Pathway to Japanese Literature

...Why was I standing here like this... Why was I rooted at the center of the railroad crossing tracks, vacantly staring at my own feet... Even though a train might come and crush me...

At the very moment he realized this, he felt an ominous premonition of being struck by a train crawling like insects across his entire back. He glanced left and right at rails bleached white with frost. Then lowering his thick-lensed glasses’ gaze once more to his feet, he kicked the half-rotted crossing board with military boots caked in frost-mixed mud and dead leaves—clunk clunk. Adjusting his sweat-stained teacher’s cap and refastening the maroon bell-shaped mantle over his faded high-collared jacket, he turned to look back through the deadwood grove he’d just traversed at his house’s zinc roof glinting in the distance.

...What on earth was I thinking about up until this very moment...

He had recently become aware that his chronic insomnia had worsened to such a degree that his mind had grown terribly clouded. Especially yesterday, as the cold had been intensifying since noon and sleep seemed utterly impossible, he had bought alcohol he couldn’t even stomach—drinking a mere five shaku of it cold before sleeping—which perhaps explained why this morning his head felt peculiarly lightheaded while simultaneously bearing a leaden weight at his brain’s core that throbbed dully with each pulse. As if wringing out his skull, he pulled his thin eyebrows tightly together and stared intently at the red mud clinging to his toes.

...This was strange.
This morning my head seemed seriously off....

...This morning in that zinc-roofed house amidst dead trees—I unquestionably did my usual routine: cleaned up after cooking properly locked against stray dogs and came all this way—but what had occupied my mind since then?... Felt certain Id been wrestling with some grave matter while walking here... Strange.
Now nothing remained—not one detail of that crucial problem...

This is strange... Strange...
No matter what, this morning my head is seriously messed up.
If I keep this up, I might doze off during afternoon classes and get laughed at by those innocent students...

He anxiously fumbled through his jacket’s inner pocket and pulled out a large silver pocket watch—it showed exactly 7:40.

He was unconsciously comparing the two hands frozen at the 8 and the second hand rotating with a tick-tick-tick—but—soon twitched a lonely... self-mocking half-smile beneath his thick-lensed glasses.

...It’s nothing.
Ridiculous.
It’s nothing at all.

...I’m on my way to school now... This morning, thinking I needed to review the unfinished lesson plan before classes start, and resigned to afternoon drowsiness, I left about thirty minutes early.
Moreover, since there are still over five kilometers left to the school, if I dawdle I might run out of time... That’s why I’m standing here thinking.
Wasn’t I standing here frozen in indecision—whether to take the national highway along the main street or follow the railway tracks as a shortcut—…?

...It’s nothing.
It’s nothing at all…

...That’s right.
Anyway, I'll take the railway tracks.
If I take the railway tracks, it’s a straight shot to school—no more than three kime at most—so if I just pick up the pace a bit, saving twenty minutes would be effortless… That’s right… I’ll take the railway tracks….

With this thought cycling through his mind, he once again twisted his beard-stubbled face into a bluish-black wry smile.
Clutching the triangularly bulging Box briefcase firmly under his left arm, he leaned his upper body from the frost-white crossing board and began to step one military-booted foot onto the railroad tie—equally frosted over—that lay beyond.

But... once again, he jerked to a halt.

He gently pressed his right hand against his forehead. Covering his nearsighted glasses with that palm as if in prayer, he let his head slump dejectedly. He had finally recalled the true reason he himself now stood rooted at the center of the railroad crossing. And now he felt once more with clarity that certain “ominous premonition” which had unconsciously anchored him to the crossing board’s center.

He had woken that morning thrusting his head from warm bedding into chill air, rising while feeling a hangover-like unbearable headache—and at that very moment, while thoroughly washing his face with cold well water, he had felt crawling at the edge of his consciousness a distinct, eerie premonition: ...I’ll undoubtedly be crushed by a train today....
Then he hurriedly boiled water, shoveled down last night’s leftover cold rice, thrust his feet into yesterday’s mud-caked boots unchanged, repeatedly adjusting his grip on the black satchel containing an aluminum lunchbox, and trudged along the frost-covered abandoned path strewn with dead leaves until reaching this crossing board—but when he heard the heavy thud of his mud-caked boots landing on frost-shrouded planks, that instant sent both this ominous premonition and his entire life now menaced by it spinning through his mind at terrible speed.
Should I cross these tracks and hurry around via the national highway?
Or should I boldly follow the railway? While hallucinating his own figure still standing there like a stone statue—lost in thought despite this wavering indecision—he found himself assailed by these eerie premonitions, now striving to unravel their mysterious origins.

The onset of these uncanny psychological phenomena that had begun assailing him was not a matter of yesterday or today.

From New Year’s through February of last year, he had lost his beloved wife and only child in rapid succession, and ever since then, nearly every morning he had been gripped by a strangely vivid premonition—…today… today without fail I’ll be crushed by a train…—that persisted relentlessly.
However, even so—each time, simple-minded as he was—though assailed by a grave anxiety tinged with a sense of fate, every time he crossed the railroad tracks he would apprehensively glance left and right, which must have been why he ended up commuting along the national highway.
When evening came, he would cast off that anxious feeling and return uneventfully to his solitary house in the mountains.
After finishing his meager supper of whatever side dishes he could scrape together and pot-cooked rice, he would feel a deep sense of relief from the bottom of his heart—as if forgetting the day’s toil—and set to work compiling the "Elementary School Arithmetic Textbook," his lifelong passion.

However, he never once attributed the cause of these mysterious psychological phenomena assailing him to his own neurasthenia.
Rather, he had convinced himself that a certain unique psychological sensitivity he had possessed since childhood had transformed into a receptivity to such mystical premonitions.

The reason for this was none other than...

In that very sense, he himself was undoubtedly possessed of a uniquely peculiar sensitivity—for he had ample, indeed more than sufficient, mysterious experiences that allowed him to believe this.

