Pathway to Japanese Literature

Initially, the Latin Quarter had been their enclave; next, they had moved to Montmartre, and now Montparnasse had become their center. “To leave Paris before June 30th is foolish; to remain in Paris after June 30th is equally foolish.” This was a proverb passed down among exiles from mouth to mouth. In other words, under some pretext of continuing annual events through June, Paris still retained its substance. Afterward, when the season shifted to coastal summer resorts, Paris became an empty shell. Even when one took pains to wear that year’s fashionable summer hat, it proved utterly futile. They admonished one another that even vanity yielded no effect.

Shinkichi Yodoshima was among the Japanese residents in Paris who fell into the category of exiles. But even calling himself that now felt like hackneyed sarcasm, so thoroughly had he become accustomed to the waters of Paris. The so-called "Riverside" district—that fashionable bustling area—had become so irritating to his very skin that he transported his meager belongings by car himself, crossed Grenelle Bridge, and relocated to Mozart Street in Passy Ward, known as the mistress town. That was also about four years ago. On the wall of his rented house, the laburnum from his neighbor Madame Besseire’s home—its tall woody vines parting through—blooms yellow year after year.

“This summer, I intend to be a fool for thirteen days.”

Shinkichi would answer in that manner whenever someone asked. The exile comrades who knew the proverb readily concluded that he indeed planned to remain in the area until July 14th’s Bastille Day festival—an unusual move for him. To his fellow Japanese exchange students who did not yet know the proverb, he simply explained it himself.

“This year I intend to witness the Paris Festival.” He had heard rumors that Catherine—whom he had loved fifteen years ago without ever meeting—was now somewhere in Paris, but he told no one of his dreamlike, tenuous plan to find her amid the Paris Festival crowds, when nearly all Parisians remaining for summer would flood the streets in revelry.

It was sixteen years ago that Shinkichi had left his young wife in Japan and come to this city. When he asked which was the horse chestnut flower, someone pointed out a white, faintly glowing bloom amidst the dark, lush foliage of the street trees—a cluster resembling upright bundles of candles. The famously touted Champs-Élysées felt exasperatingly vast and desolate; he could discern no trace of the picturesque quarter's charm he had imagined anywhere along its length. For a month—relying daily on a map from the family-run inn where he had been allowed to stay with meals included for a hundred francs, visiting key spots one by one as he wandered—Shinkichi’s first Bastille Day arrived. The town was lined with flags, strings, and lanterns along every eave. At every crossroads, bandstands adorned with decorations were erected, and people would seize whatever partner they found nearby and dance wildly around them. Until the song ended, pedestrians and vehicles on the street stood still and waited. Shinkichi couldn’t help but admire the Parisians’ festival—a true testament to their fervor—yet even as his heart raced at the thought of being swept into the revelry, he carefully avoided each swirling dance crowd, taking wide detours around them.

In less than a year, Shinkichi had fully adapted to Paris. Paris finally seized Shinkichi, making him forget his Tokyo hometown and molding him into the exile he now was. Leaving behind the student-like existence of family-run inns to taste fleeting freedom in cheap hotels; playing at domesticity in a quiet apartment beneath the Eiffel Tower's shadow with a single maid—Shinkichi began sinking his teeth into Paris from every angle. If one truly immersed oneself in Parisian life, daily existence alone would consume one's entire being. There remained no strength left for dividing between work or study. Shinkichi sank his teeth deep into Paris's marrow and became Montmartre's denizen. Even before the next year's Paris Festival arrived, he still hadn't touched the storefront decoration research that had been his original study abroad purpose. Instead, two women came to intricately weave through his heart via shared living. One was Catherine—daughter of an architecture school professor. One was Lisa—a woman of pleasure. Moreover, even then, the young wife he'd left behind in Tokyo kept her afterimage sharp in Shinkichi's heart. Paradoxically, this very presence formed the foundation where the two French women could seep in.

On July 1st at 4:00 PM, Shinkichi had been invited to tea in the small garden of his neighbor Madame Besseire, Paris's premier fashion designer. "The first day of foolishness has come upon you, hasn't it?" Madame Besseire said as she poured tea into Shinkichi's cup. She was a woman past middle age who no longer gave any thought to her own beauty. Because this madame had such an unaffected quality, even when encountering her rather eccentric antics or persistent attentions from time to time, Shinkichi found himself surprisingly untroubled.

“Truly, once July arrives in Paris, I feel even the azure sky turns utterly hollow.”

She looked up briefly at the vague yet bright Parisian sky and took a deep breath. Shinkichi pressed his head with a dessert fork and said while toying with the sawara soaked in liqueur that seeped into the silver paper with its sweet fragrance: “Perhaps one reason is that the horse races have ended?”

Both the Longchamp Grand Prix and the Auteuil steeplechase races had come to a halt last week. Madame Besseire adjusted the bent rubber butterfly drip catcher beneath the teapot’s spout on the wisteria-patterned table, wiped her damp fingers with the handkerchief tucked at her wrist, then stretched her hand out to hook under Shinkichi’s chin and turn his face directly toward hers. “Come now, stop talking about other things and do tell me already—why you’re staying for the Paris Festival. I have a hunch there’s more to your lingering than meets the eye. Even your demeanor differs from usual.”

When Shinkichi realized, indeed, though about twenty minutes had passed since coming to this table, he had been keeping his face down the entire time. Now flustered, he blinked two or three times and looked around at the sky and garden. On the trimmed lawn, red and white summer flowers bloomed profusely like embroidery.

“You’re behaving exactly like a child,” “Trying to butter me up with sweet talk.” Madame Besseire gazed at Shinkichi’s face for some time with a sly smile. She wasn’t in love with this young man. Yet should he fall for another woman, it remained unclear how jealousy might twist her sentiments. The ill-fated beauty—her history of warped marriages ending in ruin—had begun meddling strangely in others’ romantic affairs.

Shinkichi was thoroughly accustomed to having his chin grabbed by Parisian women. Shinkichi calmly took a cigarette from his case and carelessly put it in his mouth. He offered Madame a cigarette as well, then lit both of theirs with a lighter. The initial puffs of smoke from their mouths rose in perfect unison, which struck them as absurdly comical. The two laughed. Taking advantage of the relaxed mood, Madame said: “If you absolutely won’t say it, I’ll have to make some cutting remarks. You’re not staying in Paris for my sake, are you?”

Shinkichi found the fleeting clarity he'd felt moments prior—that he might finally explain himself—abruptly sealed by her words. Were he to describe his scheme in a tone matching Madame's mischievous teasing, the emotional logic might be grasped, but its substance would remain precarious at best. So finely woven was this newfound resolve with delicate emotional textures. At present, repaying this woman's familiarity through what would amount to a novel's title alone seemed the most gracious approach. Thus Shinkichi drained a cup of faintly sweetened tea—having forgotten to add more sugar—and spoke these words.

“Madam.” “I...” “If it were cuisine, I’ve gorged myself on too many Parisian specialties.” “And so...” “I’ve grown nostalgic for plain set meals.”

Madame Besseire’s manner, as expected stirred by that offhand remark he had just uttered, took on her characteristic erratic leap. “So,” “Are you saying you want to pick up some festival-going maid and become an ordinary young man?” “No way,” “But I do want to return somehow—to that ordinary world you mentioned.” “As I am now, I’m truly nothing but a stylish cripple.” Because Shinkichi’s subdued melancholy felt too natural, Madame’s erratic tone could not settle back into its usual plainness, cresting instead into a conflicted wave midway—both sharp and dull.

“Whatever the case—after four years of letting you share this view of laburnum flowers, you really ought to open up about everything. Even regarding my goodwill.” “Whenever you’re ready.”

While making such blunt remarks, Madame grew suddenly tense, and when Shinkichi started to rise to leave, upon seeing the letter from Japan that the concierge had deliberately delivered here, she persistently inquired about who the sender was. “It’s from my wife back home,” Shinkichi answered clearly.

Shinkichi returned to his room and folded himself up, then flopped onto his back amidst the Arabian-patterned bedspread of the corner bed that served as his daytime sofa. Using his right hand to help his left—which held the second cigarette he'd lit at Madame Besseire's—he slit open the envelope from his wife. As usual, it contained only practical matters. It concerned the city council election; the candidate selection included Shinkichi's family home within its scope, impacting the entire fish market's interests.

For Omichi, his wife who had been left alone to manage the shop after Shinkichi’s parents passed away during his prolonged absence while continuing operations single-handedly—even this Shinkichi, separated so long that their emotional bond now felt tenuous—remained someone she could not help but depend on. She, fully aware she could not obtain clear instructions from her husband who had grown unfamiliar with circumstances in their homeland, had persisted in reporting only practical matters. There had also been the fear that if she carelessly wrote something emotional, she might be despised by her husband who had gone to the West and become an enlightened person. She had endeavored to make the style of her letters increasingly resemble Shinkichi’s replies—cold and businesslike. Shinkichi, pleased with this approach himself, had at least made sure to skim through her letters.

