Pathway to Japanese Literature

Monkey-Faced Youth

There was an arrogant and insolent man who would laugh derisively through his nose and snap shut any novel after merely skimming its opening lines, as though he had already seen through all its artifice.
Here lies a verse from a Russian poet:
“Who might you be, Mr. Somo?
Merely an imitator then?
A phantom unworthy of notice?
Some Moscow brat cloaked in Childe Harold’s mantle?
A rehash of others’ affectations?
A lexicon of fashionable turns?
No—call it rather a poem of mangled phrases.”
Perhaps that was precisely what it amounted to.
This man believed himself to have read too much poetry and fiction—a mistake he now bitterly regretted.
They said that even when lost in contemplation, he would fastidiously select each word for his thoughts.
In his heart, he referred to himself as “he.”
Even when stumbling drunk and seemingly bereft of reason, were someone to strike him, he would calmly murmur:
“You’d best not regret this.”
These were Prince Myshkin’s words.
What might he say upon losing love?
At such times, the words remained unspoken.
Phrases that raced through his breast.

“If you stay silent, it calls your name; if you draw near, it flees away.”
Wasn’t this Mérimée’s modest reflection?
At night, from the moment he burrowed into bed until he fell asleep, he was tormented by delusions of his unwritten masterpiece.
At such times, he would cry out softly like this.
“Let me go!”
This was what it was—the artist’s confiteor.
Then, when he was alone, doing nothing and spacing out—what would it be like?
It was said to come spilling out—the soliloquy “Nevermore.”

If such a man—spawned from the dregs of literature—were to write a novel, what kind of thing would result?
The first thing to consider was that the man surely could not write a novel.
He would write a line only to erase it—or rather, he probably couldn’t even write that single line.
He had a bad habit—it seemed that even before taking up his brush, he had already applied what one might call the final polish to the novel.
Most nights, he would burrow into his futon, blink rapidly, grin to himself, cough, mutter incoherently, and labor until near dawn to piece together a single short story.
He thought it was a masterpiece.
Then he would try replacing the opening lines, re-examining the closing words, and slowly, slowly caress the masterpiece within his chest.
It would have been good if he could have fallen asleep at that point, but according to past experience, things had never gone so smoothly even once.
Next, he attempted to critique the short story.
So-and-so would praise it with such words.
So-and-so, without fully understanding, would pinpoint a certain passage here and boast of their own insight.
But if it were me, I would say this.
The man began to construct what was perhaps the most accurate critique of his own work.
The moment he muttered to himself something like “the sole flaw in this work…”, his masterpiece had already vanished without a trace.
The man, still blinking rapidly, gazed at the bright light seeping through the shutters and grew somewhat vacant.
Before long, he would drift into a drowsy half-sleep.

However, this did not properly answer the question.
The question was: if he were to write it.
To declare “It’s right here” and thump his chest might have seemed rather dashing in its own way, but to any listener, it would likely come across as nothing more than a tasteless joke.
Moreover, since this man’s chest—what one might call a flat chest—was a shape that had been crushingly deformed since birth, his earnest declaration that “the masterpiece lies within my chest” became all the more artless.
Even from this, one could see how facile the answer—that he probably could not write a single line—truly was.
The question was: if he were to write it.
To better consider the problem, one might simply construct a concrete environment in which he absolutely had to write a novel.
For example: this man had frequently failed in school and was now in a position where people from his hometown spoke ill of him behind his back, calling him a “treasure,” and if he did not graduate within the year, his family—faced with their relatives—would stop sending him monthly funds.
Moreover, if we supposed that not only was it unlikely for the man to graduate within the year, but he had no intention whatsoever of graduating in the first place—what then?
To further consider the problem, let us suppose that this man was not currently single.
He had been a married man for four or five years already.
Moreover, his wife was a woman of lowly upbringing in any case, and one might allow that this marriage had left him abandoned by all his blood relatives save for a single aunt—a clichéd romance tinged with such implications.
Now, let us suppose that a man in such circumstances had absolutely no choice but to write a novel for the sake of his impending life of self-subsistence.
But this too was abrupt.
It was downright reckless.
To make a living, it wasn’t necessarily fixed that one must write a novel.
Why not just become a milkman?
However, that could be easily refuted.
The phrase “in for a penny, in for a pound” would suffice.

