Pathway to Japanese Literature

I read your story that was published in last month’s issue of K magazine.
So this is your debut work, then?
In Mama’s intention, you probably meant to express this subtle balance: how the French people’s temperament—sharp in self-interest yet refined in emotion and astuteness—gracefully treats an enemy nation’s female detective with charming elegance.
To me, who knows France and the French well—though of course there are many aspects of the French temperament that I, as a Japanese person, cannot fully sympathize with—this comes through with crystal clarity.
And in that sense, this work must have been quite successful.
But this is my own hope for you, Mama: why are you writing about other people’s affairs?
There is a world you should be writing about.
Mama’s lyrical world—why don’t you fully become its heroine?
This isn’t the realm of other people’s affairs.
Since Mama moves her own hand to wield her pen, she must write about a world that presses in on her even more urgently.
The fact that you’re writing about other countries’ national conditions like that is ultimately because Mama’s childishness is being exploited by a somewhat feigned sentiment.
Mama!
Mama, you must always become the mistress of your own lyrical world.
Do not let yourself be ruled by childish ambition.
If not, then don’t write things like novels at all.

It was a letter from Kanojo’s son.
It had just arrived from Paris, France.
As she was about to set out on her morning walk with her husband Itsusaku as usual, a student who had received it from the back entrance handed it into Kanojo’s hands.

Itsusaku had already come out to the entrance and was wearing his geta sandals.
There, he had encountered someone by chance and was murmuring in hushed tones with them at the opened entrance door.

Kanojo truly embodied the "childishness" her son had accused her of, lacking even a child's patience.

Although Itsusaku seemed to be waiting, she seized the opportunity while he was engaged in conversation with someone and tore open the envelope of their son’s letter. Then she was abruptly struck by the contents now before her.

But for Kanojo, anything would have sufficed so long as it was a letter from her son—whether reproachful demands or plaintive appeals—(though there had been no room for dependency. The son was twenty-three; having grasped his mother’s childishness since his own teenage years—she who had borne him—he stood far from needing coddling, instead assuming the role of chastising or steering her whenever childishness surfaced. (While somewhat slipshod in daily matters, he remained at heart an emotional yet keen-minded and earnest young man.) And so these letters from their only son—so utterly cherished by Itsusaku—were always something she made certain to open first herself.

“Oh, it’s Mr. Takegoshi.”

The one talking with Itsusaku at the entrance was a reporter from Bunmeisha who had come to Kanojo regarding a manuscript.

Oh, I do apologize for calling on you so early in the morning…
“Instead, I had the rare opportunity to meet your husband…”

Mr. Takegoshi’s sincerely lowered head was neither exaggerated nor forced.
Itsusaku smiled out of goodwill and waited for the exchange between the woman and Mr. Takegoshi to conclude before standing slowly at the entrance.

Mr. Takegoshi left.

The two of them exited the gate and turned their steps toward the back street, opposite the main street where Mr. Takegoshi had gone.

“Where’s that journalist from?”
“Oh, you don’t know? But you were talking so friendly with him.”
“But he was the one who started being friendly.”
“Didn’t he say something about the magazine being really good?”
“But when greeting a reporter, what else could you say?”
“Even if you don’t know which magazine it’s from?”
“That’s right—any magazine’s the same anyway.”

“Well, I can’t hold a candle to you, Papa.”

Kanojo compared it to her own situation and thought.
Kanojo had once been greeted by a man in the corridor of a certain theater.
Though she couldn’t tell who he was, she reflexively bowed her head.
But the fact that she had bowed to a stranger weighed on her mind.
And then, reflexively, she chased after the man.
[She] chased after the man down some fifty meters of the wide theater corridor,

Who might you have been?

she asked seriously, looking at the man’s face.
The man was someone who had once come to Kanojo’s place on business regarding Itsusaku’s artwork from a certain magazine company.
The man reportedly told people in various places that he could not forget the face Kanojo had made when she earnestly asked for his own name that time.
But that, too, was five or six years ago.
While frequently walking through Ginza with Itsusaku—popular in his artistic career—she had learned from observing how he would magnanimously nod his head just once and pass silently through even when greeted by strangers, and she had not repeated her own such awkward earnestness for some time; but upon seeing Itsusaku’s adaptability toward Mr. Takegoshi this morning, she recalled her former obstinate self after a long interval.

“Ouch.”

