Pathway to Japanese Literature

His wife’s mother, chanting Buddhist sutras, brought a small Buddhist altar from the adjacent room and gently placed it in the alcove by her daughter’s deathbed. Then something like a wind stirred behind him. And then grief welled up within him for the first time. He had encountered his father’s and mother’s deaths before, so he already knew well how human death was handled. When he saw the Buddhist altar, it flooded his heart all at once. There lay a death that could be dealt with in no other way. His wife, now free from suffering, lay in her bed as others tended to her. Her slender hand had not yet turned completely cold, but for the first time he realized he had been left behind in this world. Now he too felt he was living as things were done to him.

“I’m in such a daze—please handle everything.”

Looking at his brother-in-law, who was handling funeral arrangements and crematorium formalities, he spoke those words. The fatigue and agitation from the previous night had rendered his consciousness nebulous. In the room where his wife lay was his sister-in-law from Kobe—she who had rushed over at dawn as death approached but failed to arrive while consciousness remained. He entered the adjacent room alone and smoked a cigarette. Beyond a single shoji screen, his mother-in-law prepared the midday meal in the kitchen. (So this was how it would be—meals would still be taken here daily from now on?) he dimly contemplated. ...Something within his heart seemed to crumble and fall endlessly without sound. Suddenly his eye caught four or five books upon the desk. They were all Buddhist texts. Since joining the cultural film company that summer and being made to read nothing but manuals on machinery and technology, he had abruptly felt compelled to explore Buddhism's realm. It was because he wanted to know—now, as this merciless war stifled the earth—how humanity of old had persisted through resignation. Yet from the books read at his ailing wife's side, only superficial knowledge had amassed itself. Now it seemed to collapse soundlessly into ruin. He remained vacantly crouched upon the tatami.

It was not a landscape where trees stood upside down and stones split open to scream.

In the six-tatami room where night had fallen unnoticed and lights were lit, people had gathered and were conversing warmly...The friend from the Tokyo film company sat right beside him. The friend wasn’t offering any special words of condolence, but for him, just having that friend nearby calmed his mind. Around the small Buddhist altar placed in the alcove, flowers had been arranged unnoticed, and candlelight flickered. Viewed from the open engawa, the two-tsubo garden with its small air-raid shelter crouched as a pitch-black mass. Within that darkness lay the mark of a sorrowful season. It was also this season when he had parted from his mother seven years prior. Three days earlier, his wife had murmured casually from her sickbed, “Today is your mother’s death anniversary,” but— ...When he had lost his mother too, dark shadows had streamed into him. But as a son, he could still yield to grief then. But now, when he thought of what lay ahead, he felt only a distant wailing heard through haze.

Her bed had been moved to a corner of the room, her face covered with a white cloth. That spot had always been where her bed was most often laid out. She still seemed to be sleeping peacefully as though nothing had changed. Yet there it lay atop the bedding—the visiting kimono she had prepared four years earlier but never once worn. Under the electric light’s glare, its green hem pattern throbbed with unnatural vividness. A large mantis flew in from the outer darkness seeking illumination, fluttering about before alighting on the kimono’s edge. Death’s presence permeated every corner of this room still. When the sutra chanting ended and neighbors departed, silence crystallized in the space left behind. He approached her pillow and lifted the white cloth from her face—how many hours had passed since then? Death’s imprint upon her features had settled into that final stillness beyond anguish’s grip. (Will we ever speak of this again?) Her face offered no reply. He wiped her body with alcohol-soaked cotton brought by his mother-in-law, who kept touching the corpse’s fingers with lingering tenderness—as if continuing some unbroken act of nursing. This was a body he knew with excessive intimacy. Yet now he saw new shadows pooled in its stiffened skin and muscles.

That night too gave way to morning. To buy flowers for the coffin, he headed out with his friend to Chiba. After leaving the house, the friend who had remained silent all that time emerged onto the asphalt of the national highway and,

“You’ve got to keep your spirits up—don’t let yourself break down.” He muttered.

“Yeah, but…” he responded. “However—” he began, but the words that followed never took shape. A desolate, monotonous view of the countryside town lay before his eyes. (From now on—from now on—nothing but sorrow would lie ahead) Suddenly that thought crossed before his eyes. ...he had sprinkled mint liquid over his wife’s white garments laid in the coffin. Around her face, upon her hair, across her chest—flowers were gradually placed around her clasped hands. He had often written works tinged with fantasies of the deceased until now, but what unfolded before his eyes was no illusion.