In Japan today, they were loudly proclaiming something called a “Literary Renaissance”—a term whose meaning eluded him—and scouting new writers with offers of fifty sen per page. The man too had seized this opportunity and turned to his manuscript paper, only to find himself unable to write the moment he did so. Ah, if only it had been three days earlier. Trembling with overflowing passion, he might have dashed off ten or twenty pages in his sleep. Night after night, the phantom of a masterpiece would stir his thin chest, but whenever he tried to write, they all fleetingly vanished. If you stay silent, it calls your name; if you draw near, it flees away. Mérimée had forgotten another noun besides cats and women—the weighty noun of a masterpiece’s phantom!

The man made a strange resolution.
He rummaged through the closet in his room.
In the corner of that closet were piled approximately a thousand manuscript pages he had written over ten years with rapturous joy—stacked there with an air of significance, it was said.
He read through them one after another.
Occasionally he blushed.
It took him two days to finish reading them all, then he spent an entire day in a daze.
Among them, the short story titled 'Correspondence' lingered in his mind.
It was a twenty-six-page story where anonymous letters from unknown senders would arrive to rescue the protagonist whenever he faced trouble.
The man found himself particularly drawn to this story likely because he thought his present self yearned to receive such fine correspondence.
He resolved to somehow rewrite it skillfully and pass it off.

The first thing he had to rewrite was the protagonist’s profession.
Oh dear.

The protagonist was a new writer.
He decided to revise it this way.
First: aim to become a literary giant → fail → first correspondence arrives.
Next: dream of revolution → suffer defeat → second correspondence arrives.
Now: become salaryman → agonize over domestic comfort → third correspondence arrives.
This became his rough framework.
Keep protagonist far from literary affectation.
Once revolutionary aspirations begin? Not one syllable about literature.
When I endured such circumstances myself—those letters/postcards/telegrams I’d desperately wanted—I’d write them as received facts.
Had to write this joyfully or lose out.
Write shamelessly sweet with straight face.

The man suddenly recalled the story called *Hermann and Dorothea*.
Shaking his head fiercely to drive away the strange delusions assailing him one after another, the man hurriedly turned to his manuscript paper.
He wished his manuscript paper were much smaller.
He wished he could write so messily that even he himself couldn’t understand what he was writing.
He titled it *Tidings from the Wind*.
He also added a new opening.
He wrote thus:

―Do you scorn correspondence? When you stand weeping at life's crossroads, would you spurn such messages that flutter down with the wind from unknowable realms onto your desk, casting illumination upon your path ahead? He was blessed indeed. Thrice now had he received these heart-quickening *Tidings from the Wind*—once on New Year's dawn at nineteen; again in early spring at twenty-five; lastly in last winter's depth. Ah! Do you know this wondrous ache—this alloy of envy and fondness—that comes when recounting another's joy? Let me unfold the tale beginning with that nineteenth-year morning.

Having written that far, the man set down his pen for the moment.
He seemed somewhat satisfied.
Yes—this was how he should write.
After all, novels weren’t something one could grasp through mere contemplation.
He had to try writing them.
The man murmured this earnestly to himself and was said to have been utterly delighted.
He had discovered it—discovered it.
Novels had to be written willfully after all.
They were nothing like exam answers.
Alright.
This novel—he would advance it little by little while humming.
Today he would stop here and leave it at that.
The man quietly reread his work once more before tucking the manuscript into the closet and beginning to don his university uniform.
Though he had long ceased attending school altogether these days, he still fidgeted into that uniform once or twice weekly for these outings.
The couple rented two rooms on an employee’s second floor—a six-mat room and a four-and-a-half-mat room—where he maintained appearances before their landlord’s family through these sporadic pantomimes of academic attendance.
The man too possessed this vulgar streak of social pretense.
Moreover, he appeared to keep up facades even before his own wife.
As evidence showed—his wife seemed convinced he genuinely attended school.
Given her humble origins as previously noted, one could reasonably assume her illiteracy.
The man exploited this ignorance freely—one might say he perpetrated various deceptions through it.