Kanojo flipped over her geta sandals.
The paving stones laid by the town council had transformed into an uneven, unsightly state—one corner jutting sharply from the earth, another sunken in opposition.
It was a road ruined by trucks hauling soil for construction at some pompous magnate’s house—the grandest in these backstreets—and they had often seethed at this “service to upstanding citizens.”
But there were also benefits.

“Hey Papa, if we consider that thanks to the O family we can breathe fresh air, it eases the mind.”

“Well, such is the way of things.”

The two of them walked and talked.

In reality, the O family had claimed an area spanning several blocks at one end of this town as their estate grounds.
The several blocks within their estate grounds were a sea of trees.
The green waves surged and roared in the wind, standing radiant under the sun.
In Berlin, for public health, they maintain a vast Tiergarten park within the city.
This wealthy family maintained a sea of green trees in our town.
The wealthy family themselves, without intending to, were distributing abundant oxygen for the sake of the good citizens’ respiration.
"—that’s how gains and losses balance each other out in such matters—" they walked on, thinking in unison.

After walking two or three blocks, they came upon the reconstruction site of a front gate at some executive’s mansion.
It had been half a month already.

“A strange man and woman come out every morning from the same direction—that’s what the laborers must be thinking, don’t you think?”

Kanojo said.

“Hmph.”

Itsusaku walked swinging his hands.
A secondhand mouse-gray crepe heko obi was fastened around his waist—neither sloppily nor tightly, but with moderate restraint.
An old serge unlined kimono hung slightly too long at the hem.
His jet-black hair—darker than most—made the sparse white strands interspersed within shine like silver dust.
His medium-height frame bore sloping shoulders and a neckline reminiscent of Raphael’s Madonna; thin lips defined the clean jawline extending from his neck, those lips protruding ever so slightly forward.
With each step, his secondhand komageta clattered against the ground, greasy footprints visible on their soles.

Kanojo’s bobbed hair was utterly simple, not even styled with a wave. Her build was altogether different from Itsusaku’s. There wasn’t a single extended line anywhere on her body—all were short and cinched. She had enormous eyes like sunflowers, yet timid cheeks that blushed shyly like the moon. She walked as clumsily straightforward as a child—the truth was, she still hadn’t grown accustomed to wearing komageta after her long overseas trip. The lips she so adamantly declared never touched by rouge when breathing morning air held the natural redness of a healthy woman’s lips—a woman in her early forties who kept her figure trim. She wore a short, rough meisen kasuri unlined kimono, its obi tied in a faintly traditional Japanese manner; the rest hung in a blurred, ill-fitting way, like a foreign woman clumsily draped in kimono.

“Hey, you’re Amida-sama, and I’m Kannon-sama.”

With that, Kanojo pointed at Itsusaku’s softly gleaming small eyes and poked her own round forehead with a finger, striking a brief pose—but even so, it pricked her conscience that to others’ eyes, this odd pair of a man and woman must seem to be heading somewhere every morning with some purpose in mind.
Kanojo, with her strong self-conceit, was also prone to foolish jealousy.
But in the end, the laborers carried the clods of earth and stone pillars entrusted to them by their trade—those very things filled their eyes to the brim.
The eyes had merely stolen a glance at something of no particular significance—just a sidelong look—and she concluded this on her own.
And with deep consideration, she looked back at those laborers in turn from her side.

Cheerful and innocent, Kanojo was also an inveterate thinker. Her thoughts might hang on the distant celestial core or the earth’s axis; they might dwell on eugenics or questions of the afterlife; they always connected to causality or her own view of fate. She sometimes got lost in thought about things she wanted to eat or nice clothes too. But immediately her mood would shift, and she would stop before the sign on the vacant lot for sale, comparing the price with her meager savings and pondering it.

Itsusaku knew well that Kanojo currently held no particularly new desires regarding their own residence. She took pleasure in imagining—if their only son in Paris were to return, perhaps they could build him a house around here; or even if he never intended to come back, if they were to build a house like this or that for him, might such an interest mingle with his attachment to his parents, and might he then return from Paris? Having secured a considerable position there and given that his artistic nature was undeniably oriented toward that place, she couldn’t say he would return here. Moreover, something like Kanojo’s artistic conscience felt this was not merely a matter directed at her son’s art but an even more fundamental blasphemy against the very deity of art. In the battle between artistic conscience and personal instinctual love, Kanojo was pained again, tears welling in her eyes. The reality of life—hollowed out in one spot by her son’s absence—and an imagined life filled with various engagements should he return took turns occupying Kanojo’s heart.

