Pathway to Japanese Literature

For over a year, I lived with what people called a "formidable woman," and during that time, I must have thought of running away countless times.
Moreover, the truth is, I did return many times to my wife and children, who remained evacuated to M Coast in Izu.

However, it was never a complete escape.
I longed for the "formidable woman" and could not endure my wife's insensitivity.
The formidable woman, Keiko’s past—I knew little about it.
I met Keiko in the street.
But I believed she possessed an innocence and resolve that set her apart from ordinary angels of the night.

After concluding a business transaction with me, when I was surrounded by four or five burly foreigners and a fight broke out, she remained on my side until the end.
After we went to a hotel together again, she spoke without concealment of her shameful past, shed tears, and yet embraced my body in delight.
I thought that for the first time in my life, I had known the joy of carnal desire.
That I had believed she spoke of her past without concealment was my delusion.
But that she showed me even a little of her sordid past was a salvation to me.

The wife I had married out of pity, so to speak, was not a virgin.
Moreover, she lied that it was due to riding a bicycle and, trying to present her past as sacred, remained cold toward me all along.
I was not a virgin either, and that wasn't why I ended up with my wife.
Yet I told her my past without concealment.
And I wanted her to do the same for me.
But my wife carried out her "revenge for the defiled virgin" against me.
In response, I countered with debauchery.

Around that time, as the Second World War intensified, I was repeatedly called to the front. In the merciless battlefields of murder and arson, even my rigid, turtle-shelled wife became as dear to me as an angel, and each time I returned home, I made her bear a child.

When the war ended, I was fired from my company, and there were as many as four children. Inflation rapidly intensified, and the retirement money of about 6,000 yen didn’t even last three days. I had aspired to literature from the start, but at that time, precisely because I felt the evils of capitalist society so keenly, I joined the Communist Party with the hope of creating a new, just world.

However, within about a year, I grew disillusioned with the current Communist Party.
This was because it seemed exploited solely by those pursuing self-interest around faction bosses.
Even still, staying within to fight would likely have been the right path.
But swept up in momentary passion, I hurled my resignation papers at the Party.
I came to despise myself more than I despised them.
There I stood—the very blueprint of a traitor and faithless man—so repulsive I could hardly bear my own reflection.

And when I returned home and tried immersing myself fully in literature again—by then already deep into postwar literary scarcity where many popular writers had emerged—I found myself like one who'd missed the bus; even submitted manuscripts barely sold.
To these desperate struggles of mine too my wife showed not an ounce of sympathy.
Driven reckless I asked her whether I might take a lover someday if circumstances allowed—to which she coldly replied: “Fine—send money and Father needn’t stay.”

However, around the time I had gained some financial leeway, under circumstances similar to before, I became acquainted with Keiko.
Keiko, thanks to a foreigner she had previously cohabited with, had a makeshift house.
And so I ended up crashing there.

Keiko also told me several lies. She claimed to be five years younger and said she’d graduated from a girls’ school, but she couldn’t even do simple arithmetic like calculating twelve times eight in her head. She was the daughter of a poor farmer and had been born a child of an illicit affair. In her childhood, she once told me memories like how grueling weeding tobacco fields was—being scolded all night, forced to stand on the dirt floor, tormented by mosquitoes. When it came to men and money, she sometimes told lies. However, her lies were as easily exposed as a little girl’s, and for that very reason, they seemed more endearing than my wife’s obstinate deceptions. My wife tended to conceal even physical pleasure, but Keiko seemed to lay everything bare, and to me, she was a dear woman.

Thus, while leading a round-the-clock life of carnal desire with Keiko, I began writing feverishly for those smutty magazines they called kasutori zasshi.
There were nights without number when I drank until dawn with their editors.
I felt my prose coarsening through this disordered existence.
Moral pangs too would come—for my wife and children left behind at their evacuation site, receiving nothing but money.
And there was pain in believing I’d betrayed what I once considered the Communist Party—the people’s own vanguard.

Unable to sleep, I came to use sleeping pills with increasing frequency.
At first, ten Calmotin tablets or two Adorm tablets would let me sleep, but in the end, I couldn’t sleep unless I swallowed between fifty and a hundred Calmotin tablets and around ten Adorm all at once.
Even then, instead of making me sleepy, taking them would bring on a pleasant state of excitement.
And then, intercourse with Keiko.
To forget that fatigue—even during daylight hours—I would take Adorm and write manuscripts.

I had always been fond of alcohol and could hold my liquor well, but once I began taking sleeping pills regularly, I found I couldn’t get drunk on alcohol alone.
I was a former rower—six feet tall and twenty kan.
Even so, drinking a bottle would put me in a good mood, but before long, even downing a bottle of shochu left me unfazed, so I began taking sleeping pills with alcohol.
Moreover, there was also this stingy feeling that it was more economical.
Thus I became an addict of Keiko’s body and sleeping pills.
If even a single day passed without either, withdrawal symptoms would set in, and I’d become like a half-dead patient, lacking even the will to speak.

Thinking that if things continued like this, my health and talent would be ruined, and my wife and children at the evacuation site would be destroyed too, I felt utterly overwhelmed.
Every time I quarreled with Keiko—who turned violent when drunk—I would seize it as an opportunity to flee back to the countryside where my wife and children were. But there, when faced with my wife’s rigid, turtle-shelled expression of silent contempt, I would ache for Keiko so desperately it felt like dying, and end up fleeing back to her again.
When Keiko would get drunk and lose all restraint, going out into the nighttime streets with other men who had come to visit, I too would be seized by jealousy and go out into the nighttime streets with other men, stay in disreputable places, and sleep with prostitutes—but in such cases, thinking of Keiko’s body, I couldn’t bring myself to touch those other women.
Ironically, while my wife—who had at least seemingly kept her chastity for me after marriage—was someone I had no desire to remain faithful to, I found myself keeping my chastity for Keiko, who had been like a nocturnal angel before we came together.

