Pathway to Japanese Literature

Author: Kamura Isota

He had made a mistake dismissing it as just an initial cold.
When his fever finally rose past thirty-nine degrees, Keiichiro was forced to take leave from his job at Hamamachi's sake industry newspaper.
Even while bedridden and feverish, he remained haunted by fear of angering his boss—an anxiety so intense it leaked into his delirium.
On the third morning came an express-delivery summons.
Though he had begged them to understand he'd return once his fever broke, this proof of others' indifference now drew unbidden tears.

“I’ll go.”

Keiichiro crawled out from the futon, but his legs wobbled and he felt dizzy, nearly fainting.

Chitose panicked, grabbing his body as she pleaded, "Stop it! If you push yourself like that, there'll be no turning back!" she said, trying to make Keiichiro lie down again.

"But I can’t afford to get fired."

Chitose kept both hands on his shoulders, her pale oval face veiled by disheveled hair pressed against his chest as she sobbed convulsively. "I’m truly making you suffer so much... I’m sorry…"

“Don’t cry. This much hardship is nothing!”

With these words, Keiichiro immediately pulled Chitose into a tight embrace, then rocked her gently and stroked her back in a soothing manner. She buried her face even deeper into his chest and, like a lion clamping its jaws, continued her sobs for some time while gasping through heaving shoulders.

He drank one gō of cold milk, threw a mantle over his padded robe, left the attic room they rented above a senbei shop in Morikawa-cho’s Shinsakaue district, and boarded a streetcar from in front of the university’s main gate. And there was Chitose leaning against a utility pole seeing him off, while Keiichiro too from the conductor's window locked gazes with her in mutual intensity, until soon he faintly saw her small figure—head lowered—hurriedly crossing the quiet tracks bathed full in windless, beautiful late autumn sunlight.

When he arrived at the company near Eitaibashi, he consulted with the waiting boss about various aspects of the front-page editorial scheduled for November 20th.
The boss—sporting a burly Zhong Kui beard—wore a faded old-fashioned frock coat.
He mentioned plans to visit the Ise Grand Shrine while attending the National Sake Tasting Competition soon opening in Osaka.
Furthermore, he left instructions to interview wholesale dealers of Shirataka, Masamune and Gekkeikan bottled products regarding industry stagnation during the lean season, then hastily departed with his wife.

After seeing his boss and wife out to the genkan entryway, Keiichiro hurried back to the second-floor editorial room. Having abandoned his work, he rested his elbows on the desk and massaged his throbbing head with both palms in slow circles when a maid came creaking up the steep stairs.

“Mr. Oe, a letter.”

“The clippings report?”

“No.”
“It’s from Haruko—written in your preferred style, Mr. Oe.”
“Heh heh heh.”

Keiichiro stood and snatched it from the maid’s hand. The stocky maid with pockmarked cheeks tried to maintain her mocking tone, but at his forbidding scowl she retreated awkwardly downstairs. Then came whispers with another maid before their raucous laughter erupted.

Keiichiro endured the palpitations in his chest and stared fixedly at the address on the envelope from his younger sister back home with bloodshot eyes.

Four months had passed since Keiichiro left his wife and child behind in the rural Y Prefecture countryside and eloped with Chitose.
In those early days, his sister had sent letters nearly every three days—among them not a few ghostwritten by their father in his unskilled hand.
Each time he saw them, he could only repeat that same remorseful sorrow like swallowing needles.
Tormented by agony as though his flesh were being sliced, he sometimes threw them away unread as scrap paper.
Since he rarely replied, his sister’s correspondence had grown sparse of late.
Keiichiro now found himself seized by an impulse akin to touching a festering sore, hesitating to open it—yet unable to rest without looking.
He went to the entrance, peered downstairs for a moment, then closed the shoji and opened the letter.

Dear Brother in Tokyo,
The mornings and evenings have grown markedly colder, but I trust you remain in good health?
Though you had so sternly admonished me in your last letter that I must not send news which might pain you—knowing full well how this must grieve your heart—I find myself compelled to write regardless.
Yet where should I begin?
There are far too many things to relate…

Father had been bedridden with a cold for the past week.
Compounded by his chronic asthma, his recent decline had become visibly apparent.
Dr. Ando had been coming daily to examine him and administer calcium injections.
Given his advanced age, this made us all the more anxious.
Each time I heard Father's agonized coughing, I felt as though my very life were shrinking away.
"I must settle Keiichiro's affairs while I still live," Father declared from his sickbed yesterday.
Lying prone while eating porridge, he would suddenly murmur "What's Keiichiro doing now?"—whereupon the chopsticks would slip from his fingers of their own accord.
Even when midnight turned to one o'clock, whispers from Father and Mother's secret conversations still leaked from the inner parlor.
Brother, please send Father a gentle letter of comfort sometimes.
This is my desperate plea.
The depth of Father's longing for your letters is something you could never imagine, Brother.
From that high hill's orchard, Father would watch intently where the deliveryman coming upstream might go.
When the man approached our house and I signaled it bore word from Brother, Father would turn frantic—truly scrambling and stumbling his way home.
How could someone like you ever comprehend a parent's heart?

