Pathway to Japanese Literature

I

The garden grew thick with Japanese cypress leaves, asunaro trees, aoki trees, Japanese black pines, and other evergreens, so when the intense early summer sunlight shone down, the low-ceilinged eight-tatami room became submerged in green reflections as if sunk to the bottom of blue-green algae.

In that brightly lit yet somehow gloomy room, Sayo sat all alone, thinking about one thing.
The thought was about oatmeal.
From the moment she listlessly finished her solitary lunch on the small bamboo Korean lacquerware tray, she had been turning it over in her mind.
The maid had returned to her hometown for about ten days.
Every morning she arranged bread, black tea, and soft-boiled eggs before her husband and herself.
Because the same menu had continued for so long, Sayo herself began to seek change.
As she pondered this and that about the flavor that seemed to have been missing for some time, she suddenly found herself desperately wanting to eat oatmeal.

However，trustworthy items weren’t sold at small suburban shops or the like．She thought without it even becoming a murmur．“If only you could stop by on your way home to buy it for me．．．”“It’s just a short way to Ginza though．．．”

However, Sayo knew all too well what indolent tendencies her husband had developed over the years.
Moreover, she understood he lacked her particularity about food.
He would surely say that rather than transferring through those dreadfully crowded trains to go downtown for a single can of oatmeal, enduring half a month with readily available bread would be far preferable.

In the depths of Sayo's eyes as they gazed at her garden appeared a small, clear panorama of May in Ginza near Nihonbashi - vibrant with color and activity yet thick with dust.
One brilliantly clear day from memory resurged vividly - river ripples seen from Nihonbashi Bridge, houses jostling both banks, the sky's soft aquamarine.
Within this impressionistic scene, a nimble French-style automobile sped past Murai Bank's side, Nishikawa Futon Store's red banners fluttered tranquilly, and a refreshing breeze swept through Tokyo's grand avenues.
—Sayo longed to wander those streets aimlessly in a light kimono, parasol in hand.
The mere pretext of traveling from Hiratsuka's depths to the city center - just to buy oatmeal somewhere - sufficed for her.
With that excuse alone, she could have spent nearly half a day wandering vivaciously along Tokyo's premier paved thoroughfares.
But leaving the house empty being deemed perilous meant even this expedition eluded her freedom.
A desolate heaviness settled over her like spring's overcast sky.

Sayo got up, went over, and took out the knitting bag.

Sitting on the veranda's rattan chair, she took out silver-gray silk thread from the bag. Then, making the pointed metal needle glitter in the thick green melted sunlight, she began knitting her grandmother's shawl.

Her husband returned home slightly later than usual that day.

When the surroundings grew completely dark, Sayo, sitting alone, felt that her brightly lit house stood out like a lantern in the vast darkness of the countryside. And she felt intense anxiety. No matter how tightly she shut the doors and windows, it felt terrifying—as if she were being watched through them from the pitch-black outside. She felt that the sounds she made in the kitchen echoed strangely clearly in all directions. The flickering reflection of her own face in the glass even seemed like something unfamiliar and suspicious. She strained every nerve to perform the simple cooking tasks.

Therefore, when her husband’s voice sounded at the entranceway, she finally let out a sharp breath—as though she had completed a perilous tightrope walk.
She hurriedly unlocked the lattice door.
And welcomed her husband.

“Welcome home.—You were rather late today.”

Having barely spoken to another human since morning, Sayo felt a warm current of unspent words flooding her chest—more than she could ever articulate.

“What do you mean by that?”

“I had unexpected business at Itoya today—that’s why I’m late.—It’s dreadful there this time of day.”
“Practically a riot.”

“In Ginza?”

While looking down at her husband's back as he removed his shoes, she thought it had been a missed opportunity.

"If you were going to Ginza, there was something I wanted to ask of you."

"Hmm... What is it? You could go again... but..."

He took out a paper package—one that Sayo hadn't noticed until now—from behind his black leather portfolio.

"There's this thing..."

It bore the Meidiya trademark.
Sayo said jokingly.

“Shall I try to guess?”
“What did you buy?”

Yasuo hung his coat and, while entering the living room, said.

“It’s something dubious.”

“No need to worry—I’ll get it right for sure.”

Sayo declared, treating it as something she would of course get wrong.

“Oatmeal—two cans? Or is one of them something different?”

Yasuo turned around and looked at Sayo.

“That’s cheating—you peeked, didn’t you?”

“No.
I wouldn’t do such a thing.”

She, in turn, looked suspiciously at her husband and asked.

"But... did I guess right?"

“Your intuition worked unusually well this time—it’s oatmeal, both of them.”

“Oh...”

Sayo was unexpectedly surprised.
She had expected to be flatly denied with a single “No.”
Taking that as her cue,

she had intended to say, “That was what I really wanted.”
Rather than feeling pleased with her correct guess, she found herself more surprised by why her husband had chosen to buy this—especially today.

“Did I... say something this morning? About the oatmeal?”
“No, I didn’t say anything.”

Yasuo shrewdly perceived his own achievement from Sayo’s wide-eyed face.
He declared with the air of a self-assured husband.

“Something like this, I can tell clearly.
It was written all over your face.”

