Pathway to Japanese Literature

I

After having the document she had left in a slightly recessed area to the right at the bottom of the grand staircase returned to her, she passed through a hall clad in Ural marble beyond six or seven more steps, then pushed her body against the large heavy glass door and went outside.

The bustle of Tverskaya Street, carrying the scent of a warm winter, instantly swept Asako's inconspicuous figure into its own swift, vibrant current.
The sunlight warmly illuminated the city from directly above, warming the rust-red and yellow exteriors of buildings, but from the coats of passing strangers drifted scents through the air - the smell of frost lingering somewhere unseen, the nostalgic fragrance of fur.

One gloved hand thrust deep into her pocket, the other clutching the collar of her plain brown coat as if to pull it tighter, her face beneath the beret remaining lowered, Asako walked mechanically for some time.

Having reached the break in the tree-lined path where Pushkin's statue stood, the expanse of that place brought Asako back to herself.

Asako lifted her downcast face for the first time and gazed with a look that seemed to re-examine familiar sights - at sunflower seed sellers and apple vendors lining the sidewalk with baskets, at a black-clad Chinese woman with bound feet selling toy paper parasols crafted from colored paper.
The emotion that made her clutch her coat still hadn't subsided, and as she stood there waiting for streetcars to pass while observing these things, Asako distinctly felt the agitation manifesting on her own face.

I could stay and live in this city.
Had I ever considered such a possibility?
After traveling through Western Europe, had I ever truly considered—with this heightened fresh understanding and affection, in this human tide that pressed against my open heart day and night—that I could indeed dissolve into the crowd as one of its own?
That had now suddenly been presented before Asako as something both remarkably simple and almost inevitable in its progression.
Now, at this moment when Asako and her friend Motoko were set to depart for their homeland within the year.
——

While somewhat relaxing yet caught by thoughts that made her head droop again of its own accord, Asako turned the corner toward the hotel where they lived.
Midway up the stairs, when Katya the cleaning woman who had been cleaning the carpet cleared the way, she gave Asako a smile both gentle with an indescribable depth of radiance and hollow at its core, and Asako opened the door to their room at the end of the corridor.

“I’m home.”

Motoko, seated at the desk facing the left window, turned toward the voice and responded without moving from her position.
Asako removed her beret with sluggish movements and hung it on the entrance hat rack, took off her coat and hung it there too, then went to sit by her bed.
The relatively spacious room held a slightly stagnant brightness from the double-pane windows that danced across clean pale blue walls and around Motoko’s shoulders as she faced away.
A single tall bookshelf served as a partition, with Asako’s desk positioned by the right window.

“What’s wrong!”
“Hmm.”
“It got to you!”
“It did.”

The sight of her finishing the final line with quickened pen strokes could be seen from where Asako sat apart.

“—What’s the matter with you?”

When Asako saw the look of shock suddenly spreading across Motoko’s jujube-shaped face as she swiveled around in her chair toward her, she felt an indescribable anguish, as though her own inner turmoil were being mirrored there.
Yet Asako currently lacked the capacity to alter her own expression.

“What’s the matter?”

Though there was nothing particularly significant in her words, Motoko said them with deliberate force as she watched Asako—who had begun pacing about the room—with fixed intensity. She remained motionless herself, cautious yet probing through the distance between them as if trying to discern something.

After a brief pause, Motoko spoke in a voice edged with sarcasm:

“You came because someone told you something, didn’t you?”

“You came because someone told you something, didn’t you?” she said.
Motoko knew both about the old man Asako had visited today and that Asako had gone there.
Asako looked straight into Motoko’s eyes – those eyes casting a dark, complex light upon her – and remained silent.

Motoko,

“I knew it would come to this!”

And after lighting a cigarette, she blew out a long stream of smoke while looking upward,
"They told you to stay, didn't they?"

she asked somewhat gently.
Asako nodded.

“They’d say that to you.”

In that tone echoed Motoko’s deeply wounded feelings and self-derision.

“They’d say that to you, but they wouldn’t say it to me.”
“Right?”