Ever since Brother fled our house, the interior had been plunged into a darkness as if all lamps had been extinguished. The zelkova mountain behind the house had completely turned to autumn hues, and though the season grew ever deeper, it felt as though all the pathos in the world had gathered solely within our home. The early rice had long been harvested, and now during the late rice harvest season, the paddies were bustling. The long-standing tenants weren’t so bad, but Tokiji and Yosaku were already aggressively haggling over the additional rice levy even before finishing the milling. If we did not comply with their demands, they declared with a threatening air that they would absolutely not continue tenant farming. This was because they looked down on us, thinking there were only women and elderly here. “Every time I look at the fields or the mountains, I can’t help but shed tears at how pitiful they’ve become,” Father kept saying. The other day, Father had recounted how the previous generation endured extraordinary hardships when purchasing those patchwork upland fields—the ones sung about in that ballad, *“Where no kite would ever circle”*—then said, “I can’t face our ancestors’ graves,” and literally choked on his own dark tears. Father, precisely because he was an adopted son, felt an intense sense of responsibility toward our ancestors. Every time I heard Father’s lamenting words about how you—who should rightfully inherit our fields, mountains, and forests—were not here, I could not help but resent you.

The other day when Father went to inspect that cedar mountain beyond the blacksmith’s shop, it seems that vile-natured Master Tazawa had shifted the boundary stone two ken toward his own property.
Father ground his teeth in bitter frustration.
“It’s because Keiichiro isn’t here that this kind of thing happens.”
That unfilial wretch! That starving brat!
“Soon, punishment will strike, and his eyes will rot away!” Father venomously rebuked Brother.
But when his agitation subsided: “Ah... All of this must be what they call karmic cause and effect.
Mother, let us resign ourselves.
……There’s no helping it.
We must await Toshio’s coming of age.
And if I die before then—what’s to become of us then?’”
Thus he declared.

If you were to divorce Sister-in-law Sakiko and return home with Chitose-san, everything would be resolved.
However, that would make it impossible for the Ōe household to fulfill our obligations to relatives and maintain our social standing.
Sister-in-law Sakiko continues to rant about demanding ¥10,000 or else taking the matter to court, colluding with a shoddy matchmaker to torment Father.
Ultimately, you are the one at fault.
Why didn’t you formally separate from Sister-in-law Sakiko first—if you disliked her, if you hated her—and then be with Chitose-san?
It’s because you went and did such a reckless thing that the problems have grown increasingly complex, and our mutual feelings have become strained.
Now you can’t even find the end of the thread to unravel this tangle—is this not how matters have come to pass?

But I do understand your feelings, Brother.
When I reflect on the years you spent with Sister-in-law, I cannot believe this recent matter was merely a momentary caprice on your part.
It might have been all too natural—perhaps even excessively so.
At a family council held some time ago, there were many proposals that it would be best to divorce Sister-in-law Sakiko.
But Sister-in-law Sakiko swiftly caught wind of this and declared she needed no money but would take Toshio with her, abruptly returning to her maiden home.
Moreover, Toshio is none other than the apple of Father’s eye—his one and only grandson.
Without Toshio, Father cannot sleep even a wink at night.
Father went with Mother to apologize at her maiden home in Y Town and brought back Sister-in-law Sakiko along with Toshio.
We simply cannot separate Toshio from Sister-in-law Sakiko.
To separate them would be cruel.
The truly pitiable one is Toshio-chan, isn’t he?

Due to his innate timidity and because the neighborhood lay too far away, Toshio-chan could not bring himself to go out and play alone.
When he saw children his own age playing in the rice paddies and gravel banks across the way, he could not bear it and burst into tears.
When friends occasionally came over, he danced with joy; when they left, he would not even eat his meals.
When told it was time to go home, we tried to cheer him up by offering sweets—saying we would give him some treats—or picture books—promising a storybook—trying one thing after another.
When it finally became unavoidable, he came begging to me and Sister-in-law to make them stay.
Even so, when evening came, there was no helping it.
When he watched his friends’ retreating figures disappear into the twilight from the mansion’s front garden, he sobbed and dashed into the house.
And when he climbed onto Father’s lap, he fell asleep without even eating dinner.
With firewood smoldering in the kitchen hearth, the whole household stayed up late into the night.
Father said things like “The spitting image of Keiichiro,” or “A pheasant in burning fields, a crane in midnight snow—does Keiichiro not know a child’s preciousness?” while stroking Toshio’s sleeping face.

The twenty-first of last month marked the death anniversary of the Revered Master.
The village's old and young crossed hills and bridges, gathering in twos and threes to receive offerings of sweets and red bean rice as they made their rounds.
I too took Toshio along to receive these offerings.
As I walked along the ridge path beneath Myojin shrine—holding Toshio's hand while he carried an offering basket—I saw our neighbors, the Kan couple, passing along the riverside thoroughfare with their toddling child between them.
The moment I saw them, I scooped up Toshio and covered his face with my sleeve—is this not pitiable?
Brother—are you not truly one burdened by profound sin?
Can such acts still be called human?
The child within my womb should be born by the time my husband returns from his ocean voyage.
When I contemplate Toshio-chan's shadowed fate, I shudder at the thought of bringing my own child into this world.

