Pathway to Japanese Literature

*Fish’s Preface*

Even so, I didn’t want to think of her as a precocious woman.

Several days after our wedding, when I asked her "Just how old are you?" and was shocked to learn she was twenty-three, yet she still had that childlike air about her, like someone needing their kimono shoulders taken up.

At that time, we had settled behind a suburban graveyard, so in those early days, both of us would often find ourselves in a strangely hushed mood and see dreams of ghosts or such.

“Hey, graveyards are unexpectedly beautiful places, you know.”

Morning.
She said this while making Kansai-style potato porridge in the one-tsubo kitchen.
"In the end, a graveyard belongs only to graveyards—it’s not nearly as beautiful as you make it out to be."

“You really do have such an insincere way of speaking… One shouldn’t say things like that.”

Watching her figure in the kitchen from behind like this, I couldn’t help feeling mouselike.
But from her simple heart, she would sometimes create and show me poems like this.

When I returned

There was no one.

When I opened the quiet shoji,

A one-legged crane

was spinning around all alone

Because there was no place to sit

I too, together with the one-legged crane,

would play while dancing through the room.

“So now you’re claiming to feel lonely inside?”

While inwardly impressed by her poem, I glared sharply at her with irritation at what could only be described as a cheeky turn of phrase.

“Well… When I saw the lantern in the grave, I suddenly felt this way. It’s not like it’s anything real anyway.”
“But this… it’s like standing by a river singing something… Don’t you understand that feeling?”

“Can’t say I do… I’m no poet…”
“Yes… That’s how it is…”

To tell the truth, from the beginning, I wasn’t in love with her or anything of the sort. She too had probably never dreamed of ending up with me, and on our wedding night, she let slip the words: “I’m sorry…” As to what she meant by those words—by my own interpretation, she must have felt apologetic toward someone other than myself. Before I knew her, I had loved another girl. Her frame was angular, her eyes bordering on sanpaku eyes that showed white below the irises. Her name was Yuriko. When walking, she always had to cling to a man’s shoulder—a compulsion that seemed to define her—and this very quality was precisely what made her charming.

“So you finally went and married Okiku-san, I hear. You’re quite the dark horse, Miyoshi-san.”

When we met on the dusk-filled street, Yuriko glanced at me reproachfully and said this; as we walked, she leaned her shoulder against mine as usual, bringing with her the scent of perfume. But strangely enough, that lingering sadness before our encounter—when we happened to walk side by side like this in passing—made me realize how Kikuko, who still kept her distance even after becoming my wife, was acquiring a strangely new allure for me.

We, as husband and wife, had come to feel a love like water pooling beneath moss—unspoken yet mutual—but even so, old habits ingrained over time proved hard to shed. When not a single sen remained, she would fashion some peculiar furoshiki-wrapped bundle and run off down the graveyard path.
So I’d put on a show of nonchalance and call out the window, “Okiku-saan,” as if summoning some boardinghouse mistress.
Then, she turned back pale and answered with a desperately smiling face, “It’s an errand!”

“So it’s an errand.”
“Just come back.”

“But don’t you want strawberries?”
“I’m going to buy them…”

Something grew hot in my eyes—to the point where crimson specks seemed to scatter over the graveyard—and I felt as though she’d laid bare my utter worthlessness.
And then, unable to bear it any longer, I ran out barefoot onto the graveyard path.

“Idiot!
“I don’t wanna eat strawberries that bad even if you go that far!”
“Go back—just go home already…”

She childishly hid the furoshiki-wrapped bundle behind her back as though it were a sweet bun or something, standing there stubbornly. When that stubbornness struck deeper into my chest, I grabbed her hair and dragged her across the ground like a mud loach.

“It’s because you keep jumping to conclusions that those men before me hit you too, I suppose.”
“I’m starting to feel like throwing a knife myself. You once told me how you’d been stuffed into a charcoal sack and shoved under a plank all day—well, I’m gradually coming to understand how those men must have felt too.”

