Pathway to Japanese Literature

The wife’s mother chanted Buddhist prayers as she carried a small altar from the adjacent room and placed it gently in the alcove by her pillow. Then something like a wind stirred behind him. And then, for the first time, grief surged up within him. Having witnessed his father’s and mother’s deaths before this, he already knew well how human death was managed. When he saw the altar, it overwhelmed his heart completely—here lay a death that could only be handled this way. His wife lay motionless in her bedding now that her suffering had ended, surrendered to whatever hands would tend to her. Though her slender hand had not yet grown fully cold, he realized for the first time that he was being left behind in this world. Now he too felt himself living as one surrendered to circumstance.

“I’m too dazed to function—please handle everything.” Looking at his brother-in-law, who was handling the funeral arrangements and crematorium procedures, he said those words. The fatigue and excitement from the previous night had left his consciousness hazy. In the room where his wife lay, the sister-in-law from Kobe—who had rushed to her deathbed this very morning but had not arrived in time while she was still conscious—was present. He entered the adjacent room alone and smoked a cigarette. Separated by a single shoji screen, in the kitchen, his mother-in-law was preparing lunch. _So that’s how it was… Would meals still be prepared here every day from now on?_ he mused hazily. ...it was as though something within him collapsed ceaselessly, soundlessly crumbling away. Suddenly, four or five books on the desk caught his eye. They were all Buddhist texts. Ever since joining the Cultural Film Company that summer, he had been made to read nothing but books on machinery and technology—when suddenly he found himself wanting to explore Buddhism. It was because he wanted to know—amidst this very moment when a merciless war suffocates the earth—with what resigned acceptance humankind of the past had continued living. But from those books read by his sick wife’s side, he had likely only accumulated outer forms of knowledge. It now seemed to crumble soundlessly away. He absently crouched on the tatami.

It was not a landscape where trees stood inverted and stones split open to cry out. Before he knew it, night had fallen, and in the six-tatami room now lit by lamps, people had gathered and were conversing warmly. ……The friend from the Tokyo film company was sitting right beside him. It wasn’t that his friend offered any particular words of condolence, but for him, the mere fact that this companion was there by his side brought a sense of calm. Around the small Buddhist altar placed in the alcove, flowers had been arranged without anyone noticing, and candlelight flickered. When viewed from the opened engawa veranda, the small two-tsubo garden with its 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 before. Three days earlier, his wife had murmured offhandedly from her sickbed, “Today is your mother’s death anniversary.” But… When he had lost his mother too, dark shadows had come shuddering into him. But as a son, he could still indulge in grief. But this time, when he thought of what lay ahead, it felt as though he were hearing a wail from some far-off place, dazedly.

His wife’s bed had been moved to a corner of the room, her face covered with a white cloth. That spot had always been where her sickbed was laid out before. She still appeared to sleep quietly, undisturbed. Yet atop the bedding lay the visiting kimono she had made four years earlier—never once worn since its creation. Beneath the electric light, its green hem pattern glowed with an almost painful sharpness. A large mantis flew in from the outer darkness seeking illumination, fluttering about the room before alighting on the kimono’s hem. The presence of death permeated this space utterly. When the sutra chanting ended and neighbors departed, the room fell into glassy silence. He approached the bedside and lifted the white cloth from her face. How many hours had passed? Death’s imprint upon her features had settled into the calm following anguish’s storm. (Will we ever speak of this again?) Her face withheld all answers. He soaked cotton in alcohol brought by his mother-in-law and began wiping his wife’s body. The mother-in-law still touched the corpse’s fingers with lingering care, as if continuing her nursing vigil. This was a body he knew exhaustively. Yet in its stiffened skin and muscles dwelled shadows he’d never before perceived.

The night passed, and morning came. To buy flowers for her coffin, he went out toward Chiba City accompanied by his friend. After leaving home—this companion who had maintained silence throughout—they reached an asphalt stretch of national highway where

“Cheer up now—don’t lose heart,” he muttered. “Yeah, but…” he responded. However—he began—but the words that followed never took shape. A desolate, monotonous rural townscape lay before his eyes. (From here on out—from here on out—nothing but sorrow lies ahead.) Suddenly, such a thought flashed through his mind. ...on the white garment of his wife laid in the coffin, he had sprinkled mint liquid. Around her face, atop her hair, over her chest, encircling her prayerfully folded hands—flowers were being placed one by one. He had often written works tinged with fantasy about the dead until now, but what was happening before his eyes now was no illusion. Her brother from their hometown had arrived at the house that evening. Each of these events unfolding before his eyes began to foster within him—hazily—the sense that someday he might speak with his wife again.