Motoko threw her head back and let out a shrill, unnatural laugh—ha, ha, ha—each burst separated as if it pained her.
Then, wiping tears that had pooled from laughing, she lifted her glasses with the back of her hand and rubbed her eyes.
Alongside her own emotional turmoil, Asako felt she couldn’t bear to witness Motoko’s confusion manifesting in this manner.
Her face taking on an expression tinged with somewhat childlike fear, Asako earnestly—

"But that concerns me as a writer—it's strictly within that professional scope," Asako said.

"It makes no difference either way."

And then, turning back toward her desk once more,

"You can do exactly as you think best," Motoko said, "but I absolutely refuse to be made into some strange excuse-maker for your mother and the others."
"I'm making that clear upfront."
"If you're not going back then don't—but you'd better write a proper letter or something explaining it."

If they included the three years lived here, Asako and Motoko had spent about six years living together. Over that time, the two women had gradually diverged in some fundamental respects, little by little, until now they had collided against an unavoidable crossroads. In the very manner of their collision, there was something inescapably apparent about how each woman's angle manifested itself—this Asako felt with acute intensity.

Asako, who had pressed her face against the pillow of the bed as she lay there deep in thought and had eventually dozed off, soon—

"I suppose we have to go buy kerosene (cooking oil) before dinner."

Startled by Motoko's curt voice speaking these words, she sat up abruptly. Motoko was saying this in a tone that seemed conscious of its own brusqueness, deliberately keeping her back turned.

Asako wordlessly stood up, changed her shoes, opened the wardrobe, and took out the shopping bag made of thick hemp thread. The small shelf on the left side of that large wardrobe had become their dish shelf during their hotel life. Ever since their return had come into view, Motoko had clung to her desk and books with a frantic obsession from morning till night, leaving the daily tasks to become Asako's responsibility.

"I'll be going then. Do you need anything else?"

"I don't need anything."

When she exited the hotel, Asako walked unhurriedly in the direction opposite to where she had come from earlier. The roadway through that backstreet area was an old-fashioned stone-paved path, every paving stone worn down over long years until their corners had been eroded into irregular shapes. The gaps between these jagged stones lay wide and deep enough to make walking treacherous, while through the winter air drifted the occasional whiff of horse manure. When a pack horse shod with heavy iron shoes passed by - its wheels bouncing over the stone pavement - the vigorous clatter of hooves against stone and rumble of wheels echoed off the grayish buildings lining both sides before returning to Asako walking below. At the left side of an alley terminating in some wall stood a kerosene sales office where twenty people had already formed a queue on the sidewalk. Asako took her place at the line's end. The oil-stained iron door of the sales office stood open, revealing glimpses of a man in a leather apron moving about inside though sales had not yet begun. Sparrows slightly darker than their Japanese counterparts - something of an urban specialty here - chirped as they flitted up from a sun-warmed drum can lying nearby only to return again in playful arcs. Watching this scene unfold, Asako waited for the line to advance. Using two ration tickets for herself and Motoko, she managed to purchase two bottles.

Then she went to the bakery, where she joined the queue there as well and bought a day’s worth of bread.
Asako remembered there was nothing to eat for evening tea and went down to the semi-basement of a grocery store about three street corners away.

Near the entrance stood rows of large barrels brimming with pickled cucumbers, and tubs of salted mushrooms in vivid vermillion reds and aqua blues—colors so strange they defied description.
The aromas rising from these sources—apples and the smoked fish hung in abundance at the back—mingled to form a uniquely familiar scent that permeated the low-ceilinged store.
Asako, carrying her shopping bag, looked around here and there.
And after taking her time, she bought things like salmon roe, soured milk, and smoked small fish.
Black tea and soap had just arrived that day, and with people rushing in aiming for them, the checkout line was moving at a snail’s pace.
The stone-paved floor where everyone shuffled their soles as they inched forward would soon have sawdust spread all the way from the entrance steps to prevent slipping when the snow began to fall.
The sawdust, dampened by snow and steamed by the crowd’s humidity, emitted a nose-stinging odor that suffused the store—where lights already blazed from three in the afternoon—with an indescribably cheerful atmosphere.

