Pathway to Japanese Literature

1

Like eyes that had parted from someone, a flock of carrier pigeons strolled over the newspaper company's sky, tracing large circles through the water-laden gray air.
Smoke crawled low across the sky, dissolving over the currents of daily life.

Dusk added its glow to the city’s lamps as it seeped into the farthest reaches of the alleyways.

The dusk of a thawing day.
The city sank into the depths of the fog, and when the outlines of tall buildings vanished into the sky, the lights lit in upper windows flickered like lighthouses on a foggy night.

The interior of the fruit shop was entirely enclosed by walls of fogged glass, and when he absently wiped away a large S initial with the edge of his woolen scarf, mandarin oranges and ponkans suddenly emerged from the mist.
The woman’s smile sulked behind the mandarin oranges.
When he pushed open the glass door and entered, the woman stiffened and was lighting a match to a doll made from napkin paper.
The doll burned as it collapsed into the ashtray.
The matchbox lay shattered in pieces across the table.

――He was late.

——……

“What’s wrong?”

——……

“You’ve got crime clinging around your mouth.”

“——Oh?”

When I look at windows, I think they’re beautiful symbols that lend romance to human emotions.

——Oh?

Even now, through the company gate from which people were spewed out in swarms, I too was spewed out as one of them.
Countless backs passed before me one after another, overlapping, leaving strangely lonely silhouettes in my eyes as they all glided smoothly away.
The city was wrapped in thick fog—within it screeched streetcar bells and glared automobile headlights.
As the light revolved, within that ring swarmed soundless figures—exactly like a school of fish at the ocean’s depths—people, people, people... When I lifted my eyes—look—that department store over there had already closed, its lights extinguished.
The outlines of buildings melted into the fog until sky and earth became indistinguishable.
Then in an unexpectedly high place burned a single solitary light.
In that office over there—they must have been handling remaining tasks.
I...

“My, aren’t you talkative today? You’re not quite yourself, are you?”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because… because your eyes are full of tears.”

“It’s the fog. The fog gathered on my eyelashes.”

“Are you planning never to see me again?”

“But you absolutely refuse to take me across the bridge. So…”

The woman suddenly fell silent. A blue melancholy drifted across her face like cloud shadows racing over a lake’s surface. After a moment:

“You may come if you wish.”
“But…it would be better if you didn’t.”

At the edge of the town stood a bridge.
The far side was perpetually veiled in mist.
Whenever the woman reached its approach, she would invariably bid farewell.
Without turning back, she would briskly cross over and disappear homeward.
He would lean vacantly against the bridge's lamppost, watching her receding form dissolve into the haze.
His ears would catch the fading strains of the Mazurka she hummed while departing.
Then he would pivot sharply and trudge back through those twisting alleys like some forlorn stray.

In the dark little room without a charcoal brazier, pulling at his shirt, knowing her beyond that bridge had recently become his yearning. But even though the woman hadn’t told him to come, crossing the bridge alone made him feel defeated—something he couldn’t bring himself to do. The woman always waited for him at a fixed time behind the mandarin oranges. The woman was called Shiika. He did not know her other names, nor even how they were written. Even how he had come to know her was something he no longer had any real sense of.

2

Night enveloped the city.

Over the rooftop garden of the newspaper office, the night wind blew like a funeral procession. A single black figure leaned vacantly against the railing, gazing down at the city below. Along the main avenue stretched two endless straight lines of streetlights, while car headlights—glowing like noctiluca in a nocturnal sea as fish dart—interwove in constant motion.

In the factory downstairs, an Albert Company high-speed rotary press—churning out thousands of newspaper sheets per minute—continued its thunderous rotation, plunging twenty-odd neighboring households into insomnia-induced neurasthenia.

The stench of oil, paper, and sweat—alongside the new minister’s grandson’s smile, a bride’s sorrowful gaze, or Ibsen, Chiang Kai-shek, lovers’ suicide, insurance mania, Terao Fumiko, Araki Mataemon, moratorium…—were all bound with coarse rope, loaded onto trucks, and dispatched toward several stations linking this metropolis to rural provinces.
So even if he had ascended to this rooftop garden as nonchalantly as a black rubber balloon, there was no one to reprimand him.
He was thinking about Shiika.
The smile of Shiika who had said, “If you wore a morning coat, you’d look quite dashing in it.”

He quietly took out a Clara Bow promide from his pocket and gazed at it. Each time the searchlight rotating around the towering rooftop spire flashed its long luminous tail across the urban sky, caressing the night air, Clara Bow’s face would briefly brighten into a smile—only to sullenly retreat into darkness again, lost in thought within the shadows when the light passed. She had that quality about her. Shiika had it.

She was always cheerful and lively when they met, but her retreating figure humming the Mazurka as she vanished across the bridge—the Shiika who lived in his memories during their time apart—was as lonely and melancholy as a road leading to a graveyard.

