Pathway to Japanese Literature

In mid-February, Keiichirō and Chitose found themselves forced to abandon the second-floor room they had been renting above a senbei shop in Morikawachō Shinsakaue—driven to this extremity by an unforeseen trivial incident they could never have anticipated. Yet though the hard buds of the magnolia tree in the neighboring garden—its branches stretching over the back drying platform—had begun showing faint color, any house where they might settle remained stubbornly beyond their grasp. A full year and a half had passed since Keiichirō eloped with Chitose, abandoning his wife and still utterly endearing child in a rural village at Y Prefecture's far western edge. Through those months he had piled up manifold torments, suppressing shamelessly servile and contemptible base emotions while tenaciously maintaining this dim six-tatami room as their dwelling place. How he must have cherished this makeshift room of theirs! Daily Keiichirō found himself compelled to confront this thought: that if he were to sit facing the yellow wall—its cracked speckled surface stained with grime—until calluses formed on his feet; if he were to bow his head to a life henceforth dictated by past deeds and karmic retribution; then perhaps some demonic voice might whisper into the very core of his resolve, urging him toward decisive action.

Since last month, through the introduction of a kind acquaintance he had recently grown close to by chance circumstances, Keiichirō had been able to join a literary magazine company in the Ushigome area. His joy defied comparison. In stark contrast to being driven like cattle by that Santama activist-turned master of the Sake Newspaper Company—a burly-cheeked, domineering man—this new position proved almost wastefully carefree in its idleness. Yet this too proved fleeting; though one might attribute it to his lack of experience, being socially inept, stubborn, and inflexible as he was, he soon found himself enduring the scorn and ridicule of his peers—a humiliation born entirely from the rust of his own ineptitude, an inevitable consequence he could not escape. Like a beggar clinging to people’s sympathy with outstretched hands to beg for daily sustenance, Keiichirō visited renowned literati day after day, kneeling on the ground to implore them for contributions. But due to his lack of tact, he would persistently press them, only to be disliked and curtly rejected—a frequent occurrence. At times, he would be deemed a nuisance by the doorkeeper and subjected to threatening remarks. He would desperately whip himself into action, yet as dusk approached—fueled by the resentment of an outcast, a fallen man—his spirits would wane. Hiding his tormented gaze beneath the faded brim of his shabby fedora, dragging his weather-worn shoes with worn-down soles, he would make his way back to this attic resembling a hidden cellar where Chitose lay concealed, all while feeling the helplessness of a traveler resting on a grassy pallet. Could it be that the thread binding them had now transformed from a vexing constraint into thick iron chains dragging through darkness? I don’t understand. He sank into thought, stood still, and let out a ragged sigh. Though he exerted all his strength and bloodied himself in life’s struggles, whenever he turned inward, he found himself enclosed in desolate thoughts. The moment he felt his body shudder under a sudden tempest of remorse whirling in from nowhere, what followed his self-flagellation was an interminable dark night of ignorance—driven by vile base passions that allowed no moment of peace. I know not where to drive the wedge that might prevent my falling—whether in denial or affirmation—of my having been born into this world, of this sorrowful existence, of being thus with so many acts of madness. Once again, Keiichirō let out a hot breath like a sickly, exhausted beast, opened his heavy eyelids to fix his gaze with eyes devoid of light, and looked around his surroundings as if only now realizing...

“What are you making such a fuss about now! We haven’t even found a house yet!”

One day, when Keiichirō returned early from work, his irritated, sharp voice made Chitose stiffen instantly. “I just thought… we should be ready to move whenever we find a place…” she said in a faint whisper, her pale oval face lifting as she fixed him with a pleading gaze, then snapped shut the lid of the trunk she’d been packing. That trunk was the sole memento left to her by her adoptive father—a stock trader who had now passed away. The nephews, nieces, and relatives who had gathered at the stock trader’s deathbed surveyed every corner of the room—where his final labored breaths hung in the air, growing more urgent by the moment—with eyes gleaming like wolves, already appraising the items they would claim once he drew his last breath. They had taken all notable possessions of course, even mere trinkets, but this large trunk—little more than a worthless object covered with inspection seals from various customs houses and marks from foreign inns, which the stock trader had carried through China and Manchuria during his prime—was, remarkably, left to Chitose. This had been brought to Tokyo along with the koto—a memento of her adoptive mother’s days of former glory.

