Pathway to Japanese Literature

In mid-February, Keiichiro and Chitose found themselves forced to abandon the second floor of the rice cracker shop they had rented in Morikawachō Shinsakaue—driven out by an unforeseen trivial incident that had erupted without warning. Yet even as the hard buds of the magnolia tree stretching its branches over the backyard clothes-drying platform began tingeing faintly with color, they could find no hope of securing a stable dwelling. Keiichiro had now endured a full year and a half in this dark six-tatami room—piling up every manner of torment while smothering shamelessly servile and contemptible base passions—since eloping with Chitose after abandoning his wife and still-frail child in a remote western village of Y Prefecture. How he must have cherished this makeshift room of his! Facing the cracked yellow wall mottled with stains—his future life bowed beneath past misdeeds and their karmic toll—Keiichiro was driven daily to press himself relentlessly with thoughts as though whispered by a devil’s voice: What if he sat until calluses formed on his feet? What resolve might take root then?

Since last month, through the introduction of a compassionate acquaintance he had recently grown close to by chance, Keiichiro had been able to join a literary magazine company in the Ushigome area. His joy defied description. Compared to being driven like livestock by that Santama activist-turned owner of the sake newspaper—a burly, high-cheekboned man of crude appetites—this new position was almost wastefully comfortable, absurdly tranquil. Yet this respite proved brief; though one might attribute part of it to his unfamiliarity with the work, ultimately it was inevitable corrosion springing from his own ineptitude—socially clumsy, obstinate, and inflexible as he was—that soon forced him to endure his colleagues’ scornful sneers and the humiliating stigma of inferiority. Keiichiro, like a beggar clutching at society’s pity with outstretched hands to secure his daily bread, visited renowned literary figures day after day, prostrating himself to beg for interviews. But lacking in tact, his persistent entreaties often bred dislike and met with brusque rejections. At times he became such a nuisance that doorkeepers showered him with threats. He would desperately lash himself forward, yet as dusk approached—bitterness festering from his pariah status and fallen circumstances—his resolve crumbled into apathy. Concealing eyes tormented by anguish beneath the brim of his faded, misshapen bowler hat, dragging feet shod in weather-worn shoes with worn-down soles, he would shuffle back to this attic-like hovel hiding Chitose, feeling the helpless resignation of a traveler bedding down on grassy earth. Could it be that the thread binding him to her had now transformed from irksome fetters into thick iron chains dragging through shadowed realms? I don’t understand. He stood lost in thought and heaved a ragged sigh. Though he poured every ounce of strength into living—making existence itself a bloodied struggle—whenever he turned inward, desolate thoughts enclosed him. The instant he felt his body shudder from a sudden whirlwind of remorse blowing in from nowhere, what followed his self-flagellation was an endless dark night of ignorance—driven by base, vile passions that permitted no respite. I know not where to drive the wedge that might forestall collapse—whether to deny or affirm my being born into this world, this sorrowful existence, this state of being amidst so many acts of madness.

Once again, Keiichiro exhaled a hot breath like that of a sick, exhausted beast, opened his heavy eyelids to fix eyes bereft of light upon his surroundings, and looked around as though realizing it all anew…

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

One day, at Keiichiro’s irritated, sharp voice as he returned home early from work, Chitose stiffened instantly, “I just thought… we should be ready to move whenever we find a place…” she whispered in a faint, trembling voice, lifting her pale melon-seed face to fix imploring eyes on him before snapping shut the lid of the trunk she had been packing. That trunk was the sole memento left to her by her adoptive father—a stock trader who had since passed away. The nephews, nieces, and other relatives who had gathered at the stock trader’s deathbed surveyed every corner of the room—where his final gasps lingered as death drew near by the minute—their eyes gleaming like greedy wolves appraising items they would claim once he breathed his last. They had taken away every notable possession—even mere trinkets—but this large trunk, no better than scrapwood littered with inspection stamps from customs houses across China and Manchuria and hotel labels from foreign lands, which the stock trader had carried about in his prime, was after all left to Chitose. This had been brought to Tokyo along with the koto, a memento of her adoptive mother’s days of splendor.

Chitose folded her meager three or four pieces of clothing—her poor belongings—and stowed them away in that trunk. After he had raised his voice and rebuked her, an unbearable sorrow assailed his heart. Keiichiro and Chitose could not afford to linger in even a moment’s sentiment over this six-tatami room they had grown accustomed to. The relocation had been thrust into a state where not a moment’s hesitation could be afforded. It had happened just recently. Since her usual bathhouse on the tram line was closed, Chitose went to one in Kikuzaka she had never visited before. As she washed herself in a corner, right in front of her—though the woman kept her back half-turned toward Chitose—there was someone uncannily resembling Madam Landlady from downstairs, her hair arranged in a ginkgo-leaf chignon. The woman furtively glanced around as she busied herself with a towel, her movements tinged with suspicion. When she looked closer, she saw that all toes except the big toes were missing from both of the person’s feet. She felt an involuntary shudder, swallowing back a gasp as she fixed her gaze intently on those unnervingly deformed feet—and in that instant, the woman turned to face Chitose. It really was the Madam Landlady from downstairs! In an instant, Madam Landlady—her teeth clenched in a terrifying grimace—retreated up the stairs without uttering a word to her, who stood stunned and dumbfounded, not even properly wiping off the soap suds. Chitose had likely invited Madam Landlady to the bathhouse countless times before, but Madam Landlady had never once accepted and had always worn tabi socks even in summer to keep her bare feet hidden, so Keiichiro had harbored some inkling of the truth—but regardless, that night the two of them tossed and turned restlessly, unable to sleep. Sure enough, from the very next day onward, Madam Landlady did not speak a single word to Keiichiro and the others. When Chitose went downstairs on an errand, she slammed the shoji so violently it seemed the very lattice might break, followed by a deliberate, house-rattling cough. They were terrified and demoralized. Until this day, Madam Landlady and Chitose had been on terms as intimate as sisters; she would carry up to the second floor the sewing work that neighbors brought to Chitose, skillfully handle urgent orders that Chitose had yet to finish, and climb the ladder-like stairs countless times a day to relay messages to greengrocers and sake shops. The two had been filled with such overwhelming gratitude for Madam Landlady’s many kindnesses—so intense it made their hearts race—precisely when everything changed. Madam Landlady had even undertaken roles such as secretly intercepting correspondence sent from Keiichiro’s hometown—letters Chitose must never see—and discreetly delivering them to him, attending to every need with meticulous care; yet all such kindness turned as if flipping a palm after that night. The extent of Keiichiro’s desperation was no ordinary matter.