Under California’s bright sky, the figure of a girl moving vivaciously emitted the fragrance of fruit and sunshine across countless screens worldwide. She possessed an Eastern grace unique to Oriental women, and though her hair remained uncut, there was something in Shiika’s features that resembled Clara—especially when she would say “You forgot something,” tilting her head slightly as she sought his lips. Shiika absolutely refused to give him a photograph—she inexplicably detested leaving behind concrete proof that humans had existed within something called the past. She was so afraid of contemplating anything beyond her present self in the moment. So reluctantly he bought that American actress’s photo card and adjusted the nose area with pale ink to make it slightly lower.

When he and Shiika were talking as usual at the fruit shop, the term Sunkist came up.
He insisted that it surely meant "kissed by the sun."
California always lies beneath a bright sky where fruit grows in abundance.
Over there, a Clara who closely resembled you was vigorously scattering the spring petals that blossomed in men’s hearts.
Like a chameleon that forgot its chastity—cheerful yet melancholic,…

Then Shiika suddenly pointed at the navel orange she was eating and asked, “Do you know why this is called a navel?”
“It was in Naples, Italy—” he began.
“No, that’s not it,” she interrupted. “This comes from the English word ‘navel’—like a bellybutton—that got twisted around.”
“See? This part here looks like a bellybutton.”
“My English teacher told me that,” Shiika laughed.
“Didn’t Aristotle say all things have a navel?”
The thistle pattern on her crimson kimono swayed at the swell of her breasts, scattering an intense fragrance... He couldn’t help remembering such things.
What had he come to the newspaper building’s rooftop for so late at night?

He put away the photo card and quietly began to walk.
When he opened the pigeon house door, he suddenly grabbed a carrier pigeon and hid it under his mantle.

3

In the department store, every facet of life stung the eyes like the cut ends of bundled green onions.

A noblewoman whose ten fingers proved insufficient had borrowed the fingers of two young ladies to make every diamond she owned glitter.
A young company employee had brought up various topics about food to scatter his wife's purchasing focus.
The mother was picking out detachable collars here and there—ones her daughter kept saying she disliked—as though selecting a prospective son-in-law.
The daughter, truth be told, had taken a strong liking to one herself, but since she was likely to be scolded by her mother, her face turned red as she fretted.
There was an old man shoplifting a toy trumpet, driven solely by the desire to be liked by his grandchild.
A young typist was buying glasses.
Rejoicing that now she could see the man’s face clearly even when not kissing.
An actress was promoting her own name using a bulletin board.
While the younger sister was having her arranged meeting, the older sister—who had already married—found her heart racing even more.
The ideologue was shaking off the tailing detectives by exploiting the parasol’s chromatic illusion.
Two schoolgirls who had fallen into a homosexual relationship were buying matching shawls while holding hands, appearing delicate.
As the elevator had just reached capacity, the mother left behind by the young couple abruptly recalled her own age and suddenly began waiting for the next one with a forlorn look.
A single person was buying a brush to remove dust from coat hems.
A radio was playing a quiet serenade amidst this crowd.
A young maid slipped past her mistress's gaze and stealthily flipped over the price tag on Takasago's step-platform.
In the rooftop garden, a heartbroken soul was being taunted by monkeys.
In the smoking room, land transactions were being conducted.
A man who had been kept waiting endlessly stood before the watch department, anxiously checking the time, but pitifully, the countless clocks displayed there showed the hour in every city across the globe.…………

Before the third-floor clothing department, he suddenly appeared.

“I need a morning coat.”

“Ah, a custom order?”

“I need it tonight without fail.”

“Well, that’s…”

With a troubled expression, the store clerk converted his height to metric measurements.
When he stood on tiptoe, he felt as if he might glimpse the Statue of Liberty in New York.
After pondering awhile, the clerk seemed to recall something. With an “Ah, right!”—accompanied by the knee-slapping gesture of old—he produced a morning coat.
“Actually, this was worn by a Parisian doll at our recent World Customs Exhibition,” he said.

When fully dressed, he looked remarkably dapper, his mood brightening like the coarse stripes on his trousers.
"I'll just show this to my wife downstairs," he said.
With his utterly natural manner and behavior, the clerk found nothing suspicious.
"In that case, we'll place this coat in a box and send it to the purchased goods counter at the exit..."

However, the elevator continued smoothly all the way down to the bottom floor.
Mingling with countless people, he was slowly spat out into the city.

Walking through the lamplit dusk-filled streets, he thought.
At the company, I work eight hours a day doing more than enough labor equivalent to dividing this nation's production by its population.
So it’s only fair that I do my share of dividing the nation’s luxuries by its population.
Just as public morality in trains is perfected through individual practice, so too my morning coat... Then he stared vacantly, thinking about how Shiika always wrapped a handkerchief around her left wrist.