After completely finishing the evening meal cleanup, Sayo placed the bluish-green double-layered pot on the fire for tomorrow morning's preparations.
Inside was the oatmeal from earlier.

Perched on a footstool, elbows propped on the kitchen counter under the electric light, she contemplated her own feelings while keeping watch over the boiling pot.

Had it been half a year earlier, how excited I would have been even over something like this.
Although the circumstances were entirely different, when she realized—through yet another trivial matter—that her husband’s feelings and her own had aligned perfectly, Sayo remembered how she had once marveled at love’s delicate nature.

Now, she did not flush so readily.
She no longer believed such coincidental alignments were a divine blessing bestowed solely upon the two of them.
It was likely just one of those domestic trivialities.
Beneath roof after roof among the countless homes, this was but a commonplace occurrence that happens time and again.
And yet, she could not help feeling an indescribable thread of kindness and warmth within this commonplace event.
If humans were viewed from high above in the sky, they would appear how very small; yet amidst their earnest efforts to live on, their accustomed wise instincts nodded amicably to one another.
That mutual nodding—Sayo gladly recognized it deep within her husband’s heart and her own.

From the boiling pot, steam merrily billowed forth.

From the direction of her husband’s study came the crisp sound of a typewriter, resounding in a steady rhythm that evoked his presence.

――

While working in the kitchen, Sayo suddenly recalled a poem she had always liked—

When I cross the Hakone road—
Waves approach the offshore islet in sight

She recalled the poem:
Their life seemed to float small within a vast, bright panorama—like this offshore islet seen from afar, imbued with distant emotion—and Sayo felt a calm joy tinged with nostalgia.

II

It was a certain day not long after that.

Sayo was seated at the dinner table with her husband and his friend, the three of them together.
Next to her, her husband sat down.
Across from her sat the friend.
Then, after picking up his chopsticks and pausing momentarily, Yasuo—

“Hm? Hm? Hm?”

Making inarticulate sounds in his mouth, he turned his face toward her as if asking something.

Sayo looked back at her husband’s face but answered immediately.

“Oh never mind, just finish up quickly—”

Noticing Yasuo’s chopstick tips touching the pickled dish in the small bowl, she absentmindedly interpreted his monkey-like “Hm? Hm? Hm?” as meaning “Is there sauce on this?” and posed the question.

The friend observed them through the nasturtium flowers.

“What’s going on here? What happened?”

When the circumstances became clear through Yasuo’s explanation, he—

“Hmm.”

He expressed admiration with slight theatricality.

“A married couple is indeed different.
“No matter how much I tried to figure it out, I couldn’t make heads or tails of it…… Hmm, you two really do have it down to an art.”

Sayo smiled without saying anything.
The friend was a bachelor.
She didn’t know how to respond to words that could be taken as teasing, affectionate banter, or genuine envy, and though it was clear the exclamation “you two really do have it down to an art” held no malice, it left her with a loneliness as if her heart had become like some tested electric heater.

Because it was a moonlit night, they went to see their friend off to the station five or six blocks away.
On their way back, the moon hung directly before them as they walked side by side.
Perhaps due to moisture in the air, around the clear moon hung a great golden-gray halo, sleepily suspended.
At its edge rested a single bright star like an ornament.
The moon and stars—having dissolved early summer night’s essence—led through fragrant chestnut boughs and zelkova branches wherever they walked.
Sayo felt her footsteps magnetically drawn moonward.
Bareheaded with only a light cane, Yasuo walked beside her in slow strides.
That he felt peaceful contentment—that somewhere he savored their friend’s words—Sayo understood perfectly.
The friend had spoken solely of married life from arrival to departure.
When not discussing his own hopes, he’d punctuate every marital anecdote with “You’re fine—no complaints” or “After all, your ishin-denshin.”
Parting at the station, he twisted halfway through the ticket gate and called back.

“I’m counting on you to have it sorted out by my next visit.”
“Please find one and keep it ready for me.”

When they turned along the oak and chestnut hedge, the road became a country path with both sides overgrown with weeds.
On the left side was a ditch stream that flowed, glistening drowsily in the moonlight.
On the right side lay low-ridged farmland, interrupted here and there by cedar groves and blanketed entirely in a brilliant, transparent mist-like moonlight.
The moon with a distant halo like a saint’s appeared ever closer to them.
A single star sparkled ever more beautifully.
Yasuo murmured as if pitying that friend who would return home alone, drunk on beer, despite the night being so brimming with life.

“Is there really no one for him?… You must have plenty of friends… He may put it like a joke, but he’s serious—Yamaoka is—”

Sayo answered absently.

“I suppose.”

Yasuo fell silent.
The surrounding scenery was so quiet—so dreamlike—that whistling felt impossible.
Sayo walked as though swimming through the light, paying no heed to her zori-clad feet, her mind fixated on one thought.
Her consciousness circled meticulously around Yamaoka’s oft-repeated phrase—"ishin-denshin"—uttered with such amused insistence.