“Damn it! Who in the world stares so brazenly at someone else’s deformed feet?!” “Woman! How can you act with such imprudence?!” Keiichiro flew into a rage, glowered at Chitose, and lunged at her. “I’m terribly sorry,” she apologized once, but with eyebrows twitching and lips trembling—“There’s nothing as miserable as this! I’d rather die!” and “If you condemn me so harshly, I’ll leave you this very instant!”—even Chitose, who had never before shown a hint of defiance, wailed wildly as though flames were consuming her body. Day after day, the two walked through the neighborhood within the vicinity where Chitose’s sewing work was known, searching for a room to rent. When they actually set out to search, even with so many rooms for rent available, they couldn’t easily find one. Keiichiro had been pathologically disgusted by his ancestral home—a vast farmhouse with its great thatched roof and thirty-tatami hearth room—selling it off for a pittance and badgering to replace it with a modern, stylish house, each time surely plunging Father into immeasurable grief. At the height of the family’s prosperity two generations prior, when they had shaved bare the Keyaki Mountain behind them to build this house, the bustling ridgepole-raising ceremony became a tale among the neighborhood elders that continues to be recounted even now. “If you keep spouting such blasphemous nonsense, you’ll end up living in a shack!” Father had admonished him through near-tears, chastising his waywardness. Keiichiro now—with a two-tatami space barely large enough to fold his knees and a single clay pot to manage things—had been searching desperately for that shack but could not find it. Just the other night, he went to rent a certain second floor in Nishikata-cho. On the way back after being refused by the sturdy old woman—her sparse white hair styled like a tea whisk, clad in a purple haori—who scowled and waved her hand in brusque refusal when they asked to cook for themselves as a couple, Keiichiro suddenly recalled his father’s words from years past; his chest constricted, and hot, fat tears welled up uncontrollably.

The bitterness of Madam Landlady, who had worn down her nerves through grueling efforts to prevent anyone from noticing her deformed foot, was such that even tearing herself apart would not have sufficed. So she collared the neighborhood women who gathered at her shopfront and loudly spread every bit of gossip about them—true or false—up to the second floor, urging them to leave. Even her husband—a construction worker more timid and cowardly than most—wanted them gone as soon as possible; wiping his tearful face, he pleaded this to them with his eyes.

While the world, intoxicated by the shallow spring, set out for Ueno Hill with their families, the two of them had to trudge about searching for a wretched room to rent, looking on with resentful eyes.

They rose before dawn to evade the prying eyes of gossipy neighborhood women, loaded their meager belongings—packed the night before—onto a single cart, and slipped away through damp backstreets shrouded in thick morning fog, moving to No. 219 beneath the bridge in Morikawa-cho, scarcely three blocks from the rice cracker shop, as if fleeing under cover of night. It was a move made in the blink of an eye. The doctor’s widow from the neighboring house across the way—with whom Chitose had become acquainted through sewing work—who, upon learning of their dire circumstances, halted the renovations she had planned for the house she had just purchased and offered it to them. The house had two rooms—a three-tatami and a six-tatami space—with floorboards seemingly rotten here and there, a dilapidated shack so decrepit one could liken it to a fox’s den or badger’s burrow, where they had to tiptoe across sunken tatami mats. Facing it stood a high stone wall shrouded in ivy and vines, while behind stretched the undulating roofs of row houses winding like a belt. To the immediate south of the house loomed a cliff like a sheer precipice rising dozens of yards high, while to the north ran a path so narrow one had to squeeze between the neighboring house’s clapboard 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. The day before, when they had come to clean, the two of them had looked up at the terrifying sheer cliff and cowered; recalling the gruesome death of the elderly couple crushed in the nearby Masago-cho landslide, their hearts grew unbearably dark. After pondering for a while, Keiichiro scolded Chitose—who faltered with tears in her eyes—and abandoned the now listless, attachment-free second floor of the rice cracker shop.

More than being crushed to death by a landslide, more than being consumed by flames, more than being subjected to the tyranny of any violent force of fate—what Keiichiro feared about their new dwelling was the sight of Reverend G’s chapel spire, encircled by the chinquapin grove atop the cliff.