They were supposed to meet at the hotel today.
Shiika had promised to reserve the room.

“It’s stifling, isn’t it? The steam heat.”

Having said that, Shiika opened the window. Absently continuing like that, she looked down at the cityscape where countless lights dissolved into the mist-shrouded low sky, humming her usual mazurka. As this Tchaikovsky mazurka, pronounced in Lila fashion, flowed from her lips like a song without lyrics, a strange melancholy touched the depths of his heart—especially at that time of parting when crossing the bridge.

“This mazurka holds sad memories,” Shiika had once said—a remark that had left him melancholy.

“Do you know about the Graphite Dance?”

Shiika suddenly turned around.

“No.”

“It’s even newer than the Charleston.”

“I dislike that sort of Daahty Dance.”

“Oh, how absurd.”
“Hohohohoho.”

In this square little room on the seventh floor of the hotel, when the two of them sat facing each other alone, how could he have imagined she had left unspoken secrets in the mist beyond the bridge? She laughed brightly like spring grass, took out a compact from her macramé lace handbag, finished adjusting her face, then suddenly dabbed powder on the tip of his nose.

"I have a friend like this among my acquaintances."
"She always fastens little silver bells to her garter clasps, so they jingle with every step she takes."
"By doing that, she wants to make her presence clearly known at all times, don't you think?"
"I suppose all actresses are like that?"

“Do you have actress friends?”

“Of course I do.”

“What are you doing beyond the bridge?”

“You promised not to ask about that.”

“But…”

“I’m thinking of being a dutiful daughter.”

“Are you with your mother and father?”

“No.”
“Then…?”
“Why should that matter anyway?”
“I want you to marry me.”

Shiika suddenly fell silent.
Before long, the mazurka flowed liltingly once more, faintly escaping her lips.

“Is it no good?”

“……”

“Huh?”

“That’s absurd.”
“You’re such a strange one, aren’t you?”

And as always, she laughed—the thistle pattern on her crimson kimono swaying back and forth at the soft swell of her chest, scattering intense fragrance—but from her eyes, tears overflowed of their own accord.

After a while, Shiika, as if remembering something, untied the paper package on the low table.
From inside it, she took out a beautiful Belgian-made cut glass candy bowl.
She held it up high.
The electric light drew a seven-colored rainbow across its countless facets, and she gazed entranced.

Never before had he thought her single eyelids so noble. Never before had he felt the nape of her neck to be so white. Never before had he found her chest so soft.

The cut glass made a faint sound and shattered across the carpeted floor. Her hands that had been holding it up so preciously went limp and dropped. She felt the stiffness in her shoulders from having done so for twenty years. Feeling somehow relieved and at ease, she suddenly buried her face in the man’s chest.

On her ring finger, the imprint of the onyx ring was pressed red.
Powder smeared the new morning coat.
Fragments of chastity glittered on the carpet.

The desk phone clamored shrilly.

“It’s a fire.”
“The fire broke out on the third floor.”
“Quickly, quickly, to the emergency exit!”

In the hallway, shrill electric bells clamored from countless opened rooms.
Next came the Russian opera troupe’s actresses—their disheveled nightgowns fluttering, blue eyes clouded with dread—rushing like Sodom’s doomed beauties toward the red-lit emergency exit.
The sopranos’ screams resonated in uncanny harmony.
…They marveled that this potent chorus belonged neither to Tchaikovsky nor Rimsky-Korsakov, but bloomed wholly new from their own throats.
At the doorway, a newlywed couple’s shoes remained nestled together, abandoned in tender proximity.

Clambering down the emergency ladder affixed to the building wall in a zigzag pattern at a steep angle, he desperately ran while clutching Shiika.
Shiika's hem caught on a ladder nail and tore apart with a sharp ripping sound.
In the street below, countless people squirmed here and there like insects.
Clutching tightly to the curve of her limbs—clearly defined beneath the torn hem as if she might melt away—he plunged headlong into the crowd.

“The hem’s torn.”
“I’m already yours.”

At the base of the bridge, Shiika said.

4

In the darkness, the carrier pigeon continued its raucous flapping of wings.

He kept staring through the sleepless night, thinking of Shiika.
He thought about that evening when Shiika had mingled with two or three men and they had played poker together.
In this card game where you hid your own hand and probed others', an utterly expressionless, masklike countenance—one that could lie effortlessly—was required.
They called this particular facial expression a Poker-face—that Shiika could craft such a masterful Poker-face had left him genuinely astonished.

Men and women who trust and love each other should try playing this poker game once. Like Mephisto's sneering laugh that had crept in, a shudder of dark suspicion would seep into every fiber of the man's being.

