Pathway to Japanese Literature

Author: Hara Tamiki

When I was in this room, I was made to feel exactly like a prisoner.
The walls on all sides and the ceiling were pure white, and through the gap in the frosted glass's rotating small window, the outside world visible there seemed to contain some sort of threat.
Was it that ceaseless hunger sharpened my senses, or that this room's structure - single-pane glass and thin wooden walls - absorbed the outside world's humidity and madness directly through my skin like some membrane? Sitting still and contemplating generally came to this.
Even so, what a low ceiling and cramped little room this was.
The wooden floor I sat on doubled as a thin ceiling, so even the slightest movement resonated through the room below.
And downstairs resided the wife of this house, listening intently for even the slightest sound.
For example, suppose I opened the door and stepped out toward the narrow stairs to go to the toilet.
Then, the wife of this house would swiftly disappear and hide in the next room.
She avoided meeting my gaze...... I never exchanged words with the wife of this house, and though there was her younger brother here, I no longer spoke with him either.

The master of this house had left on company business to some distant place a month ago.
I had once taken a walk with the master of the house before he left on his trip.
At that time he,

“That wife of mine’s terrified.
“She hasn’t spoken to me for a whole month now,” he said abruptly.

I gave a vague nod that resembled an “Ah...”
I found it somehow terrifying to probe any deeper into the dark shadows lurking within this house.

I am always keeping still.
From even the faintest sound—a click—this glass house feels like it might collapse.
In reality there—apart from thin walls, frosted glass windows, and narrow wooden window frames—were no pillar-like structures supporting this house.
The downstairs floor at ground level—each time someone walked on it, floorboards with missing nails sprang back.
The spacious first floor with its high ceiling had glass panels covering every wall—their frames horribly warped—but when looking up from there toward narrow stairs leading to the second story along lines of cracks in walls, one could see how the second-floor room had slipped slightly downward.
The moment when that room I’m in comes crashing down—this image cannot help but be conjured.
Does this occur when I'm in that room, or does it happen when I'm away outside... That moment when the Hiroshima house collapsed still refuses to leave my mind, no matter how I try.

As if standing atop something fragile, I had to move with timid caution.
Even when I happened to meet the master of this house downstairs, we exchanged a few casual words about the weather with the wariness of fellow criminals conversing.
I couldn't help feeling that the master of this house too was always beside fragile things, quietly suppressing something.
The wretched air radiating from this disheveled giant's entire body carried the emotion of one enduring to the absolute limit.
It came flowing toward me.
But here—at least in front of the wife of this house—I had to refrain from speaking with him, so I kept myself withdrawn in my own room.

One day—(That's right, there are days like this too.)—as I was passing by the door to that room—a small partitioned space beside the entrance of this house—the door suddenly opened with a soft click.
A large notebook was abruptly thrust out.

“Read this—it’s poetry.”
His tone was somehow different from usual.
And then I realized—ah, Madam had gone out today; the house was empty.
I entered the second-floor room with that notebook.
I placed the notebook on the oil box and began reading.
A poem titled "Enoki" caught my eye.
A coastal enoki tree, battered and mangled by fierce winds yet twisting, contorting, stretching skyward…….
Ah, this was it—I felt as though I’d been shown a self-portrait of the master of this house.
In the distance beyond the dark gaze, the luxuriant young leaves of the enoki tree... The leaves swayed gently, seeking the sun's light.

“How about some tea?”
Suddenly his voice called out from downstairs.
I stood up and went down the stairs.
Against the backdrop of sprawling glass walls, the master of this house sat on a chair.

“Have you been sleeping lately?” he asked in an offhand tone.

“Yeah.”
I responded gloomily, but something tear-like coursed along my flank.
Had we come to understand each other?
……About what?
……In what way?……At any rate, it was an abnormal hour now.

Suddenly, I saw clouds split by lightning beyond that enoki tree.
Beyond the turbid whirlpool of humanity, a radiant vision surfaced.
I wanted to babble out something feverish and heated.

“Just tea alone won’t stave off hunger.”

He shook his head heavily.
A sudden wave of fatigue washed over me again.
I dragged my heavy joints back to the small room enclosed by pure white walls and glass windows.
I collapsed onto the wooden floor.
In the faint dizziness, I closed my eyes narrowly.
The twilight-tinged light streaming through the window pierced clear through my internal organs.
Light.
Light.
I have almost no weight left.
The trees, sky, and asphalt slope outside the window were all numb; they convulsed as if about to collapse into me......Am I a man dying amid tragedy?
No...
I dreamed of crystallization.
Light, light, floating up into the void.
Transparent......Suddenly, I thought I heard the whine of a whip near my ear.
The downstairs entrance opened, and the voice of the wife of this house could be heard.
I jolted upright.
Instantly, I regained the consciousness of a prisoner.
I hunched my body and cast down my eyes, returning to a state of unresisting suffocation.
I existed within the four walls and ceiling, within a 2.5-meter cubic space.