Now that it was mentioned, their lives did contain many such moments.
She recalled the oatmeal incident from days prior.
Not only that—even daily trivialities were typically resolved through mere fragments of exchanged words.
Those fragments themselves were never complete sentences.
They served only to hint at feelings, yet somehow these hints were “conveniently” supplemented elsewhere, allowing their intuitions to align without significant divergence.
As Sayo pondered deeper, it seemed to her that the suns of today and tomorrow—intertwining, echoing, harmonizing in their flow—rose and sank upon two rivers of the heart.
The essence of their shared life felt like a mysterious sensation dwelling deeper than the surface acts of dining together, strolling side by side, or sharing a bed.
She wondered what would become of them if language vanished entirely.
To what degree did her intuition hold truth?
And how far could her husband’s mind’s eye penetrate her heart—to what extent might it mirror her own emotions and desires?

Sayo began wanting to traverse with a self-awareness she had never before possessed, delving deep into the landscapes of her own heart and her husband's. To put it another way—she remembered thinking—if she could dive to the riverbed of these two heart-rivers that had until now carried them along through unconscious momentum, and see firsthand the state of their tides, where sediment settled, how their whirlpools formed... To eyes now accustomed to moonlight, the color of their home's electric light upon returning appeared an intense reddish-yellow, hot and stagnant.

Yasuo,

“It’s unpleasantly stuffy once you get inside the house,”

remarked, and requested chilled barley tea.
Sayo served it to her husband on a tray and watched as he tilted his head back and emptied the glass completely.
She involuntarily smiled.
She constructed a watchtower in her heart unknown to her husband before the night was out.
Because through that peephole, she thought she could clearly discern what his heart was murmuring as he drank the barley tea.

However, Yasuo—

“What?”
“What are you laughing at?”

When he asked, she—like a child hiding a toy—tucked the new plan deep within her heart.
And then, suspecting something, she silently shook her head and laughed in her eyes with a happy look.

III

From Yasuo’s perspective, Sayo had recently become an especially attentive and considerate wife.

Whenever she discovered even a single unvoiced hope or request of his that she had perceived and fulfilled, she rejoiced intensely.
In Sayo there existed something beyond what an ordinary wife feels—seeing her husband’s satisfaction and consequently feeling pleased herself.
For her, being able to do so was—Yasuo,

“Oh, there is one, isn’t there? Actually, I’ve been thinking I really ought to buy some soon,” and seeing him pick up the new eau de cologne bottle—this was proof that her feeling had not been mistaken.
From this, Sayo derived a twofold joy.

At times, she would even interrupt Yasuo as he was about to speak,

“Oh, wait!”
“Don’t say it, don’t say it!” she would frantically interject.
After dinner, they would usually chat until around eight o’clock.

On pleasantly cool evenings at dusk, they would sit side by side on the engawa or stroll through the garden.
At such times—interrupting the flow of conversation—Sayo would earnestly,
“Ah! Wait!”
she would exclaim.
Yasuo, keeping both hands thrust into the back of his heko-obi sash, looked back at her quizzically.

“Why?”

“The rest—I’ll say it.”

Sayo explained without taking her eyes off her husband’s face.

“I’ll say what I believe you’re surely going to say.”
“Tell me honestly whether I was right or wrong.”

At this, Sayo would put on airs, and depending on the situation,
“The Ministry—Section Clerk Taniguchi Yasuo is currently discussing his cousin’s employment and so on.”

she would say, mixing jokes into her recounting of her husband’s thoughts and feelings.
Yasuo did not take it seriously,

“Fool.”

He listened with a wry smile as Sayo recited what she claimed were his own thoughts. Sayo spoke with unnatural intensity, her eyes like threads being drawn from the depths of her mind—but when she reached an uncertain point:

“No? That’s not it?”
“Am I wrong?”
“Is it completely different?”

she pressed him.
When her guesses missed entirely, Yasuo laughed uproariously as if delighted. Then mercilessly:

“Fool.”

Yasuo kept mocking her with that word.
Sayo scratched the edge of her forehead in defeat.
Even when her guesses missed their mark, they still made decent after-dinner diversion.
Yet Yasuo never outright denied her words seven or eight times out of ten.
Nor did he properly acknowledge them either.
He just kept smirking.

“Well, if you think so, we’ll leave it at that,”
he said.

When this guessing game fell to Yasuo instead, their conversations never flowed as brightly or passionately as when Sayo took the role.

She would pose a challenge to her husband:
“When Mr. Yoshimura visited yesterday, I sensed something about him.”
“What do you suppose it was?”
“Compare him with Mr. Suzuki—now guess what I noticed.”

Yasuo blew tobacco smoke without much enthusiasm.

“What sort of game are you starting now? Even if you felt something about Yoshimura… it’s too vague to even be worth discussing.”

Sayo, wanting to pique her husband’s interest, spoke with all her might.

“Mr. Yoshimura and Mr. Suzuki are both industrialists, right?
“Even though they’re both industrialists, I thought their motivations for entering business were entirely different—that’s what—”

“This is getting troublesome.”

Yasuo gave a perfunctory answer.

“First of all, there’s a considerable difference between how men perceive men and how women perceive men.”

“You’re impossible!”

Sayo laughed an acrid laugh.

“Precisely because they’re different, I’m asking you to guess.”
“Those two have quite different personalities, right? It’s about how I perceived that difference.”

“Well… Let’s see. Suzuki’s the neurotic type who loses sleep over his thoughts, but Yoshimura’s far more easygoing.”
“Laughing heartily after suffering a huge loss—that’s a feat only Yoshimura could pull off.”