Her beneath that mask. What a masterfully feigned poker face she had!—The violent desire to know her beyond the bridge had assailed him like a storm ever since that night. Of course she had won overwhelmingly, and after carelessly stuffing bundles of bills into her macramé handbag, she smiled brightly and supplely wrapped her white arms around his neck—but he remained silent like stone and parted from her. Without even the energy to escort her to the bridge, they parted ways at the corner of the alley leading to the riverbank.

Shiika glanced back slightly, cast him a fleeting, entreating dark gaze, then turned briskly away and made her way down the meandering slope of the alley like an autumn leaf blown by the wind...

He quietly sat up and lit the candle.
As he stared at the flame rising straight before him, a vast room materialized in his vision.
In that ice-like room sat Shiika with a husband and their child—for years upon years without uttering a word, exchanging melancholy glances.—Yes, perhaps she was already married?

Then the dim alley-facing theater stage door superimposed itself over that room’s scene in double exposure.
——There emerged Shiika’s figure sneaking out.
A thoroughly drunken gentleman supported her as if carrying her into the car.
The vehicle vanished into darkness without heading anywhere particular...

His head grew increasingly irritated.
Just like at a masquerade ball—what was the woman dancing with him thinking beneath that expressionless mask?
If someone were to gently yet abruptly remove that mask, what licentious passions might sway across her face like octopus tentacles?
Or perhaps what innocence might float there—pale and guileless as the lips of a dreaming infant?
The mask that Shiika had never once removed until crossing the bridge hovered faintly in the dim light, its eerie expressionlessness barely visible.

He was assailed by ceaseless auditory hallucinations. In his auditory hallucinations, he heard Shiika's bat-like laughter mocking his sincerity. No sooner had he thought this than he heard a pure, sorrowful tone that seemed to implore him with some tormented anguish.

Wax tears cast the shadow of his heart as they flowed soundlessly down the room’s sole ornament—the silver candlestick.
When his fantasies had dried up like lips, a sob caught faintly in his throat.

5

“Just because I was born into a wealthy family—this unjust contempt I endure, you know? When we ponder our way of living, it’s pure fantasy—as needless as paupers dreaming of luxury. And we were never granted chances or settings to cultivate the resolve needed to smash those meaningless burdens—family honor and etiquette. No one ever shows us what a passive sin it is—how we waste our days fighting boredom while pushing embroidery needles. This warped fortune that even we find tiresome cuts us off from all others’ sympathy. I don’t crave pity—but I refuse to be unfairly hated or scorned.”

“Is your family really that wealthy?”

“Yes, they’re wealthy. Whenever there’s a bank run, Father’s heart leaps like cargo loaded onto a truck.”

“Oh.”

“The other day, I met a friend who graduated from girls’ school with me. She joined a social issues magazine right after graduation and has been active there.”
“When I brought this up again, she laughed and said—”
“‘Unlike Christ, we don’t aim to save all humanity. We save comrades tormented by shared struggles.’”
“‘Why don’t you people save each other among yourselves?’”
“So I told her—”
“‘We don’t even have the power to save ourselves.’”
“‘Then just die out,’ that woman said. ‘That’s nature’s law.’”
“‘We’re too busy tearing ourselves apart,’ she added.”
“When I tried explaining our common struggles—how humanity moves through this world like Earth itself, maintaining class as its grand orbit while countless personal orbits of fathers-children, siblings, spouses, friends spin in torment within it—they just trampled over such petty worries.”
“‘We can’t afford sentimentality over the petty bourgeoisie’s whimpers.’”
“But I’ll teach you something worthwhile—as a friend should.”
“—Fall in love.”
“If you people would just fall in love, couldn’t you use all your weariness and idle hours to love each other chastely?”
“Melt every last worry into it, you see?”
“Compared to that, we devote ninety percent of our energy to ideological work.”
“Only the remaining ten percent gets spared for love.”

“That’s why we can’t keep protecting just one lover.”
“Besides, protecting a single lover means creating an idol.”
“It means creating a concept.”
“That’s ideology’s greatest enemy.”
“So... that’s what she says.”
“I... somehow can’t tell where my heart belongs—I feel so unmoored, and...”

“Do you have so many things troubling you?”

“My mother is different.”
“My real mother died when I was two.”

“Huh?”

