Pathway to Japanese Literature

Kimura is a civil servant.

One day, as usual, he woke at 6 AM.
It was the beginning of summer.
Although it was already bright outside, the maid had considerately left the storm shutters closed just for this interval.
By the dim light of the lamp burning faintly outside the mosquito net, the solitary bedroom appeared lonely.

Mechanically, a hand groped around the side of the pillow.
It was searching for the watch.
It was a rather large nickel watch, purportedly one purchased from the Ministry of Communications for conductors.
The hands, as usual, were precisely pointing at 6 o’clock.

“Hey, aren’t you going to open the shutters?”

The maid came out wiping her hands and slid open the storm shutters.
Outside, as always, fine rain was falling from the gray sky.
Though not hot, a muggy dampness clung to his face.

The maid, wearing a summer kimono with the sash digging into her shoulders, slid each storm shutter one by one into their boxes.
On her forehead, sweat was beading, and disheveled strands of hair clung to it.

“Well, today’s another day where moving around will make it hot,” he thought.
From Kimura’s rented house to the tram stop was seven or eight blocks.
Even if he left the gate thinking it was cool, walking that distance would leave him drenched in sweat by the time he arrived.
He thought of that matter.

As he stepped out onto the veranda to wash his face, he remembered there were documents he needed to hurriedly submit to the Section Chief that morning.
However, since the Section Chief wouldn’t come out until around 8:30 AM, he thought it was fine to arrive at the office by 8.

And with a remarkably cheerful, unclouded expression, he gazed at the gloomy gray sky.
Anyone who didn’t know Kimura would surely wonder what could possibly be so amusing to make him wear such an expression.

While he was out washing his face, the maid swiftly folded the mosquito net and put away the bedding.
He passed through there and opened the sliding door, revealing the living room.

Two desks were arranged to form a right angle, and in front of them lay a floor cushion.
He sat down there, struck a match, and lit an Asahi cigarette.

In his work, Kimura separated tasks requiring immediate attention from those to be done during spare moments.
He would completely clear one desk and bring whatever urgent tasks were at hand onto it.
When those pressing matters were finished, he would immediately take the items piled on the other desk and move them into their place.
These piled items were always numerous.
They stood heaped high.
They were stacked according to urgency, with relatively pressing matters placed on top.

Kimura picked up the Hinode newspaper lying beside the floor cushion, spread it out on the desk he had cleared, and opened it to page seven.
It was where the literary column was located.

He read while blowing the fluttering ash of his Asahi cigarette across the desk.
His face remained unclouded.

From beyond the sliding door came the fierce sounds of a duster and broom.
The maid was hurriedly cleaning the bedroom.
Because the sound of the duster was particularly fierce, Kimura often complained, but even if corrected for about a day, it would return to how it was before.
Instead of using the paper attached to the duster, she whacked things with the tip of the handle.
Kimura dubbed this “instinctive cleaning.”
When a pigeon is brooding over its egg, if someone replaces the egg with a piece of chalk carved into a corner shape, it will still brood over that chalk.
The purpose was set aside, and only the means were carried out.
Without any thought of removing dust, she beat things simply for the sake of beating them.

To be fair, even when engaging in this instinctive cleaning or her "tongue battles," the maid worked with such energetic efficiency that Kimura remained satisfied.
The term “tongue battles” was something a novelist from the Romantic era had coined, referring to maids who would gossip around the neighborhood after their master left.

Kimura had finished reading something and frowned slightly.
Typically when setting aside the newspaper, he would either adopt an utterly apathique expression or else frown.
This was because what was written amounted to neither poison nor cure, or else struck Kimura as unjust.
One might think there’d be no reason to read such things—and yet he read on.
He would read with an indifferent air, occasionally furrowing his brow briefly before promptly returning to his serene expression.

Kimura was a literary figure.

At the government office, he performed work that was cumbersome, soulless, and tacked-on—labor that granted him no real influence even as his hair began thinning—yet as a literary figure, he was known to a fair number of people.
He hadn’t written anything of substance, yet he was known among people.
It wasn’t merely that he was known.
Once he had gained some recognition, his bureaucratic duties saw him transferred to regional posts or the like, where he was left for dead, only to be brought back to Tokyo after his hair began thinning and resurrected as a literary figure.
It was a convoluted career trajectory.