However, he was generally in the category of a loving husband. The reason was that he occasionally told lies to reassure his wife. He spoke of a glorious future.

That day, he went out and visited a friend’s house right nearby.
This friend was a bachelor and Western-style painter, said to have been his classmate in middle school.
Since his family was wealthy, he idled about.
While conversing with others, he seemed to take pride in perpetually twitching and fluttering his eyebrows.
Please imagine a man of that common type.
He had visited that friend’s place.
He had never particularly liked this friend.
That being said, he did not much care for two or three of his other friends either, but especially because this friend possessed a particular knack for irritating others, it was said he could not bring himself to like him at all.
That he had visited this friend today was undoubtedly out of a desire to first share his joy with those close at hand.
The man seemed cozily warmed by a presentiment of happiness at this moment, but in such times, people apparently grow somewhat more compassionate.

The Western-style painter was at home.
He sat facing this Western-style painter and immediately began telling him about his novel.
"I want to write a novel like this," he explained the general plan, then added in a low voice, cheeks reddening, "If it goes well, it might sell—the opening goes like this," reciting the five or six lines he had just written.
It was said he always memorized all his own writings.
The Western-style painter fluttered his trademark eyebrows and stammered, "That's good."
That alone would have sufficed, yet he launched into needless chatter—one thing after another in rapid succession.
Things like a nihilist's mockery of God or a dwarf's rebellion against heroes—though to this day he never understood any of it—the painter even called it a geometric construct of ideas.
For him, it would have been enough if this friend had simply said, "That's good—I'd like some *Tidings from the Wind* like that myself."
In trying to escape criticism, he must have deliberately chosen such a romantic theme as *Tidings from the Wind*.
But when subjected to this heartless painter's strange critiques—geometric constructs and newspaper-trivia nonsense—he instantly thought: This was dangerous.
If he grew flustered and got drawn into that critical game, *Tidings from the Wind* would become impossible to continue.
Dangerous.
The man made an abrupt exit from his friend's presence.

It would be awkward to go straight home like that, so he instead headed to a used bookstore.
As he walked, the man thought.
I'll make this a truly splendid letter.
The first correspondence—let's make it a postcard.
It would be a message from a girl.
He wanted it to be a letter filled with short sentences overflowing with tender concern for the protagonist.
"How about opening with 'I'm not doing anything wrong, you know—that's why I'm deliberately writing this postcard'?"
Since the protagonist receives it on New Year's Day, at the very end let's add in small letters: "I forgot.
Happy New Year."
Is this perhaps too affectedly naive?

The man walked through the streets in a dreamlike state.
He was nearly hit by cars twice.

For the second letter, let’s have the protagonist receive it when he gets caught up in a once-trendy revolutionary movement and is thrown into jail.
“Let me state upfront from the beginning: ‘After he entered university, he was no longer drawn to novel-writing.’”
The protagonist had already met with bitter failure in his attempt to become a literary giant before even receiving the first letter.
The man had already begun constructing the sentences from that time in his mind.
“To become a renowned literary giant was now, for him, a dream beyond dreams.
Even if he were to write a novel that was acclaimed as a masterpiece and brought him ecstatic joy, that joy would be but a fleeting moment.
There can be no such thing as an awareness of one’s own work being a masterpiece.
He could not accept enduring five or ten years of humiliating days just to obtain a fleeting moment of ecstasy.”
It seemed to have gotten rather preachy.
The man laughed by himself.
“He simply wanted the most direct outlet for his passion.
Rather than thinking or singing, acting on it quietly seemed more genuine.
Napoleon over Goethe.
Gorky over Lenin.”
It still reeked a bit of literature.
“In this part of the text, even the slightest trace of literature must be eradicated.
Well, it’ll probably turn out all right.
If I overthink too much, I’ll become unable to write again.
In other words, this protagonist wants to become a bronze statue.
As long as he writes without missing this point, he won’t fail.”