However, in this letter, there was something Shinkichi could not overlook. It was written towards the end of the letter in the same detached manner as the rest.

Lately, when I comb the hair at my temples, two or three white strands catch the light in the partings and reflect in the mirror. I do not feel anything about it. However, it’s not something I actively show to others, and I try to conceal them as much as possible with a comb.

Shinkichi uncharacteristically kept rereading this part of the letter with obsessive repetition, unable to stop. Omichi had always been a girl whose features never fully shed their childlike appearance. Precisely because she was a wife his parents had procured for him, during his time in Japan Shinkichi had loved Omichi deeply. Shinkichi, being an only son, had resigned himself from the start to never knowing the closeness of having a sister. However, by marrying Omichi, he had unexpectedly gained both a wife and a sister. Before going abroad, Shinkichi had Omichi send for a kimono with shoulder tucks from her family home and had her wear it constantly. Her figure carrying ayame dumplings on a lacquered black tray through Tokyo's downtown Inari Festival truly appeared to Shinkichi as that of a sister.

As Shinkichi grew accustomed to Paris, he found himself increasingly recalling—and finding wanting—the ordinary childlike face of his wife back home. Paris, ravenous for distinctiveness. From dawn till dusk, she drove herself frantically—distinctiveness! Distinctiveness! she cried. Enchantresses, venomous women, coquettes, furies—she lashed every type of woman and drove their development to extremes. Mistinguett—Damia—Josephine Baker—Rachel Meller. “If the Virgin Mary had been born in modern times,” said the impresario of the Casino de Paris. “I would not hesitate to tempt her onto the stage.”

At first, whenever Shinkichi saw a woman, he would find some resemblance to Omichi—partly to soothe his homesickness, partly to resist the potent allure of French women. But before long came an incident where Shinkichi—unable to withstand even a moment’s resistance—had his armor stripped away and was sent into raptures by a Parisian woman. Shinkichi met Catherine, daughter of the architecture school professor.

It was when autumn had passed its midpoint. In the professor’s room, an electric stove parted its pink square lips. And yet the glass window doors remained wide open. A thin mist imbued with moonlight flowed into the room from the window and vanished. Having grown sufficiently familiar, Professor Fabre—the architecture school instructor Shinkichi had been attending—invited only new students to a dinner at his residence. To this Latin Quarter home whose old-fashioned architecture made one question whether such houses still existed in Paris, Shinkichi went for the first time, bearing a bolt of white silk as a gift. Though never fully committed to his studies, during this period Shinkichi still maintained superficial attendance at his enrolled school’s classrooms.

The housewife seemed to have passed away, for even during the meal, her daughter Catherine was managing everything. Shinkichi tried to find Omichi within this Catherine too, only to be pierced by a charm that was diametrically opposed. Catherine’s childlike innocence—unlike Omichi’s ordinary variety—exerted a charm of distinct character upon others. Her voice held such crystalline clarity it might have harmonized with a harp. With her noble-bearing poise and meticulous grace, Shinkichi—seated diagonally across—could only sense a dazzling aura as though reflected in a mirror, finding himself utterly unable to sustain his gaze upon Catherine’s face.

After the meal ended, the guests moved to the salon. Seeing Shinkichi—unaccustomed to Western customs—unable to properly lift his post-dinner brandy glass, the professor kept engaging him in conversation with forced kindness. The talk briefly touched upon Japanese architecture. But as intoxication took deeper hold, the professor began boasting about his daughter. Given his constitution that made him appear far younger than his presumed age, it seemed incongruous for him to call Catherine—a fully grown woman who looked twenty-three or four—his daughter. Moreover, his manner of praising her—however much one might excuse it as drunkenness—left Shinkichi thoroughly unsettled as a Japanese man.

“They say there’s no one who can see this daughter without being charmed.” “Everyone says so.” “Don’t you think so?” “And this daughter often receives love letters.” “They’re all quite serious.” “Just recently, a school graduate who went to Egypt for research sent a letter saying he feels unbearably lonely at the thought of not being able to meet this daughter for two years.”

Was the professor saying all this to foist his daughter onto someone? Or was this an extreme manifestation of what he’d long been told—that Westerners blatantly boast of their wives and daughters? Struggling to formulate a response, Shinkichi discreetly studied the professor’s demeanor. The professor cast a gaze dripping with paternal affection toward his daughter, but then turned back to Shinkichi with the dueling stare of an artist utterly consumed by beauty’s worship.

“You still seem doubtful of what I’m saying.” “Exactly.” “This daughter’s charm becomes all the more apparent when held on your lap.” “As her father, I know this well.” “Go on—try holding her.”

Catherine, who had been listening to her father and Shinkichi's conversation with a face flushed equally from bewilderment and curiosity, now compelled by her father's turned countenance, remained half-risen from her seat. She hunched her neck awkwardly toward her left shoulder and momentarily shrank back, but under her father's blunt command, reached a sudden resolution. With the heel of her left dancing shoe having hopped once, her right heel slid across the floor to catch up—and in the blink of an eye, she alighted lightly onto Shinkichi’s lap. Shinkichi felt the infinite weight of the soft form, his body stiffening like a board under its sumptuous pressure.

She said with a natural abruptness welling up from bewilderment. “I hear Japanese girls meet gentlemen looking rather sad.” In such situations, the demeanor of the Westerners present also struck Shinkichi as peculiar. There were a Romanian man and a Canadian man, along with five young Frenchmen, and they all gazed at the paired figure of the two with happy faces as if beholding something delightful. Resentfully recalling how Catherine’s soft weight on his lap that night had seeped deep into his melancholy, and phantasmally summoning from the haze-veiled moonlight he had gazed upon through the professor’s window that night the lamplit shadows of Rue Saint-Michel, Shinkichi wandered through the autumnal streets of Paris, adrift in equal measure of bliss and torment. While waiting for a second chance to meet Catherine, Shinkichi unexpectedly ended up encountering the courtesan Lisa.

Shinkichi put away Omichi’s letter into its envelope while on the chaise longue. He then reached out and tucked it behind the frame containing the storefront display photo of jeweler André.

What could have caused Omichi—ignored for over ten years—to suddenly resurface like this? Why had a mere two or three lines in a letter ignited this burning desire to return to Japan? Omichi’s childlike face remained unchanged, yet white hairs now sprouted sporadically across her forehead, coming loose. This report evoked considerable loneliness in Shinkichi’s heart—a heart that, through Parisian life, had worn away its emotions yet remained numb and acutely sensitive. The mere fact of Omichi growing old alone did not strike him as pitiable. That face—eyes and mouth formed merely by scooping clay from flat rounded surfaces with a trowel—eternally smooth like a doll’s. And time had begun to sink its claws into it. Serves you right. Ridiculous. The sentiment of a cruel aesthete. It was only when one came to discover traits in one’s wife worthy of insult and ridicule that heartrending pity and love finally revived. He had come to feel an achingly lonely desire to embrace his wife. What heartlessness. What perversity. Shinkichi grew frightened upon discovering in himself the same quality as that Jewish collector Samuel—who claimed that even when buying new pottery, he couldn’t feel it had become his possession unless he broke it, mended the seams, and made golden clasps shine there like centipede legs. Those large, protruding eyes—their gaze slackened within the sockets as if their moorings had loosened, twitching irregularly in misshapen movements; the irises, their pigment faded to a pale blue, spilling into yellowish whites over which snaked several threadlike earthworm veins. Those eyes of Samuel’s must soon become his own.

The varnish on the room’s furniture took on a dampened sheen, and the silver fittings grew cold and tarnished. It was already twilight.

Shinkichi was assailed by his habitual physiological unease and rose from the chaise longue while clutching his stomach. I really want to have an apéritif soon. Bothered by the lip plant flowers placed on the octagonal table, Shinkichi pinched their thick petals between his fingers and wandered around the table with uneven steps. Outside the window, a thicket of laburnum vines visible along the wall raged like disheveled hair against the early summer evening sky, and through gaps in their dark shadows, the yellow grasses of neighboring Madame Besseire’s garden—where she had just sipped tea—could be glimpsed below. Since then, Madame Besseire had likely succumbed to another bout of hysteria—pressing the cold blade of her glinting sewing scissors against her cheek as she often did, retrieving the visages of several former husbands from her memory, and reexamining those bittersweet recollections where love and resentment intertwined. Madame Besseire still seemed to harbor lingering feelings for her last husband, Georges. Perhaps because of this, when speaking of Georges, Madame Besseire clung most tenaciously to Shinkichi.