Asako remembered a snowy December evening three years prior.
Asako and Motoko had just arrived at the station from the Trans-Siberian Railway when they must have gazed through the carriage's flapping canopy cover—leaning out as far as possible with what emotions one could only imagine—at shop windows glittering through falling snow and the night sky darkly receding above them.
Since then, they had come to this grocery store countless times, but when Asako considered what she had gained from these seemingly mundane daily routines up to now, she felt a new profundity stirring within her.
When she delved into the root causes that had accumulated unnoticed—whether regarding the problems they now faced with their impending return home or the psychological differences between them in responding to those challenges—Asako found herself considering even this grocery store's northern-style scent as something inseparable from it all.

Motoko had come for her specialized study of this country's literature.
Asako, who wrote novels, had come harboring curiosity about life in this nation - an ancient land rich with colors made intimately familiar through works like Anna Karenina, yet now transforming into something wholly new and unknown; this country that loomed distantly amidst whirlpools of admiration and calumny from abroad.
Initially both Motoko and Asako had similarly begun language studies to varying degrees, but soon their shared single-room existence developed divergent daily rhythms during identical hours.
When instructors visited Motoko's room, she would tell Asako to vacate the space.
Finding hallway lingering impractical, Asako took to exploring various gathering places guided by the city handbook.
The tedious bureaucracy of their documentation, bookstore hunts for Motoko's required texts, ordering unavailable volumes, and meticulous procurement of daily necessities came to occupy Asako's hours while Motoko remained desk-bound.
And how fascinating it all proved.
This ancient-yet-reborn nation's existence through those twenty-four hours spanning the late 1920s into 1930 meant dire shortages of foodstuffs, paper goods, clothing - for a quarter-cabbage portion Asako trekked vast distances, queued interminably, fretting whether even those five massive cabbages might vanish before her entitled share materialized.
Butter and cheese disappeared.
They said farmers had slaughtered their cows - but why must cattle be killed?
Asako read voraciously seeking comprehension of these phenomena permeating their dawn-to-dusk existence.

Motoko read many classics and modern poems with her teacher. She analyzed poetic meter. While Motoko had advanced in her specialized studies, and while their grand summer and autumn travels had been conducted according to her plans—journeys that saw them equally buffeted by the river winds of the Terek and those great mountain ranges called the ancient spine of the world—there remained something fundamentally different between this structured progression and how Asako, amidst urban clamor, touched upon crowd emotions, examined her own feelings, and moved from general astonishment at how people endured such hardships with vitality toward gradually comprehending their reality.

They had mutually acknowledged these differences, which had even become fodder for banter, but now that Asako alone had been suddenly shown the possibility of remaining—a prospect implying deeper validation of their life there—just as this development couldn't be felt without excitement by Asako herself, Motoko too understood it carried a despondent bitterness, as if she alone were being hauled out at three years' end alongside book crates.

If Motoko were to return alone, it would mean solitude in both daily life and heart—compelling her to reconcile herself as someone fundamentally distinct from Asako, as one unacknowledged by those who had acknowledged Asako.

But what agony this must hold for Motoko?

That this pain cut more deeply into their very beings as individuals than any matter of affection—this truth had weighed upon Asako with visceral intensity ever since she'd pushed through the heavy door onto Tverskaya Street earlier.

Lost in thought, Asako failed to notice she'd reached the checkout counter until an elderly woman behind her with a black cloth wrapped about her head—

“What’s the matter, dear?”
“Did you drop your wallet or something?”

the elderly woman had addressed her.

2

Asako felt Motoko understood her feelings well.
Asako would ultimately act according to her own resolve.
All along, just as she had always lived.
But that resolve remained unformed—still held back by some lingering uncertainty in her heart.
Asako knew full well Motoko perceived these true feelings exactly as they were.
The next day passed without either mentioning the matter.

Yet in the air of the pale blue-walled room where the two had been, a kind of tense, nervous atmosphere that had never existed there before began to drift.
In a day where words had generally grown scarce and laughter vanished, Motoko stubbornly kept to her desk, yet the edges of her nerves were always attuned to Asako in her pale blue jumper, creating an atmosphere as though sensing the shifts in her heart.

By the right window edge of the bookshelf partition standing in the middle of the room, Asako was studying quietly.
On the windowsill sat a cup of soured milk, conjuring a domestic scene.
Asako translated while ceaselessly flipping through the dictionary.
It was the biography of a certain historically famous woman; not being written in a particularly literary style, it wasn’t difficult, but there were many idiomatic expressions unfamiliar to Asako.
The dictionary she used didn’t cover such minute details.
She jotted down several of them on a scrap of paper.
When cigarette smoke wafted from beyond the partition, she went to ask Motoko about it.