Sayo looked at her husband with a bored expression.
She added with an air of unresolved persistence.

“That’s completely different from what I meant.”

“But that’s just how he is—it’s an unchangeable fact.”

Sayo fell silent.
She felt an inexpressible sense of lack and loneliness.
Even when she shot her arrow with single-minded focus, the target would tilt askew at the crucial moment, making her efforts nothing more than a stray arrow that fell uselessly.
She wanted him to at least firmly grasp the main points.
She wanted him to sharply feel that unless their exchange began from him thinking, “Given who you are, you must have thought this way”—even if his answer proved wrong—their focus would never truly align.

"Can't he feel this hollow disconnect at all?!"
While sensing a chill deep within her heart, Sayo looked at her husband's face with stunned indignation.

What had initially begun as a charming guessing game—these meanderings of the heart, as Sayo called them—gradually accumulated emotional complexity as time passed.
Simultaneously, it had taken on a somewhat cruel edge.
She found herself naturally granted the opportunity to scrutinize in detail her husband's character, which until now she had complacently confined within the vague mold of "a good person."
And thus, this "good person" that her parents had instilled in her as the paramount spousal qualification proved neither reliable nor interesting in character—much less could she expect it to yield the vibrant, passionate marital happiness she had envisioned, a realization that now appeared utterly unattainable.

Sayo felt something dark and terrible growing beneath the surface of their guessing game.
She casually began to speak to her husband, who was reading the evening paper after dinner.

“Aunt Sawaguchi came by today.”

“Hmm.
What did she say?”

“She was grumbling about Mr. Yukio again.
He’s such a handful too.
He was the one who went and turned down that offer they mentioned before, she said…”

Sayo waited carefully for Yasuo’s response.
Yukio was her husband’s cousin, and he had taken on the role of an elder brother.

“That’s indulgent.
To turn down a good position on his own initiative in times like these when jobs are scarce...”

When she saw Yasuo nonchalantly say exactly what she had anticipated, Sayo felt both impatience and sorrow well up simultaneously.
She spoke, painfully aware of her own spitefully churning, complex emotions.

“I told Aunt.”
“When Mr. Yukio comes next time, you’ll surely have a good talk with him, I said.”
“That’s right, isn’t it?”
“You’ll tell Mr. Yukio he ought to set Aunt’s mind at ease soon, won’t you?”

Yasuo answered mechanically.

“I suppose I have to say it—it’s a waste for him to have gone through the finance program only to idle about.”

“Why settle for such surface-level reassurance?” The words burned through Sayo—Why won’t you dig even one layer deeper into Mr. Yukio’s true feelings?!—before finally escaping as:

“Mr. Yukio is fortunate to have such a devoted cousin.”

She let slip that irony.

Yet Yasuo appeared completely oblivious to what emotions were seething within Sayo beside him or how she restrained those feelings.
He appeared to have neither hardships nor anxieties, leisurely floating his handsome, model young gentleman’s face beneath the parlor lamp’s glow—

The life that had been modestly gleaming and smooth, like the silk thread she had been twisting around her fingertips, had transformed—at least within Sayo’s heart.

She encountered for the first time since their marriage a deeply doubtful feeling—questioning how far beyond trivial matters like debating whether to take walks or both wanting bancha tea at the same hour this harmonious silent nodding between her husband and herself truly connected them at depth.

IV

It was already June all around.

When alone, Sayo would step out onto the engawa veranda where dense young leaves cast dappled shadows, gazing at hydrangeas' vivid new foliage and goldfish swimming in glass bowls—their scales shimmering crimson and white through water—while becoming absorbed in various thoughts.

That her heart could be so captivated made Sayo clearly understand just how deeply she was fixated on her husband.
But why this fixation?
Because I love him.
As she continued questioning herself—what exactly she loved about him—a painful tightness rose in her chest.
The feeling of an unbreakable bond with her husband stood starkly opposed within her heart to his inadequacy, his mundanity, and the fact that what she sought would never dwell within him.
What pained Sayo most was being unable to lay all these feelings bare before her husband.
Silently, she had to find some answer alone.
Not through mutual effort—she alone had to change somehow—for Sayo knew Yasuo remained utterly oblivious to his own mediocrity.
Moreover, she knew that even were she to speak up, he lacked the disposition to honestly reflect on himself like an eighteen-year-old youth moved to tears.
To Sayo, Yasuo seemed a man born wearing snowshoes.
Snowshoes that would never let him drown or strand him, no matter how deep the snow.
She discovered her own feet lacked such practical implements.
Thus when trying to follow his path, she sank in so deeply she couldn't struggle free.
Even with destinations identical, Sayo felt compelled to find paths her unequipped feet could tread.
Precisely because this was an intangible matter of the heart, her husband failed to notice she'd become utterly immobilized—standing tearful and stranded.
Even were she to voice this complaint, he with his snowshoes would reflexively dismiss it: "How could such a thing be?
If you truly wished to come, you could come," he'd surely say.

Even if she were to say, "But it's no use—it's no use for me," Sayo felt forlorn and at a loss, realizing that what she ought to present to her husband was her formless, inborn nature—something that couldn't be conveyed through immediate visual means.