Shinkichi moved closer to the window. The black iron framework of the Eiffel Tower spearing through the cloudless darkening sky remained utterly indifferent. Shinkichi turned sharply and surveyed the room. The modernist interior decor his friend Fernand had designed—with its unsentimental mahogany of rough-hewn grain and sharp white brass angles drifting through shadows—maintained an air of indifference, appearing utterly cold. Fernand had been a young Alsatian who died. In the works of geniuses dying young, there always flashed a certain lonely egoism.

Shinkichi had come to want to meet Lisa, who was due to visit this room any moment now. Shinkichi checked his inner pocket wallet, put on his hat, opened the door wide, then sat down on a chair and waited for Lisa. He began fidgeting restlessly. Even as he did so, Shinkichi—aware of his own cruelty—kept imagining Omichi’s childlike face now sprouting strands of white hair. After a leisurely dinner of duck à la Tour d'Argent, Shinkichi and Lisa set out walking downstream along the Seine riverbank just before them. Lisa tended to the drunken Shinkichi as if he were a child.

Lisa was a healthy woman with bovine solidity. Though nearly ten years had passed since Shinkichi first met her, she still worked as a courtesan. By Lisa's own account, this profession suited her maternal disposition better than any other. She fashioned countless newly arrived foreign men into Paris-acclimated beings. The men would leave once they'd outgrown their need for her tutelage, moving on to more sophisticated companions. Yet she released them without hesitation and sought fresh novices. In time, these departed men always rekindled their affection, returning to address her as "Auntie". She would then assume that avuncular role, tending to them with matronly care.

The riverside secondhand bookstalls had tightly closed their black lids, while behind them, linden leaves along the bank—their outlines finely etched by the evening gloom—flashed white undersides like distant flocks of birds taking flight whenever wind swept up from the river. Following the wind’s path, their rustle traveled all the way downstream. The silhouettes of buildings on the opposite bank—their shoulders rising and falling with the Louvre Museum at their center—showed faint traces of pale evening makeup through the rising river mist, their outlines against the sky resembling the beautiful profile of a woman’s face. The sky, across its entire expanse, was casting up flames of purple-rose hue as it deepened. It was trying to stir up the darkness. Yellow, red, and blue neon signs spelled out "SUMMER BELONGS TO DEAUVILLE" in alphabetic letters across the city’s midsky.

――…………

“Oh do listen...” “So you see.” “As I’ve been saying all along.” “At the Paris Festival, you must take that girl I found for you out walking together.” Lisa said while clamping Shinkichi’s arm against her side with her sturdy limb. Shinkichi had taken charge of holding both his walking stick and summer gloves. ――…………

“No matter how much you yearn for maidenly hearts, trying to stroll through the festival while searching for traces of Catherine from days gone by—that’s just childishly poetic. Do you really think a jaded soul like you could ever sprout fresh feelings again with that?” The Alexandre III Bridge’s imposing decorations and the Eiffel Tower’s thick, splayed legs oppressed Shinkichi’s drunken yet unpleasantly clear head with dull weight. Shinkichi lowered his eyes to avoid looking at them and spoke.

“Hey—for pity’s sake, can’t you lower your tone by an octave? With that voice of yours, even when I want to nod along, resentment wells up first.”

“Oh! Have your nerves really gotten this bad? You’re just like Fernand before he died.” Lisa said, bringing her face close to peer through the darkness. As if overwhelmed by pity, the middle-aged woman’s faintly mustached, full lips approached Shinkichi’s cheek—he averted his face.

“I most earnestly recommend making that girl I found yours.” “In Paris—where everything grows through women—even those poisoned by women must still be cured by women.” “If I were but seven or eight years younger, I wouldn’t have to trouble you like this, you know.”

Lisa calmly stated the exact opposite of what she had just advised Shinkichi. They crossed the Alexandre III Bridge. The entrance of the Grand Palais—where exhibitions were held in spring and autumn—stood shut in pitch darkness, while on the Petit Palais side, posters for the Polish Craft Exhibition depicting snow-capped mountains had been pasted at precise intervals like white windows. The rustling street trees brushed faint dew against their foreheads, beneath which men and women heading to *rendezvous* flashed past each other like swallows. Shinkichi recalled Lisa from seven or eight years prior—adorned with five-colored Fauvist makeup, she had been Montmartre’s darling. It suited her strong features perfectly. Back then at a café, when she heard Shinkichi’s worries about Catherine, she pinched his nose and said.

“That sort of love is utterly trite. What passes for romance in this new age is artificially cultivating affection through technique between two people who share not an ounce of genuine feeling.”

The night when she applied gold-leaf patterns to her naked body and danced wildly at the Lapin à Gil bar was during Shinkichi’s second Paris Festival. She had gradually shed her eccentric demeanor and begun to reveal her innate maternal qualities, but after losing young Fernand—with whom she had finally begun cohabiting—she became a woman who showed nothing but pity toward men.

“You were so full of life back then too, ah.”

When he said this, even she—appearing somewhat disheartened—remained silent for a time. They reached the tree-lined Champs-Élysées, but upon gazing at the fountain on one end of the dark path—bathed in electric lights that made it sparkle like a crystal flower vase in Place de la Concorde—and turning to see the evening crowd stacked like scales along Avenue de l’Étoile on the other, she spoke in a lighter tone.

“It seems impossible, but if that’s how it is, you must decide once and for all.” “The outcome will surely be favorable.” “Then I’ll arrange for that girl to meet you on Paris Festival day in a perfectly natural way.” “You just need to become a young man of the town enjoying the festival—simply leave your own home that morning.” After thrusting the cane and gloves at Shinkichi, Lisa curtly—

“Bonsoir.”

She started to leave. Shinkichi—

“Wait a moment—would you? I’d like to talk a bit about my wife back home.”

When he blurted out, Lisa swung her sturdy arm in the darkness and snapped her fingers.

“I’ve already handed over everything about you to that girl.” Lisa swaggered off with a mannish gait.

As Shinkichi joined the crowd in preparing for tomorrow’s festival—hanging Chinese lanterns from his main street window frame and arranging decorative tassels into patterns—Madame Besseire called up from the cobblestones below.

“Splendid.” “Lovely.” “Long live the Paris Festival!”

Shinkichi raised his hand in greeting. “You have such a beautiful national flag there. If only it weren’t so youthful—” After uttering this, Madame Besseire disappeared into the gate, but soon came up the stairs and knocked on the room’s door. When Shinkichi opened it for her, she entered gracefully,

“I have some extras, so I’ll lend them to you.” Then, with an air of dejection, she twisted her body into the chair, propped one elbow on the octagonal table, and fumbled through the copperplate prints of storefront decoration drafts Shinkichi had made. She examined the subdued glaze of Dutch plates in the wall’s built-in shelf. She studied the foil-stamped banana-fiber curtain. Yet even as her gaze shifted, she never once stopped watching Shinkichi’s figure—leaning precariously from the window as he worked with unsteady hands. She seemed restless to seize any chance for intimate conversation. Shinkichi thudded down from the windowsill and thrust the chirping thing clutched in his palm beneath Madame Besseire’s nose.

“A little sparrow chick.” Madame Besseire grabbed a pinch of feathers from the sparrow chick—its tiny triangular beak gaping like a nuisance—and tossed them into the tobacco cuspidor. She indifferently covered it with a copperplate print.

“Calm down, won’t you sit there for a while?” Shinkichi twisted his left shoulder slightly and made a displeased expression, then imitated the rapid-fire lines of the great actor Sacha Guitry from an operette: “If it be Madam’s command, how could I possibly refuse? Even a throne of thorns, then.”

Having said that, he blankly sat down there.

“Well now, you’re quite unusually excited since tomorrow’s finally the Paris Festival,” she said. “You must be looking forward to it, I suppose.” Shinkichi stiffened. When it came to her own romantic affairs, she had long since abandoned them, yet her interest in others’ remained relentlessly persistent. Moreover, since Lisa and Madame Besseire were old acquaintances, perhaps she had caught wind of Lisa’s scheme against him for tomorrow. Shinkichi played dumb without dropping his guard.

“Tomorrow I intend to become an ordinary young man and dance haphazardly through all of Paris.” “That sounds enjoyable. While thinking about your wife back home, you want to forget those troubles of yours, I suppose.” Like a parrot repeating these words, Madame said this. Shinkichi thought she had missed the mark. Probing his current heart, he found no doubt: since receiving the letter from his wife back home, the image of her childlike face—now with disheveled strands of white hair—had begun evoking pity within him. Yet simultaneously, he now felt pity stirring for the unknown girl he would meet tomorrow—the maiden under Lisa’s care. An innocent girl who, by keeping company with an eccentric aesthete-ghost like himself, sought to make healthy buds of affection sprout anew from her own being. But more than anything, what Shinkichi most anticipated tomorrow was still encountering Catherine somewhere in the festival crowds. Though Lisa had derided it as childish verse, he now felt compelled to find Catherine—likely fallen into ruin after ten-odd years—amidst the Paris Festival throngs, to voice his hatred for this city that had once subdued him like a slave. What had made him into the nihilist he was now wasn’t—he realized belatedly—alcohol or women, but rather this entire city itself.