From their hometown, his wife’s elder brother had arrived at the house that evening. Each event unfolding before his eyes began to foster within him a vague sense that someday he might again converse with his wife. When the hearse stopped at the entrance to the municipal crematorium, he walked along the path through the plantings. The red of crape myrtles and cannas adorned with flowers burned amidst the glossy green foliage. Though he had long resided in that town, until this day he had not known a crematorium existed in such a place. His wife had likely been unaware of it too. The coffin was entrusted to the furnace, and he waited with the others in a small anteroom. As they exchanged idle talk while waiting, he envisioned the blue sky directly above that coffin. His wife’s body must now be undergoing its final dissolution. ("If I go to the other world first, I’ll save you too.") He recalled her expression when she had uttered those words—when had it been? It had seemed playful yet bore an air of absolute sincerity. ……By the time they had waited awhile, the cremation was fully completed. At the furnace site, charred wood fragments and straw ash mingled with white bones. His mother-in-law sorted through them with intent scrutiny. He too had crouched absently beside her gathering bones, but the urn had quickly filled to capacity. Clutching the urn wrapped in a furoshiki cloth, he walked back along the garden path through the plantings. Suddenly the leaves overhead rustled violently; a murky shadow seeped into what had been still air moments before, making sunlight appear agitated—another portent of impending stormy weather. Such atmospheric pressure and harsh light had always tormented his ailing wife’s sensitive skin and frayed his own fragile nerves. ("The wind and light remain unchanged on this earth.") Muttering this, he found the earthly vista before him abruptly taking on the uncanny quality of a memory.

The urn they had brought back was placed beside the Buddhist altar in the alcove. Until moments earlier, bright light had still streamed into the alcove, but before he knew it, even that area had grown dim. Outside, the rain poured down.

The humid, sorrowful air crawled up from the engawa and flowed across the tatami. Occasionally, accompanied by wind, the rain shook the leaves above the air-raid shelter with a sudden rush. The garden, soaked in utter darkness, seemed to be wailing. Such moments, however, seemed to him like something he had experienced somewhere before.

Because his second elder brother and sister-in-law had come from their hometown, the small house was filled with the stir of people. Outside, the rain poured down as if deranged.

When the rain that had continued for two days finally stopped, the guests from their hometown each returned home. Only his sister-in-law remained, but the house suddenly fell silent. Around the urn in the alcove, chrysanthemum flowers emitted a quiet fragrance. He intended to take that urn soon, ride the train to his hometown of Hiroshima, and return. But for now, he wanted to calm his mind for a while. He sat down at his desk for the first time in ages and tried opening a book. In his dazed mind, he intended to test whether he still retained the ability to understand writing composed by others. Spread open before his eyes was a collection of short stories by Anatole France. There was no reason he shouldn’t have been able to understand what he read. But the meaning disappeared even as he read, never entering into his heart. Now, he noticed that his world had become terrifyingly hollow.

When he rode the train to Tokyo for the first time in ages, from the moment he left home, the world surrounding him had been hazily enveloped in a demonic shadow and spun ceaselessly. It was undoubtedly the dark, sorrowful premonition of ruin that had continued encircling him since even before losing his wife. The train remained filled with people clad in murky black clothing. Amidst the platform crowds, those clutching white bundles of cremated remains flickered about like apparitions.

When he went to the film company for the first time in ages, he absently sat down in a corner of the production department's room. Soon the screening began, and he followed the others into the projection chamber. Then the shadow of evil melted into the film and streamed past before his eyes. Faces of people swarming in dark continental coal mines and dazzling white tropical clouds swept by like a funeral hymn, accompanied by clamorous noise. When he descended the film company's stairs and stepped onto the street, everything around him fell into hushed stillness for an instant. An autumn-blue sky stretched over the city. Abruptly, as though materializing from that azure expanse, his friend stood on the opposite sidewalk. The friend who had rushed to his house days earlier seemed to comprehend everything within him at a glance. And he himself, being thus perceived by that friend, felt like nothing more than a shadow drained of vital essence.