When the hearse stopped at the entrance to the municipal crematorium, he walked along the planted path. The crimson of crape myrtles and cannas in bloom burned amidst the glossy green. He had long been accustomed to living in that town, but until today he hadn’t known there was a crematorium in such a place. His wife too must certainly not have known about this place. The coffin was entrusted to the furnace, and he waited with everyone in a small waiting room. While they waited, exchanging casual conversation, he pictured the blue sky directly above the coffin. His wife’s body must now be undergoing its final disintegration. ("If I go to the next world first, I'll save you too.") He remembered the expression on her face when she had said that—when had it been? It had seemed like a joke yet appeared terribly earnest. ...Before long, the cremation had finished entirely. When he went to check the furnace area, charred wood fragments and straw ash were intermingled with white bones. The mother-in-law sorted the bones while gazing intently at them. He too absently crouched beside her picking them up, but the urn quickly filled to the brim. Clutching the urn wrapped in a furoshiki cloth, he walked along the planted path. Suddenly, leaves overhead rustled violently, and as a murky shadow seeped into air that had been still moments before, sunlight took on an agitated glare. This too signaled the weather’s impending turn. Such atmospheric pressure and sunlight had always tormented his sick wife’s sensitive skin and his own fragile nerves. ("The wind and light remain unchanged on earth.") As he murmured this, the ground’s appearance suddenly struck him with strange familiarity.

The urn that had been brought back was placed beside the Buddhist altar in the alcove. Until just moments ago, bright light had still been streaming into the alcove, but before he knew it, that area too had grown dim. Outside, the rain was pouring down. The humid, sorrowful air crept up from the veranda and spread across the tatami mats. Occasionally, accompanied by wind, the rain shook the leaves above the air-raid shelter with a whoosh. The garden, soaked in pitch darkness, seemed to be wailing. Such moments, however, seemed to him as if he had experienced them somewhere before. Since his second brother and sister-in-law had come from their hometown, the narrow house was bustling with human presence. Outside the house, the rain was pouring down like mad.

When the two-day rain cleared up, the guests from his hometown each returned home. Though only his sister-in-law remained staying on, the house had suddenly grown quiet. Around the urn in the alcove, chrysanthemums gave off a quiet fragrance. He intended to soon take that urn by steam train to his hometown of Hiroshima. But for now at least, he wanted to settle his mind awhile. He sat down at his desk for the first time in ages and opened a book. In his dazed mind, he meant to test whether any ability to comprehend others' writings still remained. What lay spread before his eyes was Anatole France's short story collection. There should have been no reason he couldn't grasp their meaning as he read. Yet the meaning dissipated even as he read, never entering his heart. Now he realized 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 spun hazily enveloped in a shadow of evil. That was undoubtedly the dark, sorrowful premonition of ruin that had continued to surround him from even before losing his wife. Even now, the train was filled with people dressed in somber black clothing. Amid the station platform’s crowds, those holding white bundles of remains flickered in and out of sight. When he went to the film company for the first time in ages, he sat down dazedly in a corner of the production department’s room. Soon, the screening began, and he followed the others into the projection room. Then, the shadow of evil melted into the film and flowed past before his eyes. Faces of people swarming in dark continental coal mines and dazzling white tropical clouds flowed past like a dirge, accompanied by tumultuous sound.

When he descended the film company’s stairs and emerged onto the road, for an instant his surroundings fell utterly silent. The autumn blue sky stretched over the city. Suddenly, as if materializing from that azure expanse, a friend stood on the opposite sidewalk. The friend who had rushed to his house days earlier seemed to comprehend his entire being in one glance. And he too felt that self being perceived was like a shadow drained of all vital essence.

“Hey, come on—pull yourself together!” “It’s no use,” he laughed weakly. But when he laughed, the tension that had been wound tight within him loosened slightly. But what had loosened instantly slipped away from him. He walked along the sidewalk in a daze, yet found himself able to move straight ahead—a fact that puzzled him as he went. After parting with his friend, the sidewalk was once again suffused with a hazy shadow of evil.