He was originally the only son of elderly parents, not only a frail child from birth but also of an eccentric, solitude-loving disposition, so even when attending school, he hardly ever played with other students.
In return, his school grades were always excellent, but he was often disliked and bullied by rowdy kids, so once school ended and his duties as class leader were done, he would rush home and remain without stepping a foot outside the gate.

But there were extremely rare occasions when he did go out completely alone.
It was always limited to days of exceptionally fine weather, and his destinations invariably ended up being in the mountains.
The reason for this was none other than...
He seems to have been naturally suited to mountain life—even now residing in a solitary house deep in the mountains far from school, maintaining an inconvenient self-sufficient existence—this preference for solitude having likely manifested since his boyhood.
When gazing from the engawa at groves of mountains standing sharp against blue sky, he would feel as though summoned by some childlike call within.
His elderly parents too must have considered this reclusive tendency beneficial for his health.
On such days they willingly permitted his outings—he would tuck away one or two volumes like a middle school arithmetic text or *Three Thousand Problems in the Four Operations* into his coat and slip toward nearby foothills, evading local troublemakers' eyes all the while.

It was a walk too mature for a child of ten or eleven, but for him that loved the mountains, it was nothing short of supreme enjoyment.
Thanks to those walks, he had memorized every last mountain path in those hills.
There were akebi vines here, mountain yams buried there.
He likely knew every detail—which thicket concealed a massive boulder eerily resembling a human face, which pond’s edge hosted a towering zelkova whose forked trunk cradled a sprouted cherry tree—knowledge that he alone in the entire village possessed.

Now, during such mountain walks, he would often come upon unexpected clearings in mixed groves.
They were usually square grasslands—flatlands likely the remnants of a residence or cultivated field—spanning one or two tan, yet being obscured by trees and such, he would wander their peripheries time and again without noticing these clearings for years on end.
Standing in the very center while restlessly peering around at his surroundings, every mountain and every hill stretched endlessly in silent layers, and each and every one of the surrounding trees seemed to stare fixedly at him.
The dry leaves beneath his feet crinkled with faint popping sounds, growing unnerving enough to unsettle him.

Whenever he found such a place, he would delightedly lie down on the withered grass at the center of the clearing, spread open his beloved mathematics book, and ponder solutions to difficult problems.
Of course, he would work through them mentally without pencil or notebook; once he grasped the solution method, all that remained was calculating the answer—but with no fear of being called by his parents and no sounds from neighboring houses reaching him, his mind would grow as clear as glass.
As this happened, problems that had been unsolvable at home now unraveled effortlessly, and he would often become so thoroughly delighted that he lost all track of time.

Yet it was precisely during these moments of plunging his head into mathematical problems with single-minded focus that a voice would ring out unexpectedly from behind—a clear "Hey"—startling him all too often.
It was neither his father’s voice nor his teacher’s nor any friend’s.
He couldn’t tell whose voice it was at all, yet the fact remained it had been exceptionally distinct.
Abruptly, a loud voice would call... "Hey"... in just that way....
Startled, he would leap up and whirl around only to find no one there.
The mixed grove blazed in the western sun’s glare, not a single birdsong to be heard.

It was truly an uncanny, mystical psychological phenomenon.
At first, every time he heard such voices, his hair would bristle—but this did not seem to be a temporary nervous reaction, for even afterward, he repeated similar... or nearly identical experiences so many times that he became thoroughly inured to them.

As he walked endlessly along the narrow mountain path, pondering mathematical problems as always, he began to hear voices—five or six, maybe seven or eight people chattering noisily—approaching from somewhere ahead.
Of course he knew the path was a single track, and since those approaching were undoubtedly adults, he intended to step aside into the roadside ferns should he encounter them—yet as he continued approaching along the solitary path while pondering mathematical problems, strangely enough, no matter how far he went, he never came across those chattering adults.
It was somehow strange.
As he thought How strange..., the narrow single path came to an end, abruptly emerging onto a stretch of national highway that overlooked vast, sprawling rice fields.
It felt as though the large group of people coming from ahead had vanished into thin air midway.

It was neither a delusion nor a nervous reaction.
Indeed, he could hear such voices.
A bright, clear voice—utterly opposed to his own dark mood as he was absorbed in thought—would reach him; though paying it no conscious heed, there were many instances where, the moment some realization struck him, that voice would abruptly vanish.

However, being an inherently peculiar child from the start, he accepted such uncanny phenomena exactly as uncanny phenomena—never finding the mountains eerie to visit, nor ever once recounting them to his parents or others.
Thinking he would understand such things when he grew older, he kept them as his own secret, forgetting them one after another without intent.
And so he went on from middle school to high school, then from university to graduate school—but during that time his parents passed away.
Then came taking Kiseko as his wife, the birth of their first son Taro, and—due to his desire to become an elementary school teacher after graduating as a bachelor—the various cumbersome procedures he underwent before finally managing to secure his current position at the elementary school; yet throughout all that time, in places like the school library, deserted stretches of national highway, and empty post-class classrooms, he had repeatedly experienced being called out to by those same unknown voices.

However，he still had never once spoken to others about such experiences.
Yet it was indeed true that as he gradually aged over time，each occasional encounter with such facts made him feel increasingly eerie by degrees.
Could it be that I'm the only one who's had these experiences?
Why have I never once heard or read of others having such mysterious experiences?... Could it be I was born a kind of mentally abnormal person from childhood?... Such were the private cautions he'd begun to entertain.

However, around twelve or thirteen years prior during his newlywed days, while killing time during night duty by entering the school library and idly flipping through a flimsy magazine titled *Psychic Realm*—its copies piled in the room’s corner—he unexpectedly discovered a theory that aligned so perfectly with his own experiences it startled him to his core.

It was an abridged translation and introduction of a new theory published in a non-commercial journal by the psychical research society of Moscow University in former Russia, titled *Instances of Being Called by One’s Own Soul*. Upon reading it, he realized that those called by disembodied voices were by no means limited to himself alone.