Chitose was folding her meager three or four pieces of personal belongings and storing them in that trunk. After he had raised his voice and rebuked her, unbearable sorrow assailed his heart. Keiichirō and Chitose were not permitted to linger in their familiar six-tatami room with even a moment’s sentimentality. The relocation was placed in a state of desperate urgency that permitted not a moment’s hesitation. It was a very recent occurrence. Chitose went to a public bath in Kikuzaka—one she had never visited before—because her usual bathhouse on the tram street was closed. As she washed herself in a corner, right in front of her stood a woman with a ginkgo-leaf chignon at her nape, turned obliquely away from Chitose, who bore a striking resemblance to the landlady downstairs—the woman used her towel with furtive busyness while glancing around suspiciously. When she looked up in surprise, she saw that the woman had no toes on either foot save for the big ones. She involuntarily shuddered, swallowed the cry that had nearly escaped her, and stared fixedly at those faintly repulsive malformed feet—the instant she did so, the woman turned to face Chitose. It was Naigi-san from downstairs after all! In an instant, Naigi-san clenched her teeth in a terrifying grimace and—without uttering a word to her petrified companion—recoiled backward as if fleeing danger, scrambling upstairs without properly wiping off the soap suds. Though Chitose had invited Naigi-san to bathe countless times before—invitations Naigi-san had always refused—and though she had worn tabi socks even in summer to conceal her feet—Keiichirō had harbored some suspicions—regardless, that night neither could sleep a wink. True enough, from the very next day onward Naigi-san ceased speaking to them entirely. When Chitose went downstairs on an errand, Naigi-san would slam the shoji door violently enough to break its latch while letting out deliberate coughs that made the house creak. They were demoralized by fear. Naigi-san and Chitose had until then been closer than sisters; Naigi-san would bring up needlework orders from neighbors to their second-floor room, skillfully handle urgent tailoring tasks when Chitose fell behind, climb those ladder-like stairs countless times daily to mediate errands with grocers and liquor shops—and just when they recalled these countless kindnesses with such overwhelming gratitude that their hearts raced— Even Naigi-san’s thoughtful gestures—like secretly intercepting letters from Keiichirō’s hometown meant to be hidden from Chitose—all reversed overnight like a flipped palm. Keiichirō’s anguish knew no bounds. “Damn it! What kind of fool gawks at someone’s crippled feet?! How can you be so thoughtless?!”

Keiichirō flew into a tantrum, eyes blazing as he lunged at Chitose. “I was wrong,” she apologized once, but with eyebrows twitching violently and lips quivering—even Chitose, who had never shown a hint of defiance—wailed frenziedly as though flames were consuming her body: “This misery is unbearable—I’d sooner die!” and “If you condemn me so harshly, I’ll leave you this instant!” Day after day, the two walked through neighborhoods within reach of Chitose’s needlework clients, searching for a room to rent. Yet despite the apparent abundance of lodgings, none proved readily available once they began looking. Keiichirō had harbored a pathological hatred for his ancestral home—that vast farmhouse with its great thatched roof and thirty-mat hearth room—selling it off for pennies while obstinately demanding they replace it with some modern stylish residence, each time undoubtedly causing his father untold grief. The commotion of this house’s ridgepole-raising ceremony—constructed when his grandfather’s household stood at its zenith after clearing the zelkova-covered hill behind it—remained legendary among local elders, its story passed down even now. “Keep spouting such sacrilege and you’ll end up in a shack!” his father had near-wept while chastising his recklessness. Now Keiichirō found himself in a two-tatami space barely accommodating his knees, trying to make do with a single earthen pot—yet even as he desperately sought that very shack, it eluded him. Just nights prior, they had gone to rent a certain second-floor room in Nishikata-chō. When requesting permission for couple’s self-catering, they were brusquely refused by a stout old woman—her sparse white hair styled like a tea whisk, clad in purple haori—who scowled and waved them away; on their return journey, Keiichirō suddenly recalled his father’s years-old words, chest constricting as scalding tears overflowed unbidden.

The landlady Naigi-san's bitter resentment—borne from her anguish as she frayed her nerves trying to conceal her deformed foot from all—was such that even tearing herself apart would not have sufficed. She would collar the neighborhood women gathered at the shopfront and, loud enough to carry upstairs, spread every manner of falsehood and slander about them, anything to drive them out. Even her husband—a construction worker more timid and cowardly than most—scratched at his tearful face, desperate for their immediate departure, and pleaded this to them through his eyes.

While watching with bitter resentment the people who, intoxicated by the shallow spring, set out for Ueno Hill with their families in tow, the two had to trudge about in their miserable search for a rented room.

To evade the prying eyes of gossipy neighborhood women, they rose before dawn, loaded their meager belongings—packed the previous night—onto a single cart, and stole away through damp backstreets shrouded in thick morning fog, moving to Bridge 219 in the same Morikawa-chō district, just three blocks from the senbei shop.

It was a completely spur-of-the-moment move. It was the Doctor’s Widow—Chitose’s across-the-street neighbor, with whom she had grown acquainted through needlework—who, upon learning of their dire circumstances, halted the planned renovations for the house she had just purchased and provided it to them. The house consisted of two rooms—three-tatami and six-tatami—with floorboards apparently rotted through in places, a dilapidated structure that could be likened to a fox’s den where one had to walk on tiptoe across sunken tatami mats. It faced a high stone wall overgrown with ivy and vines, while behind it stretched the undulating roofs of nagaya tenements resembling cloth bands. To the immediate south of the house soared a cliff like a sheer precipice of several dozen fathoms, while to the north ran a path so narrow one had to squeeze through between the neighboring house's wooden siding and stone wall, continuing up stone steps to the communal gate. If a fire were to attack from the communal gate, there would not be an inch of escape; and if the high cliff were to collapse, the house would be shattered to pieces. When they came to clean the previous day, the two looked up at the towering, terrifying cliff and felt intimidated; recalling the gruesome death of the elderly couple crushed in the nearby Masago-cho landslide, their hearts grew immeasurably dark. After pondering for a while, Keiichirō scolded Chitose, who was faltering with tears in her eyes, and they abandoned the now dreary, unregretted second floor of the senbei shop.