Keiko had been called “Striped Horse” by the foreigner she had previously cohabited with.
She was a dusky-skinned, petite woman with small hands and feet, her face flattened and the large nostrils of her low nose upturned.
With makeup, she wasn’t such an unattractive woman, but bare-faced, she was an astonishingly plain, mud-stained farmer’s daughter.
However, that body—unaware of fatigue, with faint stripes on its thighs—overwhelmed me.
It would be fair to say I was first made aware of carnal love through her.

However, unlike those philistines who calmly keep mistresses, I cannot settle into a polygamous system.
Morally, it was considered right to return to my wife and children, and from the perspective of my new morality—even if her past was what it may—leaving my former wife to be with Keiko, the woman I loved more deeply, felt like the right thing to do.
However, there was the problem of the four children.
That Keiko—who couldn’t easily calculate eighteen times six—was incapable of raising them was clear even to me.

Then finally at last year's end—even foolish me had noticed Keiko hiding foreign sweets and cigarettes—and moreover during her diphtheria treatment requiring penicillin injections—I'd begun sensing less her infidelity than her wanton nature; after swallowing hypnotics and fighting with her once more—I fled back to my wife and children in Izu.
Yet naturally still dosing myself with hypnotics—now adding liquor from Numazu too—even when midnight struck—no will remained to go home.
Unbearable—my wife's swollen-cold visage.
Near midnight—hiring a car for twelve hundred yen—returned to M Coast—yet though home stood within hailing distance—couldn't make myself enter.
Blessing that bar-brothel beneath our house—perched on its threshold drank—only nearing three did final return come.

On my way back, I fell into a field, sprained a finger, and after much anguish and struggle finally made it to my wife and children—but my wife seemed to nonchalantly dismiss this as an ordinary husband’s debauchery, and not only did she needle me with stinging sarcasm, she even taught the children to see me as a villain.
At that point, my feelings took a sudden and decisive turn: I would abandon my wife and children, resolve to be with Keiko, declare this to them, and return once more to her in Tokyo.

Thereupon, my wife took the children and immediately went crying to her parents’ home in Tokyo.
Thereupon, something like a family meeting began.
At that gathering, Keiko took sleeping pills.
She became far more intoxicated than I did on a smaller dose.
So my sisters, concerned for the children’s future, refused to take in my wife and children into the ten-mat detached room of my immediate elder sister and adamantly insisted that I immediately divorce my wife with a five hundred thousand yen settlement.
There, I saw my own children acting timidly and innocently.
Thus, my resolve changed once again.
I resolved to sacrifice myself for the children and parted with Keiko once more.

And I had my wife and children live in my immediate elder sister’s detached house while renting a workspace nearby myself.
Yet even then, my wife’s bloated face remained perpetually close at hand.
I grew uneasy too hearing Keiko—reckless since our separation—had taken work at a social café.
That said, facing Keiko again felt unbearable.
Silently I fled my workspace, clinging to hopes of a publisher who might pay.

Days of sleeping pills and alcohol stretched on.
The places where I slept were an okonomiyaki shop in Asakusa—now out of business—and the homes of close editors and writers.
I caused truly indescribable trouble for so many people.
I had determined that these so-called social cafés—lewd, exorbitantly priced places frequented by idiotic black-market dealers—were beneath me, but upon hearing Keiko was working at one, I changed locations two or three times and showed my face.

In a social café in Asakusa, there was a waitress who resembled Keiko; I took her to a hotel just once. However, I found myself with no desire to have intercourse with any woman different from Keiko. Just as I’d often done during our cohabitation, I had her place her smooth legs atop mine, then swallowed a massive dose of sleeping pills and fell into a deathlike sleep. Absurdly enough, I had still kept my chastity toward Keiko.

And I believed Keiko too harbored matching sentiments toward me.
My body that had once weighed twenty kan wasted away to barely two kan, ribs jutting through skin like shipwrecks surfacing.
Through those nightless days of wandering—Asakusa alleys, Shinbashi gutters, Yokosuka piers, Kamakura temples—I drank and swallowed pills indiscriminately, yet Keiko’s phantom kept floating through my half-dreams.
She must have been drowning in the same misery.

And so，one day，driven to desperation，I returned to that so-called old nest of love in Shinjuku.
Around three in the afternoon，I stealthily called out from the kitchen and asked if I could come up and whether Keibō was still feeling unhappy.
A stifled，giggling laugh and Keiko’s cloyingly sweet，seductive voice saying，“I’m so happy.”
“Of course I’m unhappy.”
“I’m so happy you’ve come back to me.”

At these words，I was overjoyed and entered the familiar six-tatami room through the kitchen.
She lay on the well-worn futon in her seductive nightgown，and by her pillow，the kind old woman from the neighborhood—who had been there since our time together—smiled gently.
Nowhere else but at Keiko’s home was I welcomed with such familial warmth indeed.
In that instant，I felt overwhelmed not by lust，but by a higher form of love.
Once again，I became convinced that there was ultimately no place for me to return to but here.

After sending the old woman home, I held Keiko on my lap and asked her various things amidst the sleet.

“Because I wasn’t around… I was truly lonely.”

“I couldn’t love anyone else.”

“I tried having an affair once.”

I was slightly bothered by how much plumper Keiko had become compared to when we’d parted. Had I wasted away this much from longing for her, while she hadn’t spared half as much thought for me? Yet the cascade of honeyed words that followed from Keiko’s lips proved more than enough to dispel such doubts.

Keiko writhed her taut body and said this.