And then, as for the correspondence that this protagonist receives in jail, this would be made into a long, long letter.
I have a plan.
Even someone at the depths of despair, upon reading it, would find themselves compelled to rebuild their resolve once more.
Moreover, this was a letter written in women’s handwriting.
Ah.
In the awkward penmanship of the character 「様」, he had found something familiar.
He had remembered the five-year-old New Year’s card.

For the third correspondence—this was how he would do it.
This was neither postcard nor letter—he’d make it a completely unusual *Tidings from the Wind*.
Since he’d already demonstrated his correspondence skills, he’d craft something eye-catchingly different.
The protagonist who’d failed to become a bronze statue would eventually make an ordinary marriage and turn salaryman—but he’d write it straight, depicting his own life as a salaryman.

Just as the protagonist was beginning to feel weariness with family life.
On a winter Sunday afternoon, the protagonist went out to the engawa and smoked a cigarette.
Just then, truly with the wind, a single sheet of letter came fluttering down to his hand.
He noticed it.
It was a letter his wife had written to inform his father back home that apples had arrived.
"Don’t just leave it lying around—send it off right away."
As he muttered that, he suddenly tilted his head.
Ah.
In the awkward penmanship of the character “様,” he found something familiar.
To write such a fantastical story without it feeling unnatural seemed to require burning passion.
The author himself had to earnestly believe in the possibility of such coincidences.
Whether I can do it or not—I’ll give it a try.
The man entered the used bookstore with vigor.

This used bookstore here should have Chekhov’s Letters and Eugene Onegin.
Because the man had sold them there.
He had now come to this used bookstore because he wanted to reread those two books.
In Eugene Onegin, there was Tatiana’s excellent love letter.
Both books still remained unsold.
Earlier, he had taken Chekhov’s Letters down from the shelf and flipped through various pages, but found little of interest.
They were filled with words like “theater” and “illness.”
This could not serve as reference material for Tidings from the Wind.
This arrogant and insolent man next picked up Eugene Onegin and searched for the love letter passage.
He found it immediately.
It had been his book after all.
“What more could there be for me to add upon writing this letter to you?”
I see—this would work.
It was concise.
Tatiana had then proceeded to unabashedly string together words like God’s will, dreams, vestiges, whispers, melancholy, phantoms, angels, solitude.
And then in conclusion: “I will put down my pen here.
To reread it is terrifying; with feelings of shame and terror, I want to disappear.
Yet I, while relying on your peerlessly noble heart, in one bold stroke entrust my fate into your hands.
From Tatiana.
Mr. Onegin.”

This was exactly the kind of letter he wanted.
He jolted awake and slammed the book shut.
Dangerous.
This would influence him.
Reading this now would bring harm.
Hmm.
He'd likely lose his ability to write again.

The man hurriedly returned home.

He returned home and hurriedly spread out the manuscript paper.
I'll write with a carefree feeling.
Without worrying about sentimentality or vulgarity，I want to write effortlessly.
Moreover，his old short story titled *Correspondence* was，as mentioned earlier，essentially a new writer’s success story；thus，the depiction up to receiving the first correspondence could almost entirely be copied from the old manuscript.
The man smoked two or three cigarettes in a row，then picked up his pen with an air of confidence.
He began to grin slyly.
This seemed to be the man’s habitual gesture when he was terribly troubled.
He had come to realize a certain difficulty.
It was concerning the writing.
The prose of the old manuscript had been written in a feverish rush.
This was something I simply had to rewrite.
At this rate，neither others nor myself could find enjoyment.
For one thing，it’s awkward.
It’s tedious，but I’ll rewrite this.
The vain man，thinking this，reluctantly began rewriting.