"In spaces utterly devoid of ambient noise—sealed chambers, windless mountains steeped in silence—those deeply absorbed in contemplation or fixated upon some matter will frequently perceive sundry mysterious voices."
"Indeed, within certain Ural regions persists an unshakable belief in the legend that 'those hailed by tree spirits shall perish within three years'—yet when subjecting these *sudama*, or 'masterless voices', to psychical analysis, they prove devoid of mystery."
"This phenomenon constitutes nothing less than one's own soul vocalizing to itself."

In other words, the personalities of all humans can be explained through a method analogous to algebraic factorization.
To rephrase, a human’s character is nothing other than the product of various dispositions—or souls—passed down through ancestral generations. For instance, a character expressed as (A²−B²) can be considered none other than the product of a father’s character (A+B) and a mother’s character (A−B) inherited through this multiplicative process.
Now, within this total character of (A²−B²), when one factor—(A−B)—in other words, a soul inherited from the mother, such as a "mathematics-loving" soul—becomes fixated on its (A−B)-oriented tendency... that is to say, when it rigidly adheres to an obsession with mathematical research, persistently ignoring and attempting to transcend the existence of other souls... then the remaining (A+B) soul—left behind and isolated—lingers in a detached state, gradually or suddenly triggering an unstable psychical action to call out to (A−B)... thereby exerting force to summon back the temporarily skewed (A−B)-oriented character toward the (A+B) direction, restoring it to the saturated state of its original total character (A²−B²).
“The soul’s summons, being wholly mistaken for an audible voice, must naturally startle and unsettle a person, for that voice is perceived at a far deeper level of consciousness than sounds received through ordinary eardrums.”

Through such reasoning, beginning by explaining how heredity manifesting in organisms’ appearances is conducted through mathematical arrangements—combinatorial, linear, parallel, or geometric and arithmetic sequences—the text expounded upon the fact that heredity in psychical relations, such as spirit, character, or habits, likewise operates via mathematical principles, citing numerous criminal lineages as illustrative examples.
It then mathematically explained in exhaustive detail examples of psychical decomposition phenomena—such as geniuses and madmen, ghostly manifestations, clairvoyance, and prophets—as advanced mathematical constructs. Yet among these, the passage that profoundly struck him was the following exposition presented as a premise for mathematically comparative research on the states of psychological decomposition in ordinary people, geniuses, and madmen.

“...Ultimately, what we call geniuses or madmen refers to individuals possessing a pronounced capacity—whether conscious or unconscious (pathological)—to distinctly isolate one or two factors from among the various elements within their own character. When observed in this manner, even the common saying that genius borders on madness becomes rationally explicable.”
…such as Goho who went mad painting the sun, and a number of painters who had their minds unhinged by viewing the Mona Lisa’s portrait—these serve as prime examples.
That is to say, they poured their souls so excessively into those paintings that they could no longer return to their original cohesive personalities; as a result, they came to be called out to day and night by their own thoroughly fragmented and detached souls.

Furthermore, the master painter Bekurin immortalized his name by depicting the form of his own soul calling out to him as a skeleton playing the violin.

Now, taking ordinary people as an example: when individuals grow physically frail or advance in years with death approaching, their central faculties—such as the inductive capacity of cognition and the synthesizing capacity of consciousness—weaken, causing the natural decomposition of consciousness to gradually begin.
At times, one comes to be called by one’s own voice from somewhere.
“Therefore, should one with a frail constitution or advanced age experience being called by a disembodied voice, one must give careful consideration to the approach of one’s own demise.”
And so on…

When he read this section of the paper, he instinctively hunched his shoulders with a shudder.
Given his congenital frailty and genius-level yet excessively timid disposition, he found it overwhelmingly natural—indeed inevitable—that such uncanny phenomena should habitually assail him.
From that moment onward, even as he began earnestly suspecting whether so-called geniuses or madmen might possess more rationally functioning minds than ordinary people, he simultaneously resolved to rigorously discern whether those intermittent voices calling to him truly originated from himself.

However, here another miracle manifested... which was to say, it was nothing from without.
Ever since reading that book—for reasons unknown—he ceased encountering such voices altogether.
Like a ghost whose true nature had been exposed, the voice that called out to him vanished completely; through those seven or eight years he unwittingly forgot about that “voice calling out to himself.”
To be sure—having taken on a household and children during those years while immersing himself in beloved mathematical research—he may have found scant opportunity for his soul to detach...

However, after his wife and child died, leaving him truly all alone, those very psychological phenomena he had just spoken of mysteriously reemerged with clarity, beginning to startle him. Not only did these voices begin assailing him in a form so excruciating it felt like being flayed—a torment he found utterly unbearable—but now he found himself thoroughly battered by their relentless force, left breathless and wide-eyed in their wake. Yet when he carefully pondered the very root causes of this predicament, it seemed to him that it all traced back to the aberrant character of his deceased wife.

His deceased wife Kiseko had originally been the daughter of the village chief where he lived—a rare accomplished graduate of a girls' school in these parts—but her divergence from the norm extended beyond mere appearance to encompass even her temperament.
Though he was an esteemed bachelor with a silver pocket watch, she had been a woman who—despite his being forcibly employed at his hometown's elementary school solely out of his desire to teach mathematics to its pupils—had in turn been compelled to align with his determination and join him, making it peculiar that the only aspect which remained ordinary was her affection for their child.
She was the type of woman one might describe as an extremely hysterical yet abnormally resolute figure—but precisely for this reason, even when stricken with severe tuberculosis, she not only drove herself to keep working to spare her husband hardship, but even when collapsing while coughing blood last New Year's, displayed no clouding of consciousness until drawing her final breath.
While stroking the head of Taro, who had just turned eleven, in a frail yet crystalline voice,

“……Taro.”
“You, now…”
“From now on, you must properly follow Father’s directions.”
“If you refuse to obey what Father tells you, Mother will be watching from somewhere, feeling sad.”
“As Father always says, no matter how late school gets, you mustn’t walk on railway tracks or anything like that.”

She had breathed her last with a gentle smile while admonishing him in an almost jocular tone—a steadfast and dignified passing indeed.

Therefore, soon after the mother’s death, on the night of the wake, he pulled his bereaved son Taro close and made a firm promise through tears.