What Keiichirō feared about their new dwelling—more than being crushed by landslides, more than burning in flames, more than any violent force of fate—was that it afforded a view of Reverend G’s chapel spire encircled by chinquapin trees atop the cliff. During their elopement, Keiichirō had been summoned nightly to that chapel where Reverend G subjected him to severe sermons until late hours, demanding he abandon his unholy life with Chitose. But once Reverend G saw through Keiichirō’s unshakable obsession—no matter how relentlessly he pressed—his zeal to pursue this fleeing soul soon waned. Whenever walking near the chapel and glimpsing ahead the diminutive figure of Reverend G in somber robes, dignified and stern, Keiichirō would slink away furtively. In midnight awakenings gripped by unspeakable emptiness—when visions tormented him of his rural wife’s resentful face framed by wild fox-possessed hair; his young child lying post-surgery on a Y Town hospital bed; his father grown gaunt and white-haired from unfilial grief; all those accusing gazes of country kin learned through his sister’s letters—Reverend G’s piercing gaze would join them, shining like an azure star with righteous conviction to condemn the deepest recesses of his lost soul. At such times Keiichirō would react violently—shouting abruptly or shaking Chitose awake under false pretenses—performing these cowardly acts to scatter his anguish.

Coinciding with their moving day, the magazine went to press, leaving them with two or three days of respite. At night, sitting knee to knee, they ate moving-day soba. Using a small desk as their dining table, with their favorite pickled onions as a side, they shared a gō of sake bought in an empty cider bottle and held a modest celebration.

“I’ve caused you so much worry and hardship. You must be exhausted,” she said in a tearful voice, perhaps stirred by thoughts of their tumultuous circumstances whirling about them. “No—you’re the one…”

And Keiichirō grew sentimental and murmured gently under his breath. At the same time as feeling unforgettable gratitude toward the Doctor’s Widow who cherished Chitose, he clasped his hands and bowed his head inwardly toward her before slipping into bed. In carefree ease, unburdened by reservations toward anyone, he stretched out his limbs as he pleased. The walls crumbled, the sliding doors were torn, and the cold wind seeping through gaps pierced his skin to the bone—yet shimmering silver moonlight streamed through the glass window as if beckoning life into the abandoned house’s faded tatami mats that lay like a ravine’s depths. The surroundings fell silent with a ※ (replacing 'eye' in 'silence' with 'self') hush; not even a dog’s distant howl could be heard. Lured by the plink-plunk of water dripping from a loose faucet into a bucket, he nostalgically recalled the bamboo pipe channeling water from behind his childhood home. Keiichirō suddenly slid out of the futon, leaned against the desk, and proudly wrote on a postcard to his father about finally having a house—only to impulsively tear it up moments later.

"You should rest well this morning, okay?"

In the bright morning, having woken at dawn's first light, the two lay exchanging whispered confidences about how they had navigated through darkness to reach this point, but soon Chitose spoke these words and left their bedding. Keiichirō, who had developed a slight fever, cupped his hands over his face and pressed the chill-aching base of his skull against the pillow when suddenly from the clifftop chapel came the relentless striking of a stone bell. He frantically plugged his ears with thumbs. But it proved futile. The sutra-chanting voices of nearly a hundred Imperial University students lodging in Reverend G's dormitory resounded through the still morning air, spitefully vivid as if clutched in one's palm. Clicking his tongue in disgust, he adopted a recklessly defiant mood—whistling tauntingly in rhythm while stomping his feet. Yet before long his eyes had squeezed shut. "Amidst carnal desires... abysmal obscurity." When he heard the fragmented sutra—"Partings endure long"—that Reverend G had once drilled into him at the dormitory, the turmoil in his heart swelled violently. "Inverting hierarchies... mutual clinging affections." "Squandering days till year's end... delusion's shroud"—Moments later, Keiichirō buried his face in the futon's collar, pressed fists to his temples, and bit back choked, hitching sobs unheard by Chitose preparing breakfast in the kitchen. He jerked upright resolutely, perched formally on the thin futon with hands aligned on knees, bracing his lower abdomen as if armoring against defeat.

Such mornings—mornings like being lashed with fiery whips—continued day after day. But Keiichirō, too, gradually grew accustomed to it and became increasingly negligent.

Reverend G insisted they should first separate temporarily and both thoroughly heed his teachings; then, if theirs was a bond truly meant to be, they should unite not from trivial excitement, and if meant to break, they should part—but rather than fearing lingering regrets, their daily existence bore down on them with ever-increasing urgency. With the day approaching when the money stolen from his father’s passbook would run out, Keiichirō wandered the vast city devoid of connections searching for work, clutching at straws like a drowning man. He couldn’t even bring himself to seek help from his hometown—something any proper man should manage. He had discarded all pride. He begged at the Social Bureau’s Dōjunkai and secured an apprenticeship at a dubious shack-like printshop built on Honjo Yokomido’s burnt ruins, only to be dismissed after three days. Regaining composure, he walked from dawn till dusk through towns, drawn even to “Boy Wanted” signs dangling from eaves. Rain or shine, he went daily to Ueno’s Municipal Employment Office, resting on waiting room benches among youths enduring growling stomachs with grimaces, skeletal old men lying supine with sunken eyes, and listless boys pondering with crossed arms like shriveled gourds. All were too emaciated to raise their voices. When he saw a student in serge hakama and square cap acting haughtily—face declaring “I’m no unemployed!” while snapping at staff—it freshly recalled his own wretched figure when he too had prowled employment offices in hakama, chilling him with shame’s cold sweat. Beneath a railway underpass to the side, he gazed half-vacantly at five-six laborers hauling iron pipes under searing sun—directed by a foreman in white-striped cap—chanting “heave-ho” in unison. Simply being employed made these men objects of boundless envy. The next day too, he raced around Shiba and Aoyama with Chitose seeking artificial flower and pouch piecework, only to return disappointed—shoulders pressed together in near-empty moatside trains where damp midnight winds blew through.