"I was lonely."
"Sometimes when I heard footsteps at night, I'd wake up thinking maybe you'd come back to me."

"Of course there's no way I could've fallen for anyone else."

"An affair?"
She arched her delicate eyebrows and snapped.
"Don't be ridiculous!"
"Even working in a place like that, I alone stayed serious."
"So my average income was only about four hundred yen a day."

Before that, when she had come to my elder sister’s place wanting to see me, I had heard her complain that she only earned two hundred yen a day. But thinking that too was just her harmless lie for appearances’ sake, I said nothing. She also claimed that after running out of money, she had sold the Elgin watch received from a foreigner she had previously been involved with for 1,500 yen, and that she now had only seven or eight hundred yen to her name. When I parted with her, based on the money I had left behind, I surmised that even though barely a month had passed, this too must be a lie.

But without saying a word, that night I sold my books for money, drank with her, poked at a meat hotpot, and reveled together. Even my desire—unfulfilled for a full month—turned relentless from that night onward. To her credit, Keiko writhed in pain, recoiling from it all. Yet I—ever the trusting fool—felt no suspicion toward her complaints of soreness in those intimate places. To me she remained as ever: ignorant, pure, utterly lovely.

Under our initial agreement, I had intended to meet Keiko like that occasionally each month. Each time, I had intended to bring money. Then Keiko said, “I don’t need money every single time you come like this.” She, too, while continuing her work, had intended to meet me occasionally.

The next day, I went to the publisher where I had scheduled money collection.
Finding this arrangement inconvenient when given a postdated check, I went to have it cashed by the president of a certain publishing company nearby whom I was always troubling.
Once treated to drinks, I couldn't return in time for my promised meeting with Keiko.
That night, though she had said she would take off work, she must have grown angry at my late return and gone to her workplace.

And so alone, I cradled what was likely a 1.8-liter sake bottle received from the president and sped by car from Hongō to Ginza.
Her workplace was a bar called Urara in Nishi-Ginza.

Having the driver search for it, I found out immediately.
It was a large bar on the second floor of a building that was also said to be run by third-country nationals.
Downstairs two or three attendants in white uniforms stood guard, keeping out suspicious-looking patrons.
When I gave Keiko’s real name—the one she used here—a shrill voice called out “Keiko-san!” and I was ushered upstairs.
Was this the refined establishment Keiko had described?

Under blue lighting blared a band.
Customers and hostesses danced.
Once you set foot here, you had to resign yourself to parting with at least three thousand yen.
Yet according to Keiko’s account, every customer carried between fifty thousand to a hundred thousand yen in their bags and invariably spent ten thousand.
The clientele mostly comprised construction or trade company men being entertained on corporate tabs, they said.
An elderly patron drunkenly clung to a hostess’s waist while swaying his hips; others stood frozen in embraces performing some dubious shimmy.
Through this, I felt I’d grasped the true nature of this so-called “elegant bar.”

When it became known that I was what they referred to as Keiko’s patron, I was led to a special enclosure in the back of the bar—reserved for foreign guests, they said—and four or five hostesses surrounded me.
In Keiko alone I could sense a desire to become earnest, but those four or five women struck me as utterly typical prostitutes.
Their faces and conversations spoke of nothing but wanting money, men, good food, and alcohol.
I recalled how Keiko had once competed with one of these women over a customer and wept, and suddenly I no longer wanted her to keep working this job.

All or nothing—this extreme mindset of mine, once it had me quarrel with the Communist Party, now drove me to leap into a prostitute’s embrace.
I fell once again into such an extreme mindset.
I resolved once more to abandon my wife and children and make Keiko my wife.
This was, of course, contingent on making her quit her job.

While living with Keiko, I thought about escaping from her and bought her a market stall in Ikebukuro. Keiko rented out that market stall to her friend Lily for three thousand yen a month. Lily was a former geisha who, compared to Keiko, was what you might call more beautiful but seemed equally hysterical. In this world of ours, unhinged men and women multiply by the hour.

That Lily stayed with me until the very end because Keiko wasn’t there.
I drank from the large sake bottle I’d brought while the hostesses drank the bar’s beer.
In the end, I stayed until closing time.
Drunk and too late to bother with anything else, I decided to return to Shinjuku with Lily by hired car.

When I left the store, there was a Chinese restaurant at that corner.
Since Lily said she wanted something to eat, we went in, and I ordered chicken curry for myself and yakisoba with egg soup for Lily.
I was thoroughly drunk and no longer had any appetite.
As I blankly watched Lily eat and drink, she devoured her portion in moments, then—screaming “I hate complications!”—proceeded to wolf down my curry as if draining a glass of water.
She was like a starving demon.
She was one of the women of hell.
I recalled that Keiko, too, had displayed this fearsome appetite at the start of our meetings.
They were starving—truly starving—for love, for money, for physical appetite, for everything.

The fare from Ginza to Shinjuku was 1,000 yen.
The car was a luxury vehicle that appeared to be owned by a foreign organization, and the driver seemed to be working a side job.

“Hurry up and get in,” he urged.
Inside the car, Lily too seemed drunk, fixing her gaze as she began grumbling about how stingily I’d tipped.
Upon reaching the Shinjuku house, she acted like she’d done Keiko some grand favor—“I brought your man back for you”—then started harping about the tip again before launching into complaints about the Ikebukuro market stall’s exorbitant rent.
When drunk, Keiko would never cower before the likes of Lily, but soberness made her docile—she meekly handed over the tip as ordered.

Out of consideration, I had the two women sleep on the large futon with the kotatsu and slept alone on a small, worn-out futon in the corner, but I felt unbearably lonely and cold. I shouted Keiko’s name at the top of my voice and slept clutching her supple body. According to Keiko, there were men and women in this world who felt stimulated by having others sleep beside them and preferred intercourse under such conditions—but I was a man who, when alone with her, tended to favor bold and shameless intercourse, yet lost all courage the moment I imagined someone watching.