At the time of their elopement, Keiichiro was summoned nightly to that chapel and subjected to Reverend G’s relentless sermons urging him to sever his impious life with Chitose until late into the night. But no matter how doggedly Reverend G pressed on, once he discerned that Keiichiro’s obsession showed no sign of abating, his pursuit—like chasing a fugitive—soon waned. Whenever Keiichiro walked near the chapel and glimpsed ahead the small-statured Reverend G in ink-dark robes—his figure austere—he would slink furtively out of sight. In midnight’s indescribable void, when awakened by visions—the resentful face of his provincial wife glaring like a fox-possessed wraith with bloodshot eyes and wild hair; his young child lying on a Y Town hospital bed after a head tumor’s lancing; his father grown gaunt and white-haired from a year of filial betrayal; all the accusing gazes of rural kin learned through his sister’s letters—Reverend G’s gaze too would join them, piercing his heart like an azure star blazing with moral conviction, condemning the deepest recesses of his lost soul. At such times, Keiichiro would shout reflexively or shake Chitose awake, cowardly venting his anguish through fabricated pretexts.

Coinciding with their moving day, the magazine was finalized, leaving him unexpectedly free for two or three days. That night, knees touching beneath the low desk they used as a dining table, they ate moving-day soba. With pickled onions—their favorite relish—as accompaniment, they passed between them one *gō* of sake bought in an empty soda bottle, holding a celebration that amounted to little more than a gesture of the heart.

“I’ve caused you so much worry and hardship.” “You must be exhausted.”

And she said in a tearful voice, perhaps stirred by thoughts of the rapidly whirling changes in her circumstances. “No, you’re the one who…” Keiichiro grew sentimental and muttered softly under his breath. Feeling at once an unforgettable gratitude toward the doctor’s widow from the large house who had shown kindness to Chitose, he also inwardly clasped his hands and bowed his head toward her before slipping into bed. With a sense of ease free from any reservations toward anyone, he stretched his limbs out unrestrained. The walls had crumbled, the sliding doors were torn, and though the biting wind from gaps assailed their bodies as if piercing bone, the hazy silver moonlight seeped through the glass window and fell upon the faded red tatami of the derelict house—as though it lay at the bottom of a gorge—beckoning life. The surroundings fell utterly silent; not even a distant dog’s howl could be heard. Lured by the plinking sound of water dripping from a loose faucet into a bucket, he nostalgically recalled the water drawn from the bamboo pipe behind his family home in his hometown. Keiichiro suddenly slid out of the futon, leaned against the desk, and proudly poured into a postcard to his father the joy of having a house—but immediately tore it up in a fit.

“You should rest well this morning.”

In the bright morning, having awoken at the crack of dawn, the two had been sharing their innermost thoughts—how they had somehow groped their way through darkness to reach this point—in pillow talk. But before long, Chitose spoke these words and left the bed. Keiichiro, who had developed a slight fever, covered his face with cupped palms and pressed his cooling occipital bone—accompanied by a dull ache—against the pillow when abruptly, the sound of a Buddhist gong being struck echoed repeatedly from the chapel atop the cliff. Keiichiro hurriedly plugged his ears with his thumbs. But it was no use. The sutra-chanting voices of nearly a hundred Imperial University students lodging in Reverend G’s dormitory resounded through the tranquil morning air with spiteful clarity, as if one could grasp them by hand. He clicked his tongue in vexation, then with reckless abandon deliberately whistled in time—as if jeering—and tapped out the rhythm with his feet. But before he knew it, he had closed his eyes. “Amidst love and desire...” ...profound and obscure. When he heard the sutra passage—“Parting endures long”—that Reverend G had once taught them to chant in fragmented unison at the dormitory, the turmoil in his heart only intensified. “All is inverted, high and low... ...clinging to one another. “Wasting days, ending years... shrouded in folly”—After a moment, Keiichiro buried his face in the bedding collar, pressed both fists to his temples, and stifling his voice so Chitose—busy preparing breakfast in the kitchen—wouldn’t hear him, sobbed convulsively. He resolutely sat up straight, perched formally on the thin futon mattress, aligned both hands on his knees, and gathering strength in his lower abdomen as if refusing defeat, assumed a posture poised to counterattack.

Every morning like this—every morning as though lashed by fiery whips—continued day after day. But Keiichiro too gradually grew accustomed to it and became lax. Reverend G maintained they should at least separate temporarily, both thoroughly absorb his convictions, and only then—free from transient excitements—decide whether to unite if truly fated or part ways if destined. Yet the urgency of daily survival pressed upon them far more acutely than any dread of lingering future regrets. With the day approaching when the money stolen from his father’s passbook would run dry, Keiichiro wandered the vast city devoid of connections searching for work—a drowning man clutching at straws. He couldn’t even bring himself to seek help from his hometown—to fulfill what it meant to be a man. He had discarded every last shred of pride. After groveling at the Social Bureau’s Dōjunkai, he secured an apprentice position at a dubious barracks-like printshop built on Honjo Yokomachi’s burnt ruins, only to be dismissed after three days. Regaining composure, he walked town to town from dawn till dusk, drawn even to “Boy Wanted” cardboard signs dangling from eaves. He visited Ueno’s municipal employment office daily through rainstorms, enduring gnawing hunger—that belly-worm of encroaching starvation—joining youths with pinched faces, skeletal elders lying supine on benches with sunken eyes like desiccated husks, sullen boys resembling shriveled gourds sitting arms-crossed in feigned contemplation. Among these, he rested on waiting room benches. All were so emaciated and parched they couldn’t raise their voices above whispers. Among them, whenever he saw a square-capped student in serge hakama swaggering with unspoken boasts of *I’m no unemployed bum!* while addressing clerks insolently, Keiichiro would freshly recall his own wretched self from when he’d similarly worn hakama while haunting employment offices—a shame so acute he felt cold sweat drenching his body. Half-dazed, he watched five or six laborers under a foreman’s direction—white-striped hats beneath a side guardrail—hauling iron pipes under scorching sun with work chants. The mere fact of their employment rendered those laborers infinitely enviable. The next day again, he and Chitose would scour Shiba and Aoyama for piecework making artificial flowers or sewing bags, only to return disappointed—leaning against each other in near-empty night trains rattling along dark moatsides where damp late winds blew.