When he was hired by the Sake Newspaper Company to address envelopes, by mid-month the only money left was enough for train fare. At that time, a middle-aged sculptor with a balding head and spindly bean-vine-like stature wearing a Lubashka edited there. Lubashka would ask without fail every three days, “Madam, could you lend me fifty sen?”—so poor was the man that he didn’t even hesitate to make such requests in front of others. Even so, that Lubashka would sweep his long arms from afar while tracing circles in the air as he smoked nothing but Golden Bat cigarettes. When that pungent aroma drifted over from the editing room next door through the ladder steps into Keiichirō’s three-tatami room on the wind’s currents, he found himself whipped up by an irresistible base craving. Keiichirō had gone days without being able to smoke the tobacco he couldn’t part with even momentarily. His mind grew dull while loud droning tinnitus rang through his ears; dizziness set in until the pen he held naturally slipped from his grasp. Unable to bear it any longer, he nonchalantly approached Lubashka and flared his nostrils to inhale the Golden Bat smoke he exhaled—quenching his thirst.

Timing it for when Lubashka went downstairs during his lunch break, he darted into the editing room like a mouse and nimbly stole Lubashka’s Golden Bat cigarette butts. The next day too, he peered through the same gap and stole the cigarette butts. After using a toothpick as he returned to his seat, Lubashka peered into the tobacco tray,

"How strange. All the cigarette butts are disappearing. Could someone be stealing them?" he muttered and tilted his head in puzzlement. Though the good-natured Lubashka showed no signs of suspecting Keiichirō, Keiichirō himself felt an unspeakable shamelessness and the guilt of his base nature, his ears turning crimson as if aflame while clammy sweat trickled down his spine and underarms. A few days later, Lubashka was dismissed on account of his repeated borrowing—despite having two children and a wife in her final month of pregnancy to support—and Keiichirō was installed in his vacated position.

……………… Since moving into the house under the cliff, Keiichirō sold lengthy interview manuscripts to other major magazines through the president’s efforts in addition to his salary at the magazine company, and Chitose desperately earned through sewing—so they did not lack for tobacco expenses. He walked through the streets with eyes narrowed like a mosquito’s, luxuriating in the sweet aroma of Golden Bat as he let his tongue savor it with every breath. When attempting to board a train, he would hesitate to discard his lit Golden Bat cigarette, standing rooted on the street until he finished smoking it even if one or two trains passed by—though in moments of haste, there were times he dashed it against the asphalt without a shred of reluctance, not even half-smoked. In such instances—though stemming from a miserly heart quite unlike the pious impulse of fanatical ascetics of old who poured hot tears upon rock faces in burning yearning and devotion—Keiichirō sometimes let fall a drop, two drops of hot tears upon the Golden Bat cigarette butts.

The sister who tormented Keiichirō with letter after letter detailing every conflict arising in their rural home—down to the minutest particulars—departed at once for Sasebo Naval Port when her husband, a naval officer, returned from his long ocean voyage. Keiichirō kissed with a sense of relief. However, he regretted being unable to receive any news about the condition of the child hospitalized at the Red Cross Hospital in Y Town. Ever since receiving his sister’s final letter at the beginning of January—when he was still commuting to his former workplace, the Sake Newspaper Company in Reiganjima Hamamachi—announcing that surgery for the malignant tumor on [the child’s] head would soon be performed, he had been ceaselessly distracted by worries of awaiting some ominous outcome. Keiichirō would take the discount train and stand on Eitai Bridge for twenty or thirty minutes until the company doors opened, passing the time—this had become his daily routine. Leaning his chin on the railing, he fixed his half-open eyes—with a listless, sinking feeling as if fading away—on boats growing faint as bamboo leaves: those poling upstream against the current, and those swept downstream by swirling flows, towed by tugboats while spraying foam like arrows. But as if roused by footsteps or voices, he abruptly regained awareness and raised his face to stare blankly at the vast sea stretching afar, its waves hazed in morning light. And as he thought of his hometown lying beyond the indigo-hazed boundless sea, as he thought of the sick child’s plight, the backs of his eyelids seared as if boiling over with suppressed sobs, and his teeth chattered uncontrollably.

In her final letter, his sister had emphasized that their mother was stationed at the hospital, nursing Toshio. His wife Sakiko had returned to her parents' home in Y Town under the pretense of convalescing through fabricated illness, yet stubbornly refused to visit the hospital mere steps away where their gravely ill child lay; how Father grew utterly exhausted from his daily hospital visits, jolting along the five-ri rocky path each morning on the first Entarō carriage and returning each night on the last rickety one; how pitiable Toshio was with his tonsils inflamed until no food could pass his throat—milk poured into his mouth would immediately dribble from his nose—yet how much more agonizing it was to witness Father's distress firsthand; how utterly beyond pen or tongue to express this heartache; "Brother, I beg you—please send Father just one line saying 'I'm truly sorry for all the worry'," the sister petulantly detailed in her letter. Moreover, in her increasingly erratic handwriting, his sister had added at the end that depending on the outcome of the surgery, their father intended to postpone Toshio’s elementary school enrollment by a year.