If one were to say that Kimura’s sense of unfairness upon reading the literary column was self-serving—that he grew angry when criticized and pleased when praised—that would be an unjust accusation. Whether it concerned his own affairs or others’, seeing trivial things praised and interesting ones disparaged was what made him feel this unfairness. Of course, when he himself was brought into the discussion, he undoubtedly felt it more keenly.

Roosevelt was traveling the world preaching, “If you see unfairness, fight it.”
Why didn’t Kimura fight?
In truth, Kimura had fought vigorously during the first half of his life.
But because he had been a civil servant since that time, engaging in debates meant he couldn’t produce works.
Since his revival, he had been writing works—clumsily though they were—leaving him no capacity for debates and such.

That day’s literary column had such things written in it.

“In literature, there exists what is called mood.”
“Mood is established upon situation.”
“However, it is something *indéfinissable*.”
“In all the works appearing in magazines associated with Kimura, there is no mood.”
“In Kimura’s own works as well, there appears to be no mood.”

To put it concisely, that was all.
And conversely, while examples of literary works possessing mood had been presented, not a single one was something Kimura found admirable.
Among them were included works that Kimura thought eminent authors needn’t have written.

Ultimately, Kimura didn’t truly grasp what was written. Even when encountering phrases like “mood established upon situation,” he found himself unable to form any clear conception. Though Kimura had read numerous books on philosophy and art, such terminology left his thoughts formless. To be sure, literature contained elements one might just as well term *indéfinissable* if pressed to name them—that much he could acknowledge. But what constituted “situation”? Hadn’t dramatists since antiquity spoken of works shaped by arranging characters across time and place? Was there truly any distinction between this and what Hermann Bahr pinpointed as classical literature’s essence—the tension arising from abrupt, copious, ever-shifting actions? That mood should exclusively arise from such foundations remained beyond Kimura’s comprehension.

Kimura was not a man of great confidence, but he did not think his inability to understand stemmed from any deficiency in his own mind. In truth, he found himself contemplating something profoundly pitiful and disrespectful regarding the journalist. When he saw the examples presented as works possessing mood, this disrespectful thought grew even more pronounced.

Kimura’s furrowed face cleared up completely in an instant.
And due to his habit of tidying up everything when alone, he neatly folded the newspaper and placed it in the corner of the living room’s engawa veranda.
If left there like this, after she used some for lamp cleaning and any remaining became unnecessary—he would sell them to a junk dealer.

This may have been written at length, but it was actually an event of two or three minutes.
It was an event that occurred in the time it takes to smoke one Asahi cigarette.

At the same moment he discarded the Asahi cigarette butt into the abalone shell serving as an ashtray, Kimura—appearing to have thought of something—chuckled to himself, gathered the stack of about ten manuscrits-like volumes from the desk beside him, and carried them to the filing cabinet.

That was the submitted scripts he was requested to judge by Hinode Newspaper Company.

When Hinode Newspaper Company held a script contest with a prize, Kimura became one of the judges.
Kimura had so many tasks he could barely catch his breath.
He had no time to read the submitted scripts.
If he were to make time for it, the only way would be to use his smoke breaks for that purpose.

During smoke breaks, no one wants to do anything unpleasant.
Among submitted scripts, there’s perhaps one worth reading with genuine interest for every ten you go through.

The reason he had agreed to read them was that he had accepted the task perfunctorily when asked.

Kimura was frequently maligned in the third-page section of the Hinode Newspaper.
The phrase “moral corruption by Mr. Kimura’s faction” invariably appeared.
A prime example occurred when a theater produced some Western playwright’s script using Kimura’s translated version—the same stale criticism surfaced.
As for that script’s nature: despite facing laughably strict censorship in Vienna and Berlin—places that not only permitted its publication as a book but casually allowed stage performances—it proved to be an astonishingly tame work.