Existing—that I exist here—is the most unacceptable thing here.

When did I come to be reduced to this state…….
Anyway, when I first came to this house, things were completely different from how they are now.

It was exactly the beginning of April. Bright light flooded the glass-walled downstairs, and in that atelier-style room, I sat relaxed at the same dining table with the house owner, his wife, and her younger brother, taking up my chopsticks.
We talked about all sorts of things.
After all, he was an old friend with whom I could finally speak openly after so long.
The ordeal in Hiroshima, the subsequent life of hunger and humiliation... I may have talked too much—perhaps even excessively.
Yes, I must have been somewhat buoyant back then.
But in those days, my heart swelled sweetly with gratitude toward this house for taking in a penniless burn victim like me.
I had wandered about seeking work; even when I finally secured a position as a night school teacher, it couldn't sustain me alone—yet even that hadn't depressed me too much.
That my worn-out national uniform made me look as shabby as a beggar, that my shoe soles were nearly worn through—I hardly minded any of it.
In these very shoes, I'd managed to survive by running around, and I felt a fondness for my own legs that supported this body on hunger's verge of collapse.
So when commuting began, in those crowded trains I would always brace those two legs as if resisting.
And then...it was an afternoon when a dazzling light reminiscent of summer suddenly flooded the vacant lot before this glass house; I sat down on a tree stump and gazed up at the high, high treetops.
The trees surrounding the house swayed their lush young leaves where they met the blue sky, but as I gazed that way—lured by something far gentler—a sigh of Ah, time has passed welled up within me.
Truly, looking up at those treetops from there made where I sat feel increasingly like a valley's depths.
There was no mistaking it now—I must have been in this world's deepest valley.
But someday—someday—I would climb out of this valley and marvel once more: Ah, time has passed.
In any case, I never lost sight of my war-beggar self.

However, such a thing did happen.
In the middle of some conversation, the wife of this house suddenly hurled a strange insult at me.

“Hah! How long do you think you’ll keep living? Your life’s got barely two or three years left, yet here you—”

I jolted at this pronouncement and whirled around, half-expecting to find Death clinging to some part of me.
But the wife wore an expression of cruel certainty......Perhaps those visions of catastrophe seared into my eyes—those frenzied crowds of naked bodies—still pulsed through me somewhere.
Thus to her eyes I must appear—this survivor slinking from Judgment’s final decree—a walking ill omen.
Having endured hunger’s grind and humiliation’s lash since the disaster, death’s stench clinging to me seemed only natural.
Yet I refused to wallow in such thoughts; better to wear the mask of one untouched by tragedy.

This glass-walled house—though it had been built ten years prior—now had damage everywhere, so opening doors and ascending or descending the stairs required caution.
The well pump outside the house was malfunctioning and difficult to operate.
However, when I first came here, I was instructed in the basic rules of conduct.
“I don’t believe there’s anything else you need to be cautioned about...” the wife said with a faintly satisfied air, sweeping her gaze around the room.
But there were still various minute unwritten rules I needed to learn.
“After all, she tried to impose her lifestyle and beliefs on everyone,” the house owner once quietly explained to me.
“Her history of psychological formation was extremely complex and unfortunate,” he muttered as if lamenting his own misfortune.
That I was absolutely not to engage in idle talk with members of the neighborhood association; that various psychological prohibitions existed not only within the house but extending several meters around its perimeter—the details of such matters too, I was gradually made to learn.

The outside of this house was a tree-lined asphalt slope where lush new leaves beginning to flourish around that time peered out en masse from behind the walls of grand estates. Yet whenever I walked along that slope toward the station, I felt myself becoming saturated with the gloom of rain-drenched foliage.
Even in the glass-walled house, this wretched rainy season permeated directly.
When staple rations ceased abruptly, my limbs gradually grew leaden.
Nerves quivered in minute tremors, and all countenances turned oppressive.
By then, the wife of this house particularly bore a look perpetually stifling some festering wrath.