—The April enrollment deadline now loomed less than a week away. He was beside himself with anxiety. So often did he grow lightheaded that he repeatedly made careless blunders—even bringing his locker token into the bathwater at the public bathhouse. Surely by now he must have been discharged from the hospital? At his desk in the magazine office, at the cliffside house's desk facing the stone wall, Keiichirō grew frantic to confirm his child's current condition through even a mere postcard. Time and again he tried to take up his pen and rise, but his heart remained tightly sealed, refusing to budge.

Keiichirō faced each day in silence, hands clasped, his body rigid as if frozen.

Though it was the season when scattered blossoms could be seen on cherry branches, the city sky remained shut out by gloomy clouds. For two or three days, cold rain mixed with sleet had been falling and occasionally easing, but one morning when they left their futon after such weather, they found the heavy snow of early spring had completely blanketed the house's surroundings overnight. By noon, the roof snow melted by the sun brushed against the window eaves and slid down to the ground with a clattering thud.

“Ah! Look out!”

With a shudder, Keiichirō pressed both hands against the desk and rose to his feet. From the steeply sloped high thatched roof of his hometown house came the dreadful vision of a snow mass piled over three feet thick collapsing with a thunderous crash that shook the ground—then the terrifying phantom of a child being crushed beneath it gripped him, making him involuntarily let out a scream. “What happened?” Chitose, startled, peered out from the adjacent room. Keiichirō skillfully made a plausible excuse to manage the situation, though his eyes remained terribly flustered. He spent that entire day straining his ears, desperate to catch news of his hometown amidst the impatient dripping of melting snow from the eaves and the radio broadcasts spilling over from the imposing mansion beside Kyōdōmon Gate.

At night when leaning against his desk, he would feel strangely breathless while his head grew cold as if sheet ice had formed inside it, so Keiichirō would immediately lie prone in his futon after dinner and let his eyes rest on old magazines without truly reading them. Though he resolved not to sleep until Chitose set down her needlework, his bodily fatigue and mental exhaustion soon had him burying his face in folded arms as he sank heavily into a doze. ..."Toshio!" he cried out like a madman—the instant he did so, his eyes snapped open. By then the night had grown quite late, but Chitose still diligently plied her needle, so she shook Keiichirō awake from his nightmare.

"You saw a dream, didn't you?" “Ah… I had a dreadful dream…”

He had indeed called out "Toshio!"—the child’s name—at the top of his voice, but Chitose didn’t seem to have recognized it as such. Ordinarily he had never so much as breathed that child’s name before her; had he uttered it even in a dream, she might have been tormented beyond endurance. He exhaled and pressed a hand to his chest in relief. In his dream, Keiichirō had returned to his hometown to see the child. Stealing into the village under twilight’s cover, he scaled our family’s closed Heishi gate and called his father and mother outside. But they refused to allow him an audience with their son. To meet only for immediate parting would compound their mutual sin beyond measure, they insisted. As he argued on the veranda—having come all this way just to lay eyes on his child—pleading for even a distant glimpse through narrowed eyes came running from the storehouse direction Toshio himself in loose-sleeved nightclothes crying “Daddy!”

“Toshio!” he cried out with all his might, about to leap toward the child—when Chitose shook him, snapping his eyes open. “What kind of dream was it?” Chitose asked. Keiichirō vaguely dodged the question and evasively brushed it off.

Assailed by the fear that calling his wife's name in his sleep would bring calamity, from that night onward he took care when going to bed—keeping his hands anxiously away from his chest. The meager oblivion attainable only in brief snatches of sleep—yet despite this, Keiichirō's mind stayed razor-sharp from his frayed nerves' torment, and for nights on end he lay sleepless, drowsily yet doggedly squeezing his eyes shut until the neighborhood roosters crowed.

A month had passed. On a warm evening in May when a steady drizzle fell, as he returned from the office, folded his umbrella, and passed through the Kyōdōmon Gate, he found Naigi-san—the senbei shop landlady with whom they had recently reconciled—engaged in a standing conversation with Chitose by the window. But upon descending the stone steps and catching sight of Keiichirō, she hastily took her leave from Chitose, hurried over to him, gave a meaningful glance, and abruptly thrust a letter into his hands as if bumping into him. When Keiichirō, evading Chitose’s notice, opened and read it, the letter proved to be a notice from a branch-family uncle stating that despite still being far from fully recovered, the child had nonetheless been sent to elementary school through sheer force of will. Keiichirō felt a revived joy, as though he had slipped free from a pressing weight that had been holding him down.

Before long, he put on a composed face and sat down at the evening meal. He took up his chopsticks, but Chitose sank into a leaden silence, staring fixedly downward at her knees. He could no longer bear the oppressive weight of that ominous silence, "What's wrong?" he demanded, breaking the stillness himself. "What did you receive from Madam Landlady earlier?" she asked, lifting her head with eyes that twisted spitefully, gleaming with malice. "I didn't receive anything."

Chitose maintained her composure and said in a hoarse voice, “Yes, that’s right.” The impatience of trying to believe Keiichirō washed over her face, but she ultimately couldn’t endure it. Tear-drops drenching her lashes streamed down her cheeks incessantly. Keiichirō was utterly unable to conceal it. “That’s how it is, isn’t it? If that’s how it is, why are you hiding it? Why do you go to such lengths to hide it? Show me.” Reluctantly, Keiichirō took it out and handed it to her. Her hands holding the rolled letter trembled violently as she drew in a breath and ran her eyes over it.