“Even though I feel nothing about it, my stepmother claims that ever since I was three or four—back when my consciousness had barely moved beyond the milk bottle—there’s been an infinite light of hatred in my eyes when I look at her. She kept saying that and troubling Father.”
“My stepmother says this, you know.”
“In other words—she says—the hatred my biological mother harbored during her lifetime toward every woman her husband felt affection for has taken root inside me as a pale subconscious. It still shines unconsciously in the depths of my innocent eyes, she claims—like a black cat’s eyes gleaming in the dark.”
“She’s always over there suspecting whether I’m not the one nursing grudges about everything.”
“Father is so considerate of Stepmother that he never speaks a word about me.”
“Stepmother is trying to force me into an unhappy marriage as quickly as possible.”
“And she knows full well what kind of man would make me most unhappy.”
“Stepmother seems to intensely resent me—who supposedly caused her suffering—even though I’ve never done anything to cause her pain, for potentially becoming happier than herself.”
“Can humans really hate each other so deeply?... And among them, the one most likely to make me unhappy is a certain banker’s son.”
“He’s skilled at the violin, and to my dismay, he’s in love with me.”
“The other day, the matchmaker insisted I listen to that man’s violin playing and made me hear it over the phone.”
“Stepmother absolutely insisted I listen—you know how she is.”
“Afterward, Stepmother comes out and says things like ‘How splendid! My daughter is absolutely delighted now.’”
“The next time I met him, I told him ‘That military march you played the other day was quite good.’”
“But he actually played Massenet’s elegy ‘Lament for Departing Spring.’”
“Irony—no, that’s irony for you, coming from him.”
“There was a time when he suggested going to the theater together, but he hadn’t even shaved his beard.”
“When I said that, he put on a straight face and replied ‘Well, I did shave once, but while waiting for you to finish your makeup, it grew back again.’”
“Modern men are simply obliged to stand around blankly waiting while women put on makeup for other men—that’s how it is.”

“He must take pride in despising women.”
“He’s contracted a contempt complex.”
“If he simply keeps scorning others, he gets to feel superior.”
“He’s caught by modernity’s vilest malady.”
“I’ll introduce him when we meet again.”

“Are you planning to marry him?”

Shiika suddenly fell silent.

“Aren’t you in love with that man?”

Shiika was biting her lower lip intently.
With each step, the vibrations painfully resonated through her lips.

“Huh?”

He asked persistently.

“Yes, I might love him.”
“What will you give us for our wedding?”

Suddenly, tears began trickling down her face.

The thread of his relentless imagination snapped there, and her figure vanished once more into the mist beyond the bridge.
In his head, doubt, gloom, agitation, and passion swirled violently like a cocktail shaker.
He started keeping watch over himself—this self that didn’t know what it might do.

The tree-lined path along the river stretched on endlessly.
The lights of the bridge where the two of them parted lay hazy in the distant mist.
Shiika’s pale poker face, bathed in the streetlight’s glow, smiled faintly.

“Everything I told you today was a lie.”
“My father isn’t wealthy or anything of the sort.”
“I’m really an actress.”

“An actress?”

“My, what a surprise.”
“It’s a lie.”
“I’m not an actress.”
“If you were to carve every single one of the marvelous, innocent fantasies this woman conjures up in an instant into your head, you’d have gone mad by now.”

“I’m already a madman.”
“Look here—like this!”

He said this while sharply turning around, then dashed off in the direction opposite the woman without once looking back.

Shiika watched him go for a while, then let out a deep sigh, languidly reset her expressionless face, and trudged toward the bridge like a walking stick that had belonged to the melancholy poet Lenau.

Along with the faint breath escaping her lips—like the sound of footsteps crushing fallen leaves—……

You are brimming with happiness,

I overflow with tears.

6

At the usual fruit shop, when he had already been made to wait idly for thirty minutes, a call came through to him.

“You?”
“I’m sorry.”
“I can’t come to you today, you know.”
“……Is something wrong?”

—No.

—But you went silent…… Are you angry?

—How cold your voice sounds today.

—Because the snow lies heavy on the power lines, you see.

“Where are you now?”

“At the Imperial Theater.”
“Won’t you come?”
“...I’m with that person we discussed before.”
“I’ll introduce you... Tonight’s Tchaikovsky.”
“Onegin...”

“Onegin?”

“Yes... Won’t you come?”

“I’ll come.”

At that moment he heard a man's low laughter through the telephone.
He hung up the receiver and abruptly grabbed his hat.
With a face like a slapped Harlequin's, he heard the faint sound of the block construction in his head suddenly collapsing.

In the town, snow lay piled in pallid drifts.
Along the power lines stretching endlessly through the streets, an ominous resonance—countless emotions tangled and creaking—thundered through this desolate back alley.
He turned up his coat collar as if to muffle his ears and staggered forward hunched over.
Within his vision where eye muscles had frozen—overlapping footprints of a man and a woman.
Here too emotions lay knotted together, discarded like cold embers spent of flame.

Suddenly, the city lit up brightly.
The theater’s decorative lights were reflecting a seven-colored rainbow in the mist of melting snow.
At the entrance, Shiika's face was smiling.
A figured-weave haori in canary yellow had crane patterns tie-dyed across its entire surface.
Behind her, a tall gentleman stood demurely, like an etiquette book.

The three sat side by side at the front of the second floor.
With Shiika in the center. ...He began earnestly rebuilding the block structure in his head again.

The curtain rose.
Tchaikovsky’s cheerfully melancholy melody quietly drifted from the orchestra box.
The conductor’s baton went tap, tap against his chest!
It tapped.