“......Let’s resolve never to walk on railway tracks from now on.”
“You often seem unable to refuse when your friends invite you to walk along the tracks together, but we must absolutely stop such things.”
“You understand?”
“I’ll never set foot on the railway tracks either, so...”

So he had droned on and on, repeating such things to drill them into the boy.
At that time, Taro had been sniffling and crying, but being an inherently obedient child, he seemed to have accepted his words without hesitation and nodded earnestly from the heart.

From then on, he resumed cooking for himself daily as he always had and sent Taro off to school a step ahead each morning.
Afterward, he himself would finish tidying up after meals, hurriedly prepare, and set off for school as if following in his son’s footsteps—but since he was always running late, he often ended up rushing along the railway tracks to reach school.

However, with his inherent docility, Taro had apparently kept his mother’s dying wish with scrupulous honesty—refusing to walk along the tracks no matter how his friends coaxed him—and day after day ruined his geta and tabi in the mud and dust of the national highway.
On one hand, whenever he witnessed Taro’s honesty... this was undoubtedly my fault.
It was definitely my fault.
But the school was far, and I had extra duties; even though I’d always managed cooking for myself, now I’d taken on both a mother’s role and a wife’s work on top of that—so being late to school was unavoidable.
Therefore, taking the railway tracks was utterly unavoidable—

Such were the excuses he repeated day after day in his mind.
He was endlessly repeating the same hollow apologies to his wife’s wandering spirit, sugarcoating the pangs of his conscience over and over again.

But was this what they meant by divine retribution striking true?
The time had come for such dishonesty of his to be laid utterly bare.
However, when considered afterward, an utterly unexpected event occurred—one that could only be seen as the indirect... no... direct cause of his beloved child’s tragic death—and it had dealt him a devastating blow.

It was during the height of last year’s Great Cold, on the day after his wife’s twenty-first-day memorial service had concluded—

……Having thought this far, he adjusted his grip on his briefcase and glanced around the area once more.

It was on the culvert of a stream—located where the railroad tracks emerged into a clearing within an endless grove of mixed trees that blanketed this entire area—that the nearly dried-up flow of iron-tinged water emitted faint glimmers among the dead reeds, resembling trachoma-tinged eyes.
When he crossed over that culvert, he continued recalling—without even questioning how he had come to be walking along the railway tracks—the memories of his own past that he had been pondering until now, overlaying them once more with the throbbing headache that seeped through him as they flickered through his mind.

Within those flickering impressions existed both the pure subjectivity of his own perceptions and the objective perspective of himself arising from his imagination.
There were warm words of others' sympathy intermingled with his own frigid sense of justice criticizing his actions—in short, fragments and remnants of such miscellaneous impressions and memories had already begun to blur, overlay, double expose, invert, trick, and montage themselves into countless transformations within his mind, exhausted from relentless thought. They swirled chaotically into scenes resembling Constructivist works, Futurist visions, or Impressionist tableaux, ceaselessly changing and progressing from one to the next.
And so, through hands of his own that he himself could not perceive, the workings of a mysterious force—which had compelled him to devise an inexorable fate that plunged his only beloved child into tragic death, leaving him truly solitary—now began to unfold once more with crystalline clarity, like the steps of a mathematical equation.

It was an unseasonably warm, clear afternoon in the heart of the Great Cold.

He had caught a cold two or three days prior, and as his head had felt heavy since morning that day, he found himself utterly unable to muster the will to stay late at school as usual to work into the evening.
So when about an hour had passed after classes ended, he bid farewell to the principal and colleagues who had stayed behind for some business, adjusted his grip on the black briefcase stuffed with students’ papers, and trudged out through the school gates.

Now, upon exiting the school gate and turning left onto the wide road lined with poplars, he would reach the national highway that traced a large semicircle along the coast down to the slope cradled by the mountain where he lived—but detouring via that highway was more unpleasant than anything for him.
Not only did it lengthen the distance, but being showered repeatedly with sand and dust from the recently proliferated buses, trucks, and luxury cars coming and going to the coastal villas—or encountering parents of his former students and others who knew him, forcing him to bow each time—disrupted the mathematical meditations floating hazily in his mind, which was a truly unbearable torment.

However, in contrast to this, upon exiting the school gate, if he stealthily turned right onto a narrow path through the grass, he could immediately enter a small cedar grove and emerge at the railroad crossing near the station hidden within its shadow.
From there, following the tracks through a high embankment that stretched four or five hundred meters, he could proceed almost straight along a slope of approximately one percent gradient to reach the railroad crossing in the withered grove beneath his house—and since most of that stretch was concealed by the withered grove, there was no fear of being spotted by anyone.

Moreover, as soon as he emerged from the cedar grove beside the school gate and set foot on the red clay path alongside the railway tracks, he would recall—as though it were a habit—his home nestled in the mountain shadows about a ri away and the wife and child who must be waiting there.
The habit had persisted unchanged even after his wife’s death last New Year’s, yet he never once attempted to rid himself of that foolish mental routine.
Rather than dispel it, he clung to that foolish mental habit as though it were a sorrowful right granted to him alone—abruptly conjuring before his eyes the haggard form of his wife, who until recently had worked herself to exhaustion, and the lively figure of his child, who must now have returned home ahead of him and was likely waiting, one after another.
Before the Mountain Watchman’s Hut where the water pipe dripped tonk-tonk, he would envision his wife’s profile—eyes blazing with determination as she polished rice—and Taro raising both hands impatiently upon glimpsing his figure emerge from the withered trees.

“Hey!
“Father—”

He would visualize in his mind—superimposing past and present—the image of Taro’s flushed cheeks calling out and the smoke from the bath Taro had drawn and lit crawling up the mountain slope in fragmented trails.
However, occasionally—after letting the thunderous roar of a train pass by like a black wind—he would stop on the railroad ties and light half a cigarette while,

……Again today, I’m thinking the same things.
No matter how much I think about it... the same things...

There had even been times when he sneered at his own heart. And yet, even as he hallucinated the pitiful figure of himself—past forty, having lost his wife—walking slightly hunched along the tracks twenty or thirty meters ahead…

......Quite right.
Quite right.
Indulging in such fleeting memories is the one sad privilege left behind for your sake.
Who but you could possibly scoff at such agonizing memories of yours...?