In one’s youth, everyone experiences such an evening at least once.

He wandered out into the streets at dusk and suddenly beheld a shocking reality.
He noticed that every single person passing through the street was his acquaintance.
The snowy street nearing year-end was bustling.
He had to hurriedly walk through the street, offering a brief nod to each person coming and going.
When he unexpectedly encountered a group of schoolgirls at a corner of a backstreet, he nearly took off his hat.

He was studying English and German at a high school in a certain castle town in the north at that time.
He was good at free composition in English.
After entering school, before even a month had passed, he astonished the classmates with that free composition.
Shortly after enrollment, Mr. Bururu, a British teacher, commanded the students to write their convictions on the topic of *What is Real Happiness?*
Mr. Bururu began his class by narrating an unconventional story titled *My Fairyland*, then the following week lectured for an hour on *The Real Cause of War*—terrifying the docile students and delighting the somewhat progressive ones.
The Ministry of Education’s hiring of such a teacher was an achievement.
Mr. Bururu resembled Chekhov.
He wore pince-nez, sported a short timid-looking beard, and always smiled as if dazzled.
They said he was a British officer; they said he was a renowned poet; they said that while he appeared aged he was still in his twenties; and they said he was a military spy.
That air of mystery made Mr. Bururu all the more enchanting.
All new students secretly prayed to be loved by this handsome foreigner.
It was during the third week’s class that Mr. Bururu silently scrawled on the board *What is Real Happiness?*
The chosen elite students poured their utmost effort into this glorious debut.
He too blew dust off ruled paper and deliberately set his pen to work.
Shakespeare said—Even Shakespeare is too grandiose—he thought.
While blushing he slowly erased it.
From all directions came low sounds of racing pens.
He propped his cheek and sank into thought.
He fixated on opening lines.
No matter how grand a masterpiece he believed its fate hung on that first line.

When a good opening line came to him, he would adopt the same vacant, foolish expression as when he had finished writing the entire work.
He dipped the pen tip into the ink pot.
After thinking a little more, he then wrote furiously with vigor.
Zenzo Kasai, one of the most unfortunate Japanese novelists at present, said, “Kasai Zenzo was still alive at that time.”
He was not yet as famous as he is now.
A week passed, and Mr. Bururu’s class time arrived again.
The new students, who had not yet fully become friends with one another, sat at their respective desks in the classroom waiting for Mr. Bururu, secretly exchanging hostile glances through the haze of cigarette smoke.
Mr. Bururu, who had entered the classroom with his slender eyebrows furrowed as if cold, soon smiled a faintly bitter smile and murmured a Japanese surname in a peculiar accent.
It was his name.
He slowly stood up, looking reluctant.
His cheeks were bright red.
Mr. Bururu said without looking at his face.
“Most Excellent!” he continued, pacing around the lectern with his head bowed.
“Is this essay absolutely original?” He raised his eyebrows and replied.
“Of course.” The classmates erupted into a bizarre uproar.
Mr. Bururu’s pale, broad forehead faintly flushed as he looked his way.
He immediately averted his eyes, lightly pressed his pince-nez with his right hand, and enunciated clearly, pausing after each word: “If it is, then it shows great promise and not only this, but shows some brain behind it.”
He insisted that true happiness could not be obtained from without—that whether one became a hero or a martyr, it was the resolve of the heart alone that held the key to approaching true happiness.
He began by writing the suggestive reflections of Kasai Zenzo, his senior from his hometown, and proceeded to elaborate on them as he advanced his pen.
He had never met Kasai Zenzo, nor did he know whether Kasai Zenzo had ever shared such reflections, but he thought that even if it were a lie, if he could manage to write it, Kasai Zenzo would surely forgive him.