But above all else, I had to attend to my own gnawing hunger.
For instance, even when going to the public bath, I would choose the time and weather least likely to cause fatigue.
When I carried my washbasin up the narrow stone steps and emerged onto the main road running alongside the ditch, the sand from the burned ruins that snapped up behind speeding trucks and the spindly green of the fields would instantly exhaust me.
If I were to raise my head and gaze at the blue sky, I would surely be sucked up into it just like that.
With the feeling of reeling out a thread that might snap at any moment, I had to constantly adjust myself and the external world.
……Having long been deprived of starch and sustained only by konjac and wilted greens, my body had grown terribly sensitive; even drinking morning tea, I could feel it seep all the way down to the soles of my feet.
Then, even while walking down the road, I would catch a wonderfully nostalgic smell and find myself wondering what it could be. After some bewilderment—ah yes, it was the scent of baking bread—I would be astonished: could there truly be happy households in this world where people bake bread and eat it?

Every day, I was jostled in the evening's utterly chaotic trains and had to set out for my night school duties. To avoid exhaustion, I would take my time making my way to the station. Standing amid the station platform's bustle, I felt on the verge of collapsing at any moment. In such moments, when I would find an equally pale, hungry-looking face right before me, I would feel a slight kinship—oh, so there are others like me—but the other person would respond to my gaze with a faintly angry expression. (Which of us will collapse first? What the hell!) It was as though I could hear such wordless protests. And then there were those luggage-laden people who always persecuted me in the train—were those humans walking, or was it food walking? I lacked the physical strength to carry such a heavy load, and of course, I had no money to purchase such things. At times, a desperate rage would well up from the pit of my stomach... But to calm myself as much as possible, I made it a rule to read my English grammar book every day. Then systems and order became strangely alluring. When I plopped down in the small wooden-floored room and opened my book in the morning light, the young leaves outside the window and the morning sky somehow seemed like a continuation of those days when life still held abundance. I vaguely dreamt of balance—...a transparent, enormous scale placed beneath the shade of young leaves... But whenever such a small, pleasant notion welled up within me, I immediately realized—ah, this is your doing. You were still peering in at me from somewhere, and I was made to feel like a fortunate child being watched over by a mother.

After the desolate morning meal, an intense hunger would immediately assail me. My unsteady head thought of mornings from a distant past that had slipped smoothly away. The biscuits I ate as a child, their surfaces hardened with pink sugar—such sweets and childhood tastes now came to feel like symbols of happiness. Then I would dream of silver spoons and coffee sets. Then, for an instant, the illusion of a satiated post-meal grazed me.

However, the whirlwind of hunger that came rushing into this house was gradually becoming unmanageable.
A lukewarm, whitish drizzle soaked the poisonous green of the trees, and humidity crawled everywhere alongside hunger.
And because they burned wood and paper inside the house, smoke lingered everywhere like ghosts... My head and everything I perceived had already grown dim as twilight.
The face of someone desperately clenching their teeth somewhere dimly floated into view.
Then, the faces of crowds dying one after another, and of the gravely injured who lay on the road moaning and quietly pleading for help—unnoticed by anyone—dimly floated into view... It was as though the tragedy of that day still continued unchanged.

When I glanced up, the Wife was returning from outside, utterly drenched. Her earth-colored face brimmed with an eerie absence of murderous intensity. She plopped down into the chair and,

"I was beaten," she said in a parched voice. Then she launched into a vehement rant about the dispute between women in the neighborhood association. But to me, with my hearing seemingly dulled, I couldn't make out anything clearly. While she pressed for explanations about ration quantities, the large woman beside her suddenly struck—that was all I could grasp of the situation. ……Again I became chained to the dim rain's brooding. The figures of women struggling drenched on muddy ground seemed like sparks in the rain.

It was two or three days later.

"You must stop getting up and making noise."
"Yoshio-san, stay in bed—stay in bed until the rations arrive."

At the Wife's strained voice, her younger brother lumbered up the stairs.
This coincided exactly with when I had finished my wretched breakfast; soon I too withdrew to my room with a sense of being menaced by something.
As I opened the door to enter my room, I glimpsed the neighboring garden through the narrowly parted window.
In the blue, hushed leafy shade, hydrangeas bloomed while the veranda's shoji screens remained closed.
(Are hydrangeas flowering?) I abruptly tried to recall happiness.

It was the next morning.

From a break in the rain clouds came sunlight and a sticky wind that made it an unnervingly irritable morning. I happened to have cigarettes but no matches. In my desolate post-meal hunger, an overwhelming urge to smoke seized me. Fidgeting restlessly, I combed through every pocket corner until remembering the lens—using sunlight for ignition being a skill honed during my time in that frigid post-disaster village.

Outside I chose a sunlit patch of vacant lot behind the house where thin clouds made ignition stubbornly elusive beyond its boundary fence separating us from neighboring fields while neighborhood association women clustered around rationed greens out front finally lit cigarette between lips I staggered back inside already forgetting until lunchtime when descending stairs took seat only have her materialize beside me chair creaking under forward-leaning advance.