There were even times when he felt a kind of pride akin to indignation—as though he wanted to declare something—that made his eyes burn.
And so he would often forget even the extinguished flame of his cigarette—alternately filled with inexpressible joys and sorrows as he recalled both the delight of his "Elementary School Arithmetic Textbook," which he was painstakingly compiling through his own precious experiences to help elementary students nationwide grasp the wonders of algebra and geometry spreading precisely as intended to every corner of the country, and the innocent smiling face of his pupil who had splendidly solved complex four-operation problems belonging to higher-order equations before the eyes of the prefectural school inspector.

“......Father......”

It was at such a moment that he thought he heard the voice right by his ear…….

“……………………”

Startled into awareness, he found himself once again following his usual routine along the railway tracks, standing atop the railroad ties near the midpoint of that long, long embankment.
Right beside him stood a white-painted signal post, its crossbar—streaked with black lines against a white ground—tilted to indicate an approaching down train, yet no human figure was to be seen anywhere.
Only his shabby figure, sandwiched between the towering embankment walls on either side, stood beneath the crimson glow of the winter sun slanting across the upper half of those heights—and above it all stretched a steel-clear sky tilting endlessly beyond the tracks, over the mountains.

As he surveyed such scenery, he found himself unexpectedly recalling experiences from his own childhood.

Could it be that his own soul had just now called out to him?
That he thought he heard 'Father'... could it have been a mishearing of his own?

While such thoughts spun through his mind for an instant, he glanced around restlessly at his surroundings.
But when his gaze abruptly halted at a high corner of the embankment to his left, he once again froze with a start.

On the western side of the embankment that towered imposingly high above his head, there stood an even higher levee along the national highway.
A small, black figure that appeared to have been standing there all along on top of the embankment came into view, but no sooner had he turned his face in that direction than the small shadow called out again in a desperate, high-pitched voice.

“……Father—……”

Before the echo of that voice had faded, he turned crimson like a student caught cheating.
While recalling his own admonition—"...You mustn't walk on the tracks..."—in an instant, he plucked the cigarette butt with trembling fingertips and flung it away.
Choking back any reply as he forced a strained smile upward, another high-pitched voice came tumbling down from above.

“Father—
“Today, you know...
“I stayed behind to help the teacher, you know—”
“I was marking the dictation points… wasn’t done yet… you know—”

He managed to nod slightly with great effort.
And then he belatedly realized his child had been serving as class leader continuously since entering school.
Simultaneously recalling that Taro was sometimes kept behind by his homeroom teacher to assist with grading—and how they had promised to walk home together whenever possible—he found himself bound by unbearable shame at his helplessness, managing only to adjust his tattered hat.

“Father… Shall I come down…”

As Taro called out, he began retracing his steps resolutely along the embankment toward him.

“No… I’ll come up…”

Flustered, the man shouted in a ragged voice before leaping over the ditch beside the tracks in one bound and adjusting his heavy briefcase. He began desperately climbing the turf grass covering the slope steeper than forty-five degrees.

For him—unaccustomed to physical labor—this became a truly deathly ordeal. As he crawled up the terrifying nine-meter slope using only the toes of his stiff military boots and one hand’s strength, his knees soon trembled violently with exhaustion. Each time he grasped clumps of cold grass growing haphazardly mid-slope, he felt sensation draining from his right fingertips. Meanwhile, his face grew slick with streaming sweat and mucus, breath clogging in his throat—yet bound by his child’s presence below, he had to keep struggling upward without pause, unable even to exhale.

......This is my punishment for spitting at my child.
It’s retribution—the parent committing what they forbade the child.
That’s why I’m suffering this punishment and torment......

Clutching at the slope without even a moment to look up—his mind filled with heartrending, pitiful, suffocating thoughts—his utterly exhausted ankles wobbled and turned over in his military boots two or three times, leaving his entire body dangling like grass as it nearly twisted into a violent spin.
In that instant—as if his eyes beheld his own corpse spread-eagled on the distant tracks below—he felt his soul cower to its very depths; yet even so, through death-defying effort to keep footing, he had to readjust his grip on the precious briefcase.

“It’s dangerous.
“Father—… Father——…”

While hearing Taro’s shouting voice right above his head……

Once I reach the top of the embankment, I’ll immediately hug Taro tight.
I’ll apologize until my conscience is clear...
And then when I get home, I’ll apologize once more before my wife’s memorial tablet……

Having clung to this resolve as he crawled up the hellish steep slope... yet... when he stood beside his child on the flat, hard, gravel-strewn national highway, he realized how foolish such vigor was—even the strength to speak had drained away.
Before the pale western sun, in the storm of pounding palpitations and labored breath, he stood staring fixedly as all conscious forces shattered into fragments—swirling round and round before scattering away—until within the pale yellowish light before his eyes, he felt countless gray specks swaying and flickering as they shimmered.
Then, having finally regained his composure, the heart-wrenching desolation he felt when he began walking falteringly like a specter while handing his briefcase to Taro……
The sweat that had drenched his entire body had chilled completely, and the unbearable chill began creeping relentlessly up his spine—the desolation he felt in that moment……

Upon returning to the solitary mountain house, he left everything to Taro and immediately went to bed.
And from that night onward, he developed a high fever of over forty degrees and, gasping through severe pneumonia, had to spend several days drifting between dreams and wakefulness.

On one of those days drifting between dreams and wakefulness, he remembered the wild-eyed expression of his colleague Instructor Hashimoto who had come rushing to his side.
He remembered with uncanny clarity the unusually tense expressions of the policeman, the doctor, the village head, the ward head, and the farmers from the nearby area who had come rushing in afterward.
Not only that, but they were the people who had come to inform him of Taro’s death…

“Is it right to show the corpse to someone this gravely ill, or not?”

“If we tell him, wouldn’t it affect his illness?”