“In these days when you are not here, Brother, how lonely Toshio must feel! When he asks ‘Where’s Daddy?’ and we answer ‘Tokyo,’ doesn’t he just repeat it back without understanding?”
“Daddy, when are you coming back?”
“Does he not then recall those words and plead with Sister-in-law and me again and again?”
Toshio-chan had recently learned to spin the top; there had been no joy like when he first made it whirl.
At night, he would line up the string and spinning top by his pillow before going to bed.
And when he woke, from early morning he would spin and play alone.
“When Daddy comes back, I’ll show him how I can spin the top.”
“Does he not say that?”
“I will not say it is for the family’s sake or for Father and Mother’s sake.”
For the sake of Toshio alone, Brother, won’t you please come home?

I beg of you.

Haruko.

Keiichiro’s eyelids burned as he meticulously read the first chapter and the second, but by the end he was flipping through the stationery and skimming to finish.
And having read it filled him with boundless regret.
Keiichiro now dreaded above all else the excruciating pain it would inflict upon his heart.
Even so, he had not approved of his own actions from the start, nor had he affirmed them with such superficial ease.
At times, he could not help but think that his path had been inevitable—a natural course of events. Yet even when he forced himself to view his own being in such an objective light, the self-reproach—that gnawing guilt clinging like hair pulled from behind—never truly vanished.
In that case, he might have resigned himself to accept the lash of judgment; but while he and Chitose were gasping through their blood-soaked existence together, to be confronted with such demands of responsibility by others became a doubly unbearable torment that he simply could not endure.

Keiichiro crumpled the letter into a ball with gnawing guilt and threw it into the brazier.
He struck a match and burned the remnants until not a trace remained.
His heart turned cold and numb, like stone.

The room had filled with smoke, so he opened the south-facing glass window.
Before he knew it, evening had deepened, and crows were flying over the Ōkawa River, cawing raucously.
He felt an uncanny sorrow, as though there were something strange about hearing crows cry in the sky of this city.

Minami-Shinagawa and Kita-Shinagawa are said to have been called sake towns since the days of great Edo.
Along the banks of the Shinkawa River flowing between these northern and southern Shinagawa districts, several sake-laden boats had just moored.
From the river's edge where high-tide swollen waters slapped rhythmically against the stone embankment to the warehouse, straw mats had been laid out across which young wholesaler workers in hemp aprons and twisted headbands were rolling straw-capped four-to barrels into storage—this scene visible from the editorial room's window.
Keiichiro, having absentmindedly listened for a while to the vigorous young workers' rhythmic work songs, soon came to himself and turned around to find two or three children riding a tricycle in the narrow alley beneath the window.
A child stood watching with a tearful face. Suddenly, Keiichiro felt an intense, chest-splitting pain.

It was early May of that year.
To escape his long-standing ugly and dissolute life, Keiichiro had left his wife and children in the village and begun living alone in Y Town; during this time he grew deeply involved with Chitose until the day came when they had no choice but to elope to Tokyo. On that very day, he returned to his mountain home to secure funds.
Whether through some ominous premonition, his wife clung to him with unusual persistence, but Keiichiro suppressed his unease and deftly took out his father’s bankbook, attempting to leave the house.
Just then his sister’s child had come over and was riding around on a tricycle.
Toshio, who had been standing under the eaves sucking his finger while watching enviously, ran over with a face darkening toward tears the moment he saw Keiichiro.

“Daddy, buy me a tricycle too!”

“Yeah.”

“When you come back next time, bring it with you.”
“Right?”

“Yeah.”

“When are you coming back? This time?”
“Right, Daddy?”

“…………”

At the foot of the house, the wife brought Toshio to see Keiichiro off as he boarded the Entaro carriage.
When the groom sounded his horn with a “Puu-puu!” and the horse began to gallop with all four legs in unison, the wife said, “You must come back again.
Farewell,” she said, and the child added, “Daddy, don’t forget the tricycle!”
In the same carriage sat Sanpei, his family’s tenant farmer, facing him directly.
“Young Master.
Your wife and child should live together with you in Y Town.”
“How pitiful that is!” Sanpei said reproachfully.
Keiichiro’s head lowered until it touched his knees.
When Keiichiro leaned his face out from the window at the edge of the earthen bridge marking the village border, there in his tear-clouded glasses was reflected Toshio—bending slightly at the waist like an old man, shrinking his neck like a turtle—ascending the stone steps before the gate as if counting them one by one in silence.
Perhaps this would be his last glimpse of this world?
When he thought this, his chest tightened as if squeezed in a press, and large teardrops began falling like rain, unstoppable.

On the last train that day, Keiichiro brought Chitose with him and left Y Town behind.

Chitose had come out to meet Keiichiro at the stop and stood dejectedly under the dim street trees. And the moment she spotted Keiichiro’s figure at the disembarkation point, she briskly walked up and said, “Welcome home. How are you feeling?” she said, gazing intently with teary eyes and raising her eyebrows high.

“It wasn’t anything worth worrying about.”