“Um… I wonder what this is supposed to mean…”

Motoko, as was their habit from living together all this time, silently read the awkwardly scrawled characters on the scrap of paper Asako had placed before her. But when she finished, her voice came out choked—as though throttled by the violent emotion suddenly welling up within her—

“Since you thought you could manage it when accepting the task, you should just handle it alone.”

Motoko snapped dismissively.
That Asako pursued this work with such fervor now irritated Motoko intensely.
This irritation stood fully exposed.
It too connected to the present conflict.
For Asako, this mattered not as mere labor but as a test of personal integrity.

Rebuffed, Asako’s expression darkened with grief.
Motoko’s retreat into her own stubborn nature – this gradual estrangement through self-imposed isolation – filled Asako with dread and sorrow.
She lingered momentarily by the desk before retreating to her own.
The plea “Don’t speak that way” never escaped her lips.
Could Motoko truly act so arbitrarily regarding this matter?
Within Asako bloomed a dispassionate gaze toward this version of Motoko.

When she rested her cheek on her hand and gazed out the window, without turning her face this way, Motoko thrust the new large dictionary to the edge of the desk and slid it over.

"If you look through that, most things should be there—"

Asako silently repositioned it beside herself without a word.

Finding in it clues to organize her inner turmoil, Asako continued working single-mindedly without seeking anyone's assistance.

Throughout this period, Motoko pressed forward unwaveringly—never modifying their jointly planned return preparations nor pausing for reconsideration—advancing with insistent momentum that proclaimed she would depart regardless.
This bound Motoko ever tighter to desk and books while Asako maintained her daily routines: reserving periodicals at distant publishers and visiting government offices.
During these errands Asako experienced both an uncanny detachment from administrative realities and an ineffable emotion—the awareness that these mundane acts for Motoko might mark life's turning point.

On Tuesday evening, as Motoko was putting on her coat to go out—in an ordinary tone that had become rare these days—

“What are we doing tonight?”

Motoko asked.
Twice a week, Motoko would go to the home of a female friend named Olga to ask about the colloquial expressions in the novel she was reading.

“Well...”

Asako also stood up and came over, watching her prepare,

“Either way is fine, but I—”

“Come on.
Ms. Olga had been asking about you.
Why haven’t you been coming around lately?”

“Alright then—I’ll go.
I’ll come along in two hours.”

When seven o'clock came, Asako got ready, walked to the square near the castle walls, and boarded the bus from there.
The bus heading toward the city's outer defenses was nearly empty at that hour.
After disembarking at a large intersection well beyond the city center, she walked a short way along the dimly lit, sparsely trafficked street until there stood a wooden house with old-fashioned carved window frames, followed by a lonely wooden fence.
When she passed through the wooden gate in the plank enclosure, there was an inner garden where a great elm tree grew, and the wooden stairs leading up to the second floor where Olga lived abruptly opened directly toward that inner garden.
Relying on the faint light leaking from the downstairs furniture maker's window, she climbed step by step, opened the door, and when she saw Olga's ruddy face under the low-ceilinged room's light - wearing a white blouse - Asako involuntarily—

“Ah, I’m so glad I came!”
Having said this, she grasped Olga’s firm, powerful hand.
“Now you say that?!”

Olga laughed while glancing across the table at Motoko.

"My place is somewhere you're always glad you came to whenever you visit, isn't that right, Ms. Motoko?"

Motoko said nothing as she smoked her cigarette, but when Asako appeared, that initial glance involuntarily became a gaze that seemed compelled to scrutinize even the recesses of her heart.

Asako exchanged casual chatter with Olga. Olga was an office worker, and her small room contained only a bed, a single bookshelf, a chest of drawers adorned with several photographs, along with a few other pieces of furniture. Within these practical trappings of daily life dwelled a peculiar comfort that conveyed the unassuming nature of its occupant.

"How many more times can you both visit before returning home? Let me brew some proper tea for you."