However, that was something written by the third-page journalist.
Kimura was unfamiliar with the newspaper company’s internal affairs, but he did not find it strange that their artistic opinions had failed to reach even the third page.

What he had just read was different from that.
Arguments published in the literary column—even if they bore an individual’s signature—without any explanatory preface were akin to political editorials; one might well view them as expressing the company’s artistic perspective.
Thus, to say that what Kimura wrote lacked mood, and that the works in magazines he selected also lacked mood, was to say that Kimura did not understand literature.
Why would they have someone who didn’t understand literature select scripts?
If a script without mood were selected, what would happen?
By doing such a thing, could they possibly satisfy the authors who had submitted their works?
"It wouldn’t satisfy the authors, nor would it satisfy me either," Kimura thought.

Precisely because Kimura was pejoratively labeled a dilettante, even when faced with such circumstances, he could sustain his livelihood without having to read uninteresting material. In any case, he wanted to be excused from tackling this pile for the time being, and so he moved it onto the filing cabinet. Though writing about it turned out lengthy, this was a matter of a single second. In the neighboring room, the sound of instinctive cleaning ceased, and the sliding door opened. The meal tray was brought out. Kimura ate breakfast with miso soup containing taro roots.

When he finished eating and drank a cup of tea, sweat seeped into his back.
After all, summer was summer, Kimura thought.

Kimura changed into his Western-style clothes, concealed one unopened *Asahi*, and went out to the entrance.
There lay a lunchbox and an umbrella.
The shoes too had been polished.

Kimura opened his umbrella and trudged off.
The path to the tram stop ran through narrow rows of merchant houses, most shops there being long-established ones whose owners would greet him as he passed.
He took care when walking through that section.
In the neighborhood existed those who showed Kimura goodwill through such greetings and others who maintained an indifferent air of unfamiliarity.
None appeared to harbor outright hostility.

Thereupon, Kimura tried to speculate what feelings those who greeted him might be harboring. First of all, they did indeed consider those who wrote novels and such to be eccentrics. At the same time as viewing him as an eccentric, they felt he was a pitiable person and treated him as a protégé. That showed in their expressions when greeting. Kimura did not dislike it, but neither did he feel particularly grateful.

Exactly like the attitude of the neighbors, the man named Kimura did not have many enemies in social circles. There were only those who showed goodwill with a slightly condescending air and those who left him be with indifference.

Moreover, in literary circles, he was periodically criticized.

Kimura simply wished people would leave him alone.
Though wanting to be left alone, he wished at least to be allowed to write.
He hoped they would leave it be without mistakenly lambasting it.
And if a small number of people somewhere were to read his works and come to feel the same way he did, he thought deep in his heart, that would be a fortunate coincidence.

When he had walked about halfway to the tram stop, a man named Ogawa emerged from a side street.
Because they worked at the same ministry, they would end up walking together about one in every three instances.

“I thought I left a bit early this morning, but here I’ve run into you,” said Ogawa, tilting his umbrella as they began walking side by side.

“Is that so?”

“But you’re always the one ahead of me, aren’t you? You were walking along deep in thought, weren’t you? Plotting out a masterpiece, were you?”

Every time Kimura heard such remarks, he felt a ticklish sensation in his heart. Even so, he remained silent with his usual clear expression.

“When I saw *Taiyō* the other day, it said that your orderly life at the office and your artistic life were contradictory and could never be harmonized, didn’t it? Did you see that?”

“I saw it.”
“Art that disrupts public morals and civil servant service regulations cannot possibly be harmonized—is what they’re saying, I suppose.”

“Ah, I see—there was indeed a phrase like ‘disruption of public morals’.”
“I didn’t take it that way.”
“I simply understood it as a matter of art versus civil servants.”
“Politics in its current state is merely transient, while art is eternal.”
“Politics belongs to a single nation; art belongs to all humanity.”
Ogawa was known as the ministry’s chatterbox, and though Kimura always found him tiresome, he took care not to let it show.
The other man, as if gripped by an old compulsion, had hit his rhetorical stride.
“But tell me—you’ve read those speeches Roosevelt’s crowd delivers, haven’t you?”
“If we follow what that gentleman preaches, politics needn’t be merely temporary.”
“Nor confined to one nation.”
“Refine it further, and politics could become a grand art.”
“I imagine that aligns with the ideals of someone like you—what do you think?”