As a returned prodigal son, I came to like Keiko even more than before.
For her sake, I became so desperate that I thought even losing my literature, my entire life, and my pitiful children—everything—would be acceptable.
But unlike before, I was greatly troubled by how Keiko’s material desires had grown stronger.
She gladly agreed to be with me again—but in return,

“Working at the bar taught me things—love runs parallel to material things. I want kimonos too, and you’d better let me live extravagantly. Come on, understand a woman’s vanity.”

Ah—was this the same woman who, at our first meetings, met me standing there in a tattered jumper and military boots as I declared, “I’m a man who cares little about appearances”?
“And I’m a poor writer—I might not be able to give you luxuries,” I had said, to which she tenderly replied, “That’s fine. As long as I have your love, I don’t need anything.” Was this truly the same woman?

Had that month working at the social café—this corrupting habit—caused Keiko’s rapid moral decline? No—she had always been a woman who carried these seeds of vanity within her. What had seemed so endearing was how she’d shown restraint toward me—even her “Buy me this” requests had been timidly phrased.

But now she envied her bar colleagues flaunting outfits worth hundreds of thousands of yen, pestering me to buy her such accessories too. I’d fallen asleep holding her, filled with a sadness that made me want to die.

The next day, I went with her to the home of a senior writer who lived nearby.
Though I called him my senior, he was a man past fifty with a peaceful and settled family.
I will tentatively call this person Mr.Y.
Mr.Y welcomed me after such a long time and treated me to drinks.

Seeing Mr.Y’s small children playing with such innocence was excruciating for me—it reminded me of my own children, cutting into me as though my flesh were being sliced. So I made a special effort to cheer up, taught those children their school song, and lectured the kind wife on Zen despite knowing little about it. During my wandering after separating from her, I had grown fond of reciting *The Gateless Gate*, which I had coincidentally bought at a secondhand bookstore. Among them, I particularly liked the koan called “Hyakujō’s Wild Fox.” It seemed to me that this shared something in common with Baudelaire’s lament—(Resign yourself, my heart; sleep, beast—sleep your sleep). Now, I will attempt to transcribe the full text of that koan here.

When Hyakujō Oshō addressed his assembly, there was an old man who always listened to the Dharma alongside the monks. When the assembly withdrew, the old man also withdrew. Suddenly, one day he did not withdraw and asked the master: “The one standing before me—who is this person again?” The old man said: “He is a non-human. In the past, during the time of Kāśyapa Buddha, he dwelt on this mountain.” Thereupon, a monk asked: “Does a person of great practice fall into causality, or do they not?” He answered and said: “He does not fall into causality.” For five hundred lifetimes, [he] fell into the form of a Wild Fox.

Now, he said.
The old man entreated the Master to overturn a single turning phrase and free him from being a Wild Fox.
The master promptly asked,
"Does a person of great practice fall into causality, or do they not?"

The Master said,
"He does not obscure causality."
The old man, upon hearing these words, experienced great enlightenment, bowed deeply, and declared, "I have now shed the form of the Wild Fox."
He shall reside in Yamanoato.
Boldly reporting to the Master, they requested that the precedent for a deceased monk be followed.

The Master had the Ino strike the white mallet and announce it to the assembly.
After the meal, they would send off the deceased monk.
The assembly, without debate, was entirely at peace.
In the Nirvana Hall, again no person falls ill—why is it thus?
After the meal, they merely watched.

The Master led his assembly to the base of a cliff behind the mountain and, using his staff, pulled out a dead wild fox, which was then cremated.
The Master, when evening came, ascended the hall and recounted the previous karmic circumstances.

Obaku promptly asked, “An ancient person, having erred in responding with a single turning phrase, fell into the form of a Wild Fox for five hundred lifetimes.”
Turning and turning—if one does not err, what would this bring about?
The Master said, “Come closer.”
He spoke for Obaku’s sake.
Obaku promptly approached and struck the Master with his palm.
The Master clapped his hands and laughed.
Truly, it is said: his beard was red.
Furthermore, there was a red-bearded barbarian.

Mumon declared: “Not falling into causality—why then did [he] fall into being a Wild Fox?”
Not obscuring causality—why then does he escape being a Wild Fox?
If one directs [their attention] here and attains the single eye, then they can know how the former Hyakujō (the Wild Fox) attained elegant enlightenment over five hundred lifetimes.

The verse declares: “Not falling, not obscuring—two hues cast as one die; Not obscuring, not falling—countless errors arise.”

I did not intend to impose my own interpretation on this koan.
To me—who had simply believed that living through life with desperate effort and ascetic practice alone could make one a good writer—the koan spoke its words: (Resign yourself, my heart; sleep, beast—sleep your sleep).

While I was engrossed in this Zen story, Keiko appeared to have started guzzling sake straight from the cup alone.
By the time I jolted to awareness, Keiko was thoroughly plastered, her eyes glazed and unblinking.
Then she began quarreling with Mr.Y.
Mr.Y too seemed considerably inebriated.

Keiko shouted loudly, “How the hell can anyone drink this swill? Bring me beer and cheese!” she blustered as if putting on a grand show in the shop, and Mr. Y stammered haltingly in a quavering voice,

“How dare you say such rude things?
“That’s enough—kindly get out of here.”

“Even if I do go back, don’t you dare lecture me when you can’t even feed me anything decent.”

As Keiko staggered to her feet, Mr.Y lunged at her, snarling “This insolent woman—”, only to be restrained by his wife and led away to be put to bed in the back.
I too watched the scene through drunkenly bleary eyes, and realizing I needed to get Keiko out quickly, I hurried her to the entrance—but by then she was too drunk to put on her sandals alone.
I couldn’t muster the strength either—not with the pills in my system.