“Hey now, what’s this? Pull yourself together!” “It’s no use,” he laughed weakly. But when he laughed, the tension that had been coiled tight within him loosened faintly. Yet what had loosened slipped away from him in an instant. He walked along the sidewalk in a daze, perplexed that he could still walk straight. After parting with his friend, the pavement once again faintly rippled with the shadow of evil. Though it was only a weekly commute, returning from Tokyo left him crouched in his room the next day as if defeated. Until his wife’s death, this house had at least been shielded from the demonic shapes outside. Even now that she was gone, the outside world hadn’t yet come crashing in here. But the shadow of evil creeping from somewhere seemed to grow denser each day. He couldn’t forget his impression of a mural titled “Triumph of Death” from an art book. In one painting attributed to Orcagna, a massive demon sat imposingly amidst a throng of the dead. Another showed black-winged monsters flying about across the canvas. From that photogravure, shadows of evil seemed to creep across human minds and emanate forth. The ruin that human imagination could depict might be somewhat schematic. Was the design for the coming day of ruin already lying hidden somewhere in space?

The sister-in-law who had been staying for some time decided to return to her home in Kobe. At her house there was a daughter bedridden with lung damage from the strain of the Women’s Volunteer Corps. For that niece’s sake, he resolved to give his wife’s memorial kimonos. The mother-in-law and sister-in-law took garments from the wardrobe and spread them one after another across the tatami, gazing. His wife had treasured these kimonos and worn few in daily life, leaving most nearly new. The mother-in-law gazed at a familiar kimono’s hem, turning it up with lingering hands. He envied how his wife’s mother accepted her daughter’s death with quiet resignation even through grief. Had there been a day when she knew this day would come? he absently wondered, staring at the fabrics’ clamorous colors.

Having obtained a ticket to Hiroshima, he decided to take the urn and visit his hometown elder brother’s house. When he left home that evening and boarded the train, it was packed to bursting. In the murky night air, he clutched the urn wrapped in a furoshiki cloth and his travel bag under both arms, wedged within the press of bodies. Would he manage to bring this urn safely through? Amidst the jostling khaki-clad crowd, anxiety gripped him fiercely. Arriving at the station platform revealed a train already full—no seats remained. The urn placed in a corner of the luggage rack never left his awareness. Though it was a desolate night train journey, from the depths of haze and exhaustion came something like a slender thread of clarity working its way upward.

That limpid clarity seemed to cling to him even two days later as he stood before his hometown’s cemetery cradling the urn. The tombstone had been removed for the burial, but the urn he carried proved too large to fit into the grave’s back chamber. The bones would need transferring once more into a smaller vessel. Again he took up chopsticks to separate his wife’s remains. Unlike their appearance at the crematorium, these fragmented bones now pierced his vision under stark daylight—slivers of calcined matter stinging his eyes. Those fitting into the new urn were laid reverently at the grave’s base; the excess scattered into the waiting pit. Behind him, the monk began chanting sutras in tones that seemed to cradle some invisible mourner, rocking grief itself like a child. He lifted his gaze skyward. Before him stretched a spindly tree and beyond it, a two-story building’s roof outside temple grounds—commonplace sights devoid of resonance. Only the sunlight retained that distant, glacial purity.

The people who had attended the burial then returned to his hometown elder brother’s house and gathered in the tatami room. “Wave raids…” someone was saying, talking about the air attacks on Okinawa. As he sat awhile at that drinking gathering, he suddenly found himself unable to endure staying. He couldn’t quite tell what it was, but something resembling anger surged up within him. He ended up shutting himself away alone on the second floor.

The rain began to fall from the day after the funeral.

He lay on his bed in the dimly lit second-floor room—one storm shutter left open—brooding darkly from daytime onward. This room had been his study during middle school years, and it was also where he had first welcomed his wife after their wedding ceremony. He felt as though a lingering warmth of life and boyhood dreams still permeated the space. Yet he kept thinking, body rigid with anguished tension. For him, one lifetime might as well have already ended. Having witnessed his wife’s final moments, it felt like he’d simultaneously glimpsed his own demise. Even were he to live long henceforth—how much earthly time could remain? Had living until now been mere resentment? Would persisting only repeat regrets? He traced his wife’s bones through empty air. His own posthumous remains would likely resemble those fragments. And so his bones too would inevitably come to rest within that darkness. Thinking this brought a faint tranquility. But even buried in the same cemetery—in human form—he’d never meet her again.