She wilted without shedding a tear.
From the furoshiki emerged a merino whalebone obi and the detachable-waist underrobe she had worn at our wedding.

“What’s the damn point in pawning this stuff?!”

When I looked over, she had dug out and was fastening my student-era moleskin heko obi.
A ticklish sensation ran through me, but I deliberately maintained a stern expression.

“You playing the devoted wife with your full belly—that’s some antiquated virtuous tale.”
“If there’s only one, we split it in two. If there’s nothing at all, we starve together.”

This was a magnificently fine thing to say. I felt intensely heroic from my own words, but to her, how forlornly they must have resonated. Suddenly, like a kappa child, she raised both hands to her eyes and began whimpering.

This way of crying was truly fascinating. As if she had blown any seductive charm toward the man sharing her bed into a tempest’s maw, she now seemed to savor her tears in solitary indulgence. Like a child, she used her dirtied hands—hands that had been dragged through mud as she wept—to occasionally scratch the soles of her feet, hiccuping as if suddenly remembering to do so. The trailing end of that hiccup sounded like a sheep’s bleat.

“What! Like a child—you should stop these unnecessary schemes from now on. Got it?”

I handed her the wet towel hanging by the window and, alone, looked up at the paulownia treetop with blooming flowers outside.

The sky was a truly deep blue.
I thought I wanted to work earnestly at anything, no matter what.
I wanted to work and cultivate this small home, like a crab’s burrow.
Suddenly, after a long interval, I felt the urge to write résumés again. I poured hot water into the inkstone, drew my desk to the paulownia-framed window, and spent a while dabbling in writing.
As I bent over my work, the Mino paper was so thin and pale that the shapes of clouds beyond the window and even the purple blossoms on the paulownia treetop seemed to seep through and imprint on it.

It was a scene that had already reached its end.

Perhaps having finally grown tired of crying, she lay prone on the cold May tatami, chasing and killing each small red ant one by one with her finger.

“Hey, I was thinking of putting up a sewing sign, but…”
“Huh—you can sew?”
“I can’t do anything grand, but I did learn how to make hakama and layered robes...”
“But you—what you’ve learned and running a business are different things—well, just wait. I go into town every day, so there must be some way.—If you think graduating means immediately making fifty or sixty yen, that’s just having a university degree for the sake of it, right?...”

“Yes, but I could have people we know sew them for us, right?…”

“You mean all the people we know are poor, aren’t they?”

“What about Morimoto Chinuko-san? They say she married into a very prosperous artist’s household.”

“Idiot! If we can’t eat, then we can’t eat—that’s just how it is.”

Instead, I sat at my desk and wrote letters to distant friends asking if there were any job openings.
By now I had no particular preferences regarding employment, and at length I expounded upon how one could find happiness even living in the countryside.
I even read them aloud to her in a reassuring manner.

“We must dash ahead even if we shatter!
“It’s not just us—there are mountains of people living like this, so there’s nothing to fear.”

The two of us had grown weary of sitting on the tatami talking, so I instructed her to secure the house and took up my hat and walking stick.
She began swirling the crimson whale-ribbon obi around her waist as she tied it.
In the small pillar mirror on the wall, my exhausted face aligned with her swollen-cheeked visage.
With invigorated care, I had her adjust her open collar like a schoolgirl.

After locking up and stepping outside, we expanded our chests and breathed deeply in unison as we walked along the field path lined with orderly green wheat.
Come autumn, this path would become indistinguishable beneath fallen leaves.
I found myself recalling a walk I’d once taken with Yuriko when still unmarried—but there she was behind me now, walking slowly with both sleeves pressed to her chest like a paper doll, squinting up at the sky——

“We can walk side by side just fine. Come on.”

Even so, she hesitated like neighbors would, making no effort to match my stride.

“How nice.”
“Look—the skylark’s singing.”

“…………”

“What’s wrong?”

“Am I being foolish? The scenery won’t enter my eyes at all—it still feels like I’m desperately locking up the house. Sometimes my body splits into two or three parts, each doing as it pleases.”