Perhaps because it was just before the rainy season, glistening fine rain fell from a sky stretched taut like translucent white ground glass, rinsing the green leaves with faint sounds.
When Sayo, propping her cheek on the arm of the chair, gazed out, moss resembling spilled thick tea lay damp and steaming around the massive garden stone placed in old-fashioned arrangement beneath the pine tree.
From the sky, fine threads of rain fell lightly and ceaselessly, vanishing the moment they seemed to touch the moss’s surface.
The ones that came after also vanished instantly.
Endlessly, endlessly, the blue-green moss remained motionless, drinking in the June midday rain that fell in torrents.—

As she kept watching, Sayo’s eyes gradually grew moist. Tears rolled down the mauve silk of her chest like dew on a lotus leaf. She wondered for what purpose—with what aim—they lived each day beneath the same roof. Viewed solely from the outside, Yasuo undeniably had an office to depart for every morning, documents requiring his seal, and Westminsters to smoke. But where did he keep what he considered his true, essential purpose and meaning in life? Were they compartmentalized into each one of those things? Or perhaps, like a pot’s framework—its outer shell appearing thoroughly sturdy and properly constructed—might its core be hollow at the center? Where in my life with him could I find a place of secure reliance?...

Startled by a certain thought, Sayo nearly rose from her chair.
She moved her restless eyes as if seeking salvation, surveying the rain-drenched garden, the corridor, and the dim garden.
Outside, rain fell smokily—oppressive enough to crush both nature and humanity.
The monotonous drip of water began sounding.
—Sayo stood and walked to the end of the corridor.
As if pushed back by some force, she came beneath the pillar and remained standing there without moving until lamplight began flickering in reflection on the garden's puddles.
At night, she refused her husband's embrace as peacefully as possible.
When left alone, she stifled her voice and wept violently in the darkness.
When Sayo imagined becoming pregnant with her husband's child while harboring such feelings toward him, terror and shame turned her limbs to ice.
She stared wide-eyed into the darkness, tears plopping from the corners of her eyes as she strained with inexplicable tension to focus on her husband's calm breathing.

V

If humans were like cloth garments that could be unraveled by human hands, Sayo would have eagerly begun dismantling her husband at this very moment.

And she would have examined each part—gazing at it, touching it, turning it over—until fully satisfied within herself, then reassembled it into its original form, seeking peace from the depths of her heart.
But this remained utterly impossible in the realm of imagination.
Before and beside her, her husband—untouchable in that regard—outwardly intimate and near, accompanied her with a loneliness that only deepened the closer their physical proximity appeared from Sayo’s perspective.

This lonely, painful state of mind was entirely different from what she had experienced about a month ago when she was alone at home.
At times, if only her husband would return, she would be saved instantly.
The oppressive gloom that had weighed on her all day vanished the moment she saw his face.
But this time’s situation could be said to be the exact opposite.
When Sayo saw Yasuo sitting right beside her, his thick post-bath hair gleaming as if harboring not a single doubt or anxiety between heaven and earth, she was instead driven to a desolation nearing despair and a savage restlessness.

She spent several days as if barely restraining a thrashing beast.
Finally, she could no longer endure it.
With a pitifully single-minded expression, she confronted her husband.

As usual, it was after dinner.
Perhaps because Sayo had fallen silent of her own accord and kept her eyes lowered to the low dining table, Yasuo retired early to his study.
She remained behind for a while, spoke to the maid, then soon went to the study as if following her husband.
The six-tatami room protruded into the garden like a detached building, connected by a short L-shaped corridor.
Yasuo positioned his desk facing the veranda.
The night’s darkness, like some thick liquid, was perfectly held at bay at the threshold where a keen electric light blazed brilliantly.
His back figure, the area around his shoulders bathed in glaring white light, appeared to float up in the darkness ahead.

Sayo quietly went to the side of the desk.
Yasuo held a blue pencil in his right hand, reading a thin pamphlet.—Staring vacantly at the fine Western text, Sayo spoke up.

“...Are you busy?”

Yasuo stretched his back and flipped through the pages with a rustle.

“It’s not exactly that... Why?”

“……”

Sayo, as though the night air were closing in on her, clasped the sleeves of her unlined kimono together.
Yasuo looked at her expression and slightly altered his own.
She began to speak in a resolute tone, her eyes fixed on the pamphlet as crude as straw paper.

“Hey, you—are you… at ease?”

“About what? —With such abruptness from you, I find it difficult to respond.”

In Yasuo’s tone lay thorough preparation, the calmness enveloping it, and an affected casualness that treated her like a child.

“What is it?… An earthquake?” (In 1923, a major earthquake struck Tokyo and the Shonan region, and even in the following year, aftershocks occurred frequently.)

“It’s not that—not an earthquake or anything—it’s about us.—”

Sayo lifted her face and gazed directly at her husband.

“Don’t you feel that way even a little?”
“Are you truly at ease deep down?”

Yasuo narrowed his eyelids as if to ward off tobacco smoke.

“Do you mean there’s something unsettling about our life?”

Sayo nodded in comprehension.

“I can’t bear it these days.”

