Pathway to Japanese Literature

〈1949 Kanda〉

I was watching the queue in front of the movie theater as I passed by. The back of a young lady wearing a light blue, modest overcoat had casually caught my eye. There was something inevitably forlorn about people waiting out time, yet even around that young lady's shoulders trembled threads of solitude. What warmth could possibly reach her heart even if she watched this movie about to begin all alone? O seemingly happy yet pitiable young lady. I found myself muttering such words within my heart. Then by some impulse at that moment, the young lady turned toward me. Her face—its entire surface scarred by burns—was gray. I had seen it now. Why must that young lady seek dreams within movies all alone—the reason being...

Every morning, the instant I woke in this room, a deep blue chill coursed down my spine. Do I truly exist here? Am I not floating in midair, being swept away to some unknowable place? Where does this sensation well up from? Is it from the anxiety that I will have to vacate this room again soon?

In that moment, I was alive. I did not collapse. Suddenly darkness came sliding down upon me, and I staggered while groaning. At that time, I heard my own groan. What came crashing down on my head were fragments of collapsing debris. But I felt as though I had been struck by something far more terrible. Everything passed through completely in an instant. A tremendous speed passed through me. From that moment, I could no longer find anything strange about the word “sudden,” and from that moment I became a person cast out onto the earth……I remembered that night. The city of Hiroshima burned throughout the night. I was lying in a hollow of the riverbank embankment, listening to people’s wails. In a state where what would happen next was almost completely incomprehensible, there existed a strange quietness. It might have been that kind of strange quietness—the Earth already on the brink of destruction, people placed at death’s very door. In the dim light, injured people and evacuees were crouching in great numbers. The man who came and crouched right beside me—I couldn’t discern what sort of man he was by sight. But through his voice, I could discern what sort of man he was. “Just stick with Uncle． If you stick with Uncle, you’ll be fine,”the man kept sayingglancing back at the child he was bringing along．

“This child’s been lost since morning – been trailing after me all day.” Moved by the man’s utter incomprehension of their situation, I imagined he was shielding the lost child. The child clinging to their protector, the man clinging to his makeshift purpose, myself clinging to this hollow embankment – we all leaned against something beyond understanding. Had the world ended then, it wouldn’t have surprised me. But the world endured. Dawn broke to find me still trapped at catastrophe’s burning core. What became of that child? Did that man’s fraying resolve truly save them? Or did he cast them aside when morning came?

When walking through the bustling crowd, amidst the noise leaking from all directions, there was a jazz guitar sound with a strangely mournful tone. When I suddenly noticed, an old man was walking right before my eyes with a strangely sorrowful gait. The small bundle hung by rope from his shoulder swayed in tiny jolts—tink-tink-tinking in time with the guitar's notes. Looking closer, the old man's leg was lame. He himself likely didn't even notice what sort of sorrowful figure he cut while waiting there. This figure—danced into hopping about the earth by jazz rhythms in that strangely anguished manner—might have been a phantom welling up from countless wails. As if being swept away to some unknowable place, as if luring people toward some unknowable place, that figure gradually disappeared into the crowd.

I left my room late at night and walked through the midnight streets. There was a man walking from one alleyway trash can to another, scavenging for something. The man darted between trash cans while swinging a flashlight and cloth bag. On the paved street along the streetcar tracks, I saw another man. He had attached a contraption to the tip of a bamboo stick and was using it to pluck up cigarette butts. From butt to butt, the man presented a strangely sorrowful figure with his darting steps. Why do humans driven into corners all share that same peculiar mannerism? That figure overlapped with my own. Am I, who cannot possess a "room," still a man darting about the ground?

In the freezing blue depths of this room, I drifted through half-formed dreams. Children with burned homes and denied shelter wasting away...in Greece, Poland, Rumania...these splintered visions rose before me. I understood this came from those photographs lining the pavement that day. There was one where lips beneath sunken cheeks sucked broth from a spoon. Another showed emaciated shins darting barefoot across sand. A third revealed a quivering mound of flesh - some rounded shoulder receiving an injection beneath a makeshift tent's fluttering shadow. I recognized how these images still coiled through my being like smoke.

Then from somewhere drifted in the sorrowful sound of an accordion. Lured by that sound, I felt myself trudging through the streets in procession. Yet where I stood remained steeped in darkness. In what seemed a dim underground passageway, countless children shuffled along in line around me. I should have followed their current. Suddenly that current ceased. Before my eyes slid down the white net-wall of a vagrant children's roundup.

At the morning street corner, I caught sight of a young woman's retreating figure walking right before my eyes. In the refreshing morning light and vibrant air, her quick, clipped steps showed nothing out of the ordinary. She appeared neatly dressed and healthy. But when my gaze suddenly settled on the expressionless coat's shoulder seam, an instant vision flashed before me of her body scattering into pieces. Then from all directions, the faces of those who had died in agony and the fire's scream closed in around me. With a start, I had to steady myself. ...After some time, when the seething within me subsided, I resumed following her retreating figure with my eyes. She was already on the verge of disappearing into the crowd. Her form seemed to harbor a dangerous fissure - indistinct yet undeniably present.

