besshirō first set foot in Keisetsukan and laid eyes on the younger sister Okinu, he thought, “Oh!” Here was a girl inhabiting a world utterly remote from his own—and yet never had one existed who suited his tastes so perfectly. She maintained an eternally dreamlike innocence in her appearance, yet carried a faint tinge of ironic bitterness. There lingered about her an authoritative quality akin to the pristine purity of spring’s first sprouts, while concealing within its mystery some future growth violently torn away.

Okinu showed no particular interest in Besshirō—the young man who had entered this rarely visited household—and even when occasionally near him, would leave him forgotten as if discarding an object, daydreaming or amusing herself alone. Perhaps from being raised motherless under her domineering father’s sole care, her loneliness then carried a gender-neutral quality imbued with aristocratic melancholy. She appeared never to have noticed Besshirō’s handsome features from the outset. The elder sister Ochiyo was the one who flushed crimson and displayed flustered mannerisms.

When facing Okinu, Besshirō found himself stiffening his posture against his will and adopting an overbearing manner. As if seeing through his very core—or perhaps not—the girl slowly raised her typically downcast smoldering eyes to stare directly at the young man. At this, Besshirō felt a chasm of disparity yawn between them, his heart contracting at his own baseness. Yet as Besshirō attended to Keisetsu while being tasked with teaching culinary methods to the sisters—growing accustomed to guiding Okinu’s hands during instruction—he began feeling an unexpected ease. This girl too proved innocently clumsy at cooking like any ordinary maiden. Her airheaded moments became as endearing as pale skin glimpsed through a rent in her kimono. He could scold and berate her while savoring these lapses. Okinu never conceded defeat in such exchanges, always retorting sharply, yet she seemed to have developed a peculiar interest in this young man’s exceptional skills. Emboldened, Besshirō launched into boasts about his artistic philosophy. All restraint fell away—though ultimately, this amounted to nothing more. While privately acknowledging how utterly smitten he was with this girl, Besshirō found months slipping by in an unremarkable domestic life with Itsuko—until a child was born. The Aunt now waited eagerly for another infant who would secure the Higaki family’s succession.

Tonight, spurred by the depth and viscous thickness of the dark on this misty night, Besshirō found himself unusually savoring the flavor of his past life. He had resolved death to be the absolute end where all accounts are settled, taking that as his anchor; gazing back upon this life born from nothingness with a heart that lightly deemed a fleeting existence to be of little consequence, he now looked upon death and perceived it too as something slight. A philosophy he believed he had refined into a coherent ideology, beginning with childhood experiences and culminating in the present day.

The conviction that living itself was the bloom and that he should continue devoting himself to preparations if possible had gradually grown suspect. Not a single thing had gone as he intended. Even this single culinary taste he thought he had been single-mindedly pursuing—the mundane circumstances surrounding it had grown so numerous that they now seemed to be sweeping him in unexpected directions, reducing him to a mere lever to be wielded.

Hail fell. In the deep, viscous darkness. The hail kept falling incessantly—as if trying to someday whiten this darkness that no amount of falling could ever bleach.

As the night deepened, sounds from neighboring houses quieted, leaving only the occasional roar of trams passing along the main street to reverberate through the darkness. In the adjacent tea room, his wife—apparently having fallen asleep—would whisper "Papa's here, Papa's here" whenever the child showed signs of crying, pressing him against her breast to hush him before resuming faint sleeping breaths. While Besshirō was home, constrained by fear of his stern father and hearing his mother's voice utter these words, even when the child teetered on the edge of tears he would clench his teeth with childish resolve and endure—a habit Besshirō found pitiable for the first time tonight. His deceased father, an old monk, had reportedly instructed the mother that should a child ever resent him by crying "Why did you bring me into this world?", she must answer "I never asked to be born either. We're even." Reflecting now, Besshirō sensed these might have been words his late father arrived at through arduous contemplation. "We're even," he had supposedly told her to say—yet tonight it seemed this phrase might have been his father's hard-won conclusion. Even the child harbored a will unknown to himself.

Amidst this mutual unknowing, his father had left him behind, and he was now leaving this child behind. The mother who had conveyed his father’s final words—intending to sever all worldly desires in her youthful state as atonement for her family’s sins—found herself unable to relinquish her gluttony alone. Lamenting this, she passed it on through her own cravings. In my boyhood, when I returned home speaking of delicacies tasted elsewhere, Mother would interrogate me exhaustively, her face flushing with vivid satisfaction as though she herself had partaken. And Higaki no Shujin—my sole true friend, for whom I performed the final water rite—had in death’s unconscious throes effortlessly concealed from me the scheme to wed his niece to me and secure an heir’s lineage. Reflecting thus, he realized nothing in this world could be settled within one lifetime. There was not a single thing I could claim as wholly my own achievement. All flowed from his deceased father’s “mutual obligations”—endlessly passed along like cursed heirlooms. What first came to mind were words spoken by a painter-poet couple encountered but twice during a Kyoto spring: “We thought it inexcusable to linger long in paradise’s confines, so we seek seats in hell instead.” Considering this, those teachers too must have been souls who suffered profoundly under these inescapable bonds. When Madame spoke of “truth” and “sincerity,” did she mean not some trite morality but rather something resembling a deep current with hidden eddies? What could that be?

The night deepened profoundly, growing ever more intense—a darkness viscous in its thickness, lushly moist. The hail fell with infinite appetite, devoured from below again and again, insatiable. If one were to shift their perspective slightly, it could equally be seen as endlessly spewing hail from above. In the end, it was a darkness that knew no satiety—devouring while spewing, devouring without cease. Besshirō had never before known such a voracious appetite. Was this how those who devoured death and spewed life were?

As he surrendered himself to the darkness, gazing so intently that he lost himself, there emerged something lustrous within the darkness—and with that moist richness, he felt his heart being ceaselessly toyed with.

Okinu?

Hmm. This too must be some contrivance. The radish chili pot had long since reduced, its bottom resembling a dried tidal flat strewn with debris. When he went to the kitchen, it seemed the liquor shop boy had delivered several bottles of beer. After carrying these to the sitting room, Besshirō—despite his low alcohol tolerance—resolved to drink through the hail-filled night while gazing into darkness. Yet to commune with this formidable dark, "I can’t very well be eating radishes now."

He called out gently to the adjacent room.

“Itsuko—sorry to trouble you—but go wake Izusō on Nakadōri Street. Get anglerfish liver, or if they have leatherjacket liver prepared, bring that instead. If you tell them the teacher wants it, they’ll surely give it—” He made the request with uncharacteristic politeness. “Yes, yes,” came the drowsy reply. As Itsuko scurried out, Besshirō added more charcoal to the brazier. When light from the fifty-candlepower bulb fell across his tilted face, a dewdrop unlike any he’d ever seen glistened on Besshirō’s eyelid.