He had indeed clearly perceived even their whispering of such matters in the dark earthen-floored area. Yet he felt neither surprise nor sorrow. This was likely because his consciousness had fallen into delirium from the high fever. It was all like a dream...

...Is that how it is... Has Taro really died... Will I too go to the other world...

While thinking this—without any particular sadness—he merely kept shedding tepid tears that flowed ceaselessly one after another.

And then another incident from the following day… or perhaps not—he couldn’t be sure—but upon hazily waking, he heard women’s voices conversing in hushed tones just beside his pillow.
The lamp’s wick was turned down to an extreme degree, so he couldn’t even discern whether this was his own home, but they were likely women from a nearby hamlet—or something of that sort—attending to care for him.

“Oh my goodness...”
“The young master was right there in the middle of the culvert beneath the signal…”

“……My, now… must’ve been worried ’bout Father’s illness, they say… sneakin’ ’long the railway for a shortcut behind the teacher’s back… that’s what everyone’s sayin’, mind…”

“Oh…”
“Poor thing…”
“In that rain and wind…”

“So then… In the end, they went and cremated the young master without even showin’ his face to Father, I tell ya…”

“What a cruel thing to do...”

“And y’see… Ever since the teacher took to his bed, that old janitor woman from the school—the one who’d been feedin’ the young master his meals every day—well… She said she’d take his place if she could. Like she was lamentin’ her own grandson’s death, she did…”

All that remained was the sound of sniffling sobs, but he paid them no particular heed.
Without even the strength to consider the meaning of those words, he began dozing off once more.

“Instructor Hashimoto said as much too, though…”
“The father might find more happiness if he were to just pass away as he is now too,” they said…

While half-hearing such murmured whispers... while facing the people—their mouths agape, eyes blinking rapidly—upon hearing news of his own death, and smiling...

But then, when even that raging fever miraculously subsided, he fell into a temporary state of spiritual detachment.
Even when the monk came to chant sutras, he would sit on the veranda ignoring him; he wouldn’t drink a single bottle of soy milk delivered from his wife’s family home as a get-well gesture. Yet it seemed he hadn’t forgotten to attend school—for as soon as his strength returned, without any prior notice, he began trudging steadily to school, clutching his black briefcase.

The staffroom members were all astonished.
While turning back to look at his visage—a face so emaciated as to be unrecognizable, with a wildly unkempt beard now markedly streaked with white—they exchanged glances with one another.
Among them, his colleague Instructor Hashimoto was first to rise from his chair and rush over, placing both hands on his shoulders with a voice thickened by emotion.

“Wh-what’s wrong with you? P-please… pull yourself together…”

Blinking rapidly, the principal who had risen from his chair also approached him from the side.

“……Please rest fully.
“We and the parents are of course deeply sympathetic—as is everyone in the Educational Affairs Section…”

[The principal] had stroked his back as if admonishing a child, but such kindness and sympathy seemed not to reach him at all. From beneath his thick myopic glasses, he merely swept his pale eyes across the classroom interior, then settled into his own chair and summoned the junior teacher who had been substituting for him to receive the subject handover. And then, facing the students who stared in shock at his beggar-like emaciation, he began his lecture in halting fragments.

Then in the afternoon—from his colleagues in the staff room—

“No wonder.”

Exiting the school gate while being seen off with such looks, he turned right as he was and, without regard for the students watching him, briskly began making his way along the railway tracks…while once again repeating the same memories as before…while visualizing the figures of his wife and child who must be waiting for his return within a house hidden among the trees…

From then on, day after day, he began repeating those old habits as if stamped with a seal—but within them lay just one single thing that differed from before.
It was that when he came to the white signal standing midway along the culvert shortly after leaving school, he would pause and look around as was his routine.

He peered around intently at the area while seemingly intent on finding remnants of where his son had been crushed, but after having been washed away by countless rains and winds over time, such traces were nowhere to be found.

Yet even so, day after day, like some mechanism repeating its motions, he stood rooted in that same spot and scrutinized the same area over and over until he had memorized—with such vivid clarity that he could recall them beneath his bedclothes at night—the wood grain and knotholes of several railroad ties lying there, the layered arrangement of each individual gravel stone, even the growth patterns of lawn grass and wild bramble branches in the vicinity.

And so, even when utterly absorbed in unrelated thoughts, he had become so thoroughly conditioned that upon reaching the area beneath the signal, he would halt almost unconsciously—unable to advance a single step further until he had surveyed the surroundings once over…… Left unaware of why he stood rooted there, a dark, dark, lonely, lonely mood would descend, compelling him to fixate on each familiar pebble’s shape, each railroad tie’s cross-sectional form, each interval between rail joints, scrutinizing them one by one with unwavering intensity…………………….

“Father”

It was precisely as he did so that he heard a clear voice speak.

The moment he heard that voice, he jerked his head back as if struck by electricity.
Unconsciously closing his eyes tightly and hunched his shoulders stiffly, he eventually opened them quietly again and timidly looked up toward the elevated area to his left.
Anticipating the red clay slope clad in desolate frost-withered grass and the small, black human figure standing atop it...

However, now, the inner part of the culvert unfolding before his eyes presented a scene entirely different from such expectations.
As far as the eye could see, every blade of grass and every tree was cloaked in flame-like young verdure, while multicolored spring flowers across the colossal earthen slopes to either side clustered in endless brilliance, rippled in flowing waves, and bloomed in wild profusion.
On the middle of the mountain slope enveloping his house beyond the railway tracks, scattered remnants of mountain cherry blossoms overlapped palely.
A bright, clear blue sky stretched serenely above, white clouds rippling softly as if hinting at carmine hallucinations, while the calls of skylarks near and far—even the chirps of bramblings—carried a tranquil harmony.

……Nowhere within it could he hear a voice resembling his son’s……nowhere in any shadow could he find a figure akin to Taro’s……Amid a world brimming with utterly unexpected radiance and splendor—he who discovered his own pitiful form, unchanged from days past, standing utterly alone like a single blot at its very center…….