When Keiichiro was employed by the Sake Newspaper Company to address envelopes, by mid-month all that remained was train fare. At that time, a middle-aged sculptor wearing a rubashka—balding and spindly as a bean vine—was handling editorial work. This Rubashka too was so poor that every few days he would ask without pretense, "Madam, could you lend me fifty sen?" Yet even so, while drawing circles in the air with his long arms extended from afar, that Rubashka kept smoking Golden Bat cigarettes. When that pungent aroma drifted through the ladder-like steps into Keiichiro's three-tatami room from the adjacent editorial office on the wind, he found himself whipped into an unbearable vulgar craving. Keiichiro hadn't been able to smoke for days despite his constant need for cigarettes. His mind grew foggy, a pounding illusory ringing filled his ears, dizzy spells washed over him until the pen slipped from his grasp. Unable to endure it longer, he casually approached Rubashka and flared his nostrils to inhale the exhaled Golden Bat smoke, temporarily quenching his thirst.

Seizing the moment when Rubashka went downstairs for lunch, he scurried into the editorial room like a rat and deftly stole Rubashka’s Golden Bat cigarette stubs. The next day too, peering through the same gap, he pilfered the cigarette ends once more. Rubashka, picking his teeth with a toothpick upon returning to his seat, peered into the tobacco tray,

“Strange... All the cigarette butts keep disappearing. Could someone be stealing them?”

he muttered and tilted his head quizzically. The good-natured Rubashka showed no sign of suspecting Keiichiro, but Keiichiro, overwhelmed by an inexpressible restlessness and the guilt of his base nature, turned crimson to the tips of his ears as trickles of clammy sweat ran down his spine and underarms. Several days later, Rubashka—burdened with two children and a wife in her ninth month—was dismissed for repeatedly borrowing money, and Keiichiro was installed as his replacement.

……………… Ever since moving into the house beneath the cliff, Keiichiro had been earning extra income beyond his salary at the new magazine company by having the president broker the sale of his lengthy interview manuscripts to larger publications, while Chitose worked diligently at her sewing—so at least they didn’t lack for cigarette money. As he walked along the road, he narrowed his eyes to slits like a mosquito’s, letting his tongue revel in the sweet aroma of Bat as he luxuriously inhaled. When trying to board a train, hesitating to discard the lit Bat, he would stand rooted on the street letting one or even two trains pass by until he finished smoking—but in moments of haste, there were times when he would smash it against the asphalt without a shred of regret, having smoked less than half. In such moments—though unlike the pious impulses of fanatical ancient ascetics burning with yearning and devotion, who would pour their hot tears upon rock faces—Keiichiro, from a stingy heart, would sometimes let one or two hot tears drop onto the Bat cigarette butts.

His sister—who had tormented Keiichiro by sending letter after letter detailing every trivial trouble arising in their rural home—departed immediately for Sasebo Naval Port once her husband, a naval officer, returned from his overseas voyage. Keiichiro kissed in relief at being spared. Yet he grieved over being unable to receive any word about his child’s condition at Y Town’s Red Cross Hospital. Ever since receiving his sister’s final letter at January’s start—when he still commuted to his former workplace at Reiganjima Hamacho’s Sake Newspaper Company—which stated that surgery for the malignant head tumor would soon be performed, his mind had been ceaselessly disordered by dread that seemed to await some ill-fated conclusion. Keiichiro would ride discounted trains each morning and stand on Eitaibashi for twenty or thirty minutes until the company doors opened—a daily ritual to kill time. With his chin resting on the railing in a listless stupor—as though his very soul might dissolve—he fixed half-closed eyes upon boats poling upstream against the current and others swept downstream like arrows by swirling waters behind tugboats spraying foam. His gaze clung to these vessels until they shrank to bamboo-leaf specks vanishing into haze—until some imagined footstep or voice startled him back to awareness, whereupon he’d jerk up his head to stare vacantly at dawn’s light hazing distant waves over the vast sea. And thinking of his hometown beyond that indigo-misted expanse and of his sickly child’s plight, his eyelids burned as if boiling with unshed tears while his teeth clattered uncontrollably.

In his sister’s final letter, she had conveyed that their mother was stationed at the hospital nursing Toshio. Sakiko, your wife—using a feigned illness under pretext of recuperation—has returned to her family home in Y Town yet stubbornly refuses to visit our gravely ill child at the hospital just steps away. Father grows utterly exhausted from daily hospital visits—jostled along five ri of rocky road each morning on the first Entarō carriage and returning each night on that same rickety one—while Toshio’s tonsils have become so inflamed that no food passes his throat; even milk poured into him streams straight out through his nose. Heartbreaking as this is, seeing Father’s anguish firsthand proves unbearable—too pitiful for words or pen. Brother—I beg you—send Father just one line saying you’re truly sorry for causing him such worry! With this plea she petulantly detailed her grievances in cramped script. And with increasingly erratic strokes she had added at end that depending on surgery results Father intended postponing Toshio’s primary school enrollment by a year.