But might there not indeed lurk dangerous fissures within any human form? I remember how those humans burned to death by the atomic bomb's rays had worn expressions more mysterious and inorganic than human—like statues or something of that sort. From within the chaotically swollen masses of flesh, spindle shapes and cylinders had silently swelled up and flowed. That was the rhythm of great shock against what had suddenly assaulted them. All convulsive rhythms were intertwining and vying to seize space.

Even now, at times, I see the town before my eyes surge up in terror, an image crystallizing into a single posture floating before me. Then each person in the crowd flows silently with the mysterious expressions of inorganic objects—cylinders or spindles.

One day, in a crowded diner, I suddenly looked around and was astonished. Due to the light rays slanting in from the window, nearly all the faces swarming under the dim ceiling were distorted. Muscles gouged by toil, soot-stained skin, and disheveled hair intermingled and swirled within shabby clothing. For an instant, I felt as though I were sitting inside a strange oil painting.

In this diner, each time I unwittingly passed that young man whose face I'd memorized on the pavement, I was filled with a faint aversion. That he had long curly hair and wore a gaudily bright suit caught my attention enough, yet none of this seemed reason enough to dislike him. But the mere fact that he took meals similar to mine in the same place at the same time—this alone would suddenly become unbearably repulsive to me. Even now, a childish impulse lurks within me that fiercely wants to reject something. Thus whenever I saw the hunchbacked man across the table perpetually hunched over his chopsticks, that same faint distaste would well up again. But once when I glimpsed that hunchback drenched in sweat pulling a cart along the roadside, I started. The childlike core still lingering within me nearly shattered. However violently I might reject the external world now, that world might reject me more violently still.

I passed by a hardware store's eaves and suddenly felt uneasy about the items catching my eye. All those numerous utensils would before long each find their way into some household's cupboard. But I even felt as though I had forgotten the names of those utensils. Alumite... nickel... I forcibly tried to recall something I was beginning to forget. But something slipped away from me. When you were alive, I had been surrounded by household furnishings without any anxiety. For a long time, both the names and shapes of the items in my house had become completely ordinary to me. Now, those countless utensils and clothes seemed to me like a dream. Those dreams that had been burned to ashes now had nowhere left to be contained.

Therefore，those dreams dissolved hazily into air，flowed across earth，and drifted along. Since parting with you through death，since losing what we called home，I who wander this ground can only watch endless currents vanish into void. Yet even now，countless houses must still stand upon this earth，beneath whose eaves countless melancholies and affinities endlessly repeat. There must dwell expressions and signals—secret codes that live nowhere but beneath those very eaves.

The sensation of the veranda from my burned-down hometown home comes back to me in dreams. Which part of that tatami room’s veranda plank was it? I think it must have been near where the beautiful grain of the maple tree’s chestnut-brown knot was visible. In that spot, my deceased Mother would sit and tell me thunder stories when I was young. From there, the trunk of a pine tree—which twisted and wound its way up from beside the well—soared high into the sky, standing directly before us. “It was the sky above that pine tree.” “With a crack, a pillar of fire erupted.” “A huge crimson pillar like fire tongs…” “Then, shortly after, a fire broke out.” “The lightning had struck Mr. Kagawa’s roof.” “The frightening thing from that time—how should I describe it?” “It was still morning.”

Mother still retained the expression from that moment when she had seen the pillar of fire in the sky above the pine tree. That had been an event from before I was even born, but from Mother’s expression, something faintly warm had reached me. “When you were still in my womb, there was a fire nearby.” “At that time too, I was so startled—I hardly knew how to describe it.” There was something mysteriously entrancing about Mother’s expression as she spoke of such things. Perhaps I had sucked in her frightened heartbeat from Mother’s breast. That came to seem like women's prayers—something trying to survive on this earth. (Therefore, I can almost see the expressions and words with which those many girls who experienced Hiroshima’s tragedy will someday, as mothers, tell their sons of that time.)

In the zashiki room of that burned-down house, a refreshing early summer breeze was always rustling. Undoubtedly, I as a child must have been utterly delighted by such refreshing things. My deceased father too seemed to have enjoyed imagining things in the breeze. On a cool rattan mat, he would hold my boyhood self on his lap and tell me stories. "When you grow up... Let's see now—I'll tell you about when you become an adult." "You'll live in a great big house then." "And you'll have a splendid bride—a truly splendid one." "That's right—among your siblings, you'll become the most fortunate of all."