Kimura thought it utterly ridiculous and felt the urge to frown slightly but restrained himself.

Before long, they arrived at the tram stop.
As was typical of the outskirts, if one left in the morning and returned in the evening, they would inevitably end up riding only crowded trams.
The two stood beneath a red pillar with their umbrellas side by side, letting two trams pass before finally managing to board.

Both of them hung onto the hand straps.
Ogawa still did not seem to have talked his fill.

“You.”
“What do you think of my artistic philosophy?”

“I don’t think about such things,” Kimura answered lackadaisically.

“What’s your mindset when you do it?”

“I don’t think anything of it.
I create when I feel like it.
Well, it’s like eating when I’m hungry, I suppose.”

“Instinct, then?”

“It’s not instinct.”

“Why?”

“I do it consciously.”

“Hmph,” said Ogawa, making a strange face, and whatever he thought, he remained silent until getting off the train.

After parting ways with Ogawa, Kimura went to his room, hung his hat on the hat rack, and propped up his umbrella.
Only two or three hats were hanging there.

The door stood open with a bamboo screen hanging down.
Passing an attendant in a starched white uniform, he went to his desk.
Those who had arrived early had not yet begun work and were using fans.
Some exchanged greetings as simple as “Good morning.”
Others gave silent nods with their chins.
Every face was pale and lifeless.
And no wonder.
There wasn’t a soul who didn’t fall ill about once a month.
The only exception was Kimura.

Kimura brought out damp documents from a soot-stained cabinet labeled "Emergency Removal" and piled them into two stacks on his desk.
The lower stack consisted of documents to be processed day by day, with a bundle marked by a red tag at the very top, sticking out like a tongue.
This was the urgent matter that had to be submitted to the section chief that morning.
The higher stack consisted of tasks that could be handled sporadically at intervals.
In addition to his regular assigned duties, documents requiring corrections to wording also came to Kimura from other bureaus.
Those that were not urgent were included in this.

After taking out and placing the documents and sitting down in his chair, Kimura checked that conductor’s watch.
There were still ten minutes until eight.
There remained forty minutes until the section chief arrived for work.

Kimura spread open the top document from the high stack, read through it, applied paste from the pasteboard to a small scrap of paper and affixed it, then wrote something down.
The paper scraps—several connected by twisted paper string—hung from the side of the desk.
At the government office, these were called attached tags.

Kimura took his time and worked steadily without pause.
All the while, his face remained unwaveringly serene.
Kimura’s state of mind at such times was somewhat difficult to explain.
This man approached everything he did with the mindset of a child at play.
Even within the same “play,” there were interesting varieties and tedious ones.
Such work fell into the category of that tedious “play.”
Government work was no laughing matter.
He was keenly aware that he himself rotated as a small cog within the government’s vast machinery.
He was aware of this, yet the feeling with which he engaged in it remained akin to play.
The serenity of his face manifested this very state of mind.

Whenever he finished one task, he would drink down a glass of morning brew.
At such times, Kimura’s imagination would start acting up.
He thought how even division of labor could become tedious drudgery for those who drew the short straw.
Yet he felt no discontent.
That said, this did not mean he had resigned himself to accepting this as his fate, nor did he hold any *fataliste* philosophy suggesting such resignation.
At times, he wondered, “What if I quit all this?”
Then he considered what would come after quitting.
In his current circumstances, he imagined what it would be like if he were to write from morning till night, as he did when writing under the lamp.
Even when this man engaged in writing, he approached it with the mindset of a child immersed in their favorite play.
That did not mean there were no hardships.
No matter what sport one played, obstacles must be overcome.
Nor was he unaware that art was no laughing matter.
He was aware that even the tools he held in his hands could produce works capable of moving the world if they were to pass into the hands of a true master craftsman.
He was fully aware of this, yet approached it with the mindset of play.
Gambetta’s soldiers once began a charge only for their spearheads to grow dull.
Gambetta ordered them to blow the bugle.
Then, instead of sounding the charge, they blew *réveil*.
Italians maintained a playful mindset even when standing on the brink of life and death.
In any case, for Kimura, everything he did was play.
Therefore, if it was all the same play, there was no doubt that a preferred, interesting play would be better than a tedious one.