As the two of them staggered out of Mr.Y’s house on the cliff, she lost her footing and tumbled headlong into the ditch ahead.
From the stinking, rancid ditch, a gaudy undergarment was visible; in the darkness where things glimmered faintly, Keiko’s thighs lay exposed.
Staking her talent and body, making herself a substitute, trying to prove her disowned parents and family wrong—she too was a Wild Fox.
Wild Fox falling into a ditch; elegant enlightenment over five hundred lifetimes—such sentiments welled up uncontrollably in my chest, but I had to hurry and save her.

I too fell on my backside as I somehow managed to pull her body out of the ditch, but she had become like a mud-smeared temple attendant. And before I knew it, a crowd of rubberneckers had gathered around us.

“Look—a drunk woman!”
“Disgraceful!”

“Pour water on her and leave her there—she’ll sober up on her own.”

The more repulsively ugly Keiko became and the more she was insulted by everyone, the more unbearably dear I found her. Having no other choice, I went to ask if we could have her rest in Mr.Y’s entranceway, and Mrs.Y came out holding a towel and a metal basin before cleaning up Keiko’s face and body thoroughly.

Keiko regained some composure and staggered to her feet on her own.
Her kimono’s front hung open; from the hem jutted her bare feet in jet-black tabi socks.
A passing boy called out, “Hey, a female ghoul!” which sent her flying into a rage. “You bastard!” she screamed as she chased after him.
I gazed at her retreating figure and imagined her as a little girl in some rural village, just as tomboyish back then—and couldn’t help but smile.

In my own boyhood, having grown up in a rural village in Kamakura, I often felt both curiosity and a faint romantic longing toward girls like Keiko. The many girls who went off to the city only to be infected with venereal diseases and die young—the affection I had felt for those girls now erupted over Keiko.

Around sixteen or seventeen, she had been targeted by an old farmer who tried to assault her and chased around by a doctor’s son. At nineteen, seduced by a countryside go player into losing her virginity; at twenty-one, pressured by relatives into a loveless marriage where she clashed with her mother-in-law and sisters-in-law; taking café work before joining a printing factory after her husband’s military deployment to become self-reliant; postwar, despising her repatriated husband enough to divorce him, cohabiting with a foreigner until his black market deportation left her working as a hostess while moonlighting in prostitution—this was Keiko. In her I recognized the tragic fate of postwar Japan’s women. I wanted desperately to save myself and rise up together with her—yet—

I held her handbag and sandals and chased after Keiko, who, drunk, was chasing after the boy. The boy, who seemed to be a clerk at nearby S Station, fled into the office, and Keiko chased after him. And as they were making a scene in the office, I went in, apologized to everyone, and returned by train to Shinjuku.

Last night, the market where the corpse of a young man—said to have been stabbed once with a dagger—lay sprawled on its gutter planks. Over those gutter planks she walked barefoot in her tabi socks, her hair tangled and wild, her upturned eyes resembling a flatfish’s, advancing with perfect composure. That wretched form—how passionately I had loved it. Along the way, she was stopped for suspicious questioning by a police officer, but since I was with her, it ended without incident.

On the way back to her house, there was a Chinese soba shop. Keiko used to say that when she had been working, she would sometimes stop by there when she got hungry. At times, she brought along the bar boy who had escorted her home. For a moment I suspected this might have been a customer, but at that time I still believed Keiko would tell me anything—even her most shameful past—without hiding it. And Keiko ate two whole bowls of ramen with egg added. It was the same terrifying appetite she’d shown last night when seeing Lily.

After returning, we slept embracing each other like corpses.
In the morning, the moment I woke, it was I who initiated the embrace.
When she had worked at the bar—I wanted to know whether she had never had so much as an affair.
So I tried every way to make her confess, but whenever it came to that, her expression bristled like a pangolin’s spines, leaving me no choice but to believe her.
In this way I had gradually come to dislike her—a fact Keiko seemed to have forgotten.

It wasn't that only men had the right to cheat while women didn't.
Since I'd abandoned Keiko once before, there was no helping it if she'd turned to prostitution during that time.
Yet I believed our mutual love and trust could only arise from laying bare all these shameful parts of ourselves to each other.
It was precisely the absence of this that made me grow to despise my wife.
But Keiko seemed to regard this very thing as some sort of trap or snare I'd laid.

The next day was when I would make her quit her job.
Wanting her last night at work to be pleasant with proper farewells to everyone, I shamelessly borrowed money from an editor acquaintance in Ginza’s literary circles and headed to Urara around half past ten.

Under blue lighting among heavily powdered women and drunken men, Keiko appeared transformed.
To me she looked charming—her exaggeratedly squared shoulders compared to others’ poised postures, her rustic air amidst metropolitan affectations, her petite frame against their studied elegance.
She seemed irritated that I’d brought only four or five hundred yen and refused to settle at my table even momentarily.
Since Keiko had spread word of my jealous nature, concerned hostesses kept calling “Keiko-san!” across the room, but she deliberately wove through customers with skittering movements—that small body dancing incessantly.
Watching her stubborn defiance with amusement, I started dancing with another hostess.

Whether the song was a tango or a blues didn’t matter—it was a dubious dance where we just kept stomping out trot boxes.
To me, who had learned rowdy dances before the war, it seemed utterly lackluster.
However, in the end, for someone as tone-deaf and dance-averse as me, this was more comfortable.

When I returned to my seat after dancing a piece, a composed and beautiful hostess—said to be Keiko’s group leader—sat down before me.
At a glance, I could tell she was a true Tokyoite—her makeup refined, her speech crisp.
As we talked for a while, I realized she was the daughter of a restaurant near the boathouse where I had stayed during my student days.
She was, in any case, a hostess who knew of a bygone era when cafés still had a certain sense of social obligation and etiquette.