“It’s because you keep staring at my back. Here—go on ahead. You’ll see beautiful scenery whether you want to or not…”

When I made her walk ahead, now I was the one who couldn't bear it. Her red-corded geta were as worn-down as horse droppings. Yet despite their age, the wood grain showed through clearly, as if diligently polished with a rag.

"Why don't we sing something?"

"Well... I've forgotten all those school songs... It's difficult to think of what to sing at a time like this..."

We stretched out our legs under the bushes on a slight hill above the stream and began to sing Furusato, a song we both knew.

A skylark soared high.
The young leaves in the wind seemed to unravel as they went.
I grew sleepy and flopped down on my back, then covered my face with my hat and closed my eyes.
The room behind my eyelids was pitch black, yet swirling seven-colored vortices spun wildly within.
Had she moved away from my side? The sound of her stepping on soft grass as she retreated reverberated in my mind.

“Hey, don’t go too far.”

From under my hat, I must have dozed off for a while after saying that.—When I suddenly opened my eyes, she was beneath a distant silk tree, having untied her crimson obi and washing her face and limbs in the stream water.

When viewed from afar, her figure looked just like a nursemaid.

Perhaps because I had kept my eyes closed under my hat for a long time, when I got up, the surroundings appeared dim as if it were evening.
I took out a crumpled cigarette from the depths of my sleeve and lit it.
The refreshing memory of early summer became a wind that swelled my sleeve.

Beneath the silk tree, she soon finished tying her obi and came up to the embankment.

“What’s that white furoshiki…”

She hid the furoshiki behind her back as was her habit and, smirking, said, “I went gathering greens.”

She explained that there were simply too many edible-looking greens.
Inside the furoshiki she had spread out were things like hizuru, dandelions, and even suiba.
What I had taken for a white furoshiki was in fact her bleached underrobe.
I felt like saying out loud, “So this is why I can stay poor without worry,” so thoroughly domestic did she seem for a twenty-three-year-old.

At night, she boiled these gathered greens and arranged them on the dining table.
Their color was fresh-looking, but their fibers clung to the teeth—chewing the hizuru greens felt exactly like konjac.

Beyond the graveyard, the crematory’s smoke still billowed thickly into the ashen sky each day, burning people.—I was beginning to think that going into town seeking work or writing résumés was all futile.
The people I had bowed before at various places conducted themselves with notions befitting what one might call Feuerbachian mansions—ideas entirely divorced from those in thatched huts—rendering everything utterly absurd.—Mornings would find me waking to rinse my mouth, flopping onto my back to watch smoke consume human remains, while beside me she sat sewing with unsteady hands.
Her hair had gathered white dust like a netting—when I noticed this, something painful swelled in my mouth as though bound round a fireball.

She must have said something like, “I know a good seamstress—I’ll ask her for you,” and obtained this kimono-mending work from Ms. Morimoto Chinuko.

“Hey—the other day when I met Mrs. Hirai, she told me something like, ‘You’d better return that kimono to Chinuko-san soon! Kiku-san’s gone and left it at the pawnshop instead of taking it to the seamstress—she’s in such a fix!’ But really—they wouldn’t even lend fifty sen for this sun-bleached kimono? It made me feel so terribly lonely.”

I remained silent.
It had already been over ten days since she brought that kimono from Chinuko’s house, but what could I possibly find to criticize in her as she was devotedly stitching away at it day after day?
“But since this is finished now, I’ll take it over…”

She folded the completed kimono and laid it beneath the zabuton.

“If it’s finished, take it over there quick. Looking at some heartless bastard’s belongings just pisses me off.”

I was beginning to grow weary of constantly telling her what not to do—this is bad, that’s wrong—and even my own frayed nerves had started feeling a bit too much to handle lately.

I must have written forty or fifty résumés by now, and sent countless troublesome letters to every friend I could think of—but most of those I’d asked were themselves jobless and struggling.