As Olga boiled water on the kerosene stove and portioned out jam, Motoko—who had been watching her hands—finally seemed unable to bear it any longer,

“I’m certain I’ll return, but I don’t know whether Ms. Asako will.”
she said in an oddly quiet voice.

Olga,

“Really?”

turned a surprised expression toward Motoko, then toward Asako.

“Ms. Motoko, are you being serious?”

“Seriousness.”

Asako remained silent with a perplexed expression.
Staring at that face, a softness of compassion surfaced in the large eyes framed by wrinkles at their corners that belonged to Olga.

“So—have you decided yet?”

“No, not yet.”

No one said anything more, and for a while everyone remained completely silent.

Before long, Olga naturally changed the topic and began talking about her young nephew.
Then the conversation shifted again, and this time Motoko began discussing folk proverbs.
In that conversation, Motoko’s face lit up with interest as she spread open her notebook and began jotting things down.

Asako had, for the first time since this issue arose, expressed her heart before Motoko through those two phrases—"No, not yet"—but upon hearing her own voiced words, there surged within her a powerful feeling of astonishment at the warping of resolve: that something which on one level seemed utterly natural and simple to decide remained undecided.

From the moment the topic had first been broached, the point that staying there and working as a writer would result in at least two million copies being published had not been deeply engraved in Asako’s mind. What moved her more than that was the recognition as a writer who could remain and work there. It was the intensity of that great astonishment and joy at being even somewhat worthy of such recognition. The emotion became so overwhelming that it stirred turbulent waves in her heart; even as she uttered "No, not yet," to the fullest extent of that feeling, she sensed a sincere acceptance welling from within. This was perceived through the unclouded clarity of welling tears. But why then—why was it 'No, not yet'?

Asako blinked in a particular way—as if refocusing her gaze onto Motoko’s head bent over her writing across the same small table where she had been staring absently moments before. When she pursued her thoughts to that point, it no longer related to Motoko’s emotions or anything else—she could feel something within the problem itself squirming faintly yet with decisive persistence, suggesting that this “No, not yet” might burrow slightly deeper within her.

When they exited through the plank fence surrounding Olga’s house, Motoko asked:

“How about it? Shall we walk a bit? Or not?”

Her tone carried even more strain than Asako had noticed when they first set out. How had Motoko taken Olga’s response? What emotional foundation had she built upon it? Though such anxiety and scrutiny flared within her, Asako replied quietly:

“Then up to that red temple.”

She agreed.
The weight of newly surfaced yet still unformed thoughts in her heart drew Asako into quiet tension of its own accord.

Just as various meetings had concluded, the dimly lit sidewalk in that shopless area had taken on vitality.
At this hour, those walking in the same direction as Asako and her companion were few, while pedestrians with blurred outlines swiftly approached from the darkness ahead - passing by one after another, their various faces revealed momentarily in the mingling night mist and white breath as they suddenly entered the sphere of a streetlamp's light, only to vanish instantly.

The square near the castle walls where the grand theater stood was filled with the late-night loneliness that follows a receding crowd; up its gentle slope they walked slowly toward the hotel.

Motoko said quietly.

"A writer who can't write in their own country's language is useless—that's what I think."

In purely linguistic terms regarding what was happening with Asako, this was—so to speak—first and foremost something Asako herself had put forward.
There being plenty who understood Japanese meant such worries were unnecessary.
It had been settled that Asako should write about Japan in Japanese.

“As a linguistic condition, it’s been resolved, but…”
“So you’d write in Japanese… about Japan?”
“Otherwise, there’s simply no meaning in it for me as myself.”

Motoko remained silent.

To write a novel about Japan in Japanese... here.
This concept carried within it—there on this sparsely trafficked sidewalk beneath night skies where placards fluttered—something vaguely unassimilable that touched Asako's actual sensations as inherently different from having written about life here to send to Japan, a quality she couldn't deny.
The two climbed the hotel stairs in silence, their expressions fixed on opposite ends of the same thought.

III

With what feelings had Motoko said such a thing in particular? Was it words spoken with sincerity arising from her understanding of literature? Or was it perhaps a hint cast from that exquisitely minute implicit shrewdness Motoko occasionally displayed through direct confrontation?