“...There’s nothing to be uneasy about at all.”
“I am such a faithful husband!”
“You’re free to sleep or wake as you please all day! — As for me, far from feeling uneasy, I consider myself profoundly happy.”
“Especially yours—it’s a life surpassing Utopia itself.”

Sayo unpleasantly interrupted her husband’s jest.

“Save the jokes for later.
"I’m being serious—do you truly believe our life together is fulfilling?”
“Are you certain? Do you truly believe it’s something complete?”
“I can no longer remain so carefree these days.
...I’m terribly anxious.”

“…Selfish of me?”

Yasuo, trying to draw out Sayo’s laughter, even added an exaggerated expression.
Sayo earnestly denied.

“No, that’s not it.
It is absolutely not that.
Since we’re living together as two people, this is an important matter—it would be better if you listened seriously.”

“You know, lately I can’t understand you.
The core of your heart—the vital essence of living—seems to exist in a place completely separate and distant from me, and it’s agonizing.”
“Of course that’s true.”

She explained to Yasuo, who had begun listening attentively.

“There are places where we overlap, you know.”
“There are moments when we think or feel the same things.”
“But those are trivial matters—in the end, since neither of us particularly minds either way, we keep unconsciously yielding to one another until you trace it back to its source, and it feels like the two of us must inevitably drift apart. Do you understand me?”
“What I’m trying to say…”
“For instance—until this very moment when I’m voicing these thoughts—had you felt even an inkling of what I’m describing?”
“Not only did you fail to sense it yourself, but you remained utterly unaware of what I was feeling—didn’t you? That’s exactly what I mean by drifting apart.”

“Hmm…”
“But this stems from your failure to properly grasp my feelings.”
“Not yet—”

“Is that so?—I perceive it inversely.”
“You—finding reassurance solely in society’s recognition of us as husband and wife, in knowing our outward conditions appear properly aligned—isn’t that your comfort?”
“I loathe how you discard matters of our hearts while observing only the surface like some bystander—smug in your complacency.”
“I want security rooted to my marrow.”
“I want us to firmly grasp the true core we ought to share.”

“You’re being awfully skeptical.”

Yasuo looked at Sayo with an incongruously vague expression of vexation around his well-kept beard.

“Given how we’re actually living day to day, what other way could our life possibly be?”
“And...your words have nothing concrete to latch onto.”
“Rather than vague talk of distance or loneliness, you ought to clearly specify any actual problems.”
“If you can’t do that, I’ve no choice but to conclude your complaints lack any real foundation.”

“There’s nothing wrong per se.”
“It’s not about fixing—it’s about delving deeper into the heart’s core.”
“I want a heart that feels more raw, more keenly.”
“If I may speak plainly—what pains me is how you try to force this feeling of mine into some logically sound framework.”
“You understand now, don’t you?”
“—It’s about the heart.”
“These are matters to be felt directly with the heart!”

“Then doesn’t all this roundabout talk just mean there’s no point in telling me anything?!”

Yasuo displayed the cold bureaucratic attitude that had filled Sayo’s heart.
She barely overcame her own tearfulness.

“I can’t just calmly say it’s no good and leave it at that!”
“If we are to live together as two people, I want us to live in a way that truly feels alive.”
“So—”

“Hey, Sayo.”

Yasuo crushed his cigarette into the ashtray and cut off Sayo as she grew agitated and pressed closer.

"Happiness in life—like love—is a form of faith," he declared.
"It bends to whatever shape one's faith demands."
His voice hardened. "You still don't understand true living...... Yet even you must believe in my love?"
"Isn't that foundation enough for our entire existence?"

He seized her wrist mid-protest.
Then with forced levity:

"Enough philosophy—be my docile little wife again."

As he said this, he tried to pull her close and caress her.
She flushed and finally spilled tears.

“You can’t just dismiss things like that—you’re being cunning!”

She withdrew her hand and sat up properly.

“It’s precisely because I value us both that I’m bringing these things up.”
“Even if we swore ‘I love you, I love you’ a million times—if the double doors of our hearts keep missing each other and drifting apart—how can you stand it?”
“How can you remain so composed?”

Sayo wished that at least here he would say, "No—I can’t bear such a thing." She wished he would say, "I can’t just let such a thing happen!" With those words, half her heart might have found relief. She wanted, somewhere, to collide squarely with the frank, exposed heart of Yasuo. In her desperation for this wish alone she expended many words—yet he spoke with astonishing calmness.

“That’s your imagination.—As proof that you alone idly kneaded this together, look.”

He said with eyes like a triumphant man’s, even suffused with a smile.

“Isn’t this precisely something that I, living right here in the same house with you, haven’t felt even an inch?”

Sayo involuntarily,

“Dogmatist!”

she shouted.

"How can you say that?! Do you truly believe life—the human heart—contains nothing beyond what you yourself can comprehend?"

“It’s better not to get worked up.—And besides, I don’t consider myself a stranger to you in the least.”
“At least I am your husband.”
“To me as your husband—it’s impossible that I wouldn’t understand your……the precious feelings of the one who is your wife.”
“And yet if someone like me—not incompetent—can’t perceive it, then I’m afraid the weakness lies in your foundation.”