After wrapping the kimono in the furoshiki, she rolled her eyes mischievously like a naughty child, grabbed both my hands, and led me to the kitchen.
“Hey, I think I’ll bring Ms. Chinuko a nice souvenir.”
When I saw her point to the kitchen sink after saying that, Western red bean flowers and large bunches of cornflowers were thoroughly soaked in the water.

“Oh… how beautiful…”

“Aren’t they lovely…”

“What’s with you having such a luxurious bouquet?”

“No… I went to the new graves and swiped them.”
“I thought it was such a waste.”
“But there’s so many—the bouquets on rich people’s graves go for about ten yen each...”

“So you’re repurposing them as souvenirs? Even Buddha wouldn’t rest easy…”

“But they’re beautiful flowers—I want them!”

She wrapped the bouquet as though freshly bought from a florist and, clutching the furoshiki, scampered out into the sunlit path like a puppy.

I got up, sat down on the window ledge, and gazed out at the graveyard path.
The cedars and hackberries surrounding the graves were putting out flame-like buds.
To me, it was somehow too painful a landscape.
I could hardly wait for night to come.
I wish night would come quickly.
The wind seeped into the room like an empty box, but everything was so meager that not even a shred of life’s joy could be felt; within this two-tatami and eight-tatami mat room, I alone existed like some tool.
On the warped desk lay the yellowing draft of my unfinished translation of Pushkin’s *Shateki*, but I was beginning to lose even the confidence to try peddling such things.
I suddenly recalled someone’s story.
The desolation of someone having spent six months translating Balzac’s *Petit Bourgeois*, only for over six hundred pages to not even fetch a hundred yen.
The feelings of that person who poured half a year’s passion into translating must have been desolation beyond measure.

Back in my university days one or two years prior, I should never have felt any anxiety about life—no, perhaps I had been too terrified to even consider such matters. In dim coffeehouse corners, all I ever pondered were foolish daydreams of traveling abroad.

I put on the hat from the wall and took the cane she detested.
In an attempt to take a walk among the graves, I, too, ventured out onto the graveyard path she had left.
As if overwhelmed by the sweltering heat, the sparrows flew about, tumbling over the ground like rolling pebbles.
Sure enough, just as she had said, the new graves were adorned with flowers like grass.
Some were already beginning to wilt.
Thirty, fifteen, nineteen—all were young spirits.
Among them was one grave marker that caught my eye, inscribed with the words “Kiidai Zenshi.”
On the back of the grave marker was inscribed “This world leaves no memories”—likely by Régnier or someone—and these words now warmly comforted my heart.
It stated she was twenty-eight—what kind of woman had she been?... The words on this new grave’s marker, belonging to someone who died at my own age, left me feeling so lighthearted I even wanted to whistle.

“This world leaves no memories”—how refreshingly it had been declared.
Beyond the grey graveyard, someone passed by whistling in tune with my heart.

When the light in the electric lamp hanging together on the hat nail came on, she returned home with the furoshiki-wrapped bundle swollen like a pincushion from the rice inside.

“I got fifty sen.”
“Ms. Chinuko said I’m not very good at all!”

“Ah, if someone wears that kimono you sewed, their body’ll probably swell up like crazy—but hey, I found some good words in the graveyard today.”

“What words?”

“Ah, nothing so formal—but hey, don’t you have somewhere to take flowers again tomorrow? There were loads of gladioluses and tulips—the grave’s owner wouldn’t mind us taking them. ‘This world leaves no memories,’ it said.”

“‘This world leaves no memories’—how pretentious! If it were me, I’d have them carve ‘How bitter!’”

“Oh—‘How resentful!’ Well, I see…”

She’s such a cheeky one.
Whenever she managed to buy rice, her singing grew more beautiful.
The one-tsubo kitchen came alive with activity, and the smell of grilling sardines made my mouth water.