Nothing could be read from Motoko's face. The two still spoke little beyond practical matters, with Motoko having moved past conspicuous spite born of her own anguish yet maintaining an attitude of keeping fixed distance without stepping inward. In an unexaggerated businesslike tone, Motoko was going herself to request the wooden crates for packing and shipping books.

That evening, the two women were at the theater.
The theater was always packed, but tonight, with a special performance by a youth theater troupe, spectators were crammed even up to the tiered balconies on the second floor.
From ceiling to orchestra floor, an indescribable hum filled the space—barely containing its overflowing youthful vigor—and when the curtain rose, one could feel a passionate immersion as if the youth on stage and youth in the audience were innocently rushing from both sides into a single unified world.
Though the people of this country were generally theater- and music-loving, that night presented an utterly extraordinary spectacle.
The older members' mood too became naturally swept along; with cheeks flushed cheerfully, occasionally nibbling apples held in their palms, they gazed about here and there.

Asako had secured seats near the center of the orchestra floor well in advance.
The performance began with a brief satirical comedy lampooning youthful life, and no sooner had it concluded amidst explosive laughter and roaring guffaws than the young spectators in the balcony seats instantly memorized the short, cheerful song from the play and began singing it in chorus.
The intricate melodic passages faltered, tangling with laughter and chaotic voices as they reached the ending—

Oh

We, the young—

We, the young

When they reached this repeated phrase, the voices that had been following along feebly suddenly gained a heartfelt force - as if eyes had snapped open -

"Oh

We, the young"

they sang through to the end in perfect unison.
Asako opened all her senses and immersed herself in the singing and atmosphere.
When she turned to look up at the balcony, that group of young men and women were keeping time among themselves as they sang with natural enthusiasm, utterly unconcerned about being watched by anyone.
The joy of life was innocent and unrestrained, and she keenly felt the generous lack of insistence in how they were rationally, realistically creating that joy moment by moment.

Compared to this, how complex my own emotions were, always carrying a certain sentimentality.
As she gazed upon them, the subtle differences in her own heart’s responses to these moving scenes struck Asako with fresh astonishment that evening.
When encountering such scenes overflowing with vitality, the foremost thought that had trembled in Asako’s chest over these three years was this intense desire: Ah, how she wanted to show this to everyone exactly as it was.
I want to convey this joy, want to share it—how they would rejoice then!
It had been that kind of intense desire.
This "everyone" naturally meant the people of Asako's birthplace - these honest souls who would want to rejoice in such joy themselves. Even now, as she listened to the singing voices crisscrossing beneath the theater's domed ceiling, there was no mistaking how the fervent longing of thousands upon thousands of absent others - those not sharing this moment - formed an inseparable foundation of pleas that pressed upon her emotions, underpinning her profound感动.
In these instants of profound emotion, Asako would always experience violent passions—as though clutching the chiaroscuro of history to her bare chest along with her very existence.

“Oh

We, the young

We, the young”

On the balcony they were still singing, now gradually improving from their initial attempts.

Asako listened with rapt attention, then suddenly flushed crimson and spilled abrupt tears.

“What’s wrong?”

When Motoko seated beside her asked, Asako silently shook her head.
The youths' songs and scenes of joy had vividly revived—with poignant sorrow—the visage of her younger brother Tamotsu, who had committed suicide in Tokyo when about ten months had passed since coming here.
In connection with that, a voiceless scream resounded in Asako's heart.
We shall sing this song someday.—This "we," Asako felt keenly, meant not just ourselves but thousands upon tens of thousands of others far away, all encompassed within this very "we."

On the stage, a three-act play continued to be performed.
It told of a young man named Warōja who, feeling responsible for disrupting his comrades' entire plan through personal actions during their train mission, attempted suicide but failed.
Having survived, he earnestly undertook the process of assuming a crucial devoted task to atone for that responsibility.
The backdrop was set over a decade before the period depicted in Fadeyev's novel.
The young actor portraying Warōja skillfully captured both the tumultuous movements of a youthful heart - where well-meaning chivalry surrounding a girl unwittingly sowed political discord - and its subsequent regrets.
The audience engaged with visceral reality, accepting and critiquing through their own circumstances while radiating tense mental struggle.
The local youth maintained this same simple yet vigorous attitude whether reading novels or watching plays.