Kanojo liked weeds. In this vacant lot, weeds thrived abundantly. No matter how grand a studio they might build for their son, she would not let them remove the weeds she favored. Why did people have the right to distinguish between weeds and garden trees? For instance, who decided to distinguish dewflowers—studded with lapis lazuli like stars in the heavens—or bush vines whose blossoms resembled embroidery stitched with gold and silver threads—from roses or hydrangeas? Who ranked elegant dandelions and lovely red shiso against poppies and pinks? If growing abundantly everywhere became the standard of value, then wasn’t it humans themselves who were fickle and shallow? But if Kanojo stubbornly refused to remove the weeds, her son would chide her with that sweet-and-sour anger of his—might even give her a playful sports-style whack or two. Well, if that happened—there’d be no helping it—she supposed it was fine to remove them. Speaking of “whack,” Kanojo had once said to her son.

“When Mama gets old, she’ll hold Ainoko’s grandchild—how lovely,” Kanojo recalled saying once in front of her son, entirely in jest, only to be scolded for it. The youthful resilience of her son’s reprimanding fist still lingered fondly along her spine. At that time, he had said: “I won’t marry French women such as those who bear children.” She never knew whether this meant he refused to reduce French women to childbearing utility or whether it sprang from a young man’s ordinary aesthetic sense deeming such practical women unbeautiful. Yet even this memory now returned to her with nostalgic sweetness. When they had taken him six years prior and Kanojo with Itsusaku returned the year before last, only their son remained in Paris.

While Kanojo stood before the sign of the subdivided lot, indulging in her musings about their son, Itsusaku remained quietly upright two ken away.
To call him quiet would be an understatement—Itsusaku’s stillness was no ordinary thing.
It was a brazen quietness that seemed to mock the universe itself.
Thus did he transact directly with the sun’s rays.
Though Itsusaku’s refined features seemed suited to moonlight’s gleam, in truth he bore a layer closer to this world than that.
Perhaps because of this, he too loved the sun.
His face—unmarred by superfluous lines—drank sunlight abundantly into the faint wrinkles at his eyes’ corners, nearing middle age.
Whether wind billowed his hem or bicycles, people, and dogs brushed past, Itsusaku stood nonchalant and unperturbed.
This form that mocked the cosmos—so Kanojo privately judged it.

“Are you done?”

Itsusaku’s calm tone resembled the rustling of leaves. There had been a friend of Kanojo’s who once described him as “quiet as death.” That friend had addressed Kanojo with a voice blending sympathy and envy. But Kanojo considered this merely a superficial assessment of Itsusaku. His silence was not that of a departed spirit.

Were one to liken him to a machine, this machine might be said to possess one exquisitely refined component while leaving the remainder neglected. The reason the taciturn, ponderous Itsusaku excelled in socially conscious paintings lay in how this part manifested as a nimble faculty. The driving force behind its workings could only be—at times—his devotion to art and—at others—his love for Kanojo. This refined element operated with agility, sometimes in service of his craft and sometimes of her. Kanojo had always reliably received it.

Thus she felt even her delusions occupied vast territories. Beside her, Itsusaku’s agile faculty chewed through these very delusions. What emerged digested—whether through his heart or body she couldn’t tell—seeped into the spaces of his other disregarded parts. In essence, Itsusaku was Kanojo’s sovereign domain.

That she could voice any thought or fancy freely by his side proved he was her territory. This functional dynamic between them constituted what the world disparaged as “harmonious marital love.” Yet Kanojo detested such phrasing.

The characters and sound of “married couple” carried for her a raw sensuality ill-suited to the tender word “love.” She deemed it permissible only when applied fleetingly to others—in certain moments or contexts. When accompanied by theatrical gestures or jōruri rhythms, she allowed its use once perhaps, in scenes where dewy young lovers navigated becoming “publicly wedded spouses,” sensing there a sensuality tempered by worldly wisdom.

But for a man and woman bound in a union that had endured for years—one so unassuming, definitive, and unadorned that its essence defied specification—and especially for themselves, who no longer even distinctly felt like a man and woman, being labeled with an adjective like “married couple” in front of their child was mortifying—a term reeking of raw, pungent sexual desire.
It often seemed somewhat pretentious when young husbands called their young wives “old lady” or such, but she particularly disliked hearing couples—especially those not blessed with comely features—refer to themselves as “we married couples” in front of others.
Even if the characters for “married couple” occasionally appeared in newspapers and magazines—matters concerning others that seemed inconsequential—she did not find them agreeable.