The stage was a field of snow.
Within it were two black dots—Onegin and Lensky—facing each other like two jet-black crows with ominous beaks.
He took out his fountain pen and hurriedly wrote on the edge of the program.

(Excuse me for asking, but do you truly love Shiika?)

The program was quietly passed into the theater opponent’s hand.
The man brought his face closer, peered at it intently, then similarly took out a fountain pen.

(For Shiika, not being loved is being loved.)

“Well, what’s this?”
“What conspiracy are you two plotting?”

Shiika chuckled softly.
The program shifted left and right on her lap.

(Do not mock me with such meaningless paradoxes.)
(I am outraged!)

(I’m the one who’s much more outraged here!)

(Do you think you can make Shiika happy?)

(The one who can make Shiika happy is neither me nor you.)
(Happiness dons a mask whenever it approaches her.)

(I must decline to have Shiika explained to me by you.)

(Are you also one of those who love her?)

"You're both being so noisy!"

Shiika suddenly crumpled the program.
On the stage, a thunderous gunshot resounded.
Lensky’s body collapsed into the snow like a withered tree.

“Stand!”

Suddenly he bellowed.
The theater opponent flinched, then stood up like a frog’s leg with muscles tensed.
Shiika dropped the opera glasses onto her lap.
He suddenly shoved the man’s waist with full force.
The man’s body swayed unsteadily and staggered—then went right over the railing and crashed down into the center of the first-floor audience seats with a heavy thud.
“Agh—”
“A scream—”

The audience’s heads rose as one; countless pairs of eyes looked upward.
On stage, Lensky—who should have been dead—abruptly sprang upright.
The music stopped short.
The chandelier above the seats blazed to life.
A scream!

The chandelier’s light began swaying violently across his vision.
A powerful arm suddenly seized his shoulder.
Through his unfocused eyes floated Shiika’s deathly pale face.
Her expressionless countenance—wide eyes emptied of all emotion.
Her blanched mask of a face.—He knew she felt nothing for that man now crushed like an insect on the auditorium floor below.
And he saw she harbored no hatred whatsoever toward him—this self who had killed for her sake.

7

The buds on the street trees were visibly greening, and a fragrant spring scent drifted through the city sky.
A group of schoolgirls bathed in pine pollen, utterly excited for no reason, returned home laughing brightly beneath the wall of a large mansion.
"It’s already spring, isn’t it?" remarked one of them, throwing up her hands with Dalcrozian abandon—only to inhale a swarm of mosquitoes, myriads upon myriads drifting unseen in the air, right up her nose when she took a deep breath.
She made a grimace and began to snort.

The bright sunlight poured bountiful arrows of light into the geranium pots placed beneath the eaves.

The investigation took about two months.
The preliminary judge, who had changed into a spring suit and taken a particular interest in his crime, conducted a highly conversational and free interrogation along with intelligence tests and psychiatric evaluations from early this morning, along with his young medical scholar friend.

The conversation transcript written below consists of fragmentary notes appropriately extracted from among them.

Q.
Has the defendant ever experienced any severe emotional stimuli?

A.
The intense desire to know her beyond the bridge was tormenting my emotions day and night.

Q.
Did the defendant firmly believe that knowing that would bring him happiness?

A.
I was certain it would instead make me unhappy.

Q.
I don’t believe humans exert effort to bring about their own unhappiness.

A.
I believe uncertain happiness would be more wretched than certain unhappiness.

Q.
To the best of your knowledge, what kind of character did that woman possess?

A woman skilled at maintaining a poker face. But this didn't stem from conscious malice. She felt no sense of reality about her own character and life beyond momentary instances. She even feared leaving behind a handkerchief stained with her lipstick in my possession. So even when she told magnificent lies, they became absolute images to her own mind. When she called herself an actress, she had indeed stood on some stage surrounded by gorgeous bouquets. When labeled a young lady, she transformed into an indolent daughter of good family who'd never once made her own bed. That was her unshakable subjectivity.

Q.
If that were understood, would the defendant not have had any reason to restlessly probe her?

A.
Humans can never find peace within another’s subjectivity.
They are compelled to impose cold objectivity upon every fact.
They are not satisfied with the mere fact that the sun revolves around the earth.
They want to place their own eyes upon an airplane.

Q.
Has that woman ever spoken much about what you call "her beyond the bridge"?

A.
She does talk a lot at times.
However, as I mentioned earlier, I believe it was likely an endless chain of lies conjured by her imagination in those moments.
If we pressed her with logical questions, she would immediately clam up like a shellfish out of water.
For hours on end, she’d stay silent as a locked drawer.

Q.
In such times, what attitude does the defendant take?

A.
I would silently trim my nails or try to recall each Hyakunin Isshu poem one by one... And besides, I detest factory-like women.