During the intermission, this time Asako and her companions also rose from their seats and joined the procession of people forming an elliptical loop as they walked through the theater's grand hall.
Tonight’s overflow crowd pushed this loop beyond capacity, its human chain now spilling out into the corridors.

In the shade of potted palm trees there was a buffet selling sandwiches and tea, but that area was a sea of people.
The ceaseless scraping of countless footfalls against the floor and the babble of chatting, laughing voices - all blended within the grand hall's hazy veil of tobacco smoke - became a single human loop circling through the space, and in Asako's heart, which felt as though it were walking step by step across the terrain of her own mental struggles alongside the play's lingering impressions, those earlier phrases surged upward again and again.
Ah, we shall sing this song someday.
And tonight, she could feel it clearly.
Since I write novels, it is none other than this life of ours that seeks to sing which I want to write.

There were professors translating The Tale of Genji and language students reading newspapers in droves.
Yet even amidst this shared joy, Asako thought, she wanted to depict the lives of us in today's Japan - we who thirsted for a joy felt so intimately close that it required sentimental justification, we who lived and perished by that very thirst.

When the play ended and they emerged from the terrible congestion of the cloakroom, Asako, fastening her coat buttons, turned a gaze containing a brightness unseen in days since this matter arose toward Motoko.
There was something joyful—she felt like whispering so.
Asako had at some point without even realizing it flipped the focus of her dilemma; without trying to abstractly decide whether to stay or leave, she had abruptly touched upon her literary mission and now felt herself wanting to remain if nurturing its growth proved possible.

How astonishing that in this city people from every corner of the world had gathered! Even within its own borders, this country contained few regional dialects, yet when spring or autumn arrived with their grand assemblies, Tverskaya Street alone transformed into a colorful exhibition of ethnicities and customs. In the May wind that had not yet fully become summer, the people who secured the billowing fronts of their Japanese daimyo-striped overcoats with sash-like belts as the hems fluttered - though they too had come up to the capital from the same southern regions - differed in both language and customs from the elevated cable workers who wore crisp long boots and stylishly flared jackets trimmed short at the waist, adorned with daggers. There were men like John Reed who had come from America and entrusted their lives to a single page of this country’s history, possessing graves within its city walls. The trimmed ends of thick black hair belonging to Chinese girls spilled from striped caps and swayed down past their shoulders.

Around this time, a group of laborers from Germany began staying at Asako and Motoko's hotel.
A new clock factory was built, and they were people who came there along with the machinery.
It was a group consisting entirely of men.
At night, the sound of them singing in their own language the songs favored by this country's youth would reach all the way to Asako and the others' room.
And the melodies of those songs were something that Asako and the others could also create in their own language.

One of the mechanics from Cologne named Hans became acquainted with Motoko at some point and came to visit their room.
On the pediments of large banks and government office roofs at street corners, placards announcing that organizational cleaning was being carried out as part of their operations began to stand out prominently.

Asako, sensing these ceaseless rhythms of urban life moment by moment, contemplated the theme of her work during intervals in her dictionary work.

Ah, we shall sing this song someday.
Always those words rang vividly in Asako's ears.
Her heart circled in wide arcs above those words, gradually descending until where its loop came to rest lay Tamotsu's death and her own regret-filled, frustrated sorrow spread out with crystalline clarity.
But now Asako understood Tamotsu's death as the reverse image reflected in the mirror of we who would sing.
Were one to liken history to bas-relief carving, Tamotsu's path existed as concavities on its reverse side - where the depth and poignancy of those indentations should through their very thickness narrate the raised pictorial patterns of life existing beyond them.
The contracting circle of Asako's heart drew tighter still, attempting to probe those patterns.
Yet they always manifested in her mind as mere flat sketches.
The entire sketch lay visible.
It was visible over there.
But within that sketch existed no lines her own body had entered to trace.

With her newly awakened exploratory gaze, Asako had withdrawn completely into the depths of her own heart. During shared meals or when Motoko unexpectedly met someone's eyes mid-conversation, she often noticed within Asako's eyes a sincere, concentrated expression - one so profoundly immersed in self-contemplation that it seemed ready to interrogate her very being. And in that gaze existed no trace of Motoko, nor of the one urging her to remain. This too she could feel.