If he could pour out his hatred for this city’s allure until she shed even a single tear for his sake, then perhaps this decadence that had eaten into his very marrow might be wiped clean. Then he could settle this incomprehensible period of his Parisian exile and return decisively to his Japanese wife—her disheveled strands of white hair falling across her forehead. But that was entirely relying on chance, as if it were something without inevitability—like the plot of an old tale. Yet other than clinging to this chance, he had lately found no method of revival whatsoever. Now that things had come to this—the architecture school professor meeting an accidental death at a construction site; his daughter disappearing after rumors of her marrying some graduate in Egypt; recent whispers suggesting she might be back in Paris again—Shinkichi felt this inability to uncover anything beyond fragmented hearsay still extended his misfortune. Yet this very ignorance seemed a kind of mercy—the happiness of preserving the single beautiful dream still miraculously intact.

Seeing Shinkichi fiddling with a hammer while lost in thought, Madame Besseire said in a malicious voice that seemed to twist its way in. “Because I struck a nerve, you’re staying silent.” “I’m a strange woman, so please keep that in mind when listening.” “I wouldn’t mind at all if you’d taken up with some common streetwalker.” “But when there’s a man living next door who’s begun feeling genuine concern for his wife back home—I simply can’t sit still.” “I am a widow, you see.” “To be honest, I can’t suppress my jealousy.” “Ever since the day after your wife’s letter arrived, you’ve seemed different.” “Forgive me—am I being neurotic?” “But there’s no helping it.” “If I don’t speak honestly, my jealousy—it’s going to get even worse.” “So you stayed in Paris this year because you wanted to see one last Paris Festival before returning to your wife, didn’t you?” “I simply must put a stop to it.” “I simply must devise a way to make tomorrow’s Paris Festival so delightful for you that you won’t even think of returning to your wife.” “Therefore, tomorrow I intend to accompany you to the Paris Festival.” “It’s a pity you’ll have to put up with an old lady like me.” “But this is getting absurd.” “So please do keep that in mind.”

Though Madame said it in a joking tone, this joke contained her full measure of morbid interest in Shinkichi. “Anyway, tomorrow you must amuse yourself with me. I’ll let you have your freedom. If you find a woman you like, I’ll even let you walk with her.” Madame Besseire said this too as a joke that contained her decisive true feelings. “Well then, I’ll leave it in your hands.” Shinkichi had inadvertently spoken in a weak moment.

“I’ll come to pick you up in the morning.” Madame Besseire brought her joke to its conclusion and turned to leave with an air of satisfaction when—noticing the pitiful caged chirp of a sparrow from the lidded ashtray urn—she came back true to form,

“Oh, what a pitiful thing we’ve done.” “I’ll be taking this with me.”

With the urn still containing the sparrow, Madame Besseire left. After seeing Madame Besseire off, Shinkichi muttered under his breath to himself, “Such a nag, that old hag.” Yet now Shinkichi perceived in Madame Besseire the subtle melancholic grace and dignity common to beautiful Parisian women, and he once again felt profoundly this breed of Parisian woman who could never refrain from loving someone in some form.

With eyes half-open yet sunk in sleep as heavy as leaden plating, Shinkichi awoke to an Italian pastoral song. Breakfast being ready, the maid Louise had played the gramophone before leaving. The fields lay blanketed in primal heat haze. As the aroma of sun-cured hay impressed upon his mind a vision—the Alpine range radiating from Jungfrau like fingertips along the horizon, their peaks staining saffron—Shinkichi gradually regained awareness. When the pastoral melody ceased, thick coffee’s odor permeated the room’s morning reality, piercing his nostrils. Gagging on champagne acidity creeping up from his ravaged stomach—last night’s excess at Restaurant Maxim’s—Shinkichi dragged himself to the table. Resisting nausea, he gulped two-three bowls of coffee so dense and slate-gray it verged on toxic. As queasiness relented, a dizziness-inducing thrill seeped into his limbs. Clear skies glared. Through yesterday’s latticework window drapings, muted decorations from the kept-women’s quarter beyond—azure sky fragments and vivid tricolors—came assaulting his eyes via twin windows’ brutal morning light. Though requiring standing to verify, Madame Besseire’s roof likely framed an Eiffel Tower similarly adorned.

First, Shinkichi envisioned his role of searching for Catherine beneath these decorations amidst the crowd; then he wondered through what contrivance Lisa would deliver a new girl to him in today's festival streets. How that would entangle with Madame Besseire clinging to him. Thinking about it left him feeling slightly melancholy.

Last night at Maxim’s, he had accidentally encountered Georges, Madame Besseire’s last husband. He had left after quarreling with Madame Besseire not long after Shinkichi moved in next to her, so he hadn’t been particularly close with Shinkichi, but upon spotting him, approached with apparent nostalgia and insistently offered him drinks. Compared to when he had been living at Madame Besseire’s house, he seemed to have grown remarkably younger. He introduced a young woman as his new wife. She was simply youthful with average looks, behaving in a giddy manner. There was something scatterbrained about her nature. Thus the two men openly discussed Madame Besseire. Georges’ scheme became apparent—to get Shinkichi drunk and make him criticize Madame. Shinkichi didn’t take the bait. Then at last, he confessed to still nursing lingering feelings for Madame Besseire,

“You’ll never find a woman more unconventional than her,” he said. “Living with her felt like truly inhabiting Paris itself. For six days straight at the velodrome stands, watching her peel crayfish for our drinks with that insouciant air—it was chillingly wonderful just being there together.” He had begun volleying such remarks. But ultimately, he started speaking unprompted: “It’s those scissors of hers, you understand. Those blades gleaming like a shark’s belly. Since you’re her neighbor now, you’d best stay wary.” He sighed, his voice dropping to a mutter. “Of course, that scissor’s edge—it’s the very spark of her genius in costume design… Still, she’s a pitiful creature. Drives men away even as she torments them.”

He ended with a muttered soliloquy, sighed, and took his leave. Due to these circumstances, last night Shinkichi—fearing Madame Besseire would disrupt his long-awaited Paris Festival—lay in bed pondering how he might outwit her. If he simply didn’t return home, that would settle matters—yet even this felt somehow cowardly, and he dreaded the terrible repercussions should Madame Besseire notice. If possible, he wanted to refuse in manly fashion and leave his house alone come morning—so resolving this as he thought it, he eventually fell asleep. But gazing at sunlight gradually illuminating his room with splendor, all of it—Catherine, the girl Lisa would send, Madame Besseire—ceased to matter. Only one desire surged up—to plant his British-made boot heels upon the town’s cobblestones and walk endlessly east and west.

As he washed his face and changed clothes, an old-fashioned yet gaudy waltz—its origin untraceable—came undulating through the still air like the lingering swell of distant waves. Bursting through from behind, jazz unleashed the clamorous roar of a whirling explosion. The festival had begun. From the main street came the chatter of adult groups. The pattering footsteps of running children. White hat in hand, standing before the mirror to cheerfully greet his own reflection, Shinkichi—despite this habitual gesture—nonetheless left the room dragging a trace of melancholy within him. No one occupied the entrance guard’s window; amidst the festival decorations, facing geranium blossoms, a caged bullfinch bathed briskly in its water.

He took a step onto the cobblestones. There by the outer wall where drooping laburnum shoots brushed his shoulders—the guard’s wife and maid Louise stopped their playful wrestling when they saw Shinkichi and laughed through their morning greeting. Then he turned toward neighboring Madame Besseire’s house, “Madam!”

“Our Monsieur is heading out now.”

they shouted in unison.

Evidently having coordinated in advance, Madame Besseire—now fully adorned—appeared through the wall-set garden gate with theatrical grandeur like a rising stage curtain. Dressed in a black-and-yellow striped outing suit, the lines flowing from chest to waist to hem contained a provocatively beautiful contour. She tilted her Panama-hatted head—its rear peeking with avian plumage—in a pose mimicking skyward observation. Though radiating absolute confidence in her ensemble toward Shinkichi, she soon snapped open a matching-patterned silk parasol, baring half her back while tilting her ample chin over her left shoulder toward him. Her eyes maintained a doubt-free clarity regarding the day's agenda. Had he finally been ensnared—? While thus ruminating, Shinkichi approached Madame Besseire and reflexively extended his left arm in habitual courtesy. The madam drew back her chin and laughed for the first time.