However, even that would become monotonous and tiresome if done from morning till night.
Even in his current tedious work, there existed a function sufficient to disrupt this monotony.

How would I break the monotony of a writing life after quitting this work?
There’s also socializing.
There’s also travel.
But that requires money.
I don’t want to approach social interactions with the attitude of someone watching another person fish.
To feel pleasure in *vagabondage* like Gorky，one must apparently have Russian-like heredity.
I consider that after all，it might be better to remain a petty bureaucrat.
And the fact that he thought this did not particularly come accompanied by any painful feeling akin to despair.

At times his fantasies grew increasingly unrestrained，and he would even dream of war．The bugle sounded the charge melody．He imagined how exhilarating it must be to gallop toward a high-raised flag．Kimura had never been ill，but being small and thin，he was not conscripted．Thus he never went to war．Yet he recalled hearing how even so-called heroic charges might involve crawling with sandbags overhead．Some of his enthusiasm waned．If placed in that situation，I wouldn’t refuse to hold up sandbags and crawl，he thought．But visions of heroism or exhilaration faded．Then he imagined that even if he could join a major war，he might be assigned to logistics and made to transport supplies．Were I made to stand before the cart，I’d try to pull it．Were I made to stand behind，I’d try to push．Yet I think I’d grow still further removed from anything heroic or exhilarating．

At times, he also dreams of voyages.
Crossing waves as large as houses and traversing the ocean would surely be exhilarating.
Planting a national flag on the polar ice would surely be exhilarating, he imagines.
However, even in that, there would still be a division of labor, and when he imagines that he might be made to stoke the steam engine’s fire, his dream of *enthousiasme* vanishes.

Having finished one piece of work, Kimura pushed that batch of documents to the far end of his desk and took down another batch from the tall stack.
The first had been hanshi ruled paper, but this time it was purple-tinted Western paper.
It clung flatly to his palm.
The sensation felt exactly like grabbing a slug along with a clothesline pole.

By this time, five or six colleagues had gradually arrived, and before long all the desks were occupied.
When the eight o’clock bell had rung and some time passed, the Section Chief appeared.

Before the Section Chief had even taken his seat, Kimura took the documents marked with red tags, stood at a slight distance, and watched as he slowly took documents from his portefeuille, removed the lid of the inkstone box, and began grinding ink.
Having finished grinding the ink, he turned this way as if by chance.
A Doctor of Laws three or four years younger than Kimura—with sharp, tightly composed features that left little room for softness, a face suggesting agility—he wore gold-rimmed glasses.

“Regarding the matter you instructed yesterday,” he began, presenting the documents.
The Section Chief received them, skimmed through them, and said, “This will do.”

Kimura returned to his seat with the feeling of having unloaded a heavy burden.
Documents that failed to pass upon their first submission rarely proceeded smoothly even on their second attempt.
They were made to be corrected three or even four times.
Over time, even the other side began to reconsider various aspects, so what was initially stated gradually changed in some respects.
In the end, they became impossible to handle.
Therefore, he rejoiced when they passed on the first try.

When he returned to his seat, tea had been brought. At eight o'clock when he arrived for work, a cup of tea would be brought, and on days with afternoon duties, another around three—even if he said nothing, the attendant brought them. It was tea that had color but no flavor. When he drank it down, the bottom of the teacup held a thick sediment of dregs. After finishing his tea, Kimura settled back as usual and steadily continued his work without pause. The processing of documents from the lower hill only occasionally required taking out ledgers to cross-check them, yet it progressed rapidly. There were times when he managed to finish three or four cases without taking a smoke break. What he had completed, he would stamp, have the attendant take them, and send them to their respective destinations. Among the documents were those that needed to be taken immediately to the Section Chief's office.