Asako began casually leaving the room without stating her destination and not returning for hours.
When she returned, she carried the cold outdoor scent in her hair and coat.

Their emotions had undergone subtle shifts, and Motoko's eyes would sometimes fix on Asako - who remained unchanged in her light blue jumper whether coming or going, perpetually lost in thought - with frank concern. Asako carried a preoccupied gentleness and kindness of someone whose heart had set elsewhere, and Motoko spoke with precisely the concern her words suggested.

“I don’t want you wandering around in a daze and getting hit by a bus or something.”
“I’m fine.”
Asako laughed in reply, but her smile carried something that would linger in the depths of Motoko’s eyes until she returned.

Walking undisturbed between two tree-lined avenues, riverbanks, and groves of this great metropolis, Asako was thoroughly reexamining the self she had developed over these three years, tracing it back through her previous life down to every last corner.
Standing where the possibility of settling there to live had been presented, she surveyed every corner of herself.
The joy of being accepted there shook Asako from the depths of her soul, and precisely because of this, she persistently examined herself regarding whether she was truly worthy of it, whether she could attain achievements as a writer that would satisfy her.
Asako knew too much about the true nature of this beloved capital to merely exist there as a guest—like some specimen—and besides, she loved her work.

One evening, after turning off the light, Asako remained awake for a long time, absorbed in thought.
From the large curtainless window, through the double-pane glass, the rooftop of the newspaper company building directly across was visible, and the afterglow of illumination ahead could be seen dimly reddening the night sky even from the bed.
The furniture in the room hulked blackly under the uncertain external light.

Three years prior, on the night they had first arrived there, Asako had gazed out through curtainless windows for a long time.
At that time, the newspaper company building's enormous glass-domed ceiling lay in ruins, and the sight of swirling snow falling through its gaps between skeleton-like steel beams appeared even more desolate when viewed in daylight.

Now lying in this room once more, Asako listened to the clock tower in the fortress walls striking the hour with indescribable emotion.
After thoroughly examining herself from within during this period, Asako had clearly acknowledged that to write what she truly wished to write here, she lacked knowledge of the Japanese life required for it.
What joy it was to see within this realization the self that had grown through life here.
Yet this remained ultimately nothing more than the geometry of growth Asako had acquired here - the Japan that held tangible reality for her existed as images from her life three years prior, that current which had ended Tamotsu's brief existence and sent her here, but which Asako herself had never directly touched; those middle-class days spent in relative loneliness and tranquility beyond that circumference.
What Asako now earnestly wanted to write was not the daily aspects of that life.
While breathing in even greater pain, it was precisely the chronicle of that passionate heart striving to sing its song that I wanted to write.
While connected to humanity's historical goodwill, I want to depict Japan's unique song that possesses a completely distinct visage.
For that purpose, what must Asako do?
What must I do as the most sincere course of action?

Driven by surging emotions, Asako rose from her bed.
What Asako had to do was return.
Was that not the case?
Wasn't it about returning straight to where her sorrow resided or where her setbacks lay—returning there and honestly passing through them?
Was it not precisely this sorrow and these setbacks that the heart loving life here truly loved?
If there was any growth in her, then knowing this value—would that not be the very meaning of growth?
Asako felt a humble yet trembling enthusiasm for life and shed tears woven from joy and sorrow.
Now returning home felt to Asako like a departure into life itself.
From here she would set out.
Those three years here—substantiated by her beloved brother's very life—if any goodwill sought to keep her in this place, surely it would recognize the sincerity with which she would continue loving and making valuable this existence, even as she stumbled and rose again henceforth.

Asako hardly slept that night.
The next morning saw the first snow falling upon this northern capital.
Through reflections from shallow snow accumulated on the rooftop of the building before their window, the pale blue room shared by Asako and her companion filled with a transparent, pristine brightness that made it feel more spacious than usual.

When she had finished her morning tea, Asako said in a quiet voice,

“I’ve decided to return home,” she said.
Motoko slightly opened her mouth as if to say something.
But no words came out.
Unable to maintain her usual composure any longer, Asako stood up and went to the window, gazing out at the roofs glistening white in the faint morning murmurs.