“Oh, that’s a relief then.” Of course, her speech was laced with rural dialect. “You can’t imagine how worried I’ve been.”

Like an innocent child welcoming a parent returning from an outing, Chitose pulled Keiichiro’s hand with a somewhat coquettish air, and then they returned to the second floor of their hideout, not far from the tram line.
After quickly settling Keiichiro into the futon warmed by the foot warmer, Chitose spread old newspapers by the pillow and hurriedly brought over their meager dinner.
The two of them picked up their chopsticks.

“It kept worrying me and worrying me until I couldn’t bear it anymore.
I very nearly thought to ask about your condition over the phone, but...”

Chitose faltered.

When told this, Keiichiro felt as if being scratched by thorns. He behaved like a single man at his workplace. His actions dragged dark shadows wherever they went, so when he had hinted to Chitose that she should pretend to be the landlady downstairs if making phone calls, the cruelty and bitterness of that moment surged anew and clogged his chest until food would not pass through his throat.

“Today, the neighbor’s wife brought over some sewing work,” said Chitose as she set down her bowl and opened the rear cupboard with one hand, showing him the Oshima and Yuki silk bolts piled high atop the wicker trunk. “There’s so much here! I’ve decided to start sewing tonight and work through the night. If I finish all of them, I should be able to receive about fourteen or fifteen yen. I’ll manage to prepare something like a thank-you gift for the doctor myself—even if I don’t ask you to do it!”

“I’m sorry.”
Keiichiro had grown intensely sentimental due to his illness.

“I hate it when you say such standoffish things.”
Chitose said in a voice tinged with anger.

After finishing the meal, Keiichiro took his medicine and covered himself with the futon, while Chitose spread out her sewing table and began her needlework.

“You, face me please.”

Chitose raised her face and said while working the thread.
She felt dissatisfied that his face was hidden by the nightgown’s collar.

“And then, tell me something please. I’m lonely you see.”
“I’m lonely you see.”

Keiichiro nodded with an “Ah,” revealed his face, and managed a few perfunctory words about how the master and his wife had gone on a trip—but then immediately fell silent.
At that very moment, phrases from his sister’s lengthy letter were recalled one after another, filling him with gut-wrenching madness.
The image of his hometown home shrouded in deep sorrow appeared vividly before his eyes—the figure of his aged father throwing down chopsticks in lamentation (“What is Keiichiro doing?”)—and then the child’s voice (“Daddy when are you coming back?”).
The child’s face with its melancholy brow—muttering things like “When Daddy comes back I’ll show him how to spin the top”—and even his wife’s face, resentfully lamenting her unbearable grief—now floated vividly before Keiichiro’s eyes.
And yet those same eyes of his had to strike down Chitose.
Not quite a rift in their love—yet he felt an inexplicable guilt, as though defiling Chitose.

Keiichiro had never experienced what might be called a mother's loving affection since becoming aware of the world.
Between mother and child existed an unfathomable curse.
That Keiichiro—whose need for affection surpassed others'—repeatedly had his yearning heart coldly betrayed felt less like mere differences in temperament and more like an actual curse.
His mother persistently declared her intention to disinherit him and pass the succession to his elder sister.
His mid-middle-school dropout too had sprung from rebellion against his mother and private sorrow.
By that time Keiichiro had already reached adulthood, yet his mother provided him no better clothing than what tenant farmers' sons wore.
It was during this period that the tormented young man worked as a stonemason at a monastery in the mountains of M County.
Thus the radiant youthful happiness filled with prideful freedom—that which every ordinary household's son could savor—remained beyond Keiichiro's grasp.
When this same Keiichiro turned nineteen, a marriage arrangement with Sakiko was proposed through traditional channels.
Though Sakiko was an unknown woman from his mother's distant relatives, her being two years older struck Keiichiro—who had never known maternal love—as nothing less than heaven-sent bounty.
With the heedless folly of a blinkered racehorse, he married without weighing consequences or alternatives.

In the early days of their married life, Sakiko had loved and cared for Keiichiro like an infant, just as anticipated.
If that were so, had he then been intoxicated by complete happiness?
At least superficially, their marriage had harmonized like zither and lute—yet against this strained fervor of joy first known at nineteen, her strings now twanged out a discordant note that refused to align.
The absence of that exhilaration one feels from a rose newly bloomed, its fragrance still piercingly sweet, could not be dismissed as mere disparity in age.
What in the world had happened?
He began to doubt.
Once doubt reared its head, Keiichiro could no longer restrain himself.

“Sakiko, you were a virgin, right?”

“What are you bringing this up out of nowhere for… How rude!”

Keiichiro had of course hoped for fiery rage, but while Sakiko seemed angered, there lingered an insufficiency in her wrath that unsettled him.
His suspicions only deepened.
And with serpentine persistence, he found himself compelled to probe every crevice of doubt.

“Were you truly a virgin?”

“The woman differs.”

“Even so—look into these eyes of mine.
“No deception will work!”

Keiichiro clenched his teeth fiercely and glared with eyes wide like a wrathful arhat.

“Look all you want,” his wife said, locking her pupils intensely with his gaze, but then immediately twisted into a bitter smile and fluttered her eyelids,

“I can’t stand such a suspicious...”