——With less than a week remaining until April’s school enrollment period. He was frantic with anxiety. So often would his consciousness fade that even absent-minded acts like carrying his bathhouse locker tag into the soaking tub became frequent occurrences. By now, surely Toshio must at least have left the hospital—right? Whether at the magazine office desk or the cliffside house desk facing the stone wall, Keiichiro grew desperate to confirm his child’s current condition through even a postcard. Time and again he tried to seize the pen and sit up, but his heart remained tightly sealed, refusing to budge.

Keiichiro greeted each day in rigid silence, arms crossed. Though cherry branches now bore scattered blossoms, the city sky stayed sealed beneath oppressive clouds. For two or three days there had been cold rains mingled with sleet—until one morning when he crawled from bed to find their house entirely engulfed by early spring’s heavy snowfall overnight. By noon, roof snow melted by sunlight slid past window eaves with thick plopping sounds before thudding to earth.

“Ah! Dangerous!”

Keiichiro shuddered in fear, pressed down on the desk with both hands, and stood up. A terrifying vision—from the steeply sloped high thatched roof of his hometown house, a snowdrift piled over three shaku thick collapsed with a thunderous crash that shook the ground—and then, overwhelmed by the horrifying phantom of the child being crushed beneath it, he let out an unconscious scream.

“What happened?”

Chitose, startled, peeked her face in from the adjacent room.

Keiichiro managed to smooth things over with a clever excuse, but his eyes betrayed intense panic. He spent that entire day straining to catch any news from his hometown, his ears attuned not only to the urgent sound of snowmelt dripping from the eaves but also to the radio broadcasts of news and weather forecasts spilling from the grand residence beside the communal gate. In the evenings, when he leaned against his desk, he would grow strangely short of breath, and his head would turn piercingly cold as if sheet ice had formed inside—so Keiichiro, after dinner, would immediately sprawl face down in his futon and stare vacantly at old magazines without really reading them. Even as he resolved not to sleep until Chitose set aside her sewing needle, his body’s exhaustion and mental weariness would swiftly overtake him—burying his face in the crook of his folded arms, he slipped into a fitful doze. ...he screamed “Toshio!” like a madman—then his eyes snapped open. By then, the night had grown quite late, but Chitose was still diligently plying her needle, so she shook Keiichiro awake from his nightmare.

“You had a nightmare, didn’t you?”

“Ah… I had a horrifying dream…” He had certainly shouted “Toshio!”—the child’s name—at the top of his voice, but Chitose didn’t appear to have recognized it as such. Ordinarily, he never so much as uttered the child’s name in her presence—had he cried it out, even in a dream, who knows how she might have begun to agonize. He exhaled and rubbed his chest in relief. In his dream, Keiichiro had returned to his hometown to see the child. Slipping into the village under twilight’s cover, he scaled the locked Heike-style gate of his family home and called his father and mother outside. But his parents refused to let him meet the child. “If we must part again right after meeting,” they insisted, “then there’s no greater sin between us than this.” Having come all this way solely to lay eyes on his son, he was still arguing on the veranda—“Just one glance, even from afar!”—when a boy in a sleeveless loose nightgown came running from the storage room, crying “Dad!”

“Oh, Toshio!” he cried at the top of his voice, about to leap toward the child—when Chitose shook him and he jolted awake.

“What kind of dream was it?” Chitose asked. Keiichiro evaded giving a clear answer and half-heartedly glossed over it. Assailed by the fear that calling out his wife’s name in his sleep would spell disaster, from that night onward he took care when going to bed not to let his hands rest on his chest in anguish.

All forgetfulness—barely obtainable only during brief slumber—yet Keiichiro’s head, heightened by the affliction of exhausted nerves, left him enduring sleepless nights that continued for days on end, eyelids fluttering incessantly until the neighbor’s rooster crowed at dawn.

A month had passed.

On a warm, drizzling evening in the rainy season, as he returned from work, furled his umbrella, and passed through the communal gate, he saw Madam Landlady of the rice cracker shop—with whom they had recently reconciled after her abrupt severing of ties—chatting with Chitose by the window. But when she descended the stone steps and spotted Keiichiro, she hastily took leave of Chitose, rushed toward him with hurried steps, gave a furtive glance around, and thrust a letter into his hands as if bodily colliding with him. When Keiichiro, stealing a glance at Chitose, opened and read it, the letter turned out to be a notification from his uncle in the branch family that the child had—though still far from fully recovered—nonetheless forced himself to enter elementary school. Keiichiro felt a revived joy, as though a weight that had been pressing down on him had slipped away.

Soon, he composed his face into a nonchalant expression and turned toward the evening meal’s table. He took up his chopsticks, but Chitose remained stubbornly silent, her head bowed intently as she stared at her knees. He could no longer endure the oppressive weight of the hostile silence, “What’s wrong?” he asked, throwing out the question himself.

“What did you receive from Madam Landlady earlier?” she asked, raising her head, though her eyes twisted with spiteful malice as they gleamed.

“I didn’t get anything.”

Chitose maintained her composure. “Yes… yes, that’s how it was,” she said in a hoarse voice. Her impatience to trust Keiichiro overflowed vividly on her face, but she simply couldn’t endure it any longer. Tears that drenched her lashes to their tips streamed incessantly down her cheeks.

Keiichiro could no longer conceal it.