With just fifty sen of income, it was an astonishing elixir for our lives.
I, too, hurriedly turned to my desk.
Even though it had now yellowed and become old, I should try revising my translation of Pushkin.
She had taken ten days to earn fifty sen.
And her singing was truly lovely.
I straightened my knees and flipped through the dictionary, but its coldness left me feeling hollow again.
It’d be better to sell the dictionary and trade it for fish.
The smell of sardines was a nostalgic one.

“Come on, let’s eat.
“It’s been so long—so very long… I feel like saying Amen.”
“Let’s stop with that thing you always say—‘Are humans just for eating?’”
“Come on, dig in.”

On the entrance’s dining table stood a single peach-colored peony arranged in a cup—likely stolen from the graveyard.
The two ate voraciously.
It was a truly beautiful and modest appetite.
She had eyes as satisfied as a dog’s.

“Today, on my way back, I stopped by Mrs. Hirai’s place again—do you hate the idea of being a night watchman?”

“Night watchman?”

“Yes, a night watchman job.”

“Night watchman?”

“It’s a terribly wealthy mansion, they say—with only women there, so they want a live-in student or something—and Mrs. Hirai said, ‘How about Miyoshi-kun?’ They said thirty yen with meals—I thought it sounded decent enough, so…”

“Can we both go?”

“I didn’t ask that far… Really.”

“What? That’s no good then—I’ll do anything. Now that it’s come to this, I’ve got no mind to sit around at my desk anymore—”

She began spilling fat teardrops with an unyielding face, her cheeks stuffed full of rice. Indeed, beneath these endless roofs, such fragments of lives must exist everywhere.

“So, is it true they’ll give thirty yen?”

With her mouth stuffed with rice, she managed a nod.

I traded the dictionary for money in town, tucked Hirai’s letter of introduction into my pocket, and set out for that suburban mansion.
It was a grand residence surrounded by an antiquated earthen wall—the sort where samurai might come charging forth if it had warrior windows—with stately trees flourishing around the estate.
The strains of a piano drifted out.
That alone made me oddly timid, and I paced several times before the daimyo-style gate—until suddenly recalling “This world leaves no memories,” I felt my blood grow hot and loudly requested admittance with heavy footsteps.

The girl who appeared was about sixteen or seventeen with a peach-split hairstyle, wearing a kimono that hung awkwardly short. I was first ushered into the reception room and kept waiting there for nearly an hour—an oil painting in Utrillo’s style on the wall, a single crimson spear mounted on a rack, and beyond the hexagonal window lay a large fountain with stagnant water. Around the fountain, thistles bloomed thick as undergrowth.

“How splendid!”
It was a silence that compelled admiration despite oneself.
Eventually I was led to the room of the house’s owner—a widow—but with so many maids about, I was passed along like a relay baton from one to another until, upon reaching outside Madam’s chamber, I felt such a cloying unease that I nearly bolted.
Madam sat upon a thick purple futon, attended by two nurses.

“Yamada is from Shinshu, I hear.”

I was immediately overwhelmed.
Since the Madam was also from Shinshu, our conversation turned to the mountains of Shinshu.

“Please spend today looking around all the rooms and come as early as possible.”

Whenever I tried to bring up salary or my wife, the nurses would already be bowing.
Even in fairy tales, there’s no daimyo lifestyle like this.
If I showed her, what would she say?
The elderly maid showed me over fifty rooms one after another.
It was said to be an entirely female-dominated household—four young ladies headed by a nineteen-year-old, eighteen maids, and two clerks—with the only men being the old bath-stoking man and the youngest young master.

This Ninomiya family was said to be raw silk merchants known as the Ninomiya of the realm, a household that had once flourished with all the momentum of the rising sun.
Indeed, with its imposing dignity, by the time I finished seeing over fifty rooms, only walls were spinning round and round in my head.

The elderly maid saw me out to the entrance and said, “Please send your belongings quickly. With so many women’s hands here, we’ll tidy them up for you.”
I had also seen the student room that was to become my own.
A single high window pierced the wall, and characters hung there that defied deciphering.
The color of those tatami—faded as if scrubbed raw—might already belong to beings with no connection to me.