“No! Absolutely not!”

No matter what was said, Keiichiro intuited the dark shadow within his wife. Even after Toshio was born, he did not cease repeating such interrogations hundreds, thousands of times thereafter. Keiichiro had resolved countless times to go to a barber near his wife’s family home in Y Town and, while getting his hair cut, casually uncover the truth by feigning idle gossip about unrelated strangers. But when it came down to it, he could not bring himself to do it. As a child, when he took a six-shot pistol from his father’s desk drawer, pointed the barrel at his sister while threatening to shoot her, and placed his finger on the trigger—only to suddenly think better of it and peer into the cylinder—there were six bullets ominously glinting inside! He let out a sharp cry and nearly lost consciousness. It was precisely that same kind of feeling. If he had pulled the trigger, what would have happened? When imagining this scenario—if Keiichiro were to go to a barber and discover that terrifying truth come morning—every hair on his body stood on end, and he shuddered uncontrollably.

But at last, that day arrived.

In his second year of middle school, through being a judo team member himself, Keiichiro came to know a man named Yamamoto—two grades above him and likewise a team member.
Keiichiro instinctively disliked Yamamoto—the narrow-eyed, thick-lipped, hook-nosed Yamamoto.
During a match between upperclassmen and underclassmen, ever since he had splendidly thrown Yamamoto down, Yamamoto bitterly held a grudge over it.
One day, as one of his roommates playfully aimed a lens from the dormitory window at the faces of those playing in the schoolyard, the beam of light struck Yamamoto’s face.
The next day, Yamamoto pressured Keiichiro to reveal which friend had played the prank, but when he stubbornly remained silent, Yamamoto slapped his cheek with an open hand. It was from a young monk at their family temple that he later learned Yamamoto and Sakiko had maintained a shameful relationship for two whole years.
Beyond anger, resentment, and frustration, Keiichiro stood utterly appalled by fate’s cruel trick.
Moreover, this marriage had taken a form where he himself had practically begged for it rather than being urged by his parents, leaving him with no one to confront but himself—forced to stagger onward, wounded by his own hand.
And so the daily torment of his fury gradually shifted into nothing but the dazed suffering of despondency.

Keiichiro spent the next three or four years in this manner—moving to Tokyo to channel his wounded heart into religion; clinging to art for solace; returning to the village out of lingering attachment to Sakiko and gnawing anxieties about his child; then disgustedly fleeing back to Tokyo—his life growing endlessly and foolishly decadent from violent mental turmoil.
In the end, Keiichiro came to work as a county history compiler at the Y Town county office, renting a room in a desolate suburb where he distracted his mind with research on local history—and then, before long, he began exchanging words in secret with Chitose, who worked at a private girls’ school while renting the annex of the same house.

Chitose’s hometown was H Town in S Prefecture—a place deep in snow, nestled against the western end of the Chūgoku Mountains and facing northward to the sea. She was an ill-fated orphan who never knew her birth parents’ faces, shuffled between the homes of uncles and aunts who raised her—yet every last relative proved grasping and miserly. At fourteen, she became the adopted daughter of a speculator acquainted with her uncle and moved to Y Town. The speculator couple doted on Chitose beyond what true parents might have done, allowing her to graduate from a local girls’ school as she desired and even sending her to a temporary teachers’ college. But when their household collapsed financially midway through her studies, and soon after her adoptive parents passed away one after another, she was forced to become independent.

When the ill-fated Chitose and Keiichiro mutually revealed their circumstances, the two could not hesitate for a moment and soon found themselves forced to flee to Tokyo, their relationship now one that had to be hidden from the world.

Chitose could not forget the kindness of her adoptive parents after all. Whenever she recounted the final moments of the speculator who had been so kind to her, tears would stream down her face. On nights when cold hail rattled against the wooden doors and eaves while the distant roar of waves from the sea half a league away sounded mournful, she would cling to corpses and weep through until dawn, grieving over the fleeting nature of human existence yet unable to accept life’s impermanence. She spoke so often of the neglected graves on Y Town’s outskirts that Keiichiro grew to resent it. Anxious that no new stone monument had been erected and that weeds must be overgrowing the earthen mound where only a few memorial tablets stood askew, she secretly sent money to the gravekeeper to request tidying.

Chitose’s view of impermanence—had been nurtured from her past experiences.
At times, that emotion would return to her all at once like a tidal surge, tormenting her.
On nights when Keiichiro returned unavoidably late from proofreading duties—from the hour when crowds bustled to meet trains until even the last blue-lit train approached, its schedule growing urgent—Chitose would watch ceaselessly arriving trains, sending one away only to anticipate the next, then vainly dispatch another only to await the following, until Hongō Street fell silent in the deep night and even the footpaths lay emptied of shadows; through it all she persisted relentlessly, unable to cease waiting moment after moment for Keiichiro’s return. This view of impermanence she harbored possessed an unfathomable gravity that Keiichiro’s imagination could never permit nor comprehend.

The next morning, Keiichiro finished all the work his boss had assigned him in one go and spent the afternoon writing a long letter addressed to his father and sister.