“That’s how it is, isn’t it? Then why are you concealing it? Why must you conceal it so elaborately? Show it to me.” With no alternative, Keiichiro took it out from his breast pocket and handed it to her. Her hands clutching the scroll trembled violently as she inhaled sharply and scanned the text. “I’m truly sorry!” Chitose cried in a strangled voice, pressing her sleeve to her face before collapsing onto the tatami. Her shoulders heaved like turbulent waves. “Please—you must return to your hometown. Abandon someone like me and go back. I’ve wronged your father and your child beyond forgiveness...”

When she raised her face—swollen from crying, the unnervingly bloodshot whites of her eyes fixed on him—and spoke those words, Keiichiro felt a chest-tightening anguish that made him wish he weren’t alive. Yet even as he anxiously strove to placate her—alternately threatening and coaxing—the pitiable image of the child floated before him: a schoolboy with a satchel slung over his shoulder, a straw sandal bag in hand, his head wrapped in white bandages beneath a soldier’s cap tilted like an Amitābha statue’s halo. Withdrawing his hand from the exasperated Chitose, Keiichiro secretly swallowed his tears.

Keiichiro’s heart found not a moment’s respite as worries about the child kept crowding his mind one after another without cease. The child, inheriting Keiichiro’s dim-wittedness, was woefully deficient in mathematical aptitude. Even the daughter of the neighborhood carriage driver—the same age—had thoroughly mastered addition and subtraction up to twenty, yet his own child, despite a deceptively clever appearance, couldn’t reliably manage numbers up to ten. Keiichiro resolutely made it his daily mission to drill numbers into the child.

“1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7—now count them,” he would say. “1, 2, 3, 5, 7,” came the child’s reply. No matter how many times he repeated it—over and over—the effort proved futile. The child finally began to cry. He wanted to stab the child dead in one furious motion and die himself. During elementary school, the teacher would pose problems on the blackboard and dismiss students one by one as they answered correctly. Yet even as voices from the playground—playing capture-the-flag and tag—drifted in cheerfully, Keiichiro alone remained trapped at his desk. A relative’s child from a feuding branch of the family would rally classmates to press their faces against the windowpanes, snickering through suppressed laughter. How bitterly must he—with his stubborn pride in defeat—have burned with shame! When such memories resurfaced—Damn this wretched brat!— Keiichiro raised his hand and struck the child. Yet even as the boy wailed, he found himself weeping alongside him in shared anguish. Moreover, the child bore the karmic burden of Keiichiro’s stunted height, growing abnormally small. There could be no doubt: at school, the child undoubtedly ranked dead last. Keiichiro himself had been shorter than all his peers. Worse still, odd-numbered seating left him isolated at a two-person desk. During group games, they would shoo him from the line—leaving him no choice but to stand resentfully beneath a poplar tree, finger in mouth. More pitiful still were field trips. While other students marched two-by-two—chatting merrily as they clasped hands—he trailed alone at the column’s end with hurried little steps, lunch bag strapped to his back: a spiritless figure. Such experiences must have withered Keiichiro’s sensitive boyhood heart beyond measure—even now, he would daily resurrect those immutable sorrows etched into his distant schooldays and meticulously transplant them whole onto his child’s circumstances, tormenting himself anew. Then came mental tests for new students. “What does Mr. X’s father do?” “Yes.” “He farms rice fields.” “And Mr. X’s?”

“Yes.” “He is a carpenter.” “What does Mr. Oe’s father do?” When asked this, the child stood up like a startled doll—but how would he answer? “Mr. Oe’s dad ran off with some woman without a care, y’know! Nyah-nyah!” Teased by Akutarou’s mocking cries, the child burst into tears, covered his face with his hands, fled through the school gate, and dashed toward home in disarray—it was as if Keiichiro could see it all before his eyes. Tormented by the child’s sorrow—begging Akutarou’s gang not to hurl such heartless taunts, even resorting to bribing them with paper and colored pencils—Keiichiro imagined the inevitable tragedies awaiting the child, his body searing as though aflame.

“You—setting aside your wife—must have some attachment to your child, no matter what?”

Chitose occasionally asked abruptly. “There’s no room for that.” “Is that so?” She stared at him as if testing his expression, then bit her lower lip and sank into thought without moving a muscle. “But no matter what you say, you’re parent and child.” “Even if you say such cold things aloud, I don’t believe that’s what lies in your heart.” “When your child grows up without fail and comes looking for you—what will become of me then…”

Chitose, overwhelmed, repeatedly let out uncontrollable sighs. Then suddenly came the thought of the day when, years later, his grown child would come to visit. The child who had slipped free from his stern surveillance would be spoiled by everyone in the household, raised in utter indulgence until he squandered the family fortune and became an unmanageable rogue wandering from place to place—only to come searching for his father in the end, would he not? If he—with hair grown long enough to hide his forehead, a scruffy beard, wearing a tattered overcoat and trousers frayed at the ankles hitched up with a red sash above his waist, hands thrust into their pockets in such an outlandish getup—were to suddenly appear at the front door, what would Keiichiro do? Surely he wouldn’t go so far as to throw his father, Keiichiro, to the ground, force a gag into his mouth, and strangle him until his eyeballs bulged out—though he probably wouldn’t. He was dispirited.