Because of this, he became the sole focus of his class’s adoration.
Young crowds are sensitive to the emergence of a hero.
Mr. Bururu continued to try out one good assignment after another for his students.
Fact and Truth. The Ainu. A Walk in the Hills in Spring. Are We of Today Really Civilised? He swung his arms with all his might.
And thus he was always fairly rewarded.
The thirst for glory in one’s youth knows no bounds.
That year during summer vacation, he returned to his hometown carrying himself with the pride of a promising man.
His hometown lay in the mountains at Honshu’s northern tip, his family being a well-known landowner in that region.
His father possessed an incomparably good-natured disposition yet tended toward maliciousness—even acting deliberately spiteful toward him, his only son.
No matter what failures he committed, his father would sneer and forgive him.
Then he would say while turning aside:
“If you don’t do something clever.”
After muttering this, he would abruptly bring up a completely different topic like some shrewd man.
He had long detested this father.
He found him utterly repulsive.
This stemmed from his father having done nothing but tactless things since childhood.
Mother revered him beyond reason.
She believed he would surely become someone great someday.
Even when he first returned home as a high school student—his mother initially startled by how sullen he’d grown—she concluded it must result from higher education.
When he returned to his hometown, he did not idle about.

From the storehouse, he found his father’s old biographical dictionary and investigated the brief histories of the world’s literary masters.
Byron published his debut poetry collection at eighteen.
Schiller too was eighteen when he first took up his pen to write *The Robbers*.
Dante conceived the draft of *The New Life* at nine years old.
He too had done so.
He, who had been praised for his writing since elementary school and was now even recognized by knowledgeable foreigners as having some intellect, also...
He brought out a table and a chair under the large chestnut tree in the front garden and diligently began writing a long novel.
His gestures of this sort were natural.
Regarding that, I won’t let you claim to have no inkling.

He titled it "Crane."
It was a long novel tracing a genius’s birth through to his tragic end.
He liked to prophesy his own fate through his own works in this way.
He struggled with the opening.
He wrote like this.—There was a man.
At four years old, a wild crane built its nest in his heart.
The crane was ardently arrogant.
...and so on.

After summer vacation ended, in mid-October, on a night when sleet was falling, he finally completed the manuscript.
He immediately took it to the town’s printing shop.

Father sent him two hundred yen exactly as he had requested, without protest.
When he received the registered letter, he once again resented his father’s malicious nature.
If he was going to scold me, he should have just done so; what grated was him sending it over in silence with that magnanimous air.
By late December, *Crane* had become a beautiful book of over a hundred pages in chrysanthemum half-size format and was piled high on his desk.
On the cover, a strange bird resembling an eagle had spread its wings as if the space were too cramped.
First, he signed and sent one copy each to the main newspapers in the prefecture.
When I awoke one morning, my name would likely be renowned throughout the world.
To him, each moment felt like a hundred, a thousand years.
He walked around distributing five, ten copies to bookstores in town.
He pasted flyers.
Clutching flyers—roughly five inches square, emblazoned with fierce phrases like *Read Crane, Read Crane*—and a bucket slathered with paste in both hands, the young genius raced to every corner of the town.

Thus there was nothing mysterious about how he had come to know everyone in town from the very next day onward.

He continued wandering aimlessly through the streets, exchanging silent bows with every person he encountered.
When his greetings went unnoticed due to others’ inattentiveness, or when he found the posters he’d painstakingly pasted onto telephone poles the previous night ruthlessly torn down, he would make an exaggerated show of grimacing.
Eventually he entered the town’s largest bookstore and asked the young clerk if *Crane* was selling.
“Not a single copy yet,” the clerk replied brusquely.
The clerk appeared unaware he was the author.
Undeterred, he casually prophesied “They’ll start moving soon enough,” before leaving the shop.