“What a pity I’m not a young wife.”

she said, but placing her right hand on the left arm Shinkichi had offered, she resumed her usual demeanor and strode off with chest thrust forward. Shinkichi gazed at the faint scent of white powder brushed upon Madame Besseire’s face and the small Legion of Honour medal dangling from her breast, feeling dread toward the abyssal depth of this aging beauty’s allure. As they emerged from Mozart’s alley onto Passy Avenue, a music band’s stall had already been erected at the corner café there, with seven or eight groups of dancers blocking carriage traffic on the road. The young girl from the tobacco counter of the café known for its usual unfriendliness was being held by one of the patrons. Since it was still before noon, familiar neighborhood faces outnumbered those who had come from distant towns among the dancers. Among them were men dancing with maids still clad in leather-aproned work clothes and carrying shopping bundles. They nodded greetings to Shinkichi and Madame while dancing. The café chairs had been set out along the street in far greater numbers than usual. When the dancing subsided, cars and carriages halted on both sides of the narrow throat-like street all surged forward at once. The dappled shadows of plane tree thickets swayed across the road.

“It’s the full festival spirit now, isn’t it?” The aging beauty even displayed a childlike excitement as she repeatedly urged Shinkichi toward the city center, where the vortex of clamor drew people in with its restless allure. As he grew accustomed to the stimuli of the sunlit day, the vivid tricolor flags, and the aging beauty on his arm, Shinkichi began to feel weariness. Then even the loose footsteps of their synchronized walk began to sound unbearably mundane to his ears.

“I’m going to waste the whole day walking around stuck with this persistent hag.”

Even in Shinkichi’s heart, which had lost its elasticity, this indignation raised its head. As the café’s excitement faded, several alleyways zigzagging like lightning bolts appeared in his pallid eyes. An antique shop where armor with snapped crimson cords leaned against Saint Augustine’s shrine niche. A small market that had drained its water and shut tight its doors. A tailor peering at seamstresses through glass panes. Middle-class walls maintaining their impeccable order. Such sights passed meaninglessly along both flanks of Shinkichi’s stride. He recalled the Tokyo festival that had electrified him in childhood—shops shuttered, crimson carpets unfurled where elders in haori coats gathered to banter over shogi boards. Soon would come the drumbeats and cries of shrine-bearers hoisting their mikoshi. Little Shinkichi would burst forth still wearing new white tabi socks, leaping onto the main road. From his matching crepe-yukata’s sleeve opening, a toy bell suspended by hemp tasuki struck against sun-bared childish elbows, chiming.

Moods have a curious way of coinciding. Madame Besseire too recalled her childhood. "I—you know—" "When I was nine years old during the Paris Festival, my mother took me through Rue La Boétie." "I was grabbed by this blue-faced man wearing a beret—with his shaven beard stubble—and forced to dance." "It was from that terror that I first learned love." "Even now when I see such men—berets and blue shaven jaws—they give me this queer mix of fear... and longing."

Along the main thoroughfare cutting through back alleys appeared numerous pedestrian figures who seemed like remnants of crowds that had watched the military review in the Bois de Boulogne. Above their heads passed five or six Guardsmen, their silver-glinted helmets towering over the throng, with strikingly lustrous black hair streaming down from behind their armor. "You haven't brought your wife's letter in your pocket now, have you?"

Because Shinkichi’s responses to Madame Besseire’s reminiscences were lackluster, she abruptly brought up this matter. Shinkichi, sensing danger, “As for you—could it be you’ve tucked Mr. Georges’ mouchoir into your bag?” she retorted. Then Madame Besseire withdrew her hand from Shinkichi’s arm and seized his shoulder, “I simply adore such sentimental tales!” With these words, Madame Besseire once more lightly kissed Shinkichi on the cheek. Shinkichi found himself newly astonished by this woman’s foolishly innocent nature, yet still thought her impossible to truly despise.

Aimlessly baked by the midday sun, obstructed here and there by crowds spilling across the road in dance, or pausing to watch out of curiosity—they felt themselves beginning to climb a slope that seemed to lead them back where they had come. By the roadside stood a fence, beyond which stretched a garden of flowerbeds forming a gentle, orderly slope toward the Seine, grazing the edge of Trocadéro Palace’s austere rounded wall as it passed over the treetops below the cliff. Where the garden’s incline ended rose a tranquil bridge, and the Eiffel Tower—resembling a giant straddling the structure—appeared somewhat hazy through the veil of river mist. Looking up, its immensity struck them anew: thick iron beams transitioned abruptly into flat planes, while high above at the needle’s zenith piercing heavenward, a tricolor flag no larger than a bean fluttered derisively. When they lowered their gaze to trace the river’s course through shifting shades of green foliage, dizziness washed over them. Shinkichi spoke.

“We’ve only just come this far, haven’t we? Let’s rest a bit, then decide on some sort of schedule for seeing the town properly.” “Let’s become like children and drink ice cream.”

An Italian ice cream seller had set up a stall with white and lemon-yellow patterns and was watching swallows darting about. Shinkichi and Madame Besseire stood blocking each other’s path in the middle of the street, making exaggerated faces while clowning around and gnawing sideways at their wafer ice cream cups, when from the slope they had climbed earlier came a young girl ascending the cobblestones, casting a deep shadow as she approached. The girl came up to them and asked without a trace of hesitation.

“How do I get to Place de la Bastille?” The girl’s words carried a Loire-region accent. She held a small bag meant for a man. Madame Besseire first fixed on the curls peeking beneath the girl’s hat before sweeping her gaze over the entire outfit. Ruthless curiosity rippled across Madame’s face. “Aha! You’ve come to see the Paris Festival, haven’t you.” “From here to Bastille? That’s entirely the wrong direction.” “And you—when did you arrive in Paris?”

“It was about half a year ago.” “I still haven’t found anyone nice enough to take me around.” “Oh, how dreadful!” “There’s nothing dreadful about it. Not with such a lovely face as yours.” When it came to the Paris Festival, it was a day when anyone could say whatever they pleased—indeed, such behavior rather suited the occasion’s traditional elegance.

The girl had a beauty so unresisting it verged on simpleton-like passivity, yet with something oddly urbane about her. Shinkichi had concluded she must be the girl Lisa sent over. He began suspecting this might be collusion with Madame Besseire, yet the Madame clearly appeared to be meeting the girl for the first time—utterly engrossed by curiosity. "How much pocket money are you carrying today, young lady?" "About eighty francs."

“Eighty francs is just the right amount for a young lady of your appearance walking alone.”

Madame Besseire crossed her arms with affected sensibility and looked down at the girl. Shinkichi preemptively addressed her before Madame Besseire could grasp his intent. “If you’d like, why don’t we spend today wandering together?” “Of course we’ll cover all expenses.”

While the girl was looking down in thought, Madame Besseire gave Shinkichi a look layered with hidden depths. Shinkichi summoned all his nerve and maintained an air of nonchalance toward it. “Madam, I’ll be taking this girl along. With just the two of us, we might end up quarreling—that wouldn’t do.” She was overwhelmed by Shinkichi’s quintessentially Japanese resoluteness. Moreover, combined with her vanity of wanting to appear generous before the girl, Madame Besseire surprisingly consented with unexpected ease. Shinkichi felt a smug satisfaction at Madame Besseire’s persistence, yet couldn’t help pitying how her charm was wrinkling visibly under the radiant firmness of the young girl’s glossy skin.

After taking a taxi to the Opera crossing and stopping by Italy Street, they showed the girl the capital’s festive bustle while having a light lunch at a café—and as they did so, Shinkichi found various thoughts surging through his mind, entangled with the scenes before his eyes. Could it be that Lisa was hiding near the cliff of that Trocadéro slope, having the girl follow them? Even so, she’d managed to find precisely the sort of girl one might commission. Though unaware of how Lisa had persuaded her, the girl performed this charade with such naturalness it scarcely seemed like acting at all. While maintaining her act, the instinctual flair of her technique—never obscuring her essence—made her appear the very archetype of a French girl. Spearing a piece of sausage and shreds of sauerkraut’s vinegar-pickled cabbage on her fork, she leaned past Shinkichi—seated at the table’s center—to chat animatedly with Madame Besseire. As Shinkichi kept observing them, he even began suspecting some prior tacit understanding between the madame and this girl’s sudden appearance.

Could it be that Lisa and this friend of hers had schemed together yesterday or last night to make this girl appear? Still, the girl spoke to Madame Besseire as if they were meeting for the first time. Her name was Janet, she claimed—working at one of those powder factories dotting Paris' suburbs. Her hometown lay along the Loire's banks, she said—raised on rabbit stews and homemade wine. She made sure Shinkichi could hear every word. The girl's round-cheeked face seemed too perfectly arranged like a mannequin's beauty, yet her plump cheeks still glistened with youth's dewdrops. Through lunch she casually ordered Shinkichi—fetch the mustard pot, bring water—then leaned past him again to chatter with Madame Besseire. Shinkichi smiled bitterly.