After shutting himself in his room for about three days, staring at his anguish, his eyes were filled with an acidic grief. When the rain stopped, he left the house and wandered through his hometown streets. His feet moved on their own toward the cemetery. He stood before the grave for a while, but upon leaving the temple, he crossed the bridge and headed toward the riverside park. The crisp autumn breeze seemed to lighten his heart. As if everything were dissolving into purified air, he continued to envision a vision of transformation fluttering and dancing upward into the distant sky.

A week later, he returned to the house in Chiba carrying his wife’s Buddhist memorial tablet. He felt as though he had truly returned. Even though he knew his wife was no longer in the house, to him it remained a familiar place. When he sat down in his study, he found himself in a mood where he could recount every detail of this recent journey to his deceased wife.

But one day, when he went out to Ginza with a friend after leaving the film company and had dinner there, he felt the specter of evil moment by moment, like a fraying of his nerves. Outside the windowpanes and around the restless table, shadows of sinister things seemed to seethe and swarm.

“Someday I want us to make films we truly love—just us.” His friend murmured this as if kindling hope within him. But would such a bright society ever come to pass within his lifetime? Now before his eyes stretched only an ominous current of mechanical force dragging itself relentlessly toward ruin. When he left the cafeteria, he felt compelled to wander deeper through dusk-lit streets. The new reality of dining out freely and abandoning homeward urgency pressed insistently upon his mind. He trailed behind his friend’s footsteps, meandering without purpose.

“Shall I show you the bridge?”

His friend invited him and walked toward Kachidoki Bridge. When they reached the bridge, the view of the town transformed completely into something vast and boundless. There was chill water and a dim-lit sky. (Before long, even this area would…) He seemed to see visions of flames within the evening haze. Then as they turned back toward Ginza 4-chome, shadows of evil swayed amidst human waves and twilight mist. (Even if this moment advances toward ruin…) The figures moving through haze still held faintly sweet melancholy within their gloom. But when he parted from his friend and boarded the train, something from night’s air crawled over his skin— a dark coldness slithering through his veins that threatened to crush him at any moment. (What rages so wildly within?) A strange new exhaustion unlike any he’d known before.

When he arrived home, he laid out the bedding and succumbed to sleep. Something flowed into him—a sensation like the dark wind at death’s threshold. He thought it would be fine to close his eyes and let himself be swallowed by the darkness. However, after two or three days had passed, his turmoil had subsided.

One afternoon, he sat absentmindedly in the production department room. Before his eyes, a post-screening critique dragged on endlessly until someone abruptly stood up, transforming everyone’s expressions. People began leaping from windows toward the ground. He instantly grasped what this meant. Following behind them, he walked where they went. When he looked where people were gazing upward, a small silver key-shaped plane lay soundlessly embedded in blue sky beyond hilltop treetops. Anti-aircraft bursts echoed distantly as people filed into hillside cave shelters. The dark floor held muddy clods and puddles that hindered their steps, but pressing deeper inward revealed a faint glow like a far entrance. People clustered together crouching there. Shadowy figures clutching cameras or candles loomed dimly. Stillness made the shelter walls bite with cold. Suddenly it felt like a crowd huddled in some primeval cavern. The earlier plane now seemed a beautiful fantasy…… When chaos ebbed, only a deceitfully bright autumn afternoon remained. He stared blankly from the train window at clear skies arching over city buildings. What had been coming had arrived—yet how silent the sky stayed.

What was coming, however, arrived one after another from then on. One afternoon, at home, he was sitting at his desk writing something.

When he became aware of an unusual noise in the distance, the sirens and the report of anti-aircraft guns immediately sounded close at hand. He left his desk and began preparing himself.

“Oh my, you’re surprisingly composed, aren’t you?” his mother-in-law laughed, observing his demeanor. He too noticed the change in himself. He had often imagined himself being suddenly overwhelmed by terror and collapsing. But now，even amidst these abnormalities，he could hardly feel any frenzy. If his wife were still alive—the thought suddenly occurred to him. If his sick wife had been by his side，his nerves might have been more desperately tense. Had death now reduced the landscape of the living world to insignificance for him?

In the distant blue sky above the roofs, a small airplane glided like a star. It seemed to scatter away toward the coast.