That night, he returned to the school dormitory, repeating that habitual excuse of his—which even he had grown somewhat troubled by—over and over.

On the very first night of such a glorious dawn to his life, *Crane* was already humiliated.

The moment he stepped into the dormitory cafeteria for dinner, he heard the dormitory students’ strange uproar.
At their dining table, *Crane* was undoubtedly being discussed.
He modestly kept his eyes downcast as he sat down in a chair at the corner of the cafeteria.
Then, he cleared his throat softly and poked at the cutlet on his plate.
The dormitory student sitting immediately to his right extended a copy of the evening paper toward him.
It seemed to have been passed along one after another from the dormitory students five or six seats ahead.
He slowly chewed his cutlet while vacantly turning his eyes toward the evening paper.
The single character *Crane* struck his eyes.
Ah.
The piercing outcry of hearing the reception of his debut work for the first time.
Nevertheless, he did not hurriedly reach for the evening paper.
Using a knife and fork to cut apart the cutlet, he calmly skimmed through the criticism.
The critique was typeset in small print in the left corner of the page.

―This novel is thoroughly conceptual from start to finish.
Not a single flesh-and-blood character is depicted.
All of them are distorted silhouettes seen through frosted glass.
In particular, the conceited protagonist’s bizarre words and deeds bear an uncanny resemblance to an encyclopedia riddled with missing pages.
The protagonist of this novel supposedly affects Goethe by morning, takes Kleist as his sole teacher by evening, and possesses the essence of every literary giant across the globe. In his boyhood, he adores a girl he glimpsed once to the point of death; in his youth, he reunites with her only to be disgusted to the point of nausea—this must be some derivative adaptation of Lord Byron’s work.
And it’s a clumsy direct translation.
First of all, the author seems to understand even Goethe and Kleist only as conceptual types.
The author likely hasn’t read a single page of *Faust* or a single act of *Penthesilea*, wouldn’t you agree?
*How rude.*
Above all, at the end of this novel, there is a depiction of the dry, rattling sound of wings flapping from a crane stripped of its feathers; while the author likely intended this description to impart a perfect impression upon readers and make them feel the dazzle of a masterpiece, we can only turn our faces away from the ugliness of this malformed crane.

He was chopping the cutlet.
The more he tried to stay calm—calm—the clumsier his movements became.
*A perfect impression.*
*The dazzle of a masterpiece.*
This hurt.
Should I laugh out loud?
Ah.

In those ten minutes with his face still bowed, he aged ten years.

To this day, he still did not know what man had given this heartless advice, but using this humiliation as a wedge, he began to encounter various misfortunes.
Other newspapers similarly did not praise *Crane*, and his friends also treated him exactly as the rumors dictated, addressing him by the avian name “Crane.”
Young crowds are sensitive even to the downfall of heroes.
The book had sold only an embarrassingly small number of copies—so few it was shameful to mention.
The people passing through the streets were, of course, no different from complete strangers.
Every single night, he secretly went around peeling off the flyers from every street corner in town.

Although the full-length novel *Crane* met a tragic end just like the story within its pages, the wild crane nesting in his heart still feebly spread its wings, lamenting the inscrutability of art, entrusting life’s tedium, and within that desolate reality, indulged in anguished writhing as it pleased.

Before long, winter vacation began, and he returned home growing increasingly morose.
The wrinkles gathered between his brows had come to suit him after all.
Even so, his mother—still believing in that vaunted higher education—gazed at him adoringly.
Father welcomed him with that maliciously cutting attitude.
Good people seem ever inclined to hate one another.
Behind Father’s wordless sneer, he sensed those newspaper readers lurking.
Father must have read it too.
When he realized mere ten or twenty lines of printed criticism had spread their poison even to this backwater, he wanted to turn his body into stone—into cattle—into anything but himself.