“No matter how much I am called inhuman or accused of being an unfilial wretch, I cannot hold my head up any longer.”
“But please do not think badly of Chitose-san.”
“What pains me most of all is that Father and Haruko think of her like a villain.”
“Even if you think so, punishment will be visited upon this body of mine.”
“For there is no justification left for me.”
He tried to write these sentiments layer upon layer.

Keiichiro had written to his father and sister many times before with this same plea—that they show compassion for Chitose—but his own guilt ran so deep he could only ever phrase it abstractly.

The revolution of life—it wasn’t that those words’ noble content was entirely absent from Keiichiro’s recent actions; rather, he wanted to believe they contained a great deal of it.
But when he calmly reflected and questioned himself, he could not help but feel a wave of revulsion wash over him, cold sweat instinctively trickling down.

Ever since learning of his wife’s past, the thought that clung to Keiichiro’s mind and refused to leave even for an instant was that he had never known a "virgin."
Whether in the village or Tokyo, he could not forget this even momentarily.
On streets and in trains—every time he saw a woman, what first surfaced in his mind was not her appearance but whether she might be a virgin.
Could she be one?
Such became his fixation.
Had fortune allowed, he would have wandered nightly through dens of iniquity seeking such a woman miraculously among those blooming in shadow—he would not have cared even were she a beggar’s child.
Even if forced to don prison garb through humiliation, he would fixate obsessively to the point of rape.

One summer night during their stay at a boarding house in Nezu, Keiichiro was invited to the common room where he engaged in casual conversation with the landlady and her daughter Yoshi-chan.
Restlessly fidgeting, Yoshi-chan soon laid out her bedding beside the long charcoal brazier and went to sleep.
Due to the summer vacation, both upstairs and downstairs were completely empty, and the surroundings lay hushed in silence.
Suddenly kicking off the futon while flapping her legs, Yoshi-chan splayed her pure white thighs like a drawn bow.
In that instant, something like 'tsu...' flashed into Keiichiro's vision.

“Oh, Yoshi-chan, how improper!”

The landlady hurriedly covered Yoshi-chan with the futon.
Keiichiro bowed his flushed face downward, trying to suppress the strangely seething turmoil in his heart.
If only the landlady weren't here—he thought, his teeth chattering violently.
In his head flashed a cruel thought—like a spider binding its prey and tearing through its throat.

It was upon Chitose's body that the extension of these bestial, brazen desires was first realized.
When his long-cherished wish had finally been granted, he dragged Chitose away without a moment's hesitation—though one might call it mutual consent, it was as cruel and savage as a gorilla dragging off a woman.
Of course, Keiichiro felt the utmost gratitude and great responsibility toward Chitose.
Like a foolish summer insect flying into the flame, he was resolved to support Chitose even if he had to gnaw on stones without needing his father's wealth.
But while he himself was resolved to face life's struggles alone, dragging even her frail form into that whirlpool and subjecting her to hardship was unbearable.

Keiichiro endured the pain as he drove the many confessions he could not make—to his father, to his sister, to anyone—deep into the recesses of his own heart.

In the end, the letters to his hometown were nothing more than affected yet hollow strings of characters.
Yet he added as a postscript—in his usual verbose manner—just the request that a few comforting words be sent to Chitose: words suggesting how trying it must be to endure life with such a provincial self-willed man as Keiichiro.

The letters of sympathetic concern from Keiichiro’s father to Chitose—which he kept requesting—were something his father had already sent repeatedly, not just once or twice but three times over, without needing to be petitioned. From the very beginning, Father had not shown even a speck of intent to separate the two. Even if they were to separate now, Keiichiro was not one who could boldly return to his family’s threshold in the village; at the same time, it could not be denied that Father keenly felt the weight of his son’s sin against Chitose. Amidst the clamorous rumors and various reports from nearby villages that boiled like a cauldron’s waters, Father had apparently shut himself away in a room for some time out of shame—yet even during that period, he continued sending letters frequently. Though he listed various complaints, he wrote things like hoping they would live together harmoniously, that they would take care of their bodies and live long so they might someday reunite, and that when that time came, they would talk about all the things they’d stored up to discuss. And as always, he would conclude by writing, "There is nothing to do but resign oneself to karmic cause and effect." At times, money orders bearing the postmark of a neighboring village’s post office would unexpectedly be enclosed—and this happened frequently. Vividly imagining Father—who, ashamed before the familiar post office clerk in their village post office, had clung to his cane while climbing the steep slope of two ri, wiping his sweat again and again as he crossed the mountain pass—Keiichiro berated himself with such intense agitation that he wished to die by his own hand.

Keiichiro felt that every path he might take was blocked.
What existed in his heart was nothing but a binding curse that made any movement impossible.

Keiichiro left work early, stopped by the sake wholesaler’s office in Kaimagashi-cho to note down market prices in his notebook, then visited the Shirotaka Masamune wholesaler in Okawabata, where he hurriedly tried to extract newspaper material from the demon-like owner with a lump on his forehead—all before the lights came on.
When he went outside, the surroundings were already pitch dark.
The blue lights and red lights of boats passing through the river mouth were scattered beautifully across the dark water's surface.