Compared to her, my Keiko appeared unrefined and covetous.
During my wandering days a few days prior, I had eaten and drunk with revue actresses in Asakusa, but compared to their prewar selves, they too had lost all dreams and vanity, leaving me disappointed by their sheer materialism.
And what disappointed me even more were the waitresses at these new-style coffee shops.
There, to put it simply, encountering this type of group leader who lacked that crude vigor made me happy.

That night too, once I got drunk, taking the suburban train felt like too much trouble, so I returned by hired car.
This was a Japanese charcoal-powered car costing eight hundred yen.
After returning home, when we went to bed together, the habitual friction act would repeat itself.
I keenly felt the decline of my own flesh and the vigor coursing through her body.

I had intended to start working from the next day, but when I inadvertently touched her body in the morning—the previous night’s drunkenness still lingering—I found myself unable to work. When I asked the old woman to buy Adorm from a nearby pharmacy, I took two tablets in the morning, then four more, and spent the entire day drowsing under the futon. Then came her relentless anger toward me, who wasn’t earning any money. When I took Adorm, a sheep turned into a wolf—Keiko was terrified that I would hit or kick her, the absolute monarch.

Therefore, my Adorm was restricted, and that night I received only five tablets.
Beside her—already sunk into loud snoring—I lay tormented.
Like this, I would never work again—not tomorrow, not ever.
When I thought of my wife and children, left without a single yen from me, sleep grew more impossible still.
Having crashed into her life just as she grew accustomed to her job—fully aware of my guilt—there was no choice: until resolving matters with my family and addiction, I would leave Keiko again and retreat to my sister’s house.

When Keiko claimed she didn’t even have money to buy rice, I shamelessly asked an editor who had come to visit me to sell Kropotkin’s *Ideals and Reality in Russian Literature*, Joyce’s *Dubliners*, and two or three other Western books I had cherished—through a bookstore president with whom I had only a passing acquaintance.
Moreover, after that, I discovered she had savings amounting to ten thousand yen.

Back when I was cohabiting with her, I struggled with her strictly limiting my drinking money and was exasperated by her constant nagging about the funds I sent to my wife and children—to the point where I resorted to hiding cash in various places.
Now, if I considered that I was being subjected to her revenge, foolish me couldn't bring myself to blame Keiko for this matter, at least.

However, when I heard that Keiko had stayed out for about three nights over the course of that month, each time bringing back thick wads of bills to save up, I was aghast.
She had a bad illness, and she claimed that after I had stormed out, she had hardly received any treatment for it.
In that case, wasn't Keiko effectively destroying herself through her own actions?
Recalling this and that with nearly unbearable anguish, I once again left Keiko's house and went to my elder sister's place.

There was my wife’s triumphant face.
While I was at Keiko’s house, my wife took our four children and raided her home during our absence.
And upon hearing from the caretaker about Keiko’s three overnight absences and the thick wads of cash she’d brought back, she said she felt a weight lift from her chest.
During my absence, my wife had pawned her one good kimono, it was said.
By societal common sense—no matter who you asked—public opinion would side with my wife.

But that triumphant face of my wife gouged even deeper into the wound in my chest; from that moment on, I could no longer bear to look upon the faces of my wife and children.
My sister tried to stop me, crying, but I stubbornly insisted on divorcing my wife and refused to listen, ultimately driving my wife and young children out to my eldest brother’s house near my sister’s home.
And I would provide child support, but I made my wife work as a housemaid.

I think I saw my wife’s tear-streaked face.
But that didn’t linger in my heart as much as my wicked Manon—Keiko’s tear-streaked face.

And so I rented the ten-mat annex of my elder sister’s house and began a dreary life with the twelve-year-old eldest child.
Around ten in the morning, I would rise and manage to keep working at my desk until about four in the afternoon, but when five or six o’clock approached, I’d be suddenly struck by such loneliness that I wished to die, and head to the kitchen where my elder sister was preparing meals to ask for Adorm.

After enduring withdrawal symptoms for two or three hours, even four tablets had the effect of ten.
A euphoric sensation as if rising into heaven.
After a day spent alone at my desk came an indiscriminate urge to talk.
I began talking to my busy-looking elder sister about various childhood memories.
I was terribly starved for love.
So I chattered coquettishly to my elder sister—the only one I could sense harbored any affection for me.
At thirty-seven years old, I spoke in the same teasing manner I’d used as a child when taunting my elder sister—three years my senior—with chants of “Come on, come on!”

Even so, my elder sister had many children and a husband, leaving me with the loneliness of not being able to receive affection solely for myself.
That loneliness grew even more acute from the moment my elder sister’s husband—who had been living harmoniously with her for twenty years—returned home.
My brother-in-law was an acting director of a certain economic organization counted among the “new faces” influencing financial circles—already fifty years old.
Toward him, I felt an inferiority complex.
To distract myself from that loneliness, I played games like shogi with my elder sister’s children.

Even during those moments, I would recall how cruelly Keiko had deceived me.
The vision of her mid-infidelity would torment me, flickering behind my eyelids until I typically lost at shogi.
Though truth be told, I never much cared for shogi.

One such morning—around nine o'clock perhaps—my elder sister shook me awake shrilly as I lay in deep slumber from having taken Adorm.
By the bedside sat an old man whose face I somehow recognized.
The elderly husband of the old woman who always helped at Keiko's house.
I jolted fully awake, wondering if something had happened to Keiko.
Fortunately there was nothing wrong with Keiko physically; since it was merely a burglary incident being reported, I felt relieved.
When it comes to property matters, I've always been fundamentally penniless—carefree in my belief that any dust I might gather would settle elsewhere.