……How he had cried out in such a strange voice at that moment……how he had staggered along the railway tracks, weeping without reason as he returned to the solitary house in the mountains……how, upon reaching home, he had crawled toward the family altar atop the dresser, rolling about as he collapsed wailing at full volume……how he had wept through apologies and wailed through regrets until his heart was spent……。
And then—after some time had passed and he finally regained his senses within that solitary house where none could see or hear—fully aware, indeed excessively aware, of his own disheveled state’s shamefulness……not only did he feel no embarrassment whatsoever, but he clutched both plain wooden memorial tablets to his chest as if demanding greater humiliation and torment……How desperately he rubbed his cheeks against them……kissed them……lamented with yearning…………………….

“Oh... Kiseko... Kiseko... I was wrong.
I was terribly wrong.
Forgive... Forgive me... Oh...
Taro... Taro, Taro.
Father was... Father was wrong.
I... I will never walk the tracks again... never again.
...Fo...Forgive...Forgive me...Aaaah—ii!”

...how he had kept shouting over and over until his voice gave out…….

He continued crossing the frost-covered railway tracks through the grove of withered trees while staring with vivid clarity at his own figure from that time before his eyes.
While being acutely aware of the insides of his eyelids growing hot of their own accord and an indescribably suffocating mass forcing its way up from the depths of his throat to the back of his nostrils…….

“……Ha ha ha……”

When a laughing voice suddenly sounded beneath his feet, he was so startled he nearly leapt into the air.
He involuntarily took two or three running steps before jerking to a halt. Wiping his sweaty brow, he frantically scanned the tracks ahead and behind, but of course no human lay there.
The succession of sleepers dusted with thin frost and wet rails merely overlapped upon a multitude of gravel stones likewise crowned with white frost.

To his left and right stretched the same withered groves as ever, arrayed so densely their depths were unknowable, their gray treetops hazing beneath a clouded sun that glowed sulfurous yellow.
And then, proceeding a bit further through that space, he discovered himself standing precisely before a white marker post at the elevated railway tracks with their clear view.

"Damn it..."

And at that moment, he muttered under his breath.
...Even though he had sworn so earnestly before the memorial tablets... he found himself thinking... that he had done something inexcusable.
But when he realized he had reached a point beyond retrieval, he clenched his back teeth tightly and closed his eyes.

Then he once again placed a hand softly against his forehead and looked back behind him. He endeavored to mentally retrace both the railway scenes he had traversed to reach this point and the thoughts he had been pondering until now. He frantically tried to recall the original motive—that initial spark which had led him to break, on this very morning after nearly a year, that solemnly sworn promise so effortlessly—but it had receded from his memory as if belonging to a decade past, leaving him unable to reconstruct even how he had walked through which areas... when he had turned his hat backward... or when he had shifted his briefcase to his right hand. It could only be surmised that he had come this far by switching his briefcase from hand to hand while following the tracks, adhering to his old habit. …………Yet instead, believing he had nearly grasped the true nature of what had just laughed abruptly beneath his feet moments prior, he began retracing his steps while meticulously pressing down on each railroad tie behind him one by one. Soon after, an old tie four or five sleepers away from where he had stood could no longer bear his weight and began groaning as it sank into the gravel. With that motion, its opposite end lifted and scraped against the rail’s lower edge... producing a harsh metallic clang.

The moment he heard that sound, he finally understood the source of the laughter from moments before and let out a sigh of relief.
As if his tension had slackened with this realization, each strand of hair began prickling upright across his scalp while goosebumps threatened to erupt across his flesh, but he forcefully shrugged his shoulders as if to dispel the sensation.
He switched the black briefcase between hands two or three times and rubbed his earlobes, which had turned cold enough to feel cutting.
Then he ran his fingers through his salt-and-pepper beard damp with breath-mist, adjusted the collar of his bell-shaped cloak that had begun to sag, and once again started briskly making his way along the railway tracks toward the school.
While repeatedly glancing back over his shoulder time and again—believing the descending coal train he always encountered near the railroad crossing would arrive any moment now…

He had soon become completely detached from his previous sad memories and was walking while thinking only of mathematics. He himself plunged deeper and deeper into meditations filled entirely with mathematics—his most fulfilling state.

To his eyes, the shifting patterns of gravel between each railroad tie emerging endlessly beneath his feet began resembling those function theories and probability proofs he had once begun researching long ago and nearly forgotten. He again earnestly attempted to mathematically explain how vibrations from railroad ties scraping against rails could create illusions mimicking human laughter.

It was an utterly mundane phenomenon—so absurdly simple it scarcely merited contemplation. Yet when tracing how these base vibrations traveled as sound waves to eardrums, reflected through brains, propagated along nerves, and finally raised goosebumps across flesh, it transformed into something resembling mystical phenomena—utterly incomprehensible to his mathematical mind. This recurring realization infuriated him beyond measure.

That humans facing locomotives become immobilized like frogs hypnotized by snakes—crushed to death without resistance—must similarly stem from the brain’s mysterious functions...

What mathematical mechanism distinguishes between cerebral reflexes and conscious acts...?

...Suddenly... a white shape streaked horizontally across his field of vision, prompting him to lift his gaze without conscious intent... Though he wondered fleetingly whether a white butterfly might appear at this season... there existed nothing resembling lepidoptera—no pale form whatsoever to be discerned.

At that precise moment, he found himself standing upon the elevated railway tracks that commanded an unobstructed view.

In the far distance of his gaze lay the national highway running perfectly parallel to the railway tracks, and beyond it, overlapping rows of village houses came into view.
It was undoubtedly the same scene he had grown accustomed to over the years, yet this morning, for some reason, that landscape seemed to transform—remaining exactly as it was while simultaneously emerging within his mathematical contemplations like an aberrant flashback.
The houses, trees, fields, and utility poles within that landscape transformed into characters and symbols used in mathematics—√, =, 0, ∞, KLM, XYZ, αβγ, θω, π—shifting like trigonometric functions unfurling... like complex fractional expressions formed when solving higher-order equations... shimmering arrayed beneath pale yellow clouds that cast mysterious halations, stretching endlessly into infinity.
Containing an infinite number of imaginary numbers that cannot be expressed in form, irrational numbers, repeating decimals, and the like….