“Why don’t you move rooms?”

With those abruptly cast words, I still didn’t fully grasp what this meant.
When I looked, she wore the expression of someone trying to raise another matter, her irritation palpable.

“Which room would I move to?”

“I want you to move out entirely.”

I was utterly confused.
My breath nearly choked off as I realized my heart had suddenly clenched violently.
When I glanced over, beads of sweat glistened on the Wife’s forehead.
Ah—the muggy heat today must be fraying her nerves—in that instant, I pitied her for making such a terrifying face.

“I’ll have you know—I detest to my very core anyone who disobeys orders I’ve issued.”

“What transgression have I committed?”
I turned pallid and countered.

“What were you doing near the vegetable plot this morning?”

Finally I began grasping fragments of meaning. There had indeed been some order—when exactly I couldn’t recall—prohibiting me from wandering near the house, though its reasons remained opaque. I attempted formulating an explanation about the cigarettes, but language disintegrated before reaching my lips.

“Those aware you’re not normal don’t matter. But strangers? They’ll recoil.”
"The children already stared in horror—watching you."
“One word from me—‘That lunatic’—and this neighborhood’s children will stone you every time you appear.”

“………………”

“Moreover, the owner of that field is always watching from the shadows—if even a slightly suspicious person stands there, he’ll suddenly strike them down with a hoe.”

“In other words, you want to be beaten to death?”

I had no choice but to apologize profusely. The Wife finally left the chair without speaking.

My heart was jolted and crushed. Returning to my room, I lay sprawled for a while, but driven by some urgency—That's right, I can't go on like this—I stood up. I can't go on like this... At any rate, I must do something—I prepared to go out as if aiming at some purpose.

Yet having nowhere to go, and it still being too early for work, I found myself jostled in the usual train crowd... I had lost all capacity for thought. Only my heart kept convulsing, nerves terrified upward refusing even a moment's sleep.

The daytime shock rotated at a languid, languid pace. No sooner did this thought come than I suddenly found myself thrown onto the road gasping—people frenziedly dying in blazing sky flames, corpses cast aside lifeless...

Is that corpse me?

...Ever since that time, I had thought if I were to die, I'd still want to draw my last breath peacefully beneath some house's eaves.

But I abruptly realized—no roof remained that would shelter me now.

This should have been understood from the start.

My carelessness was at fault.

To make matters worse, around that time I had begun to occasionally develop a strange cough.

“Why don’t you have a doctor examine you once?”
The House Owner said to me in a tone of pity.
“If you were to fall ill now, it would be disastrous. You should recuperate while there’s still time.”
I listened with nothing but the desire to cry. … My suspicious cough had subsided for a time, but before I knew it, I was prohibited from rinsing my mouth at the indoor washroom.
I was made to wash my face at the outdoor well on rainy mornings.
However, before long, even washing my face at the wellside was prohibited.
I carried the washbasin I had drawn from the well to the air-raid shelter, now repurposed as a rubbish dump, and washed my face there.
……My meals too had already been separated for quite some time.
Whenever I timed my descent to coincide with meals and went down the stairs, my food would be left all by itself in a corner of the empty, spacious room.
At times, beside the meal tray would be left a scrap of paper reading “Tobacco: 5 yen and 30 sen” along with ration coupons.

I had grown terrified of speaking with this house's Wife.
When forced to make verbal requests, I would falter like a criminal.
Her face remained stone-calm, but when my trembling voice reached her ears, a sudden surge of wrath across her features felt sharp as a honed blade... Even within my room, I was perpetually watched by the house's nerves.
I was ceaselessly menaced and tormented.
Still I resisted becoming servile.
Yet this existence left me no choice but servility.
Continuing thus would ultimately transform me into a man of matchless wretchedness.
This realization filled me with fury, at times driving me toward something like hysteria.

Just how beaten down I was became clear when I went outside. Occasionally, when I visited old friends, in houses unscathed by the disaster, there were tatami mats and everything felt settled. That alone gave me some semblance of comfort, but at those houses they even served meals. Moreover, it wasn’t that I alone was left isolated to be fed scraps; everyone would gather around the table without shunning me. Could such a thing really be possible? I wondered, as something mist-like began trembling before my eyes. Even when visiting people I wasn’t particularly close to, that mist-like thing quivered within me. When meeting such people, my emotions would quake terribly and words would catch in my throat, yet they would invite me to coffee shops and treat me to coffee. When I thought there were people who treated even someone like me normally, I suddenly felt like crying. No good, no good—this is just hysterical inferiority, I shouted at myself. But this tearfulness coexisting with hunger lingered right beneath my face, and there was nothing I could do about it.