“I’m truly sorry!” Chitose said in a strained voice, then brought her sleeve to her face and collapsed onto the tatami. Her shoulders shook violently like waves.

“Hey, you—you should go back to your hometown. “Please give up on someone like me and go back to your hometown.” “I truly feel sorry… to your father and your child…” When she raised her face—swollen from crying, bloodshot eerie white eyes fixed upon him—and spoke those words, Keiichirō felt a suffocating tightness in his chest that made him not want to live. But even as he frantically tried to improve her mood—alternately threatening and cajoling—the wounded figure of his child on his way to school would appear before him: a military cap tilted askew over a head wrapped in white bandages, a satchel slung over one shoulder and a straw sandal pouch in hand. At this vision, Keiichirō would instinctively withdraw his hand from the struggling Chitose and secretly swallow his tears.

Keiichirō's heart was ceaselessly occupied, one after another, by worries about the child, never resting for a moment.

The child, resembling the slow-witted Keiichirō, was extremely lacking in mathematical aptitude. Even the daughter of the neighborhood carriage driver, who was the same age, had competently grasped addition and subtraction up to twenty, yet his child—though appearing clever at first glance—couldn’t even manage numbers up to ten. Keiichirō fiercely made it his daily routine to teach the child numbers. When he said, “1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7—go on, count them out,” his child would respond with “1, 2, 3, 5, 7.” No matter how many times he repeated it, it was all a futile effort. The child finally burst into tears. He wanted to stab the child to death and die himself. During his elementary school days, when the teacher would write problems on the blackboard and let students who answered correctly leave the classroom one by one, Keiichirō alone had to remain behind while hearing the cheerful voices of children playing capture-the-flag and tag from the playground. A relative’s child who was feuding with his family lured a crowd of students to press their faces against the glass window, peering inside while snickering and giggling. How bitterly ashamed he, with his stubborn refusal to admit defeat, must have been! When such memories revived—this damned brat! And though Keiichirō raised his hand and struck the child, he found himself half crying along with the screaming child. Moreover, the child was exceptionally short in stature, bearing the karmic burden of Keiichirō’s own stunted growth. There was no room for doubt that the child was undoubtedly the very last in school. Keiichirō was shorter in stature than anyone else, and to make matters worse, he unluckily ended up as the odd one out at a two-person desk where he sat alone; during group games and such, he would be made to flee from the line and, filled with bitter regret, had to stand dejectedly under a poplar tree with his finger in his mouth. What was even more sorrowful was during school excursions. Unable to hold hands and chat merrily like the other students lined up in two rows, he had no choice but to trail along at the end of the line all by himself, lunch bag on his back, scurrying hurriedly. Who could know how these experiences made Keiichirō shrink during his sensitive boyhood—Keiichirō would minutely grasp these unalterably sad recollections carved into his distant elementary school days at least once daily, transplanting them wholesale anew onto his child’s circumstances only to have his heart ache. And then the teacher would likely give the new students a mental test. “What does Mr. X’s father do?”

“Yes. He works in the rice fields.” “And Mr. X’s?” “Yes. He is a carpenter.” When asked “What does Mr. Oe’s father do?” the child stood up like a startled doll—but then, how would he answer? “Oe-kun’s daddy ran off with some woman! Yaaai!” Teased by Akutarō with that cry, the child burst into tears, covered his face with his hands, dashed out of the school gate, and was seen running off helter-skelter toward home. Tormented by visions of that fragile child’s heart pleading “Don’t say such cruel things,” imagining how pitifully he might resort to bribing those bullies with paper and colored pencils in desperate flattery—and conjuring all the inevitable tragedies that must befall him—Keiichirō felt a searing pain that scorched his very being.

“You—putting aside your wife—must have some attachment to your child, no matter what, don’t you?”

Chitose asked abruptly now and then. “There’s nowhere.” “Is that so?” She stared at him as if testing his reaction, then bit her lower lip and sank into thought without moving a muscle. “But no matter what you say, you’re parent and child after all.” “Even if those cold words come from your lips, I don’t believe that’s what’s truly in your heart.” “Someday… when your child grows up… he’ll surely come looking for you… but what will become of me then…”

Chitose, overwhelmed by her thoughts, repeatedly let out uncontrollable sighs. Then abruptly came the thought of the day when, years later, his grown child would come to visit. The child who had escaped his stern surveillance would be spoiled by the entire household and grow up utterly unrestrained; before long, he’d squander the family fortune, become an unmanageable rogue wandering from place to place, and eventually come searching for his father—wouldn’t he? With hair grown so long it hid his forehead, a lightly soiled beard grown out, wearing a tattered overcoat and a pair of trousers worn through at the ankles—fastened at the waist with a red sash—in such an outlandish getup, as if he’d thrust both hands into a clothes box—were this figure to suddenly appear at the front entrance, what would Keiichirō do? Surely he wouldn’t go so far as to throw down his father Keiichirō, gag him, and strangle his throat until his eyeballs popped out—but still. His spirits sank.