“The student who was here before—he’d only ever strike his wooden clappers from this high window, going *clack-clack-clackety-clack*. Oh, he was such an odd fellow.”
“He was so afraid of himself that he gathered five or six stray dogs from the neighborhood…”

I deeply regretted having walked around looking only at meaningless walls.
To guard countless uninhabited walls, I had no heart to live apart from her.
Then how were we supposed to survive?
“This world leaves no memories.”
Once more, the words on the grave marker’s back pierced through my chest.—What were we abandoned intellectuals supposed to do?
Life was exactly like those walls I saw today—turn this way or that, walls upon walls, walls everywhere, nothing but walls.

What in the world am I supposed to do?

“Excuse me, this is the terminus.”
The conductor tapped my shoulder—my eyes staring vacantly like hollow pits—and spoke with evident distaste.

Over time, I had considered many youthful pleasures and hopes, but in my youth, only the words “This world leaves no memories” remained.

She was in the garden without even turning on a light.

“I’m digging for earthworms…”

In her hands she carried an empty can and was digging into the black soil.
Earthworms—she must have heard somewhere that digging up a hundred momme’s worth would fetch some amount.

I entered the room and turned on the light.
On the desk was yet another of her scribblings.
1. Fish’s Preface.
2. Fish have been eaten and there is no money.
3. Fish are not objects of love but objects to eat.
4. Mejimaguro, mackerel, flounder, ishimochi, small sea bream.

She was a woman who loved fish like a cat.
No matter how many small bones a fish had, she never failed to take the parts where there was flesh.
―I felt around the bottom of my sleeve for what remained of the money from selling the dictionary.
I still had fifty sen left.
How should I use this money to bring her some joy?

“Hey, did you get any earthworms?”

“Not yet—I’ve been at it since this morning, but only four.”
“According to the earthworm seller’s uncle—since this place used to be a marsh long ago—he said there should be lots of earthworms... but they’re hardly here at all.”

“How much will that come to?”

“Eighteen sen...”

“Hey—that’s only eighteen sen in ten days?”

“Sewing kimonos can’t compare—this is much better.”
“The smell of soil’s actually kind of nice… Just wait a moment.”
“I’ll go wash my hands now…”

When she returned from washing her hands, I arranged one fifty-sen coin and one five-sen coin on the tea table.

“Oh!”
“I’m hungry, so don’t startle me like that.”

Even so, she looked happy.
She suddenly bustled over to stand in the kitchen, then took the bucket and went out to draw water from the well.
In the empty can placed on the tea table, four earthworms stretched pale and contracted crimson.

Night.

Perhaps it had started raining—the paulownia leaves outside the window were rustling.
She was leaning on the desk, writing something.

“So, you see, that Ninomiya house—it’s nothing but walls, I tell you.”
“What would you say if it were you? The garden—though meticulously kept—is practically a wilderness. You’d probably declare we should plant daikon radishes, wouldn’t you?”
“But walls like that—it’s just~ unbearable.”
“Not a single patch of sky can be seen properly—so it’s dark…”
“The feeling of having the sky visible—those people must find it scary, like someone’s peeping at them.”

“But it’s quite an imposing mansion—surrounded by large trees, with piano music playing…”

“I’m not the least bit envious.”

“Yeah, not envious in the least.”

She was already calmly tying my heko obi. The timidity she had initially felt had faded away, and by now she had become as cheerful as a fourteen- or fifteen-year-old girl.

“But there’s no reason we have to live our whole lives holding bowls like beggars.”

“That’s exactly right~.”
“But even if we gain some enlightened resolve to become stepping stones, we might still spend our whole lives holding out begging bowls.”

The rain occasionally splashed against the shoji screens like sea spray.
I was recalling the graveyard’s words.

In that lonely voice of hers—childlike, as if singing by a riverside—she recited, “1. Fish’s Preface.
2. Fish have been eaten and there is no money.
3. Fish are not objects of love but objects to eat...” she recited.

(April 1933)