Having calmed down—so went the old man’s account—he had visited my eldest brother’s house nearby twice last night only to turn back; on his third attempt around two in the dead of night, he managed to reach their home with a police officer’s help, stayed there overnight, then came here.

According to his story, Keiko—whom I had abandoned by storming out a second time—bought Adorm that day and sank into deep sleep. After lying dead to the world until noon the next day, she staggered outside and came back with an unfamiliar young man.
Then after eating dinner together, Keiko announced she was going to work and left with him.
Soon after, the young man returned alone and entered her house asking to rest there until his meeting time with a friend.

The kind old woman trusted the man and, following his suggestion, went to her nearby home to eat a meal.
And about an hour later, when she returned, she was aghast.
From the dresser had been stolen dozens of garments entrusted to Keiko, me, and my friend, along with about five thousand yen in cash.
The timing was just as dusk approached; using a furoshiki wrapping cloth to carry it, he had apparently made off smoothly with my Olympic commemorative trunk dangling from his right hand.
Since I wasn’t particularly attached to clothing and didn’t own anything decent, the biggest victim was Keiko—who had even her Astrakan overcoat stolen—and next in line for pity was my unfortunate friend who had been driven from their home under certain circumstances and left their belongings in my care.
And then after that, Keiko did not return home; the following afternoon she came back and caused a great commotion, having the old man rush to my eldest brother’s house in the suburbs to fetch me.

For someone as jealous as I was, Keiko’s single overnight absence—compounded by her previous three-day absence—hit me most painfully in the chest.
I had made that very thing my primary reason for leaving Keiko’s house twice; therefore, I thought that if Keiko truly loved me, she would have used such an incident as an opportunity to come to me.
Of course, had her body suffered any harm, I would have rushed to her like a madman.
But with only clothes stolen and myself pressed by work nearing deadline, I wrote a letter saying, "Please come here so we can talk properly," and handed it to the old man.

I knew that my wife—who had just begun working as a housemaid—still hadn’t retrieved her one good kimono from the pawnshop.
Even so, I found myself more preoccupied with Keiko’s burglary and wanting to discuss it properly.
No matter how anyone might revile me as an immoral wretch, I couldn’t protest.

That day after relocating to my elder sister's house, editors from two magazines came for the first time to commission novels.
Given how I'd been brooding since last December over being forgotten by the world—mired in chaos without completing decent work—these visitors brought such joy that they momentarily distracted me from my irritation at Keiko still not arriving after two hours.

At dusk, when the Adorm typically made me crave human company, I went to get medicine from my elder sister in the kitchen and declared I wanted to visit Keiko in Shinjuku.
My elder sister didn't try to stop me.
But there must have been other reasons why Keiko hadn't come despite my writing that letter.
She added that since my elderly mother was scheduled to visit her place the next day, I could postpone my own visit until afterward.
When I realized it was already past Keiko's work hours,
I decided to wait until after Mother's visit tomorrow and received five Adorm tablets as usual before going to play shogi with the children in the ten-mat annex.

Around nine at night came the sound of violent knocking at the entrance. When I called out “Who’s there?,” the response came in that distinctive rasp—Keiko’s voice saying “It’s me.” Torn between joy and discomfort, I hurriedly shooed the children away before ushering her gently into the room.

The Keiko who until recently had been plump and vibrant now looked gaunt—likely from Adorm’s influence too. For women, it seemed clothes held such value they could hollow one’s very features. Moderately drunk, Keiko kept repeating: “For women, first comes finery, second life itself, third lovers.”

I also loved that tomboyish girl’s face she made when stating everything so clearly—like some cheeky child.
Before I knew it, a fierce wind, as if conjured by the era itself, began shrieking outside. The thought of sending her back to Shinjuku alone that night—still tipsy—filled me with unease.

If anything, even my elder sister—who would normally hold no goodwill toward Keiko simply for being involved with a married man like me—sympathized with her that night, shared concern over her misfortune, and suggested she stay over due to the strong wind while encouraging her to visit occasionally during daytime hours going forward.
When urged like this, Keiko—behaving like a spoiled child—insisted she absolutely had to return home.
The mere thought of Keiko—drunk in that state—wandering through Shinjuku’s market district late at night sent a shudder through me.
When intoxicated, she grew recklessly defiant, picking fights indiscriminately with police officers or street thugs alike.
If she’d merely been detained at a police box in the end, that would’ve been tolerable—but if ruffians had beaten her and freely violated her body, it would’ve been catastrophic.

Moreover, in her past I had often witnessed such incidents myself and heard whispered accounts of others.
Therefore I restrained her even more forcefully than my sister had done, sleeping beside her that night.
Yet following my elder sister’s instructions—having continued penicillin injections from the doctor up through that very day—I lacked even the vitality to touch her body.
The next morning I saw off this strangely despondent version of her and walked to the nearby station.

We stopped at a café along the way to drink chocolate, but there, at her urging, I began swallowing Adorm—three tablets, then ten—until I became exactly like a drug addict scoring a fix: a slave to pure instinct. Once again, I no longer wanted to part with her. That her previous three overnight absences were actually a single mistake—one where she’d quarreled with a rickshaw driver on her way back from Ginza with Lily, leading to their brief detention at the K Town police box; that even the thick wad of bills was just her bundling together about ten days’ worth of earnings from the shop—I found myself wanting to believe every word of her story.