Keiichirō could not help recalling the days when he had been harsh and devoid of tenderness toward the child. He was, in one respect, in a state of outright opposition to the child. Having been raised since childhood under skewed maternal affection and mutual hatred within some mysterious curse—this Keiichirō who knew nothing of true motherly love—had married a wife two years his senior before reaching adulthood, driven solely by an irrepressible craving to be doted upon and treated with kindness. His wife had sheltered and nurtured him like an infant as expected, but when he saw the child appear in this world—cradled in her arms and being caressed—he realized all affection meant for him had been utterly usurped by the child, leaving him with incomparable loneliness. Keiichirō grew enraged, and there had been more than one occasion when he resolved to quietly poison this interloper.

As Keiichirō lay beside his wife—who was moving her long knitting needles in the detached room—chatting happily together, the sound of pattering footsteps came running down the hallway, and the child arrived. "Mom, what were you doing?" he demanded, stopping to look up at his wife. Then he threw away the loquat fruit he'd been holding, abruptly climbed astride her lap with a thud, roughly opened her neatly arranged collar, and pressed his chestnut-burr-like head against her soft breast before latching onto it. As if parched, he drank greedily, making gulping sounds in his throat, in a manner as rough as a calf voraciously suckling its mother’s milk. He trembled with jealousy as he watched.

“Stop breastfeeding him already. You’re visibly wasting away.” “If it doesn’t dry up naturally, he won’t stop no matter what I do.” “Don’t be absurd! He drinks because you keep offering it!” “Rub chili peppers on your nipples and leave them there.” “Toshio, you must stop now. If you don’t quit this instant, Daddy will punish you.” The child momentarily released the breast, fixing Keiichirō with a venomous sidelong glare, but after sharing a conspiratorial smirk with his mother, clamped his mouth back onto the nipple. Though his features mirrored Keiichirō’s own, that smile—oozing false sweetness that betrayed inner vulgarity—was pure Sakiko.

“I said stop breastfeeding, so stop!” “Once I’ve said it, you obey!” So violent was his own fury that his wife reflexively shoved back the child’s head with both hands. The child, crimson with rage, clawed wildly at her chest. Keiichirō, seething with anger, grabbed the thrashing child without restraint and hurled him onto the floor.

“Daddy, you idiot! You good-for-nothing!” “Don’t get smart with me!” He grabbed the matchbox on the desk and hurled it right at the child. The child, defiant, threw it straight back at him. He threw it again. The child retaliated once more, then in a flash turned his back and bolted away. In an instant, Keiichirō leapt down into the garden. Barefoot, he gave chase and tried to seize the child—now cornered at the closed lattice gate—but just as he reached out, his wife lunged forward and grabbed hold of him.

“How can you act so violently! To think you’d act so violently toward a mere five- or six-year-old child!” The wife swiftly scooped up the child and, without paying any heed to Keiichirō—who was so enraged that blood streamed from his nose—continued. “Honestly, you—taking out your temper even on a child! Fine then—go ahead and be as violent as you like. Before long, these feelings will fester more and more until you end up in an irreparable standoff like you and your mother… There now, Toshio, no need to cry. Mommy will—Mommy alone will—keep loving you forever and ever, so that good-for-nothing Daddy can just go somewhere and never come back for his whole life!”

Such memories weighed on him poignantly and sorrowfully, and Keiichirō found himself vividly recalling the numerous past instances of his harshness toward the child. He felt so disgusted with his own wretched self that he could find no place to settle his being. Once a grudge took root, such feelings could never be washed away by the passage of time and vanish from the child’s mind—he couldn’t believe they would. He had no choice but to steel himself for the child’s inevitable revenge—a retribution he must meekly accept.

Keiichirō was shaken to his soul by a suffocatingly intense renewal of regret and terror. And an elusive, bottomless anxiety permeated every thought of what would become of their future and even their precarious old age. The same feeling ran particularly deep in Chitose.

“We want a child.” “Please—I’m begging you—stop doing such unnatural things.” ...... “While we’re young and our limbs work freely, this might suffice—but when we grow old, what do you mean to do?” “Please consider—even a little—our old age with no child to cling to.” “Truly nothing could be more wretched than this!” “Above all, if things come to this, aren’t we left without a single soul close to us?” “The thought makes me shudder.”

Chitose paused her hands from applying the heated iron to the finished needlework, glared sternly at Keiichirō and reproached him, but immediately resumed speaking in a timid, wilted tone.

“But you know, even if we were to have a child, what should we do about the family registry? I don’t want to burden my own dear child with a dark fate like being labeled an illegitimate child.” “That would be more painful than death itself.”

Keiichirō was struck in his vital spot, anguish welling in his chest until he stood speechless. In Y Town, where their love had budded amid wordless sorrow until escape became impossible, Chitose had vowed to wait years for the day Keiichirō would formally leave his wife. Yet he—declaring he would adopt a do-or-die stance and confront his hometown—had artfully beguiled her with transient falsehoods. Of course, Keiichirō harbored not the faintest intention of undertaking such unprincipled negotiations as divorcing his wife to install Chitose as his lawful spouse. Whether through chance or her conscious efforts to revisit those ironclad promises from Y Town, he sought to smother them beneath veils of ambiguity until they faded into oblivion. Nor was this all—even were Keiichirō reduced to scrounging grain by grain from every trash can lid along the capital's avenues in utter destitution, he told himself this would prove but youth's fleeting trial. For ultimately, having both a hometown to reclaim and a child to rely on in old age would form his greatest strength—so long as his wife preserved peace in her heart to tenderly nurture that frail child. This became his ceaseless prayer. Whenever these dark secrets lurking in his heart's depths were exposed, whenever he confronted his own duplicity, he would shrink as if prostrate upon the earth, eyelids squeezed tight. He could not endure meeting eyes with that unfortunate woman so thoroughly deluded by his own base machinations.