He visited the advertising manager's house at Ueno Yamashita, but the manager was not home.
He bought bananas at the night stalls on Hirokoji and returned home on foot via Kiridoshizaka Slope.

After eating, Chitose removed the banana peels while,

“But I feel relieved now,” she said in a profoundly heartfelt tone.

“Yes…”

Keiichiro too was overwhelmed by boundless emotion.

“At that time, I…”
She began to speak, then pressed her lips together.

With just those words—“At that time”—the unspoken thought passed wordlessly between them, reaching each other’s hearts.
Keiichiro had stolen some four hundred yen from his father’s savings passbook, only to lose it all within a month or two.
Day after day they had been driven by the demands of survival.
At mealtimes, even when reaching for a piece of pickle, they would exchange glances before bringing their chopsticks to it—such was their manner now.
He had searched desperately for work, but to no avail.

“I could go to Mitsukoshi’s sewing department—they say they’ll hire anyone there anytime.”

Chitose said with forced cheer, but Keiichiro remained unmoved.

Just then, he found an editor position at the Sake Newspaper Company listed in the job classifieds and went at the specified time.
He was first among over twenty applicants to arrive.
Some were dismissed outright after brief exchanges. With the remaining half, the boss made each write an article, then picked them up one by one to read before ruthlessly rejecting them in turn. In the end, only two remained: Keiichiro and a man with a splendidly trimmed mustache wearing gold-rimmed glasses. The boss turned to Keiichiro and,

“In any case, you come by tomorrow at nine o’clock,” he said.

“I’ll work earnestly, so please hire me. I sincerely ask for your guidance.”

Keiichiro politely bowed deeply and withdrew from his seat. As he started to step out in his worn-out clogs, he turned back to bow again, but the boss’s face remained hidden behind the screen.
Keiichiro felt such hatred toward the man with gold-rimmed glasses—who was talking to the boss in an all-too-worldly-wise, efficient tone, brimming with apparent confidence—that he wanted to slap the man across the cheek.

When he stepped outside, he was assaulted by a sudden downpour of large raindrops.
He ran ducking under house eaves and took shelter on a bank's stone steps awhile, but when he finally resolved to board a bell-clanging crowded train, Keiichiro was drenched like a drowned rat.
At the stop Chitose had come to meet him; in the torrential rain she waited with one hand holding up an umbrella and the other hiking her hem high.
And spotting Keiichiro's sodden figure at the train exit, Chitose hurriedly approached,

“Oh, you’ve gotten soaked,” she said, furrowing her brows deeply with a pained expression.

Keiichiro dove into Chitose’s umbrella, and the two entered a dark alley from the side street before the university’s main gate—where the sweet shop stood—sharing the umbrella as they went.
As they walked, Keiichiro recounted to Chitose every detail of what had transpired at the sake newspaper company.

“In any case, he told me to come again tomorrow.”

“Then they must certainly be planning to hire you.”

She said this, but with the premonition that it might become yet another futile hope like those repeated countless times before rising foremost in her mind, Chitose found it too painful to say anything more.

"They might hire me..."

Keiichiro muttered under his breath.
Yet having staked his hopes on such an uncertain prospect and made the decision alone, he feared he would only disappoint Chitose yet again.
The more he dwelled on it, the more resentful he grew toward the man with gold-rimmed glasses.

"I do hope they truly hire me..."

Keiichiro let out an involuntary deep sigh.

“Don’t lose heart now, you must stay strong.”

In this way, Chitose showed her resolve and tried to bolster Keiichiro’s spirits.
But as she saw Keiichiro’s wretched figure—his drenched clothes clinging heavily to his legs, making walking difficult, and droplets plopping from his overgrown hair—even through the darkness of night, hot tears glistened in her eyes.

Keiichiro had been luckily hired, but Chitose never forgot that night.

“I thought I shouldn’t cry, but at that time—I was just so sad…”
She would mention this whenever it came to mind.

After finishing the post-meal cleanup, Chitose abruptly ended their casual conversation there and then, drew the dim lamp close to her eyes, and began her sewing work.
Keiichiro tried slipping the thermometer under his arm, but since his temperature hadn’t returned to normal, he immediately crawled into bed.

The middle school student in the neighboring house through a single wall began reviewing English with absurdly poor pronunciation.

What a funy bear !

“Ugh, shut up!”
“Do it quieter!”
The brother, who seemed to be a university student, reprimanded him this way.

The middle school student remained completely unfazed.

Is he strong?

“Shut up!”
The brother scolded in an enraged, shrill voice.

Keiichiro and Chitose unexpectedly exchanged glances and burst into stifled laughter.
But they soon could no longer laugh.
Compared to those brothers’ future—so rich in hope and radiant—they felt their own future was such a desolate, aimless thing.

By the time the night watchman’s clack-clack clappers could be heard, the middle school student’s sleep-talking became as clear as if held in one’s hand.
It seemed he was even reviewing English in his dreams.
Downstairs, the landlady had closed up the shop.
The night deepened profoundly around them.
The drunken university purveyor diagonally across yelled at his wife; the violent sounds of objects being thrown rose sharply for a time.
After a while, the Chinese soba vendor’s flute could be heard.