In the meantime, new documents would circulate in.
He handled those with red tags immediately.
The rest he placed beneath one of the stacks.
Telegrams he generally treated no differently than the red-tagged ones.

While engaged in his work, it suddenly grew hot, and when he glanced toward the window opposite, he saw purple-tinged dark clouds rolling in where the gray sky had been visible since morning.

When he looked at his colleagues’ faces, they all bore terribly weary expressions.
Their jaws slackened and drooped, their faces having grown somewhat elongated.
The humid air inside the room thickened until it pressed down on their heads.
Even when it wasn’t as exceptionally hot as now, after some time had passed into the workday, returning from the restroom and entering from the corridor meant being met with a choking sensation from the stench of cheap tobacco and sweat.
Still, compared to winter days when they lit the furnace and shut all doors tight, this summer season was far preferable.

Kimura looked at his colleagues’ faces and briefly frowned, but immediately resumed a composed expression and set to work.

Before long, it began to thunder, and it started pouring.
The rain slammed against the windows, making a terrifying noise.
Everyone in the room set aside their work and looked toward the window.

The man named Yamada to Kimura’s right said.

“When I thought it was getting muggy, the evening shower finally came, huh?”

“Yes,” he said, turning his composed, ordinary face to the right.

Yamada looked at that face and suddenly seemed to recall something, lowering his voice as he spoke.

“You plow through work so briskly, but watching from the side, I can’t help feeling you’re treating it all as a jest.”

“Nothing of the sort,” Kimura replied unperturbed.

Kimura had been told such things by others countless times.
One might say this man’s expressions, words, and actions practically invited such remarks.
Even at the ministry, the former section chief had denounced him as unserious and thoroughly disliked him.
In literary circles, critics disparaged him for lacking earnestness.
He had once taken a wife whom he later parted with unhappily; whenever daily life brought some trivial collision between them, his wife’s chief reproach had always been: “You’re making sport of me!”

In Kimura’s state of mind, there was neither earnestness nor pretense; yet this playful attitude toward all tasks likely made even the proper ex-wife feel the unpleasantness of being turned into a doll and played with.

For Kimura, this playful attitude was a “given fact.”
A certain young literary figure who associated with Kimura said, “Mr. Kimura, you lack an essential quality of modern people—it’s *nervosité*.”
Yet Kimura did not seem to feel particularly unfortunate about it.

After the evening downpour subsided into a drizzle, the air remained stubbornly warm.

When it reached around 11:30, only those who resided far away would leave for the cafeteria to eat their lunch.
Kimura would work until the starting gun sounded, after which he had made it his rule to eat his lunch alone.

When two or three colleagues had left for the cafeteria, the telephone bell rang.
The attendant went over and listened for a while, then said, “Please wait a moment,” and came to Kimura.

“It’s someone from Hinode Shimbun requesting you come to the phone.”

Kimura went to take the call.

“Hello? This is Kimura. What business do you have?”

“Is this Mr. Kimura?”
“I apologize for troubling you.”
“Regarding those submitted scripts—when might you have finished reviewing them?”

“Well…”
“I’ve been busy lately, so I can’t review them immediately.”

“I see.” He seemed to ponder what to say next.
“I shall inquire again another time.”
“I’ll leave it in your hands.”

“Goodbye.”

“Goodbye.”

A shadow of a smile brushed across Kimura’s face.
And he thought to himself that for the time being, the scripts wouldn’t be coming down from that document cabinet.
If it had been the Kimura of old, he would have declared, “I’ve decided not to look at those anymore,” and picked a fight over the phone.
Now he had grown considerably calmer, but there remained a touch of Bosheit in his smile.
However, with such petty malice, one could hardly qualify as a modern Nietzschean.

The starting gun sounded.
Everyone took out their watches and wound them.
Kimura also took out that familiar conductor’s watch and wound it.
The colleagues had long since finished organizing their documents and were noisily exiting.
Kimura, now alone with the attendant, slowly put away the documents in the cabinet, went to the cafeteria, leisurely ate his lunch, and then boarded the sweat-stained, packed train.

(Meiji 43 [August 1910])