In such a case—if he were to receive tidings from the wind like those that follow—what would happen?
Eventually, after spending his eighteenth year in his hometown, on the New Year’s Day when he turned nineteen, he awoke and found his eyes drawn to the approximately ten New Year’s cards placed by his pillow, it is said.
Among them was one—this postcard, with no sender’s name written on it.

“I’m not up to anything bad, that’s why I’m writing this plainly on a postcard.”
“I suppose it must be that time again when you’re feeling downcast.”
“You grow despondent over the merest trifles—that’s what I can’t abide.”
“Nothing looks fouler than a man who’s lost his pride.”
“But you mustn’t torture yourself.”
“You’ve got both the spirit to oppose villains and the heart to seek a world filled with tenderness.”
“Someone far away knows this about you, even when you keep silent.”
“You’re simply a bit frail.”
“We ought to shelter and cherish honest folk who lack strength.”
“You’re neither famous nor titled.”
“But only yesterday I read twenty Greek myths and found a charming tale.”
“Long ago when earth was formless, seas didn’t flow, and air hung thick with chaos—even then Lord Sun rose daily. One dawn Iris, Juno’s rainbow maid, laughed: ‘Lord Sun! How dutifully you climb each morning though no blade nor spring exists below to worship you!’”
Lord Sun answered.

“However, I am the Sun,” he declared. “It is because I am the sun that I rise. Let those who can see, see.”
“I’m not a scholar or anything,” she continued. “Even writing just this much required quite a bit of thought—I drafted it over and over countless times. I wrote with all my might to let you know there’s someone praying you’ll behold a fine first dream and sunrise, gaining ever more confidence in living.”
“I think writing such things abruptly to a man is improper and wrong. But I didn’t write anything embarrassing. I’m deliberately not writing my name. You’ll probably forget me before long, I think.”
“I don’t mind if you forget me.” A pause. “Oh, I’d forgotten—Happy New Year.”
“New Year’s Day.”

(Tidings from the Wind does not end there.)

“You have deceived me.”
“You promised to have me write a second and third *Tidings from the Wind*, yet after making me compose enough peculiar New Year’s greetings to fill two postcards, you seem intent on letting me perish.”
“Have you once again commenced your customary profound scrutiny?”
“I knew from the beginning it would come to this.”
“Yet I prayed for nothing else—for your sake and mine—that perhaps by some chance that so-called inspiration might manifest and somehow manage to sustain me.”
“So it was futile after all.”
“Perhaps because you’re still young?”
“No—say nothing at all.”
“They say a general who loses the battle keeps silent.”
“People claim *Hermann and Dorothea*, *The Wild Duck*, and *The Tempest* were all written by their authors in advanced age.”
“Talent alone appears insufficient for creating works that grant others respite or cast illumination.”
“If you were to live like a torch through this detestable world for ten or twenty years hence—and then, unforgetting, were to summon me once more—how elated I should be.”
“I will come—I swear it.”
“Promise me.”
“Farewell.”
“Oh—do you mean to destroy this manuscript?”
“Desist, I beg you.”
“Should some literature-poisoned man—one who writes in this contorted poetic tongue—compose a novel and casually append something like this while feigning ignorance, pretending it mere scribbles—why, people might applaud unexpectedly, declaring how splendidly you’ve murdered me.”
“Your faltering figure would doubtless prove most popular.”
“And thanks to this, my fingertips—then my legs—shall turn deathly cold within three seconds at most.”

“I’m not truly angry.”
“But you’re not at fault, and no—there’s no reason for it.”
“I just like you.”
“Ahhh...”
“Do you believe happiness comes from without?”
“Farewell, dear boy.”
“Become more of a villain, I pray.”

The Man looked down at the unfinished manuscript paper, thought for a while, and then titled it *Monkey-faced Youth*.
It was because he thought it a tombstone that fit him so perfectly it was beyond repair.