Though her build was large, she was still a child. Where in this child did any emotional foothold exist? Lisa had been too fixated on selecting those who were overly young. Shinkichi lightly pinched Janet’s off-the-rack necklace, “This suits you well. On you.” “But this is just an off-the-rack piece. When I look at this Madam here, it just makes me so sad.” Shinkichi was surprised that this girl, not yet seventeen, was already quite accustomed to currying favor with others. Madame Besseire also cheerfully said to the girl.

“You should properly set things up to charm this Monsieur into buying you a necklace like mine.” Madame Besseire, who even grew jealous of Shinkichi’s Japanese wife, could remain so indifferent to this girl’s appearance before her eyes—both the girl and the madame exemplified the duplicity of Parisian women, their truths and falsehoods laid bare in a way that struck Shinkichi as newly bewildering. Within playfulness lay sincerity, yet what seemed sincere would immediately take on the guise of play. Even so, amidst the bustle of Paris left behind by the absent upper and middle classes, Shinkichi’s party—comprising an elegant madame and a girl whose rustic air carried an undercurrent of refinement—drew people’s eyes.

As the lunch hour seemed to have passed, customers inside began rising from their seats one by one. Pairs of men and women showed their retreating backs in the wall mirror as they stood. The waiter restacked brioches into baskets before lying prone across tables to wipe them down. Outside, pedestrian streams thickened further while laughter unleashed by drink detonated in the afternoon glare. Through crowd gaps at Café de la Paix's opera corner, tourists with shoulder-slung binoculars and cameras protruded so far into the road they nearly collided noses with passersby—their strained faces gazing as if mesmerized by this supposed Parisian splendor in full bloom. Peanut hawkers and wallpaper peddlers crisscrossed stubbornly through the throng. Between Café de la Paix and Italy Street stretched a recessed roadway slightly widened at its dead end by the invisible Grand Opera. From the subway station's stairwell ahead, human clusters swirled like sluicegate vortices before being relentlessly disgorged into view.

The clouds had thinned for a time, and the summer sun came blazing down upon this street. The café’s outstretched awning, its bright fabric sharply accentuated with red and black stripes, made the guests beneath it appear delightfully cool and cheerful. The yellow or reddish-brown awnings of other shops, along with the flags’ colors, began to create striking visual effects. Amidst the clamor resembling a besieging war cry, the sound of music intermingled from all directions.

Shinkichi, enveloped in deep shadow beneath the awning of a jewelry store across the way, gazed absently through the flickering crowd figures at the shop decorations that paradoxically stood out—mannequins with mica-like skin, cascades of pearl lace, ceramic spaniels snapping at platinum and diamonds—and even he had to acknowledge that Paris’s very heart now carried an air of pandering to American tastes, becoming Americanized in indefinable ways. An American woman in a flashy tiger-patterned coat. Early lunch. The eatery’s sign stating, “Payment in dollars is acceptable.” Across the street, Ford's Paris branch was advertising a new model's sale of 100,000 units at a discount.

Whether it was the postprandial lethargy of his stomach that caused it, Shinkichi’s unbalanced emotions grew increasingly restless, indiscriminately hating Paris’s frivolity. At that moment, Janet turned to him and leaned in close, as if signaling something about her conversation with Madame Besseire.

“How about this?” “No, not like that.” “Monsieur.” The scent of the young girl’s body—like fresh-squeezed milk with a cluster of lemon blossoms tossed in—grazed his nostrils. Then the gloom that had begun to congeal in Shinkichi’s blood vanished smoothly, and Paris—filled with an incomparably fresh scent—began to unfurl once more before his eyes. Shinkichi replied in a voice oddly melancholic and unsuited to the moment.

“Really, now.” “That’s right, Mademoiselle.”

And once more, the memory of Catherine surfaced in his longing-filled heart. Yes, he wanted to meet her. Wasn’t today precisely the day he had been burning to see for that very purpose? As he thought this, his hand involuntarily came to rest on Janet’s rounded shoulder. When had it been? Which woman was it? He recalled the sensation of soft hands placed on both his shoulders and the conversation about the Paris Festival they had granted him.

“Truly, for the young, that day was Paris of first encounters. “It’s Paris for love.” The endurance of those soft palms placed upon both his shoulders—and that resplendent pressure from when Shinkichi had once held Catherine. The memory branded into his tactile senses now came vividly alive through the supple shoulder’s thick sensuality beneath his hand on this young girl, and Shinkichi’s heart suddenly grew feverishly agitated as if being clawed at. His breath quickened involuntarily. In his pupils—which had suddenly widened as if triggered—the dazzling spectacle of Italy Street’s vibrant crowd surged into view: men and women jostling with raw vitality. Blonde locks swelling under the sun’s heat. The smell of face powder melting in sweat; voices exchanging words on the verge of bursting. The strong arms of men twisting and rolling up the silk sleeves of women’s festive dresses. But in the end, Shinkichi’s distant memory and the immediate reality before his eyes did not align. Shinkichi’s weary mind longed to be swept away by some human avalanche—to be carried off where he might discover the real Catherine waiting to be impulsively embraced. The two women beside him had been his companions until now. All of them were women who had followed along unbidden. It had nothing to do with me. I shouldn’t dwell too much on these women. When he had exhaled his quickened breath completely into a sigh, Madame Besseire said jokingly:

“To have two ladies by your side yet lose yourself in memories of your wife back home—how rude to us, Mademoiselle. Well, let’s be on our way now.” Madame Besseire swiftly paid the bill from her handbag, its pattern matching her parasol. Blunt-force music erupted as if to bludgeon the surrounding bustle into submission. As if refusing to be outdone, the merry-go-round’s platform rotated in undulating waves. Around Pigalle’s corner here, various stall shops stood lined up in the middle of the road. Shinkichi and the two women plunged into Montmartre’s bustling crowds, bumping shoulders and laughing gaily with one another. At one stall, young men leaned halfway out—their shoes’ soles visible as they lifted their legs back—competing to hook champagne bottles with poles and strings. At another stall, a man peered into a frame covered with white paper while letting a woman lean against his shoulder. The gun fired; in the instant the woman flinched, the white paper tore to capture their photograph. A fortune-telling woman stood stick-straight with a face verging on tears. Roulette balls rolled. Between these attractions stood gluttonous hut-like structures—their walls painted garishly with licentious nudes and trampled Black men—each darkly suggestive entrance perched atop five or six steps.

When people came here, they bared their wildness and recklessness, jostling one another to voraciously hunt for more thrills. Four or five craftsman-like men struck coconuts with poles to retrieve them, cracked them open on the spot, and pushed through the crowd while gulping down the thin soap-colored water inside with noisy throats.

“Hey, watch it! You’ll get juice all over!” “It’s not like you’re gonna turn into Mr. Nice Guy and buy me new socks to replace these dirty ones—”

“Yes, yes, I’ll be careful.” “Such a demure young lady—” When swept up by the crowd, Janet fully unleashed her rustic wildness, responding without hesitation to passing men’s jokes in her thick Loire-region accent. She stretched her bare white arms and planted them on her hips, swaying them exaggeratedly while laughing—at times making gestures that seemed downright brazen depending on her audience. From beneath her hat’s bent brim, she tugged down the pointed curls of her wig and pasted them with spit just above her right eyebrow. Even Madame Besseire could no longer stomach watching and fell silent with a grimace. Yet Janet paid no mind to such trifles, growing only more unrestrained in her antics.

“HEY!”

Who knows where she picked it up—using American English for hailing low-class people, she blew a piercingly loud whistle.

All this clamor and congestion could not distract Shinkichi from pursuing Catherine through the labyrinth of his heart. As afternoon deepened and time grew more pressing, his agitation mounted; the surrounding colors and sounds dissolved into dreamlike vagueness, while Catherine’s visage—its whereabouts unknown within Paris’ vastness—flickered before his eyes with intensified reality. That visage—an oval face of pure whiteness, pupils smoldering beneath lashes neither black nor indigo that gazed unwaveringly—permeated to the outermost nerves of Shinkichi’s limbs with an indescribable fragrance and enervating languor. This sensation blended strangely with masculine shame trembling in his heart’s depths until he slipped into a trance-like state of surrender. Even Catherine’s weight—petal-light yet bearing infinite gravity—now felt tangibly real against his sun-warmed knees beneath their layer of woolen trousers. And gradually, inexorably, weariness seeped into Shinkichi’s bones.

Shinkichi could no longer bear it. To escape from that visage which unconsciously wearied him, either the real Catherine needed to appear before him immediately, or some entirely different and more potent fascination had to utterly wrench away his attention. Driven by impulse, Shinkichi wanted to swiftly part from these two women and race through the throngs of today's Paris Festival in search of Catherine. Yet another part of his mind recoiled in disgust at himself for clinging to such nebulous desires across Paris' vastness; he stopped abruptly and invited his two companions to drink themselves into oblivion.