The path of Itsusaku and Kanojo’s walk proceeded.

“I have something to show you.”

“Is that so?”

“Do you know what it is?”

“I don’t know.”

“Guess, won’t you?”

“I won’t guess.”

“That’s it.
A letter from Taro.”

“Hey, show it to me.”

“Not here in the middle of the road.”

“Enough already.”

“I’ll show you at the cemetery.”

Kanojo shifted the rustling letter from their son from within her sleeve to the fold of her obi.
Itsusaku, never one to belabor a point, suppressed that desire by pressing his lips tightly together—lips that had begun to show an appetite for something.
Kanojo’s mischievousness rebounded in delight.

Such mischief, serving as a physiological regulatory effect of their walk, was comforting to Kanojo.

When it came to expressions of desire directed elsewhere, Itsusaku’s were never overdone. However, there existed a special desire rooted in Itsusaku’s heart. Itsusaku was a man tireless in pursuing this within his own heart. It could be said that Itsusaku’s special desires amounted to no more than two or three exceedingly limited things. One of these had now been stimulated by Kanojo—Kanojo saw Itsusaku’s love for their son, grounded in parental instinct, as a truly profound and splendid friendship. The indolent Itsusaku did not have ordinary friends—the kind that could only be maintained through bothersome involvement in others’ lives. As for other relatives, both Itsusaku and Kanojo had suffered terribly in their youth and had been chastened by the experience. With an intense, earnest love intermingled with sorrow and resentment, Itsusaku and Kanojo loved, loved, and loved to the fullest their only son. This became their joint endeavor.

The nature of their son—who earnestly retraced the footsteps of Itsusaku and Kanojo’s love—and Kanojo’s own love walking alongside him there: this was precisely why their son became an even more fitting territory of love for Itsusaku.
Through Kanojo and Itsusaku loving and loving, loving their son to the fullest, a place where wind could pass through formed in their son’s character, and from there, honest buds and clever sprouts sprang up vigorously, delighting both Itsusaku and Kanojo.
Lately, even Itsusaku and Kanojo came to defer to their son’s keen artistic sensibilities and critical acumen.
But when they doubted whether their son’s fine qualities and their accompanying flaws would prove practically useful to society, their pitying love grew stronger.

“Hey, not toward the elementary school—let’s go this way.”
“Why?”

“Because the road’s packed with kids.”

“You want to take a shortcut because you’re in a hurry to get to the cemetery and see the letter, don’t you?”

——……………….

“Well, that’s right, isn’t it?”

“I hate kids.”

That’s right.
Kanojo had forgotten that.
It was true that Itsusaku wanted to take the shortcut to see their son’s letter sooner, but he certainly disliked encountering hordes of children.
Neither Itsusaku nor Kanojo thought of children as the innocent beings people so proclaim and revere.
Children may appear innocent, but in truth, they are thoughtless and self-centered.
It is not that children do not tell lies.
They are merely unfinished beings incapable of even telling lies.
They are little ruffians lacking in cultivation.
And they are tyrannical self-asserters who ignore adults acquainted with shame and restraint.
(Both Itsusaku and Kanojo had established their love for their son from the moment he left childhood behind and became recognized as an individual.) It was perfectly natural for parents to love their children by instinct.
However, the children of the world that Itsusaku and his companions viewed critically were beings who, despite their seemingly adorable forms, were spiteful, wicked, uncultured, crude—and utterly unbearable.

“But Papa, you’re the one who favors Kachi—*girl-child type*, *Madame Childishness*—the way Itsusaku calls her, aren’t you?”

“An adult having a childlike heart differs from a child remaining merely a child. That very childlike heart adults possess—ordinary children don’t hold a speck of it. So children who truly have a childlike heart from youth are just as rare as adults who retain one.”

One time, they had concocted this sort of conclusion together—seemingly illogical yet somehow coherent.