Sayo gritted her mental teeth.
She wanted, if she could have, to hurl herself at him and thrust her husband out from his self-righteous, gentlemanly, cold-blooded stubbornness.
Was he not only failing to even attempt to understand how much Sayo’s heart was suffering, but even taking pleasure in the infallibility of his own vulgar mind?
Sayo groaned like a beast.
If only she could bite and grapple with her husband like a Hottentot woman and settle matters thoroughly—how clear and relieved she would feel.
Merely because the folds in her brain were slightly more numerous, Sayo couldn’t move a single one of her own fingers.
She knew this suffering could not be resolved through grappling.
Moreover, she knew Yasuo was not a man to strike back when struck, but one who would harbor ice-like contempt in his heart without so much as twitching an eyebrow.
She had to dissolve her burning, quivering passion into nothing but a few hot tears and sit with her hands folded demurely on her lap like the very model of a refined Japanese woman.—Her thoughts were in utter disarray.
Is married life everywhere this dull?
I wish somehow to unite body and heart in peace—must even this clear desire be silently endured?

Sayo, sobbing, recalled with despair the adage about couples being closer than parent and child.

VI

A long, strained silence filled both the forest and the bright little room.

Sayo occasionally made small rustling sounds.—The surrounding silence, merging with the darkness outside, seemed to deepen with an oppressive weight.……

After a moment, Yasuo stirred.
And then, he looked again at Sayo’s wet face.

“You should go wash your face.”

Sayo felt displeasure at the tone with which Yasuo had spoken, as if declaring the worst was indeed over.
She did not move.

“……Go and properly wash your face.
“You’ll ruin everything otherwise.—”

Even so, when he saw that she neither responded nor made any move to rise, Yasuo muttered in a tone laced with sarcasm striking at her core.

“You’re really in an odd state tonight...”

He deliberately blew two long puffs of cigarette smoke toward the lamp.
And with calculated significance, he stared unblinkingly at Sayo before posing his question.

“When was that again?”

Sayo, still turned aside, responded in a low, tearful voice.

“What?”

“That matter of yours—surely you understand.”

Sayo turned her head and looked at Yasuo.
His gaze remained fixed on her with knowing assurance.
She instinctively grasped his meaning.
Simultaneously, she felt furious impulse course through her veins as if her blood had reversed direction.
"What utter nonsense!
Has he labeled everything I say as hysterical fits?
Does even my husband wield this masculine tyranny—branding whatever displeases him as pathological?!”
Sayo’s lips drained of color.
Straining to strengthen her voice until her eyeballs stiffened, she finally forced out her surging passion through fragmented words.

“Throw away that half-baked physiology…”
“Do you think with such trivial knowledge you can judge my entire heart… Why won’t you clash with me directly—sincerely?!”
“It’s cowardly.—Cowardly means…precisely this.”

Sayo felt words clog her throat, her entire body trembling as if stricken by fever.

"You think...that I—will stay silent because my pride is wounded..."
"You think...to exploit my pitiful vanity and self-delusion...don't you?"

She felt violent chills and fever jumbled together pierce through her body and head like a surging torrent. She pressed both hands firmly against her face. And then, she propped her elbows on the edge of Yasuo’s desk. Her body would float up from the tatami mats to hover unnervingly high above the garden, only to sink—lower and lower—into a bottomless darkness as dizziness overtook her—

She quietly began to cry.
Tepid tears escaped from her palms, trickled down the backs of her hands, and plop, plop formed large stains on the desk.
Within those tears, she recalled a scene she had forgotten for years.

That was the bathhouse of the house where she had been born and raised for twenty years.

One side of the changing room—with tatami matting laid over a wooden floor spanning about four and a half tatami mats—had a bamboo lattice window.
Below it was her mother’s dressing table.
The mirror was covered with a cloth featuring an old-fashioned pattern of rain, falling flowers, and swallows against a mouse-gray background.
In front of that, around two in the morning, Sayo’s mother approached Sayo—who had come padding barefoot with an unusual intensity—and,

“Dear Sayo, listen carefully to whether Father or I am in the wrong.
“No matter what logical arguments I present, Father dismisses them as hysterics.
“...Why was I ever born a woman in a world where we’re only allowed to live once anyway?”

It had been such a scene—Sayo's mother weeping and pleading.

Mother had been thirty-four or thirty-five at that time.
Sayo had been just twelve or thirteen.
At a loss, she pulled her sobbing mother's shoulders against her chest,

“Don’t cry, Mother.
“Don’t cry.
“I’ll speak properly to Father…so please stop crying!”

And she vividly remembered her childish self pressing lips against rippling hair and whispering—

What had she meant to say to Father then?
Now Sayo realized she was shedding her mother’s own poignant tears.
And were she herself the mother of some small child—whether daughter or son—that child would surely tremble slender fingers with the same bewilderment, sorrow, and misplaced chivalry she had once felt, declaring “I’ll talk to them for you!
Hey, don’t cry,” they would say.
Yet they too—like herself—would grasp nothing of what to tell their father until the day came when those very tears fell from their own eyes...

Her mind gradually calmed, and she came to have the leisure to reconsider what meaning the over-a-decade that had passed between her mother and herself held for a woman's lifetime.