Though it was only a weekly commute to work, returning from Tokyo would leave him crouched in his room the next day like a man defeated. Until his wife's living days, this house had at least been shielded from the demonic forms outside. Even now in her absence, the outside world had not yet come crashing through these walls. Yet the shadow of evil creeping from some unknown quarter seemed to thicken with each passing day. He could not shake the memory of a fresco titled *The Triumph of Death* from an art book. One painting attributed to Orcagna showed a massive demonic presence seated imposingly amidst throngs of the dead. Another depicted black-winged monsters swarming across every inch of the canvas. From those photographic reproductions came shadows that seemed to seep across human consciousness. The images of ruin conjured by human imagination might all bear traces of stylization. Had some space already quietly concealed the blueprint for destruction's imminent arrival?

The sister-in-law who had been staying for some time decided to return to her home in Kobe. At the sister-in-law’s house, there was a daughter who had been bedridden with lung damage from the overexertion of the Women’s Volunteer Corps. For that niece, he decided to part with his wife’s keepsake kimonos. The mother-in-law and sister-in-law took out the garments from the chest and spread them out one after another on the tatami mats, gazing at them. His wife had treasured the kimonos she owned and hardly ever wore them in daily life, so most remained nearly new. The mother-in-law, with a touch full of affection, turned up the hem of a kimono she remembered and gazed at it. To him, the sight of his wife’s mother—who, even in her grief, accepted her daughter’s death with quiet resignation—was enviable. Gazing at the kimonos' vibrant colors, he absently wondered, Had the day come when things would turn out like this?

Since he had obtained a ticket to Hiroshima, he decided to take the urn and go to his brother’s house in his hometown. When he left home in the evening and boarded the train, it was packed full. In the turbid night air, he stood wedged in the line of passengers, clutching the cloth-wrapped urn and travel bag under both arms. Amid the jostling khaki-colored crowd, he wondered if he could bring the urn through safely—the anxiety gripped him fiercely. Reaching the station platform, he found the train already full with no seats left. The urn placed in the luggage rack’s corner never left his awareness. Though desolate, this night train journey carried something within its turbid exhaustion—a thread of pure clarity that seemed to stir from its depths.

That pure clarity seemed to cling to him even when he stood before his hometown cemetery two days later, holding the urn. The tombstone had been removed for the interment, but the urn he carried was too large to fit into the depths of that tomb. The bones were to be transferred once more into a separate, smaller urn. Once more, he used chopsticks to separate his wife’s bones. Unlike when he had seen them at the crematorium, now the fragmented bones seemed to pierce his eyes under the bright light. The bones that fit into the urn were quietly placed at the grave’s bottom, and the remaining bones were scattered into the hole. At this moment, the monk standing behind him began chanting sutras in a gentle, soothing voice. It had a tone that seemed to gently shake, comfort, and soothe someone. He raised his eyes and tried to look up at the heights above. Slightly before his eyes stood a single spindly tree, behind it a two-story roof outside the temple—all of it forming an ordinary, insubstantial view. But the sunlight alone held a far more pure, cold clarity.

The people who had attended the burial then returned to his brother’s house and gathered in the tatami room. “Wave attacks…” someone was talking about the Okinawa air raids. As he sat at the drinking gathering for some time, he suddenly could no longer bear to stay. Something indefinable yet akin to anger surged up within him. He shut himself away alone on the second floor. The rain began falling from the day after the funeral. He lay absorbed in gloomy contemplation on his futon from daytime onward in the dimly lit room where he’d left one rain shutter open on the second floor. That room had been his study when he was a middle school student—the same room where he had first welcomed his wife after their wedding ceremony. A faint sensation of life and boyhood dreams still seemed to linger there. Yet he kept thinking until his body stiffened as if in agony. For him, one lifetime had already ended. Having witnessed his wife’s final moments felt like simultaneously witnessing his own demise. Even were he to live long hereafter—how much earthly time could remain? Had living until now been nothing but resentment? Was continuing life merely regret repeated? He visualized his wife’s bones suspended in space. His own posthumous bones would likely resemble hers. Thus in that darkness his bones too would inevitably come to rest. Thinking this brought him faint peace. Yet even buried in the same cemetery—in human form—he would 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 sadness.