Keiichiro could not help recalling the days when he had been harsh and devoid of tenderness toward the child. He existed in a state of outright opposition with the child. Having grown from infancy under his mother’s warped affections and mutual hatred steeped in some unfathomable curse—Keiichiro, who knew nothing of such maternal love—had wed a wife two years his senior before reaching adulthood, driven solely by an irrepressible craving to be cherished and treated with kindness. His wife had indeed sheltered and doted on him as if he were an infant, but when he witnessed the child emerge into this world—cradled in her arms and caressed—he understood that every shred of affection once lavished upon him had been wholly usurped by this intruder, leaving him with incomparable desolation. There had been more than once or twice that Keiichiro, seething with rage, had resolved even to contemplate quietly poisoning this interloper to death.

Keiichiro lay beside his wife—who sat knitting with long woolen needles in the detached room—chatting cheerfully when suddenly, pattering footsteps echoed through the hallway as the child came running. “Mom, what were you doing?” The child stopped and looked up at her demandingly before throwing aside the loquat fruit he held. He vaulted onto her lap without warning, yanked open her neatly arranged collar, and pressed his chestnut-burr head against her soft chest to clamp onto her breast. Like a parched calf roughly suckling its mother’s milk, he drank greedily with loud gulps that rattled in his throat. Watching this, he trembled with jealousy.

“Stop giving him milk. You’re getting thinner—it’s plain to see.” “If I don’t wean him, he won’t stop drinking no matter what I do.”

“Don’t talk nonsense! He drinks because you keep giving it to him! Then rub chili peppers on your breasts and leave them there!” “Toshio, you must stop now. If you don’t quit it, Papa will scold you.” The child momentarily released the breast, shot Keiichiro a hostile sidelong glare, but after exchanging a conspiratorial smile with his wife, latched back on again. Though his facial features were the spitting image of his own, that deceit-laden smile—the kind that immediately betrayed the baseness within—was exactly like his wife’s.

“If I tell you to stop giving him milk, then stop giving it to him!” “When I say it once, you obey!”

His wife had reflexively grabbed the child’s head with both hands and shoved it away—so fierce was his fury. The child, crimson with anger, wildly scratched and clawed at his wife’s chest. Keiichiro, flying into a rage, recklessly grabbed the thrashing child and threw him down onto the ground.

“Papa, you idiot! Good-for-nothing!” “Don’t get smart with me!”

He hurled the box of matches on the desk at the child. The child, not to be outdone, threw it back aiming at him. He threw again. When the child retaliated once more, this time he swiftly turned his back and dashed off. In an instant, Keiichiro leapt down into the garden. Barefoot, he chased after the child—now cornered at the closed lattice door—but just as he tried to seize him by force, his wife lunged forward and grabbed him to restrain him.

“What a violent thing to do!” “To think you’d act so violently toward a five- or six-year-old innocent child!” His wife swiftly scooped up the child and, without so much as a glance at Keiichiro—who stood there trembling with rage, blood streaming from his nose—continued speaking. “What on earth—a person like you, taking out your anger even on a child!” “Fine then, go ahead and be as violent as you want.” “Before long, these tangled feelings will fester until you and your mother become parent and child locked in irreparable hostility… Now, Toshio, there’s no need to cry.” “Mom—only Mom—will always, always love you. That good-for-nothing Papa can just go off somewhere and never come back for all I care.”

Such memories too pierced him with sorrow; as Keiichiro vividly recalled every past instance of his cruelty toward the child, he felt such revulsion at his own ugliness that there seemed no place for him to exist. Once planted, such resentment could never be washed away by time’s current nor vanish from the child’s mind. He had no choice but to steel himself for the child’s inevitable vengeance—a retribution he must meekly endure.

Keiichiro was shaken to his very soul by a suffocating surge of intense regret and terror, felt anew. And an elusive, unfathomable anxiety permeated every thought of their uncertain future and precarious old age as a couple. The same thought weighed even more heavily on Chitose.

“We want a child. Please—I’m begging you—stop these unnatural things.” “…………” “It might be tolerable while we’re young with our limbs still free—but when we grow old, what do you mean to do? Please consider our future with no child to cling to. Truly, nothing could be more wretched than this. Now that we’ve come to this, don’t we find ourselves without a single soul truly close to us? The thought makes me shudder.”

Chitose stopped pressing the finishing touches on her sewing with the iron, glared sharply at Keiichiro and reproached him, but immediately resumed speaking in a timid, wilted tone.

“But you know… even if we were to have a child, what would we do about the family registry? I couldn’t bear to saddle my own precious child with the dark fate of being called an illegitimate child.” “That would be even more painful than death.”

Keiichiro was acutely struck in his vulnerable spot, anguish seething in his chest until he found himself speechless.

When their love first budded in Y Town amidst silent sorrow and soon became inescapable, Chitose had declared she would wait for years until the day Keiichiro formally parted from his wife. But he, with a last-ditch resolve to confront his hometown, had cleverly ensnared her through fleeting deception with empty promises. Of course, Keiichiro had not the slightest intention of engaging in such unscrupulous negotiations as divorcing his wife to establish Chitose as his legal spouse. Whether by chance or at times intentionally, whenever she tried to touch upon the solemn promise made in Y Town, he would brush it aside and attempt to bury it in ambiguity. Not only that—even if Keiichiro were to face a life of utter destitution, prying open trash bin lids along the capital’s avenues to scavenge a single grain of rice—he told himself this would be but a fleeting hardship of youth. In the end, he reasoned, there would always be his hometown to return to, and in old age, the greatest strength would lie in having a child to depend upon. So long as his wife tenderly nurtured that frail child with care until the end, he ceaselessly prayed for peace in her heart. Each time this dark secret lurking in his heart was glimpsed, each time he confronted his own deceitfulness, he would shrink back in shock and tighten his eyelids as if prostrating himself on the ground. He could not bear to look directly upon her unfortunate face—so deftly deceived by his own base machinations.