Before her marriage, on several occasions—though differing in form—Sayo had heard similar pleas from her mother.
Each time, when she considered it, the words of comfort she gave Mother had merely seen their vocabulary grow somewhat richer with age—their content remained identical to the “Don’t cry!” from when she was twelve or thirteen.
She recalled that she herself had been of no actual help in alleviating Mother’s suffering.
But for Mother, the value of her words existed solely in the fact that she who repeated nearly meaningless words was her own daughter, and solely in the genuine bewilderment and pity she felt from the heart.

Mother lived almost her entire life bearing unresolved hardships until she grew old and her intense passions faded.

Her unfulfilled youthful devotion, her poignant human wishes for an ideal existence—all were subdued through being drained by passive sorrows and torments.
And yet—Sayo thought with fresh dread—
her mother had so vigorously arranged their splendid marriage, as if Yasuo would guide them to a woman’s paradise!

Sayo recognized there a contradiction almost akin to foolishness.
But as she continued to think, she was acutely pressed by the dearness of her mother.
Was it not that Mother, wanting to make me experience and let me possess in this world even more numerous dreams than those unrealized in her own lifetime—dreams of others, dreams of women—had me marry and sent me out into society?
Just as her grandmother had wished at the beginning of the Meiji era for her own daughter—adorned with a hair ornament from which long silk tassels hung.

The unresolved questions had remained unsolved through generations and were passed down to her.

Sayo did not want to pass down to the next generation of daughters the blank page she had inherited—whether left untouched or bearing only fragmented lines—still testifying to her inadequacy.
To somehow find an answer, free from the sentimentalities of Grandmother and Mother,

"I interpreted this as follows—what do you think? How do you solve this?" I wanted to be able to say.

When she thought that even her own lifetime would pass like those of her ancestral women—with a single tear, the same grievances, the anguish of lives unlived to their fullness—she found herself unable to calmly debate even with her husband.

Sayo removed the hand that had been covering her face. Then, letting out a deep sigh, she pushed back the disheveled hair clinging to her forehead.

Looking up, Yasuo sat propping his cheek on one end of the desk, letting listless, scentless smoke drift up from the cigarette pinched between his index and middle fingers as he stared vacantly into the evening-darkened garden beyond. But at a glance, Sayo intuitively sensed that his attention—contrary to appearances—was being steadily directed toward her. With his entire being, he seemed to declare: “Ah, I’ve been made thoroughly uncomfortable. I can’t work or do anything. It’s your fault.” Yet beneath this surface, it also revealed with painful clarity that were she to sense his discomfort, feel remorseful, and coquettishly murmur “My fault—I beg your pardon,” he would instantly forgive her—even adding a few tender words before bestowing a single kiss upon her forehead.

Sayo felt her once-calmed emotions grow agitated again.
She genuinely wanted what Yasuo was so skillfully displaying.
Yet to carelessly yield to that desire and acknowledge—precisely as he implicitly wished—that everything she had said should be retracted with an "I'm sorry" was unbearable to her very core.
She even felt hatred toward Yasuo's cruelty—he who, while knowing this conflict was inevitable for her, sought first to entice the fresh, sensitive instincts he himself had only just roused.

Inside her, the barbarian rampaged once more.
Sayo groaned inwardly.
"Drop dead!
Drop dead!
How spiteful!
How far will you torment me?—"

Sayo, her eyes darkly burning as she gazed at her husband’s profile, suddenly noticed an indescribably gloomy shadow settling across his cheek.
A glint flashed through her nerves.
With a contortion that was neither quite a twitch nor a faint smile hovering about her lips, Sayo slowly asked Yasuo in a low voice.

“What are you thinking about?—The same thing? The same thing as me?”

As if stunned, Yasuo opened his eyes wide and stared at Sayo’s face.

“You idiot!”

He disrupted the surrounding tranquil light as he violently repositioned himself on the zabuton.
Sayo’s palms were drenched in cold sweat.
Her heart pounded painfully and violently until she could no longer keep her mouth shut.
"Had he been thinking the same thing?
If not that, then why that meaningful 'idiot'!
It would emerge.
That we two could think the same thing simultaneously... That we might mutually—"

Sayo could no longer endure sitting still.
She stood up and went out to the engawa.
Outside was dark.
Dark—just as within her heart.
Before her, within the rampant, tenacious gloom, stood a densely layered thicket of evergreen trees and, leaning to one side, a single slender utility pole.
The smooth leaf tips of the yatsude plant near the engawa were partially illuminated in a sinister manner by the reddish-tinged light spilling from the room.
Above, a utility pole slanted through space—this too appearing as an effect of the light—standing out with one side unnaturally whitened like some eerie creature.

Sayo rubbed her forehead repeatedly and unconsciously with her chilled fingertips.
"It feels as though I’ve already lived a hundred years within this single night."

She thought.
"Will this long, heavy, painful night truly break tomorrow..."

Sayo found herself unbearably longing for a clear, bright morning.
The refreshing coolness of dawn’s gentle breeze; the sweet fragrance of rustling trees and grasses.
The sun rose gradually brighter and clearer, making forests, houses, and even roadside pebbles sparkle—its cool, crisp heat ascending through the air.
Yet Sayo found herself seized by a dark, dark terror—as if she had cast away those bright, joy-filled dawns of the heart to some place where they could never be found again.