Q. Has the defendant ever felt he might acknowledge any abnormality regarding his own mental state?

A. If there exists anyone who considers me a madman, they deserve the same scorn as those Pisan scholars who reviled Galileo.

Q.

Q. Did the defendant become enraged upon encountering the fact that the woman loved a man other than himself?

A.
On the contrary.
I didn't care how many lovers she took or how many men she felt heartbreak over.
Because in every moment she was with me, she always loved me.
And because the version of her that existed beyond those moments held no reality for her.
However, it was not the man she loved, but the existence of a man who loved her other than myself that became an unbearable burden on my heart.

Q.
How did the defendant determine that the man he pushed off loved her?

A.
Because he, just like me, was concerned about whether I loved her.

Q.
Q. What interpretation does the defendant offer regarding her concept of chastity?

A.
If she were to uphold chastity, it would stem not from moral judgment but from a kind of fastidiousness—a resolve not to soil a newly bought handkerchief.
It comes from the desire not to destroy what one possesses.
For her, chastity is a cut glass candy dish.
If by some chance it were dropped and shattered, there would be no lingering attachment to those fragments... Moreover, she knows how to completely separate mind and body.
Therefore, even if she were to say, “I am yours,” that could not be called her purity.
She might have easily given herself to the man she detested most.
And she might have maintained a chaste relationship while on a deserted island with the man she loved most.

Q.

Q. If the verdict is handed down, the prison lies beyond the bridge—but is the defendant considering pretexts for appeal?

A.
I will gladly cross that bridge.
There, I shall quietly read the Kannon Sutra.
And then, I shall continue loving Shiika’s phantom to my heart’s content.

Q.
Do you have any wishes?

A.
Please give her the pigeon cage in my room as my memento.
And then, please advise her to marry soon.
If there is anyone who obstructs her happiness, I will break out of prison and kill them—please tell her I said that.

Q. If several years from now—after being released from prison—he were to unexpectedly encounter her in the city with the child of the man he killed, what would the defendant do?

A.
At that time, I intend to bow with ceremonial courtesy like Lord Wotaa Roorii.
Then I'm thinking of springing upright and walking through the city streets.

Q.
Is that feeling of yours, defendant, an ideology of resignation?

A.
No, that is not the case.
I am still in love with her as if it were my first love.
She is my one and only lover.
There exists a story from abroad that goes like this.
Two lovers who were deeply in love went mountain climbing, and the woman slipped and fell into a bottomless glacial crevasse.
The man wrapped infinite sorrow and sincerity in a black garment, built a hut in the cold village at the foot of the mountain where the glacier ended, and spent his entire life there—so the story went.
It was said that glaciers flowed invisibly at a rate of about three feet per day.
For the man to discover her there as an eighteen-year-old girl, unchanged from the past, would require at least thirty or forty long years.
All the while embracing the phantom of the woman, they said he kept waiting for her steadfastly inside a mountain hut even on stormy nights.
Even if Shiika were to flow beneath this glacier of life—circling lovers like a harbor welcoming a hundred ships, seeking to forget the desolation of having forgotten how to love—I would forever and ever prepare her final supper in a desolate, lonely hut where autumn leaves tap at the window, continuing to wait for her without hope.

Then the young medical scholar conducted various detailed psychiatric evaluations regarding the defendant’s consciousness, academic ability, memory, associative concepts, attention span, judgment, emotional excitability, and other factors.

Who was the man who loved women the most?
Schopenhauer.
Name world-famous musicians whose names start with M.
Mussorgsky, Mozart, Michio Miyagi.
What are the merits of bobbed hair?
When the wind blows, it expresses dynamic beauty.

What do you associate when looking at a slumbering urban night?
Sometimes it’s a piano fallen silent.
Sometimes it’s countless red dragonflies suspended in autumn skies.
Etc., etc., etc…

8

Shiika descended alone down the usual dew-strewn slope of the path leading to the riverbank.
The stars hung coldly symbolic of cosmic indifference.
To her eyes, the Big Dipper shining beyond that slope—preserving its eternal configuration as always—felt unnaturally rigid.
That such seismic shifts within her being should coexist with celestial bodies maintaining their immutable orbits and life persisting in its habitual rhythms struck her as a maliciously exclusionary constancy.
She now shifted faint awareness toward the muffled urban clamor blanketing streets left behind.

But the fact that had altered her heart and locked her in the darkness of melancholy was not that violinist Banker’s Son—the one who had been pushed from the theater’s second floor and crushed like a bearskin pelt.
Nor was it the pure-hearted sincerity of the man who had even committed murder for her sake.
Then what?...

When she received the single carrier pigeon kept in a cage, left him with that one cold word—"Goodbye"—and emerged from the deserted courthouse entrance, it was a Diana that glided soundlessly along the asphalt pavement toward the hotel.
As it passed by—the man’s face she glimpsed.
Shining like an alabaster cup brimming with happiness, with a veiled bride seated beside him...