“You old hag brat!” With a voice feigning girlish innocence yet deliberately coquettish, Janet shouted at a man. She snatched the balloon he held in his hand. Pretending to try reclaiming it, he seized her wrist instead, then forcefully pulled her toward himself, spun her around, and pinned her against his left side. “Cut it out! I’m with someone.” Even Janet hesitated to make too much of a scene in public, screaming under the crowd’s oppressive jostling. As she shrieked and reached toward Shinkichi like a plea for rescue, tracing her outstretched arm’s direction led the man to spot him,

“What a greenhorn.” With those words, he released the woman. Then he came up beside Shinkichi and peered briefly at his face. “You some kinda Spaniard? Quit being so gloomy.” With his rugged hand, he struck Shinkichi’s shoulder hard enough to hurt before moving on—a man past middle age with the blue shadow of a close-shaven beard, his cheeks and eyebrow roots bearing fatty deposits that gave his face a lumpish appearance, yet possessing a certain stylishness and overflowing charm. Shinkichi unconsciously watched him depart. He envied that man who, despite his years, still brimmed with youthful interest in women. For someone like Shinkichi—who had long lost any capacity to feel beyond mere dreams—merely brushing past such a man made his own pallid loneliness palpable.

When he looked over at Janet, she had been pushed by the throng all the way to Shinkichi’s side while still watching the man’s figure disappear into the crowd. “Today, I got hit on by Montmartre’s number one gigolo.” Having said that, she still took out a mirror while being jostled by the crowd and checked her appearance. “If you hadn’t been here, I might’ve gotten to spend the whole day with him.”

In her voice lingered a tone that was truly somewhat base and resentful. Then a sudden repulsion welled up in Shinkichi, who had been detached from her. He roughly grabbed Janet’s exposed arm and shook it two or three times.

“You’ll get along with me.” “If you ever so much as glance at another man again, I won’t stand for it.” Then, strangely obedient now, Janet let herself be pulled into Shinkichi’s embrace while still clutching the balloon, tilting her head back to beam up at his face with a smile.

There, having strayed too far ahead alone and become separated, Madame Besseire returned.

“Oh, you were still here?” “Getting along is fine, but I won’t have secret talks without me.” Shinkichi stared at Madame Besseire’s sudden appearance before him. Amidst today’s festival’s raucous uproar that smothered Paris’s customary elegance, Madame Besseire walked beside Shinkichi with the true elegance of Paris itself. A growing tenderness toward her heart welled up in him.

Before anyone noticed, the sky had thickened with clouds, and a soft rain—like the skirts of those very clouds—began to fall. In Bastille Square, a slightly panicked commotion broke out. Some of the small stalls lining the square hurriedly began closing shop, while others hesitated, unsure what to do. The showman’s strongman couple, with their plump wife in a tracksuit leading the way, lumbered off to take shelter under a café’s eaves. The children were kicking the large iron dumbbell left by the roadside with their shoes.

At the bandstands erected in the square's center and on a distant edge of town, the musicians launched into raucously vigorous tunes. The dancers before them ultimately embraced the rain as a welcome provocation—craning their necks to cackle at the sky, playfully ducking their heads—growing ever more riotous as they pressed against one another. To those swaying calmly beneath umbrellas, occasional passersby tossed sparse applause. The screech of streetcars, shadows of crowds stumbling past. The townhouses encircling the square—now dusk-tinged and merging into a single dark mass—erupted in resplendent light.

Shinkichi had arrived here once more in an ashen state of mind wearied even by paranoia. Madame Besseire’s cruel interest swelled at seeing him now devoid of any capacity for thought or emotional resilience. Her own twisted affection—though it exhausted even herself—would accept nothing less than draining Shinkichi until he became like spent hemp stalks stripped of vitality. To achieve this, she resolved to more vigorously incite him by flaunting Janet’s burgeoning youth—that vital force so intense it could make her roam playfully—and drive him into utter frenzy.

“Well?! How about heading into that poor quarter up ahead for one last drink and dance?! Let’s go full commoner.” For Janet too, the final stage—the culmination of her mission to follow Shinkichi all day under Lisa’s instructions—was necessary. She replied without hesitation. “How avant-garde! That’s truly delightful!”

She took Shinkichi's arm and pushed through the crowd into Rue de Lappe's side street. Soot-stained small dark houses stood in rows, their mouths twisted shut as if fallen silent. Spiderweb rust stains marred plaster walls. From every alley came trickling streams of wastewater carving channels through cobblestone depressions. Rainwater pooled over this, filling the street with gurgling rivulet sounds. Madame Besseire lifted her kimono hem stylishly, kept time with her open umbrella, and strode diagonally ahead of them. Her gaudy presence partly dispelled the stench of stagnant mud and garlic. Among these grime-crumbled houses nestled dance halls—Bar des Trois Colonnes, Bar des Familles, Maison Bar—like gold-capped teeth. Varnished façades glowed dull reddish-black, entrances framed by floral patterns thick as stage makeup. Garish neon squirmed across display windows where “Dancing Free” slanted in white chalk. This was these halls’ service to regulars during Paris Festival. Their profit came from liquor. Before every hall spilled youths—shoulders hunched against wild music, hands jammed in pockets—and girls gaudied in cheap finery, all tangled together.

Upon closer inspection, they were joking around, teasing each other, and hesitating about where to go. Madame Besseire, looking so strikingly out of place in such a locale, briskly closed her umbrella and entered one of the dance halls—the Bousca Bar—whereupon they fell silent and turned to look. Then, as the striking beauty Janet entered next, pulling Shinkichi along with practiced ease, two or three among them trailed after her out of curiosity.

The interior wasn’t very spacious. Facing the bar counter stood about two rows of bare tables and chairs arranged as seating. Passing through that space revealed a dance floor measuring thirteen tsubo (43 square meters) at the far end. Around it too ran only a single row of customer tables. The three musicians, cramped for space, had been driven up into a protruding wall niche where they now sat wedged together, desperately laboring to enliven the atmosphere. Their constricted posture resembled humans stuffed into swallows’ nests. Even Shinkichi—long acclimated to Paris—found himself encountering such a place for the first time.

“Do those musicians have to haul up a ladder every time they climb in and out?” “You’re saying such carefree things.” “Rather than that...” While replying with visible frustration, Janet’s breathing became noticeably animated by the dance hall’s atmosphere. The three of them sat at a corner table where the entrance passageway transitioned to the dance floor. The stench of cheap liquor, sweat, and cooking grease—all trapped by the rain—mingled with dust kicked up from shoe soles and tobacco smoke, thickening the room’s air into a murky haze. The motes floating near the ceiling were struck by the chandelier’s light, appearing as horizontal clouds of pink and purple. Upon closer inspection, the clouds quivered in time with the dance’s tempo and, as a whole, drifted languidly in the same direction as the circling dancers. New small national flags, their cloth edges stiffened and peeling, were strung across like a child’s craftwork. In comparison, the colored strings and braids were gaudily and disproportionately large.

Even Madame Besseire—who had been pressing a white handkerchief to her nose as if nauseated while sipping harshly acidic wine—seeming to have grown somewhat accustomed, resolutely removed the handkerchief. Then she sniffed sharply and said, “Why, there’s a scent of fennel here.”

She brought her mouth close to Shinkichi’s ear and said. “They say these kinds of places secretly keep absinthe. You should have the garçon fix you a little.”

Just as Madame Besseire had said, the waiter brought small cups with an air of secrecy. She divided it with practiced hands into three large cups, then added sugar cubes and water. From the forbidden moonstone-colored liquid arose a smell so potent it paralyzed the motor nerves, driving away the surrounding air. “Forgetting means learning new things.” “To get drunk is to regain lost sincerity!” “Young people don’t know such things.”