It was true she had stayed out the night before the burglary—with two male editors from Kokusai Bunka-sha, a reputable magazine company—Keiko being the only woman present.
I found myself readily believing even Keiko’s claim that they’d spent the whole night drinking at a teahouse near Shinbashi without letting them lay a finger on her.
As for that burglar too, I swallowed her story—that she hadn’t staggered out and brought him home, but rather a man she’d met once at the market had tracked down her house and boldly marched in after an all-night mahjong session, pleading exhaustion.
Then I asked Keiko for ten more Adorm tablets.
The pills made my mind increasingly foggy—so much that when she suggested “Shall we drink?,” I forgot my looming deadline entirely, and we climbed the stairs to a nearby Chinese restaurant.

Once I started drinking hot sake, I lost all sense of what was what—forgetting all shame and propriety, as if I had completely lost self-control. After drinking and eating to our hearts' content, when I realized there was no money to pay the restaurant's bill, I sent their child to fetch my elder sister. My elder sister came bringing the youngest five-year-old girl, but upon seeing my disgraceful state, she seemed to burst into tears. And as she lectured me with her meddlesome words, I—my heart now as fierce as a tiger's—grabbed an alcove ornament and tried to hurl it at my sister.

I couldn’t quite understand why I had returned to my elder sister’s ten-mat annex.
I was worried that Keiko, who had gone out just to buy cigarettes, still hadn’t returned.
I repeatedly made my elder sister’s eldest son—who had his university exams the next day—run outside to look for Keiko, but he reported she was nowhere to be found.
So I threw a violent fit—overturned my wife’s only prized chest of drawers, put on my suit, threw an overcoat over myself, and even prepared to go out—but since Keiko still hadn’t returned, I collapsed into a spreadeagle on the spot and fell asleep.
And there I was, having even wet the bed in my stupor.

When I came to my senses, I was lying in the ten-mat annex, my elder sister having draped a sleeved coverlet over me.
Keiko's high heels and handbag remained behind, though she had now been gone for three hours.
I resolved to abandon hope and sleep.
Snatching ten Adorm tablets from my sister's hand, I swallowed them down, drifting into drowsiness around the time their effects took hold.

Suddenly, a drunken Keiko returned with the visage of a wrathful demon.
She said she couldn’t stand the sight of my face, tore at her hair, and struck her own face.
She said she wanted to return to Shinjuku, but with the last train already gone, I couldn’t bring myself to send her out in that state.
While looking at my elder sister’s utterly distressed face, I tried to let Keiko stay another night in the annex.
Yet Keiko, who turned heartless and remorseless when drunk, scoffed at my concern.
And then, because there was a splendid house of an acquaintance nearby from the past, she insisted on going there and wouldn’t listen.

If she insisted that much, I thought it might be acceptable to let her go there.
However, feeling uneasy about her going alone, I once again had my elder sister’s eldest son call a policeman and tried to have the officer escort Keiko.
But from the moment she saw the policeman’s face, Keiko grew docile.
After venting a stream of complaints about me to the officer, she consented to sleep in that room.

In the morning, as on those usual mornings when she’d get drunk and violent, Keiko collapsed sobbing into my chest. Her technique of subtly undulating her flesh. I could no longer bear the ugly wretchedness and asked her whether she had any carnal desire. “It’s unbearable,” she said, writhing her body even more as she draped her thick thighs over me.

I’ll get sick again.
The cost of penicillin—2,300 yen per dose—flashed through my mind.
The photos of several severe diphtheria cases that I’d been shown in the kind doctor’s examination room.
Noses had fallen off, leaving scars like camellia petals.
Countless blisters on both lips—especially the appalling sight of raw, inflamed flesh across the woman’s genital area.
Yet even as I pictured those images behind my eyelids, I surrendered myself to her.
Afterwards—the same old “here we go again” regret.

There, my seventy-three-year-old mother collapsed in tears, half-crazed, storming in with shouts.
“You’ve done something outrageous!”
“I can’t face my son-in-law anymore—get out of here immediately!”
With the Adorm haze lifting, I became a willless doll.
Scolded by my mother, Keiko and I gathered ourselves to leave.
Then came my sister’s gentle, tearful voice: “Michi, come back anytime.”
“Just sort out your feelings properly.”

My elder sister had an inkling of my true feelings toward Keiko.
Between love and hatred.
A helpless pity for ugly, wretched things.
Knowing full well we were sinking deeper into the muddy swamp together, I returned to the Shinjuku house with Keiko.

While explaining the stolen items to me, Keiko quietly hid the savings book that had suddenly appeared in her right hand.
I wordlessly snatched it away and examined it—startled.
On the date I'd stormed out, she had saved 25,000 yen.
Then three subsequent deposits of five thousand yen each.
The night before each deposit was likely when she hadn't returned home.
I said nothing.
Returning it to Keiko as she hurriedly tried to grab it back, something resembling a wry smile flickered across my face.

The wife who had pawned her best clothes at the pawnshop.

In the painful days of wandering after parting with Keiko—drunkenly dropping my ankle boots into a ditch, reduced to tattered military boots someone gave me—I was left with nothing but a single torn dress shirt.
Moreover, I still hadn’t paid last year’s taxes and was even two or three thousand yen in debt to my elder sister.

In stark contrast—Keiko with thirty thousand yen in savings and two makeshift houses—I recalled from my childhood a nearby home belonging to a beautiful widow whose whitewashed storehouse bore the crude nickname “Cunt Storehouse.”
Even so, I remained silent and the next morning handed over to Keiko all the money from the magazine that had brought the manuscript fee in exchange for writing *The Plum in the Golden Vase*.
I too could clearly see through Keiko’s numerous deceptions.
And to my astonishment, the more I understood, the more pitiful she became.
I felt that even a lovers’ suicide with Keiko wouldn’t seem unnatural.

Not falling nor deluded, two hues one die; Not deluded nor falling, a thousand errors ten thousand mistakes.

Wild Fox, elegant wanderer through five hundred lifetimes; I toss and turn in anguish, forever a wild fox it seems.