No matter what her actions might be, no matter what her appetite might be, there was a sorrow in that single memory—never to be tainted—receding into the dark mist.

The desire to have someone—anyone who did not know her—listen to this final song chanted in her heart became a single silver thread that sustained life within her fragile body. Shiika cast tender eyes upon the pigeon in the cage tucked under her arm.

9

A carriage raced through the bright morning.
Inside sat he and another woman dressed in a showy charmeuse gown like an actress.
The carriage made a loud noise as it crossed the bridge and swayed away.
His heart was strangely bright.
At the base of the bridge stood a flower-selling girl who watched the peculiar carriage depart with a look of bewilderment.
The scents of tulips and freesia, blending into the green-tinged spring sunlight, wafted in refreshingly through the small wire-meshed window.

All of this was fine.
I was in love with a woman.
That was fine.
That was all I needed.
Even were I to go beyond the bridge, what could possibly be seen from this small wire-mesh window...

Three-story Western-style buildings gave way to rows of single-story houses.
Vacant lots began emerging here and there.
Flower gardens, tree-lined paths, a gray road—this solitary route stretched endlessly along the carriage’s trajectory.
At its farthest reach rose an immense structure—towering like an emblem of the most unfathomable thing among all unfathomable things.
He believed it to be a prison.

Before long, the carriage approached the entrance.
But no characters reading "Prison" could be found on the gate’s nameplate.

The woman riding with him suddenly burst into loud laughter.
The elderly gatekeeper, wearing a sorrowful expression, quietly opened the gate.
The rusty iron latch creaked.
The old man was still thinking about his daughter who had died in this building like a single camellia blossom arranged in a vase.
With the man’s letter still placed beneath her pillow, when the old man approached her deathbed, she shifted her clouded, dark eyes, grasped his hand, and died while continuing to call out the man’s name—his only daughter, still so young.
He was contemplating the sad fact that the last name she had called was not his own as her parent, but that of a man he didn’t even know.

10

Shiika woke in the morning, stepped out onto the veranda, and absently gazed at the sky. Then she tied the slip of paper—gently taken from a small box—to the pigeon’s leg, went out into the garden, pressed her cheek against it while clutching the bird tightly to her chest once more, and finally released her hold. The pigeon first traced a full circle in the sky, then suddenly turned southward and flew away like a kite whose string had snapped.

Shiika looked at the birdcage with its lid opened. She felt that her spring had escaped from it. She clenched a fresh green leaf firmly between her teeth and threw herself down onto the lawn. Her eyes were wetter than tears, and the bright sun painted a delicate rainbow upon her eyelashes.

On the newspaper company’s roof, a lone waitress girl in purple work clothes absently poked at the railing with the tip of a sewing needle she had forgotten in her collar, thinking about things like getting married or the electric bureau.
In the depths of the city below, buildings of various shapes glowed like seashells on the ocean floor.

Countless flocks of carrier pigeons drew a great ring beneath the clear blue sky as they circled above the newspaper company’s building. Each time, a black shadow grazed past the windowpane. The girl suddenly noticed a pigeon that had separated from the flock, perched on the railing right beside her. It occasionally opened its cute beak and, while blinking its perfectly round eyes, remained perched there without moving. The sight of it staying forlornly apart—not joining that flock over there, like a foster child long sent away to the countryside—struck the girl as somehow adorably poignant. Even as she approached, the pigeon neither tried to flee nor moved, staying perfectly still. The girl suddenly noticed the slip of paper tied around its leg.

11

When April comes, I plan to set up a plush, wide bed and hang a black myna bird cage.

I lie prone on the bed, propping my cheek with a hand, thinking to teach words to the bird.

May your happiness overflow,

Tears overflow.

Even if she mocks me so vehemently that she nearly topples from the weight of her own beak, I will say it again.

Happiness overflows where it should overflow,

Tears, again――

Even if it laughs hoarsely, I would rather respond to that withered voice,

"Me, well, my mother, you see—

They’re going to send me off to be married—

I plan to make it remember the story."

12

Through the bright streets walked three nuns with blue eyes, holding up the hems of their black robes and snow-white hats while carrying black Western umbrellas in place of parasols.
A calm conversation drifted from their lips like a soft breeze.

“It’s already spring, isn’t it?”

“Truly.”
“When spring comes, I always recall the scenery of my homeland.”
“Since coming to this foreign land, seven springs have now come around.”

“Every country is the same throughout the world, isn’t it?”

“My sister has probably already been made to wear a Western dress with a long hem.”

“I often walked along Kastanii’s tree-lined avenue with my mother.”

“May God grant my sister a splendid lover!”

“Amen!”

“Amen!”

(The passage inserted in Part 11 is included with the consent of the author F.O.)