While drinking with a pleased expression, Madame Besseire began saying such incomprehensible things to Janet, then closed her eyes while carefully savoring her cup. “If I get drunk, I might stop handing over this Monsieur to you.” Such words from Madame Besseire—neither sincere nor morbidly joking—failed to register with Janet. It seemed her youthful sensitivity had wholly absorbed the older woman’s amiable nature. Rather than that, as if unable to endure the surging energy, Janet seized Shinkichi and stood on the floor each time the music changed. Shinkichi held Janet and for a while treated her like a bouncing ball. For Shinkichi, the entire day had already passed emptily, leaving only the fact of the young girl before his eyes being left to amuse herself alone. The monstrous Paris that made a nihilist of me would blow away this nihilist’s pale, wavering last hope like a cloud dream without a moment’s resistance. Paris—this city that ultimately refused to let him meet Catherine at today’s festival. Resentfully closing his eyes, Shinkichi found himself steadily deflecting the girl’s attempts to draw him into her buoyant rhythm—deflecting again and again—until his dancing became mere mechanical adherence to the beat. Having grown utterly disillusioned beyond mere disenchantment, grotesque visions flickered across his mind's eye—fish bladders, blue-moldered rice cakes, clusters of insect eggs clinging to leaf undersides—each image alternately surfacing until a shudder ran through him like a thin spiral wire piercing from shoulder to nape. He tilted his head back, and as he suppressed the pain at the hollow of his throat, sad tears flowed secretly from the corners of his eyes along his eyelids into the nasal cavities without overflowing. A lament tinged with sentiment—“My days are done”—emerged faintly with a sigh through parted lips, whereupon there now appeared in his mind’s eye a vision: a natural washing stone glistening with clean water, and Daphne flowers blooming beneath the delicate leaf shadows of Nandina. Japan’s quiet morning. In the small garden of her own home, at the washing basin’s water channel edge, five or six strands of white hair had fallen, and there appeared the figure of Omichi with her childlike face tidying herself. Not only Omichi—had the time of aging come for me as well? Shall I cleanly bury my youth tonight and be done with it?

Unconcerned by Shinkichi’s wandering through hallucinations, Janet continued to pursue him relentlessly with her unpolished dance rhythm. When Shinkichi finally noticed and tried to match her tempo, she unexpectedly stilled the beat with cunning deliberation, then began murmuring worldly words into his ear between dance steps.

“You.” “You plan to part ways with me right here today?” “It can’t be helped.” “So you still can’t forget Catherine, I see.” “Oh—how do you know that?”

“The fact that I’m the girl sent by Lisa—you realized that from the start, didn’t you?” “Ah, that’s right.”

“I actually know Catherine’s secret.” “A secret?! How?” “What kind?!” “I’m Catherine’s illegitimate child. And Catherine died a long time ago.”

“Is that true?” “Are you telling the truth?” Janet didn’t respond, faintly sniffling. Shinkichi roughly grabbed the girl and carried her back to their seats but said nothing. He simply sat staring fixedly at her before him. Madame Besseire was thoroughly drunk amidst the faint scent of fennel. And though she tried to pester Shinkichi again about something, upon noticing his pallid face tensely fixed on Janet, she fell silent.

Even Catherine—Shinkichi’s sole tender memory of Paris—had already borne a three-year-old daughter when he met her at the professor’s house. The child hadn’t been born from anything resembling love, but rather came about through a fleeting impulse among the workers at her father’s construction site. So immediately after giving birth, she sent the child to a rural village along the Loire River as a foster child, effectively severing all ties. By the time Janet had gained awareness and begun longing for her mother, Catherine had married a young architect who went to Egypt, only to fall ill and die shortly thereafter. Her father was known only as a laborer, his identity unclear. Janet grew up entirely as an orphaned country girl in the Loire region until nearly coming of age.

It was the day after the festival that Lisa had fully told Shinkichi all of this. The weather, washed by the previous night’s rain, had cleared even more beautifully; it was a summer day where any thought would immediately evaporate. Shinkichi was fishing among the crowd at the "Middle Island" of the Seine River. Lisa was sitting on a bench behind him knitting. “The reason I found such a girl is because my hometown is in the rural Loire region after all.” “This spring when I returned home, I was coincidentally asked by that girl’s guardian to bring her to Paris.” “As someone who’d always been hearing about Catherine from you, it’s only natural I’d want to try a little scheme when the opportunity arose.” “That’s why I absolutely kept that girl a secret from you until yesterday.” “By the way, just as I planned, you’ve regained your vigor for that girl’s sake, haven’t you?” “You’ve even started looking more alive in your face—as if you’ve found some hope.”

“I promised that girl I’d take care of her from now on.” “So a girl with firm breasts does have charm for men after all.” “It’s not like that. Watch how you phrase things.” “So you mean to play father and nurture your old lover’s memento?”

“It’s not like that.” Shinkichi pulled up his fishing rod and replaced the bait taken by a fish in the water. “In any case, Catherine—my first love here in Paris—wasn’t at all what I’d imagined. She wasn’t some pure maiden or sacred figure. Just an ordinary young lady from a good family. So for over a decade, I’d actually been feeding myself dreams about her. Though I’ll admit it’s my own fault, it still infuriates me. Now that I’ve found this girl, I mean to shape her into the Catherine I imagined.”

Lisa asked with a slightly sly expression.

“Even after molding her, do you intend to start loving her anew in place of Catherine?”

“No.” “I’ll mold that girl into the Catherine I imagined.” “Isn’t that revenge enough?” “For the dead Catherine who betrayed my fantasy, and for my own blindness. After that, she can shack up with any man she likes.” “But that girl’s so country-rough—makes her hard to shape.” “Country-rough means Paris hasn’t worn her down yet.” “The core’s still raw.” “Not yet… That’s why I’ll grind her on Paris’s whetstone.” “She’ll bloom into a fresh, elegant bud of a girl.”

Under the scorching sun, the Seine's pale reddish-brown earth-toned water flowed. The current slipped into the shadow of a box-shaped bathing barge, forming numerous small eddies among cool reeds. Eddies intertwined with one another, producing soft lapping sounds. The bronze Statue of Liberty standing on Pont de Grenelle's protrusion—the Middle Island's anchor point—seemed to shimmer in the blazing heat, heat waves rising from every angular contour into the azure sky. Five or six parasols scurried across the bridge. Between linden trees along the stone embankment opposite, procession colors rippled through. The rescheduled footrace of shopgirls passed by. The intermittent thud of drums punctuated the air. On Pont de Passy's upper deck spanning the Middle Island, a freight train rumbled toward Passy district with steady rhythm. White clouds drifted across Paris' sky—now restored to its essential elegance after shedding yesterday's festival clamor. At Shinkichi's rod tip hung a small, toy-like fish still thrashing like any self-respecting catch.

“You’ve matured quite bitterly,” said Lisa, her voice thick with emotion. “Fully graduated from Paris now.” “Why do you say that?” he asked. “What?” “The Paris you’ve known till now—that was still the exiles’ Paris.” Her knitting needles clicked like metronomes keeping time with her words. “The Paris that shapes any foreigner who lingers here awhile. But the real Paris lies beyond that—a Paris so tenacious you can’t chew through it no matter how hard you bite.” She paused, measuring the sweater against his shoulders. “Seems you’ve finally started gnawing at that tough crust, haven’t you? Dead Fernand used to call it ‘the geological bedrock of Paris.’”

Lisa lightly placed the knitting against Shinkichi’s back to check the size, “Just right. “I’m reknitting Fernand’s old work to fit your jacket.”

Shinkichi looked at the knitting in Lisa's hand. Fernand—the genius architect who had been Lisa's lover and fought death with every fiber of his being before finally succumbing—had also been Shinkichi's close friend. "If he were alive," Shinkichi thought, "he'd be making a fuss about renovating the Eiffel Tower with purism by now."

While murmuring these things like soliloquies to himself, Shinkichi felt he had now become something akin to Lisa’s son. Just as the blue sky stretching from far upstream drew near the city’s rooftops and began blurring into an egg-yellow haze at their border, a small passenger plane leisurely unveiled its tiny form.

“By the way, what are you going to do about your Japanese wife?” “I have decided to take Madame Besseire’s advice and have her come here.” “Madame says she can’t rest until she sees the real thing herself.”

“What a persistent mad old woman.” “That’s why I never told that old woman about you searching for Catherine.” “She’s convinced that girl spending time with you during the Paris Festival was just a fleeting thing.” “Right now she’s beside herself worrying you’re genuinely remembering your wife back home.” “If she finds out you’ve really taken to Janet and plan to keep looking after her, that old woman will be in real trouble.”

Having said her piece, Lisa reverted to her earnest posture and briskly set about adjusting the jacket.

Silently facing the river, tears had welled up from Shinkichi's eyes and were streaming down his cheeks. Shinkichi felt as though those tears had fallen all the way to the Seine River's bottom and seeped into its depths. Only later did Shinkichi become aware that these were tears shed for that ailing genius fashion designer Madame Besseire. But as the tears dried from Shinkichi's cheeks and the Seine's river wind swept coolly through for a time, his heart settled into a deep stillness with a sure brightness at its core.

Shinkichi slowly began to ponder within himself—Paris employs every possible stimulus to wrench people’s hearts from the real world. It makes extreme nihilists of them. Yet might not the place Paris ultimately guides people through this process be none other than a reality that pierces to life’s very bedrock—or perhaps life’s true essence? That’s what Fernand meant by “the mountain-and-river nature of Paris.” Seems I’ll finally settle here in Paris now—ready to taste life’s true flavor—