When the rain stopped, he left the house and wandered through his hometown streets. His feet moved automatically toward the cemetery. He stood before the grave for some time, then upon leaving the temple, crossed the bridge and headed toward the riverside park. The crisp autumn breeze seemed to lighten his heart. Everything appeared to dissolve into purified air as he kept envisioning fluttering visions of transformation rising into the distant sky.

A week later, he returned to the house in Chiba with his wife’s mortuary tablet. He felt profoundly that he had returned. Even though he knew his wife was no longer in the house, to him it remained a place he was accustomed to living. When he sat down in his study, he found himself immersed 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 that shadow of evil—like a disturbance in his nerves—intensifying with each passing moment. Outside the windowpane and around the clamorous table, shadows of something sinister seemed to swarm and seethe.

“Someday, we ourselves want to make the movies we like.” His friend murmured those words as if to instill hope in him. But would such a bright society arrive during his lifetime? Now, before his eyes there was only the uncanny flow of mechanical force sliding inexorably toward ruin.

When he left the cafeteria, he found himself wanting to wander the twilight streets even more. He kept reflecting on how his circumstances had changed—that he could now eat out or didn’t have to hurry home. He followed where his friend was going and ambled along.

“Shall I show you the bridge?”

The friend invited him and walked toward Kachidoki Bridge. When they came to the bridge, the view of the town transformed completely into something vast and boundless. There was cold water and a dimly lit sky. (Before long, this area too...) Phantom flames seemed to appear within the evening haze. As they turned back toward Ginza 4-chome, the shadow of evil swayed within the crowd and evening haze. (Even if this moment is but a step toward ruin...) The shadows of people moving through the haze seemed to retain, amidst their ghastliness, a faint residue of sweet melancholy. But when he parted from his friend and boarded the train, something in the night air began creeping up against his skin. A dark, cold thing seemed to be crawling through his body, threatening to overwhelm him at any moment. (What is it that rages so violently?) It was a strange, unfamiliar fatigue unlike anything he’d ever felt before. When he arrived home, he spread out the bedding and fell into sleep. Something was flowing into him; it felt like a dark wind at death’s entrance. He thought it would be acceptable to simply close his eyes and let himself be sucked into the darkness.

However, after two or three days had passed, his disorder had healed.

One afternoon, he sat dazedly in the production department’s room. Before his eyes, the post-screening discussion dragged on, but when someone suddenly stood up, everyone’s expressions abruptly changed. People scrambled from the windows toward the ground. He too immediately understood what that meant. Following them, he walked where they were going. When he turned his gaze in their upward-looking direction, a small silver key-like airplane lay etched soundlessly into the blue sky beyond treetops crowning a hill. The crack of anti-aircraft guns echoed distantly; people filed into a tunnel-like shelter bored into the hillside. The dark ground beneath their feet held muddy clods and puddles that made walking treacherous, but pressing further inward revealed a faint glow resembling an opposite entrance. People clustered there in huddled groups. Figures clutching cameras or candles loomed dimly. As stillness settled, shelter walls grew icy against them. Suddenly it seemed to him they were a crowd in some ancient mystic cavern. The small airplane seen earlier appeared phantom-beautiful too……When commotion ebbed, what remained was an autumn afternoon so glaringly bright it felt fraudulent. He gazed vacantly through train windows at cloudless skies arching over city buildings. What had been coming had come—yet how quiet lay that sky.

However, after that, the things that were coming arrived one after another. One afternoon, at home, he was sitting at his desk writing something.

When he thought he heard a strange noise in the distance, the sound of sirens and anti-aircraft guns suddenly roared nearby. He left his desk and began preparing himself. “Oh my, you’re managing to stay rather composed, aren’t you?” said his mother-in-law with a laugh as she observed him. He had noticed the change in himself as well. He had often imagined before the figure of himself being suddenly pierced by terror and collapsing. But now, even amidst these abnormal circumstances, he hardly felt any agitation. If only his wife were still alive… he suddenly thought. If his sick wife had been by his side, his nerves might have been more desperately strained. Had death now made the earthly landscape minuscule for him? In the distant blue sky above the roofs, a small airplane flowed like a star. It seemed to scatter away toward the coast.