One night, aboard a train returning from Tokyo, he abruptly saw people’s agitated movements. Then the carriage lights kept dimming until the train came to a complete stop. Those lowering blackout curtains over windows, those rising to peer outside from doors, those hastily fastening steel helmets—he sat dazedly in the hushed air. Soon the train began moving again. When they reached the next station, the woman beside him leaned out and shouted the station’s name. From then on, every time they approached a station, she would shout its name. Suddenly he heard a short siren blast. All lights were extinguished.

“They’re dropping them, dropping them!” someone peered out the window and shouted. The crisscrossing beams of searchlights appeared small in the distance.

Now he clearly felt an abnormal world unfolding just beyond his immediate surroundings. But something—something that should have been tightly connected to it—seemed to have come loose within him. He gazed blankly at the passengers around him. It began seeming like a scene from some melancholy history that held no relation to him. Like a sorrowful blind herd at the train's terminal station, people silently climbed stairs through the darkness. Yet walking among these crowds, even he felt a faint familiarity and pity rising within him. From the road came an alarm bell's clang and shouts of "Take cover!" Toward the tracks through hazy darkness crawled a train bearing red signals.

Those sorrowful scenes would shrink to mere specks and recede from within him once they passed. He sat in the hushed house confronting hushed time. At times it seemed he might not have lost anything here after all. More than memories—something far more visceral filled that room. Then from somewhere even more distant came a rustling like wind. There memories appeared to sway faintly bit by bit. Had the world been honed to a razor’s edge, trembling with sweet fragility? Something resembling quiet solace seemed to have brushed against him. ...Yet such moments too were abruptly severed by sirens. Crouching in the garden air-raid shelter, he found the night’s darkness writhing coldly alone. He felt he could comprehend primitive humans trembling in primeval blackness.

But one night, his mother-in-law emerged from the shelter and returned to the room.

“Oh, let’s end this existence soon.” “I want to return to my hometown,” she murmured in a heartfelt voice. Then, to him, everything seemed to immediately make sense. A time had come. The mother-in-law who had come to his house to care for his ailing wife had now done all she could for her daughter. For the elderly mother-in-law, there was a house in her hometown where she could settle. Suddenly, he too came up with the idea to close up this house and take shelter at his elder brother’s place in Hiroshima. Then, before his eyes, the figure of a withered tree left within the void came back to life. It was when he had been walking along the path behind the university hospital the other day to buy vegetables. Since his wife had been hospitalized at that very hospital last year, it was a path laden with emotion. In the hazy sky, eyes blurred by a low-grade fever were vaguely sensed. Then, the figure of the row of trees along the concrete wall clicked into focus before his eyes. The row of trees of equal height, each stretching their dead branches into the void, continued chillingly on. As he gazed at them, a surge of grief seemed to lash across his face. But deeper within his chest, something quietly warm still seemed to be supporting him.

“Once I go to Hiroshima, I intend to submit myself to hard labor,” he said with a laugh to his brother-in-law who had come from Tokyo. He did not imagine his hometown would now be spared from the ruin looming overhead. If he went there, even harsher whips and crueler fates might await. But with a feeling almost akin to that of a convict, he thought that from now on he would merely be living.

One day, he turned from the national highway onto a road and gazed at the spot where his house came into view. Beyond a clearing in the thicket stood a small row of pine trees, with four or five houses lined up there. Inside that solitary house, he felt that his ailing wife’s sickbed still remained, ceaselessly encouraging and supporting his fragile existence.

The belongings for the move were being packed little by little. One afternoon, he was waiting for a friend in front of Kyobunkan in Ginza. The crowd passing before his eyes flowed by like film reel, enveloped in the shadow of evil preceding ruin. For him, just as earthly endeavors now held almost no connection, might each person too be burdened with life’s unbearable weight and driven toward ruin? Dark sorrowful things seemed to flicker within every individual’s footsteps. Suddenly his friend appeared before him. The friend—assigned to travel to Kyushu on company business—wore new laced boots, his face ablaze with vital determination. But were he to withdraw to his hometown, he might never see this friend again.

“What’s this—snap out of it! Your face looks just like a ghost’s.” The friend jabbed his shoulder lightly and laughed. He managed a faint laugh in return. Standing motionless in the bleached air, he sensed a silent prayer drifting from some faraway place—as though cradling a translucent urn against his chest.

(Shōwa 26, May Issue of *Women’s Reform* [Fujin Kairyō])