“Oh, he’s come around again!”
Chitose, compelled by emotion, set down the hand that held her needle.

Chitose said that even if they were to leave this capital and live secluded in some mountain valley, she would likely never forget the sound of the Chinese soba vendor's flute.—At the time of their elopement, the highly virtuous Priest G of the Pure Land sect had tried with all his might to separate them.
Due to Keiichiro having once lodged in Priest G’s Zen quarters for two full years and constantly attended upon him to receive his teachings, upon arriving in the capital, he found himself compelled to first take refuge with Priest G and confess everything.
Though Priest G possessed full human sympathy, from the standpoint of his own faith, he could not permit himself to approve and overlook Keiichiro’s actions.
Priest G summoned Keiichiro nearly every night and preached earnestly: “The darkness of ignorance and earthly desires grows thick; deluded thoughts run rampant… Though you now lack discernment at life’s outset, soon the eyes of your delusion will awaken! Such an unnatural cohabitation cannot endure—your heart cannot bear its burden. The day of disillusionment, the day of ruin, draws near! You must abandon this fleeting fancy and part ways!”
Keiichiro felt a resentment akin to having living wood split within him, yet because he still harbored an inextinguishable bond with his family back home, and because guilt churned ceaselessly in his heart, when that vulnerability was struck, his conscience felt irreconcilable with reality.
While Keiichiro endured Priest G’s relentless sermons—harsh as rodent gnawing—Chitose waited alone on the second floor, straining for the clack of his geta in the deserted alley. It was then that the Chinese soba vendor’s flute pierced the stillness, and she wept uncontrollably, lost to herself.
From Chitose’s perspective, there was both pity and resentment toward Keiichiro—bowing weakly before Priest G as separation was demanded—but more than anything, the accursed fate that had compelled her, who had somehow sustained her frail body and fragile heart with dignity through shadowed years until twenty-three, to choose of all things to elope with a married man must have filled her with such anguish, enough to rend her very being…….

The Chinese soba vendor clattered his cart down the gradual slope in front of their house toward the foot of the hill, but only his flute's sound split the still air, arriving mournfully from some distant place.
For an instant, Keiichiro even fancied them as sin-laden wanderers hiding their exiled selves through foreign nights in Beijing or Nanjing, sinking into thoughts heavy with grief, worry, and fear—and in that moment, a bitter sorrow and loneliness seeped into his marrow.

“You should sleep now,” Keiichiro said.

“Yes.”

Having answered, Chitose put away her sewing, removed the pins, loosened her hair, and was about to change into her nightclothes when Keiichiro, upon seeing her emaciated naked form, startled as if only now realizing it and hurriedly closed his eyes.

Keiichiro’s monthly salary was thirty-five yen as a trainee for the time being.
Since this made sustaining their livelihood difficult, the shortfall came to be covered by Chitose’s sewing work, and they pasted a small rectangular cardboard sign reading “Kimono Alterations Available” on the door panel facing the alleyway downstairs.
Fortunately, the neighbors brought sewing work, so they managed to scrape by each month—but being hounded by rush orders that required all-nighters left Chitose’s health nearly ruined.

“My hair is falling out so much.”

In the morning, as Chitose combed her hair, she gathered the fallen strands into a bundle and showed them to Keiichiro with tears in her eyes.
Indeed, her hair had thinned to a pitiful degree; even with added strands combed into a seven-three part, gaps were visible like the skin of a bird whose down had been plucked.
A deep pity welled up from the depths of Keiichiro’s heart, but as her tears continued to fall, he sometimes even felt a rage that threatened to overturn their very existence at its foundation.
Don’t blame me like that!
I want to plead—isn’t this hardship mutual?
He felt a selfish impulse—unable to restrain himself from directing harsh criticism and miserly rebukes at her show of weakness.

Chitose, who had suffered severe summer emaciation, still showed no recovery of flesh even after autumn winds began blowing.
Her face remained passable—if one could call it that—but her double chin had become single-layered, and when naked, her ribs appeared stratified beneath pallid skin.
Her waist and thighs had shriveled like sun-dried grass.
Malnutrition played its part...

Keiichiro tried sleeping while embracing her gaunt form that emitted faint, staccato snores when suddenly his head seemed to burst open—as if gulping air through an imaginary mouth—bringing with it a suffocating dull ache.
He attempted wrapping navy merino cloth around the stinging electric lamp but ultimately rose to extinguish it.
The harder he strained to forget everything and sink into oblivion, the more his mind sharpened until sleep seemed utterly unattainable.

Bathed in moonlight leaking through the gaps of ill-fitting shutters, Chitose's face—her hair disheveled upon the white cylindrical pillow yet not a single eyelash stirring in her sleeping form—was as pale as that of an invalid.
He could not help but feel a deeper guilt toward Chitose than toward the wife and child he had abandoned back home.
When he thought this, an intense pity welled up from nowhere and persisted for a time.
One moment he would be overwhelmed with intense pity; the next, he found himself blankly detached.

In all of this—what was he to do?
And what would become of it all?
Keiichiro tossed and turned repeatedly.—

(Showa 3)