Both sides of the road were lined with cultural housing districts.
Cultural houses of various sizes—like those they had seen in Berlin’s new residential areas—stood in rows.
Yet they considered Japan’s intricate small-scale architectural craftsmanship more effective than Berlin’s.
The Germans’ craftsmanship proved coarser than they had imagined while in Japan.
Whether due to lacking shadows, structural bones, or some other dimension—the buildings stood under Northern Europe’s gratuitously lofty blue sky in a faintly absurd formation.
Though Japanese architecture appeared at first glance to imitate Germany’s, this shrewd effect likely stemmed not from actual structures but from impressions gleaned through photographs of German architecture.
When they had browsed photo albums in Berlin while viewing the real buildings before them, they were stunned by how much more lines, shadows, and depth the photographs possessed—enhanced through meticulous photographic ingenuity.
Bringing those unaltered albums back to show people in Japan gave them an uneasy guilt, as if peddling some half-truth.
Yet since the photos weren’t systematically doctored—merely faithful reproductions—there was nothing to be done.
Even photographing faces followed this pattern: Westerners’ sharply defined features captured better than Easterners’ flatter visages. Regardless, Japan’s architectural style had absorbed even the shadows and depth from Germany’s striking photo albums through Eastern sensibilities, surpassing Berlin’s original structures.
These buildings harmonized with Japanese trees’ graceful forms and the dense foliage shading both sides of their leaves.

“In any country’s urban residential areas, it’s the same—houses costing fifty thousand or eighty thousand yen are built in droves, don’t you think?”
“And yet when you look at the nameplates, they’re all names of people you can’t place, aren’t they?”
“It feels like a lie that there’s no money in the world.”

——……………….

“Why are you laughing silently?”

“Well, coming from you, it’s impressive you noticed something like that.”

The air grew piercingly cold as they neared the cemetery.
But there stood no temple.
Being an independent, expansive burial ground, they entered without hesitation.
Beside one gravestone, a large magnolia piled up blossoms of white propriety.
Moss blanketed the broad cemetery floor like scattered azure powder.
Upon that hushed earth, old and new tombstones mingled—their vivid summer weeds standing humbly yet conspicuous—as if staking some claim at life’s border with death.
To Kanojo at least, it seemed so; even the low bamboo fences, stern stone walls, and latticed bramble barriers around graves appeared to mark humanity’s meager, poignant threshold between being and oblivion.

“For the living, this place feels like the entrance to the path the dead have taken; it’s better to have graves after all, don’t you think?”

“Hmm… I don’t know—I find all this stuff bothersome.”
“When I die, I’d rather be cremated and have someone scatter my ashes over the sea from an airplane—that’d feel better.”

Eventually, the two of them had come to the depths of the cemetery.

“Let me see it.”

“The letter from our son?”
“You’re so persistent about wanting to see it.”
“That takes precedence over the grave issue for me.”

At the ends of the natural stones lying there, the two of them sat down.
The summer morning sun was maliciously yet gently warming and soothing the bone-chilling cold of the stone’s surface.
The two of them were able to sit down slowly and comfortably.
"Hmm, hmm," Itsusaku uttered approving hums, as if savoring something delicious, while reading their son’s letter.

“Hey, Papa.”
“You’re being loud.”

“How far have you read?”

“Wait.”

“There’s a part where he says ‘Draw Mama’s lyrical world,’ right?”

“Wait now.”

Itsusaku gripped his own arm momentarily and brushed the woman aside dismissively while continuing to read.

“Hey Papa—he’s written that I should depict Mama’s lyrical world here!”

“What on earth does my lyrical world even mean?”

“Figure it out yourself.”

“But I truly don’t understand.”

“Our son has good instincts.”

“Then shall I ask Paris?”

“Don’t talk nonsense—you’ll get scolded again, I tell you.”

“But I just don’t get it!”

“In other words—you have daily moments of joy and anger, contemplation and sorrow. He’s saying you should write about what’s most immediate to you.”

Such things about me—that’s what’s called my lyrical world.

“Exactly—don’t you understand that not everything lyrical has to be about men and women falling in love or romantic entanglements? Our son is clever. He recognized the uniqueness in your daily physical and mental mood and called that lyrical—it’s a novel way of putting it.”

Hmm, I see.

Kanojo’s wide-open eyes came alive, their gaze acting as though peering at the sky over Paris.

I do understand—I understand perfectly well.

Kanojo remained seated and jiggled her legs.