Whenever Keiichirō imagined Chitose’s old age after his death, he would be engulfed in an endless sorrow—a sadness he longed to sift away yet could not, boundless in its reach. Even when trying not to look from the train window during his commute to the company, at the foot of Koishikawa Bridge that inevitably caught his eye—there stood an old woman with a hunched spine, dressed in a single lined kimono against the cold sky, using a baby carriage as a stall as she baked daifuku mochi amid swirling yellow dust, waiting for customers. Her wrinkled face was plastered with makeup as if troweled on, and she lavished charm on boatmen, cart pullers, even oyster vendors to eke out her daily existence. How many times must he have likened this wretched old woman’s circumstances to Chitose’s fate and felt his hair stand on end? He foolishly anticipated the anxiety of her being forced to spend her days in this desolate land—an anxiety that might spread boundlessly into her future—and yet could not wipe away the unrelenting turbulence of the present.

Whenever Keiichirō found himself facing a withered old woman on the train—her vitality utterly sapped, sniffling up a runny nose—he would feel a throbbing pain within himself and even a burning anger, furrow his brow, rise from his seat, and hastily retreat to hide in a corner.

With the arrival of spring, even the cramped area beneath the cliff came alive with sudden vigor. A large calico cat lumbered about. The old chrysanthemum grower in the rear, his clothes the color of dull brown paper, remained wholly absorbed in tending seedlings and applying fertilizer. The lazy man’s portly wife squeezed through the firethorn hedge to the engawa of her northern neighbor—a silver-tongued old woman who from dawn till dusk tapped-tapped tanned leather with a small mallet, crafting koto plectrum pouches as side work—and there, basking in the glorious spring sunlight, launched into lively imitations of actors’ voices and gestures in her Shinshū dialect: “Oh Fukusuke this!” and “Oh Kikugorō that!” until their conversation became wholly consumed by boisterous theater talk. To their dwelling—whose occupants’ means of livelihood remained utterly mysterious to those around them, quiet and reserved as they were—the Doctor’s Widow’s obstinate elderly maidservant would periodically come shouting demands for needlework in an unapologetically domineering voice that brooked no restraint. Whenever this occurred, the old women in the back would as if by prior agreement abruptly halt their animated chatter and lower their voices to whisper furtively among themselves.

On clear days, sleep-inducing vendor calls could be heard drifting serenely down from the clifftop. The flower seller's cries of "Flowers! Flowers!" would shift to "Eggplant seedlings! Cucumber seedlings! Lily seedlings!", then in the blink of an eye change again to "Loaches for sale! Fresh loaches!", until finally a glorious wave of crisp air brimming with early summer's new greenery swept through, bringing goldfish sellers' voices echoing from alleyways everywhere. To hear those voices was yet another sorrow. When the goldfish seller from H Prefecture appeared on the whitish road curving along Sawano River's grassy banks—the river that meandered through his hometown—wearing his sedge hat and bending his carrying pole as he called out in that lonesome cadence, "Goldfish here! Baby carp... Baby carp, goldfish here!", every village child's heart would leap. The child—fresh from school and forced to review arithmetic he couldn't grasp, scolded by his strong-willed mother until his face twisted in misery—seemed to make his pitiful voice ("Daddy, won't you buy me goldfish?") and soft little footsteps carry across three hundred ri to echo at this cliffside house's window.

Before they knew it, the muggy, oppressive days of the rainy season arrived. When mist-like drizzle pattered down and frog croaks echoed from nowhere, suddenly through Keiichirō’s eyes this cliffside corner of the city transformed into vibrant blue rice fields of his mountainous hometown—surrounded by verdant hills teeming with clamorous frog song. And he thought how right now the countryside must be in the midst of rice planting. Though his father had ceased that intense labor with advancing age, not a single day of repose would visit his body and spirit until life’s end. For decades—through rain and wind—he had toiled alongside his father through farming’s hardships; now lying in a dim barn where even faint sunlight couldn’t penetrate, passing days as if merely awaiting death—toward this elderly fate too Keiichirō felt pity.

On the wall of their room—stained with several dirty mouse-gray streaks from rain leaks—hung Burne-Jones’s *Music*, a print by the Pre-Raphaelite master purchased last New Year’s Eve at the used bookstore in front of the First Higher School. Thick dust coated its surface, suspended by a long green cord. The sun, blocked by the front stone wall, glared in once a day through the skylight. And within the framed print—depicting an old-fashioned room overlooking a lake, hills, and castle dyed in rose-colored twilight—the sunlight glared upon two nuns quietly playing violins: one in black robes, and the other whose trailing crimson aprons dripped with a brilliance that set her garments ablaze in radiant scarlet. Keiichirō, in an overflowing drunkenness, gazed ecstatically at the print, his breath quickening as he clung to it as if for support, seeking after the elusive comfort he so desperately desired. Even if he were to set aside this world's ugliness and drive his heart toward that sublime joy—dedicating abundant love to bewitching art more precious than life itself, attaining unwavering faith—how much light and peace could possibly await tomorrow, in the future, that he could long for? Ultimately, it seemed that thoughts of resignation entangling his very being would rage on unchecked throughout Keiichirō’s entire life.

………………… (1928)