One day too, I happened upon an old acquaintance and was treated to sake at their house.
At first, something cold and fearful still coiled within me, but gradually, sake's intoxication and old friendship's warmth began putting me in better spirits.
Then I felt as though I hadn't changed one bit from my former self of when you were alive.
The illusion that a comfortable home would be properly waiting if I returned made my footsteps light.
But when I stepped out that gate, outside lay true darkness.
Staggering along an endless night path fused with ruined corpses, mad dogs and every anxiety imaginable, I walked toward the station.
Having reached the station, I waited over thirty minutes for a train.
Then at the transfer station I had to wait much longer still.
As night's hours deepened with visceral terror stirring within me, old dreams simultaneously throbbed inside.
When I alighted at my usual station, day laborers had already vanished.
Until standing at that house's entrance, I still retained some semblance of fulfillment.
...The glass house with extinguished lights stood deathly silent, jutting into midnight's depths.
Knowing its door remained unlocked still, first I pressed my lips to it.
Then entering inside, I casually tried locking it.
Yet no matter what, the lock refused to catch properly.
I kept lifting the door trying to align lock and keyhole.
Each time it rattled noisily and the lock resisted.
The clattering sound plunged me into anguish and terror.
At that moment I fancied this house's Wife emitted something like teeth-grinding moans from inner bedrooms.
Then heavy footsteps approached and from beyond darkness came the House Owner's voice.

“Oh, it’s fine. I’ll lock it.”
From the tone of his voice, I sensed that he wasn’t angry.

“Ah…” Leaving that ambiguous response behind, I ascended the stairs just as I was.

The lock I had tried dozens of times to secure without success, he managed to lock in a single attempt.
The surroundings fell deathly silent again.

I entered my room and tried to hang my clothes on the rack when it fell to the floor with a clatter.
The wooden clothes rack made an excessively loud noise against the thin floorboards (which doubled as ceiling panels, beneath which the Wife of this house slept).
Instantly I felt my ears had detected a nerve-shredding threat resembling teeth-gnashing.
Yet it also seemed like the house's own wretched moaning......Then I tried to lay out the bedding piled in the room's corner.
Then the ashtray atop the oil drum serving as desk support fell with another clatter.
These repeated failures left me utterly stupefied.

The next morning brought a relentless gale churning up the sunlight, the weather exactly like that unpleasant day when I had been ordered to move out.
I tentatively descended the stairs.
The conversation between the House Owner, the Wife, and the Younger Brother—who had been sitting on chairs in the corner of the room—abruptly ceased; with a stone-like expression, the Wife stood up sharply and disappeared into the back room.
Then came the sound of her slamming the door with all her might.

“The draft is terrible.”

When the House Owner noticed me standing there blankly and muttered this, the Wife’s Younger Brother gave a faint smirk.
I understood something.
In that instant, I felt as though this glass house had shattered into fragments and come crashing down upon my head.
Yet flowing around my feet was a lukewarm gas with an oddly cold quality.
I remained dazed and moved tentatively.
Whenever I tried to offer an explanation, the area around my lips would begin twitching uselessly……And so, I missed my chance to apologize to both the House Owner and the Wife.
Since the House Owner left on business to a distant location, not a single letter had reached me.

I lay sprawled in my room, idling away the time until I had to leave for work.
The fact that I was here like this—while feeling the needle of torment with each passing moment—ended up making my head overrun with nothing but outlandish delusions.
Suddenly, when I gazed toward the narrowly opened window, a single loofah remaining on a branch in the field across swayed unsteadily……Time had flowed.
Truly, time had flowed away completely.
Had I not encountered such moments before when in a more entranced mood?
How many times must I have lamented time's flow within such small scenes until that autumn when you and I parted in death.
Outside the house’s window, loofahs had ripened and rustled in the wind.
That remains everywhere just as it was—doesn’t it?

And then—a hushed shadow crossed beneath the window I watched. It was an old man passing by the field almost soundlessly, moving heavily and slowly in a hunched posture with a long hoe shouldered. So unhuman it was—a being of strange disposition. But abruptly, I was terrified by the vision of myself being struck in the skull with that hoe. Could it be that this valley-like vicinity stood thick with the aura of vengeful spirits? When I listened carefully, I could discern the footsteps of the Wife downstairs. The door opened, and she seemed to have withdrawn into the inner room now. If I went out at this moment, I could avoid encountering her face. Yes—now was the time....