Kanojo’s two childlike feet bounced like balls.
Upon closer inspection, faint traces of adult muscle swelled beneath them.
When she placed them on the ground, only the cords around her russet geta clogs tightened, flushing crimson where they pressed into her skin.
Unrelated to the soft flesh, her hardened nails stood resolutely aligned, bending the childish, rounded toes beneath them as if to assert dominion.
“You’re so stubborn!” Itsusaku said, pinning her nails under his gaze.

“And then…”
“Your stubbornness too.”

“My stubbornness also fits into the lyrical.”

“That’s right.”

“If you say that, there’s no end to them.”
When I return home alone from somewhere else—sometimes Papa comes out to meet me, silently holds my shoulders, closes his eyes, and when he opens them, they’re filled with tears.
Even such things?

Yes.

Itsusaku made a slightly troubled face.

“Yes, yes, that incident.”
“I only talked about it once at the Yamajis’ place.”
“Then both Mr. and Mrs. Yamaji made puzzled faces and said, ‘Why do you think that is?’”
“I suppose he pities me—someone who rarely goes out alone—for managing to come home without getting hit by a car or bitten by a dog,” I said, and what an understanding couple they were.
“They had put on such a look of complete understanding.”
“When it comes to matters about me that are public-facing, Itsusaku worries about everything,” I said.
Even such things are lyrical.

“Probably.”

Itsusaku was a man who would immediately grow shy when anything about himself was mentioned directly.

“In passing, I ended up telling everyone at the Yamajis’ place. ‘In society, they say of me: “My, how resolute—to have left your only child in such a far-off place, even if it’s for his training.”’ ‘Truly, you all are mistaken.’ ‘You’re so understanding’—society simplistically keeps praising me in such a way. ‘Magazines and such have made me quite famous as this perfectly understanding model mother—and while that’s true on the surface, deep down there’s still a completely different reality.’ ‘It’s not just from those prevailing superficial judgments that we didn’t leave that child in Paris—Paris is the lover shared by us three, parent and child.’ ‘Since all three of us couldn’t remain in Paris, out of consideration, we left at least our son to stay by Paris—our lover—and we returned to Japan, our homeland.’ ‘It’s not as if we’re keeping him there out of some desire to make him great or push him into society.’ ‘So to speak, keeping our son there is a perilous luxury we stake our lives on—enduring the pain of separation and exchange with him… you know.’”

Kanojo found herself feeling as though, even as she spoke those words herself, she was convincing herself of them.

“Hey Papa—even coming to a place like this first thing in the morning and saying such things—would that also count as part of my lyrical world?”

“Ah, for now your lyrical world explorations will keep us plenty busy, I expect.”

Itsusaku directed a practical gaze toward a spot at his feet while folding and refolding their son’s letter.
He was likely calculating the substantial sum needed for their next remittance to Paris.
When Kanojo glimpsed the stationery—its edge fraying between Itsusaku’s fingers, printed with “Dôme” in French letters—she remembered how at that grand Montparnasse café, surrounded by women their son befriended, she’d found those girls so charming she’d visit whenever free to playfully toss paper wads with them.

Since Itsusaku remained unresponsive for a while, Kanojo naturally sank into her own thoughts.

After a while, when Kanojo raised her eyes to a cluster of white clouds floating in the sky, she was teary-eyed.
Kanojo still harbored dissatisfaction, even as she held territory with Itsusaku and their son.
Toward both society and herself.
Kanojo had her stubbornness, her arrogance, and her fastidiousness all in excess.
Yet despite this, Kanojo even believed that it was society itself that fostered her stubbornness and all those traits.

Kanojo still desired a territory in the world—one that could unconditionally delight her, who yearned for human connection, and compel her to surrender to something splendid and profoundly essential, whether dignity, intelligence, luxury, simplicity, sincerity—anything would do.
Kanojo occasionally sensed such things existing far away from her.
However, she wished to offer her distant reverence to those distant things, keeping them at arm’s length.
Going out of one’s way to step into such places or linger around them felt disagreeable and hateful.
Because she had shut herself up within such fantasies and hesitations, Kanojo had gradually drifted away from the outer world close to her.
Kanojo was leading a life akin to the quiet solitude of the mountains within the city.
She was aware that this suited her for the time being.
But Kanojo found that lonely as well.
Even while knowing that asserting her own stubbornness and preferences and then feeling lonely on top of that was a luxury, tears would sometimes well up.