Keiichiro would sink into endless sorrow whenever he imagined Chitose’s old age after his death—a sorrow he longed to sift away yet could not. At Koishikawa Bridge’s edge—a sight that forced itself into his eyes even when he tried not to look during his train commute—there stood an old woman hunched like a contorted spine, braving the cold sky in nothing but a lined kimono. She had turned a baby carriage into a roadside stall, roasting daifuku rice cakes amidst swirling yellow dust while awaiting customers. Her wrinkled face was caked with makeup like troweled plaster, and she lavished coquettish smiles on boatmen, cart-pullers, even handymen—all to scrape by each day. How often had he projected this wretched existence onto Chitose’s fate and felt his hair stand on end?

He foolishly anticipated the anxiety of her being left to spend lonely days in this land—a future that might stretch endlessly—and yet could not wipe away the present with its unrelenting turbulence. Keiichiro, whenever he found himself facing an old woman on the train—sniffling a runny nose, utterly devoid of vitality and withered—would feel a gnawing pain in his very being along with a scorching fury, grimace, rise from his seat, and hastily retreat to hide in a corner.

With the advent of spring, even the narrow confines under the cliff abruptly came to life. The large spotted cat shambled about. The old man growing chrysanthemums in back—his figure the color of shibugami paper—remained ceaselessly occupied with tending and fertilizing seedlings. The plump wife of the lazy man wove through the photinia hedge to the veranda of the northern neighbor’s eloquent old woman—who from dawn till dusk tapped tanned leather with a small mallet, crafting koto plectrum pouches as her side work—and there, basking languidly in the glorious spring sun, she imitated actors’ voices and gestures in her Shinshu accent, chattering animatedly about Fukusuke and Kikugorō until theater gossip dominated the conversation. No one in the neighborhood could fathom how they made their living. To their quiet, withdrawn home—where Keiichiro and Chitose spoke little and kept to themselves—the doctor’s widow from the main house would occasionally send her obstinate old maidservant. Unabashed and imperious, she would barge in shouting demands for sewing work. At this, the old women out back would halt their animated chatter as if on cue, lower their voices, and begin exchanging hushed whispers.

On fine days, the sleep-inducing calls of street vendors drifted down serenely from the cliff above. No sooner had the cries of “Flowers and plants! Flowers and plants!” shifted to “Eggplant seedlings! Cucumber seedlings! Dwarf lily seedlings!” than they abruptly changed again to “Fresh loach here! Loach!”—and soon a brilliant wave of air, brimming with early summer’s verdant freshness, drifted in as goldfish vendors’ voices began echoing from alleyways all around. To hear those voices was itself a sorrow. Along the whitish path that curved and wound beside the grassy embankment of the Sawarano River—which stitched through his hometown village with its gentle flow—there would appear a goldfish vendor from H Prefecture, having crossed the mountains in his sedge hat. As he flexed his balance pole and chanted “Goldfish here! Baby carp… Baby carp, goldfish here!” in a lonely melodic rhythm that carried across the air, the hearts of all the village children would leap. The child—his sorrowful face fresh from being scolded by his strong-willed wife for poor retention of arithmetic drills forced upon him the moment he returned from school—now pleaded in a pitiful voice, “Papa, won’t you buy me goldfish?” And those soft little footsteps seemed to reach the window of this cliffside home, separated by over three hundred *ri*, as if carried across the distance.

Before long, the sweltering, oppressive days of the rainy season arrived.

When a mist-like drizzle showered down damply, and from nowhere in particular came the sound of frogs gurgling in their throats, suddenly, in Keiichiro’s eyes, this cliffside area in a corner of the city transformed into the vibrant blue paddies of his mountainous hometown village—surrounded by verdant greenery and teeming with lively frog choruses. And it occurred to him that around this time, the countryside would be in the midst of rice planting. Even though the intense labors of bygone days had ceased with advancing age, his father’s body and spirit would never know a day of rest. For decades—through rain and wind—Keiichiro had shared in his father’s harsh toil, enduring every hardship. Now, toward the fate of this old man who lay sprawled in a dim barn where even faint sunlight could not penetrate, idly awaiting death as he passed his remaining days, Keiichiro felt a surge of pity.

On the mouse-colored walls of their room—stained with multiple filthy streaks from rain leaks—hung Burne-Jones’s "Music," a work by the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood’s foremost artist that Keiichiro had purchased from a used bookstore near First Higher School on last New Year’s Eve, its surface now buried under thick dust and suspended by a long green cord. Once a day, the sun—blocked by the front stone wall—glared in through the window. And within the framed print—depicting an old-fashioned room overlooking a lake, hills, and castle dyed in a rose-colored sunset’s glow—the two nuns quietly playing violins were rendered thus: one in black robes, and the other whose trailing hem of crimson underrobe blazed with dripping scarlet that burned through her garments. Keiichiro, in an overflowing drunkenness of spirit, gazed at the print in ecstasy—his breath quickening, clinging to it as though leaning for support—and sought an elusive solace. Even if one were to set aside this world’s ugliness and drive their heart toward that sublime joy—dedicating abundant love to art more precious than life itself and alluring enough to secure unwavering faith—how much light and peace could possibly lie ahead, awaiting tomorrow? Ultimately, it seemed that these clinging thoughts of resignation would rage on throughout Keiichiro’s entire life.

………………

(Showa 3)