He intuited that all the fields and mountains surrounding him were filled with formulas and equations containing every manner of irrationality and contradiction.
And then, struck by an oppressive pressure as though all those things were silently mocking and threatening him, he once again slumped heavily and began to walk.
And so, as if rebelling against such a non-mathematical environment, he gradually began to think.

...I was a mathematical genius since childhood.

...I still consider myself to be.

...That's why I became an educator.
To bring about a great revolution in the current education system... To put the mathematical genius hidden within children's minds to work for society...

……But the current education system is no good.
It’s completely no good.
The current education system is one that kills off every individual’s unique characteristics.
It is an education system that doesn't permit mathematics alone to reign supreme.

……That’s why, up until now, how many mathematicians must have failed to discover their own genius and vanished into obscurity.

……I have fought silently against such an education system until today.
And so I have hatched countless would-be mathematicians into this world.

……Taro too had been one of those eggs.

……Taro, that gentle, taciturn honor student, had vigorously cultivated his unique mathematical genius under my tutelage.
He had not only grasped elementary algebra and geometry but could even create logarithm tables on his own.
The joy he experienced when—while forming spheres from the silver foil of Bat wrappers he had saved himself and periodically comparing their weight and diameter—he discovered through the curve traced by dots plotted on graph paper that weight increased in direct proportion to the cube of diameter still clings to these eyes.
Narrowing eyes, cheeks flushed crimson, low nose twitching—that profile with its magnificent forehead gleaming…

……Yet I had commanded Taro never to demonstrate such mathematical talents before others.
I had kept it from being known even to my fellow schoolteachers.
Because if I had, the school inspectors would have pouted and said, "There he goes meddling again"...

What could mere school inspectors possibly understand?
They are not educators.
They’re nothing but clerks.

……Hey.
Taro, isn’t that right?

...Their mathematics is only good for counting students and staff, calculating allocation percentages for railway discount passes issued during summer and winter breaks, and tallying their own monthly salaries.

Ha ha ha….

……Hey.
Taro...

……Dad knows full well.
That you possessed the makings of an unprecedented mathematician... That you had a mind so astounding it could rival Einstein's...

……But you yourself never even dreamed of such things.
Because I never told you... you probably never felt any regret about it.
You must have died thinking only of me…….

But... but...

Having come this far in his thoughts, he suddenly stopped in his tracks.

……But……but…….

When he had come this far in his thoughts—and found himself utterly unable to think beyond that point—he brought both feet together on the railroad tie.
While staring fixedly at the perfectly still void of his brain behind his eyeballs…

It was a dim silence embracing infinite time and space—created by his exhausted, nonfunctioning brain within the hollow of his skull.
It was the bottomless cessation of his immobilized self-consciousness.
No matter how he tried to think—could not—….

He felt as though sealed within subterranean darkness, his eyes opening wider and wider.
In the end, he peeled his eyeballs so round that his eyelids prickled, but then from above those pupils, a dim white light began to seep in, and gradually his field of vision brightened.
Before his eyes lay familiar rail joints, railroad ties riddled with knot holes, and clusters of gravel coated in white soil gushing from beneath them.

That was undoubtedly the spot where Taro had been struck down.

He slowly raised his eyes to look up at the white signal pole standing erect beside him.
Above its white crossbar streaked with black lines—tilted at nearly forty-five degrees—he gazed at the steel-colored sky stretched taut and glinting.
Once more he peered into each dim recess between the gravel beneath his feet—gravel that must have drunk his son’s blood—staring fixedly.
From those shadowed gravel gaps, he gazed down at the crimson stem—redder than blood—of a small knotweed that thrust up only its head.

……But……but…….

The cessation of cerebral function brought about by those words—once more embracing infinite time and space as it pressed down upon his head—he endured with gnawing persistence… while somewhere in the distance, the shrill blare of an emergency whistle that had been sounding its alarm gradually drew nearer from behind, all while maintaining a half-conscious awareness…

……But……but…….

As he thought this, he pressed his forehead firmly with his right hand.

……But……but…….

……I wonder if everything I've thought until now has all been a dream.
……I wonder if Kiseko's death, my son being crushed… and all these various things I've kept thinking until now are nothing but hallucinations from my deteriorating mind.
Could this be some grotesque illusion welling up from neurasthenia…

……No……that’s it that’s it……illusion illusion…….

……I’ve been caught in some sort of self-hypnosis, dwelling on such nonsensical things all this time.
My neurasthenia has grown increasingly cruel of late, and thanks to this self-hypnosis running rampant unchecked, I’ve come to delude myself with nothing but such wretched fantasies.

……What nonsense.
……It’s nothing…….

……Both my wife Kiseko and my son Taro are still properly alive.
Taro must have arrived at school ages ago, and Kiseko—well, Kiseko is probably dusting my desk right about now.
On top of that precious draft of "Elementary Arithmetic"...

...Ah ha ha ha ha ha....

……No good no good.
If I keep getting caught up in these worthless delusions, I might go crazy...

...Ah... ah... ah....

Thinking this over and over, he became completely lighthearted and—smiling and smiling—once again leaned his upper body forward to start walking along the tracks.
Then at that very moment, from an unexpected direction behind him, he suddenly felt a tremendous force—gwhaan—crash into him as if struck down.
And just now, he felt himself effortlessly thrown onto the gravel he had been staring at—but in that instant perceived soundless rotations of pitch-black wheels and between them overlapping undulating stripes of crimson light flashing through.
As this thought came, a prickling pain began at the back of his head while his vision rapidly darkened—so he blinked two or three times with great force.

……FatherFatherFatherFatherFather…….

The clear voice of Taro calling out drew gradually nearer.
And when it seemed to have reached his ear, permeating to the very depths of his eardrum, the voice vanished abruptly—yet upon hearing it, he closed his eyes as if utterly relieved and buried his face heavily into the gravel between his outstretched hands.
And then, turning his face slightly to the side, he smiled, showing his white teeth.

......What nonsense.
Was it you......Ah......Ah......Ah......