A few morning birds, not yet touched by the day’s fatigue, crossed her field of vision.
The sight of fresh birds soaring with wings held taut severed Kanojo’s train of thought.
She shifted her gaze to the departing birds.
In an instant, they slipped free from her sight and vanished into a nearby grove.
Her lingering gaze fell upon the burnt ruins of S Hospital adjacent to the cemetery.
It was a fire site from over ten years prior.
Not a speck remained of charred stakes or ashes.
The drying red earth formed a vast dazed expanse across the ground, fracturing into countless tiny spheres too swift for the eye to follow.
In one corner, summer grass leaves glistened as they grew robust.
There stood a corner of the burnt building—rooted in that thicket like cave fragments—that divided the air into key-shaped sections,
pierced them like blades,
and through those gaps revealed sky colors tinged with sorcery,
while its entire being embodied tenacious void through a decade’s changes.
Kanojo recalled Emperor Nero’s palace ruins on a Roman hill seen during her Italian travels.
Likely no ruined garden in Japan resembled that place so closely.

The ruins, holding their life as ruins, shall tower eternally into the sky of Rome.

Kanojo was recalling a song she herself had composed about that place.

And then, from somewhere unidentifiable, came the loud sound of a fart.
It was a hollow sound that abruptly transformed Kanojo’s taut mood into something carefree and detached.

“Papa, did you hear that?”

Itsusaku and Kanojo suddenly looked at each other with laughing faces.

“In the cemetery, huh?”

“Yeah.”

Itsusaku’s face returned to its matter-of-fact expression.

“Papa, what do you think of a person who farts in a cemetery?”

Kanojo peered at Itsusaku and said.

“Well… What do *you* think?”

“Me?”

Kanojo closed her eyes, made a strained face, and laughed again.
Then, opening her eyes and composing herself seriously, she said.

“I wonder if they’re someone who’s been bullied too much in the real world.”
“Normally, coming to the cemetery would make you feel solemn, but...”
“The very idea of someone coming here and relaxing enough to let out a fart.”

When Kanojo and the others rose to leave the cemetery, there suddenly appeared Mr. Kōno, the proletarian writer.

Mornings have a curious way of never making even the most wretched person look squalid.
Moreover, today Mr. Kōno looked much neater than usual.

“Hey.”

“Hey.”

It was a male-to-male greeting—.

Kanojo, in an instant, had pinned the suspicion of the fart on Mr. Kōno.
And the laughter that had surged up because of this transformed into an excessive show of charm toward Mr. Kōno.
Perhaps because of this, Mr. Kōno—ordinarily quick to take offense—was the one who amiably approached them.

“It’s been some time since we last met, Madam.”

“Out for a walk?”

“I had to work late last night finishing up a job for XX Publishing, so I brought it over early this morning.”

“Since your wife passed away, how have you been managing your meals?”

“I’ve been grabbing cheap meals out.”

“That must be hard.”

“There’s also the carefree side to being single, you know.”

As they left the cemetery and came upon a shaded slope—its hollows on both sides where fungus seemed to grow—a cold gust of wind swept up from below.

“How about it—won’t you stop by my dirty room for a moment?”

“Thank you.”

Itsusaku and Kanojo ambled along without settling on whether to visit Mr. Kōno’s room or not.
When they reached a bright three-way intersection near the main thoroughfare, Mr. Kōno made to part ways with the two—who showed no inclination to visit his room—and head toward his home, but he turned back once more and, fixing his address particularly on Kanojo, said:
“I dropped by Mrs. Tozaki’s place during my walk yesterday morning.”

“So, how has she been lately?”

“She was wearing, as always, her usual bright red Western-style dress and said, ‘Just consider—between a proletarian literary figure like you, Mr. Kōno, and a novelist like me, which of us benefits society more?’”
“‘Since there are far more people who can make ends meet than those who can’t, I write my novels for those readers who *can*.’ That’s what she said.” Ha, ha, ha, ha.

Kanojo did not find the rumors about Mrs. Tozaki—who was refined even in her gaudiness, and straightforward despite her selfishness—unpleasant.
Despite his tendency to take offense, such a Mr. Kōno seemed to visit the blunt-spoken Mrs. Tozaki quite often.

“Your name came up too.”
“She praised you lavishly—but anyway, I just can’t fathom why that woman obsesses over her son like that,” he said.

Kanojo snorted.
For she had recalled Mrs. Tozaki—childless—living with cats, dogs, small birds, a pygmy monkey, and all manner of bothersome creatures clinging around her.