One night on a train returning from Tokyo, he suddenly noticed people growing agitated. Then the carriage lights began steadily dimming until the train shuddered to a stop. Some passengers yanked down window shades, others stood to peer through doors, still others fumbled with steel helmets—he sat motionless in the thickening silence. Soon the train lurched forward again. At the next station, the woman beside him pressed against the glass and shouted its name. With each subsequent stop she repeated this ritual, barking station names like a crier. A staccato siren pierced the air. Then total darkness—every light snuffed out.

“They’re dropping them! They’re dropping them!” someone was shouting, peering out the window. The crisscrossing beams of searchlights appeared small in the distance. Now he clearly felt an abnormal world spreading just beyond his immediate periphery. But something—something closely connected to it—seemed to have fallen away from within him. He gazed dazedly at the passengers around him. That had no connection to him; it began to seem like a scene from some melancholy history. Like a mournfully blind throng, at the train’s terminal station, people silently ascended the stairs within the darkness. But as he walked among these crowds of people, even he began to feel a faint sense of familiarity and pity welling up within him. From the direction of the road came the clanging of an alarm bell and a voice shouting, “Take cover!” Along the railroad tracks, a train with a red signal lumbered through the dim darkness.

Those sad scenes would shrink to a tiny dot once they passed and recede away from within him. He sat inside the hushed house facing hushed time. At times it seemed he might not have lost anything here after all. Rather than memories, something more vividly tangible filled that room. Then from somewhere even more distant came a rustling like wind. There memories seemed to sway faintly, little by little. Was the world honed to a razor's edge, quivering sweetly? A faint semblance of quiet solace seemed to have visited him. But such moments were abruptly severed by sirens' wails. When crouching in the garden air-raid shelter, the night's darkness seemed to writhe alone in icy coldness. He felt he understood primitive humans' terror cowering in primordial darkness.

But one night，after emerging from the shelter and returning to the room，his mother-in-law—

“Ah, let’s end this kind of life soon,” she said. “I want to return to my hometown,” she murmured with heartfelt urgency. Then everything became clear to him at once. The time had come. His mother-in-law—who had come to care for his ailing wife—had now done all she could for her daughter. The elderly woman had a home in her native place where she could settle.

Suddenly, he too conceived the idea of closing up this house and taking refuge with his older brother in Hiroshima. Then, the figure of a withered tree left in the void revived before his eyes. It was when he had walked along the back road of the university hospital the other day to buy vegetables. Last year, his wife had been hospitalized at that very hospital, making it a road laden with emotion. In the hazy overcast sky, eyes moist with a slight fever were dimly perceived. And then, the sight of the row of trees lining the concrete wall snapped sharply into his view. The row of trees, all of the same height, extended their withered branches into the void, continuing coldly. As he gazed at them, he felt as though sadness were violently caressing his face. But in the deeper depths of 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 that his hometown would now escape the ruin looming over it. If he were to go there, even harsher lashes and crueler fate might await. But with a feeling almost akin to that of a convict, he thought that from now on he would simply be existing.

One day, he turned from the national highway onto a side road and gazed at the spot where his house came into view. Beyond the vacant lot in the thicket stood a small row of pine trees, with four or five houses lined up there. Inside that solitary house, even now, the sick wife’s bed remained, and he felt as though it continued to encourage and support his frail existence.

The moving belongings were being packed little by little.

One afternoon, he was waiting for a friend in front of Kyobunkan in Ginza. The crowd of people passing before his eyes flowed by like a film reel, enveloped in demonic shadows preceding ruin. For him—just as these earthly affairs now held almost no connection—might each and every person too be burdened with life’s unbearable weight and driven into ruin? Dark, sad, unbearable things seemed to flicker in and out of sight within each and every person’s steps. Suddenly, his friend appeared before his eyes. The friend—who was to travel to Kyushu on business—wore new lace-up boots and bore a face burning with life’s vigor. But if he withdrew to his hometown, he might never meet this friend again.

“What’s this—pull yourself together! Your face looks just like a ghost’s.” The friend gave his shoulder a light nudge and laughed. And he returned a weak laugh. He stood in the pallid air, sensing a quiet prayer in some distant place, feeling as though he cradled a single transparent urn. (From the May 1951 issue of Fujin Kaizō [Women’s Reform])