Father, engrossed in his own visions, would go on to depict in minute detail—one by one—what sort of kimono I would be wearing at that time, how exactly the view of that house’s garden would look. That might have been a dream painted by the gentle breeze. But had my deceased father still wanted to entrust a single dream to me?

From the small window on the north side of that house's second floor, a lacquered-black night sky perpetually peered inward. Even the faint creak produced whenever I opened and shut that window seemed connected to whatever watched from beyond. My dead sister often spoke to me of stars. In her eyes dwelled a mingling of terror before the abyss and longing toward its depths. The narrow room held its breath in silence. To my boyhood self, the infinite world unfurling beyond that peeled-back roof seemed to thrum with visceral resonance. Had some mysterious force been bewitching me—peering into my very core—since those days? ...You would understand this. How violently I craved beauty as a child. The veined wings of ladybugs, cherries' liquid gloss, rainbows trembling in soap bubbles—merely glimpsing these would hurl my soul into distant wanderings. My eyes gorged on chromatic splendor while my mind dissolved into haze. To that childhood self, only worlds swaddled in beauty's secrets proved unbearable. (Thus what I sought most desperately within you might have been this nostalgia for my own lost boyhood.)

Sometimes amidst the city's bustle, I would catch glimpses of a girl who resembled your childhood self. When I saw that neat, even slightly sorrowful-looking face of a small girl, I wondered if you were still growing there within her. Then I would recall the child you had once dreamed of - one darting and leaping about wild fields, visibly happy-looking, radiating the very happiness of being a child... Were such children still somewhere upon this earth, growing up even now?

I walked while feeling my footsteps settling into quiet order. When I turned off the tram street and entered a one-meter-wide alley, the blue sky visible above the tall buildings on both sides appeared crisply beautiful. Did such a beautiful blue sky truly exist amidst this city? But I knew. When I had staggered through the burned ruins in a state near starvation, even then, a mysteriously pure light had come streaming down from the heavens above. And the fact that I had survived—the fact that I was still alive now—something seemed to urge me to carve this reality into myself with violent intensity. I counted the sound of my own footsteps like my own breath.

I was right below this room’s window where a great number of children were chanting in unison,

Woo Woo Woo

Roar Roar Roar I listened absently to them imitating the roar of a fire. On the chilly road under falling dusk, the children grew excited by the voices they themselves had whipped up, each one behaving like a flame. Truly, were the children burning madly—possessed by something? Was this the memory of that horrific night of air raids reviving in their eyes—were they now playing amidst reflections of flames? But,

Burn burn! Wah wah wah The children's voices took on an increasingly rising pitch，as if they were all now gazing at the same shared illusion. And it seemed to transcend melancholy and reach the pinnacle of jubilation.

I was almost incessantly shaken, surrounded by noise. Across the road, this window directly faced the row of houses on the opposite side, yet the ceaseless sounds rushing through it made it seem as though the streets themselves were willfully intruding into the room. Thoroughly, I surveyed this space that temporarily sheltered me with a sense of pity. But it seemed I was the one being abandoned after all. At times, while being jostled by the commotion outside, I would sit in dusk-shrouded stillness without even turning on the light. On such occasions, wooden clogs would clack toward my window. Then someone would tug the cord dangling from the streetlamp post outside. With a soft click, light bloomed there. And in that moment, I recognized myself as one left behind. Could children truly find joy in such trifles—pulling a streetlamp's switch cord? The neighborhood children with no playground but the road inexplicably favored gathering beneath my window's lamp; within them lurked some infectious momentum—when one child shouted, chaos instantly engulfed the entire street. I'd unwittingly memorized the voices of the boy and girl who always sparked these outbursts. But once pandemonium spread, shouts welled up endlessly... I suddenly recalled the colors of images flickering through those running children's minds. My body burned feverishly beneath something warm swaying overhead. I kept running through the tube until—abruptly—the futility of it all seized me. I stopped dead. Everything turned chillingly cold.

From that time onward, I was a child left behind.

In the evening, on the chaotic street en route to dining out, I heard a gentle, simple voice say, "I found the first star." Then within me, the churning thoughts suddenly stilled as if water had been poured over them. Do stars emerge at twilight in every era, and do children always discover them with joy? I casually passed by where a girl sat playing on a straw mat by the roadside. That spot still held some brightness. Then something beautiful seemed to flicker past my eyes. Looking closer, on the paper spread over the mat lay small torn pieces of orange peel arranged neatly like buttons or such. (But does passing by such sights make me a desolate traveler?)

The spring when I first left my hometown home to embark on a journey was now a distant memory.

In the narrow room of a Tokyo backstreet boarding house, I felt for the first time as though I had become completely alone. Yet through that room's window, spring sunlight fell softly upon the neighboring black plank fence, while across the narrow garden's surface, green grass sprouted. Enveloped in tender, gentle air, I felt as though being cradled. Though made solitary, back in my hometown house my mother and sister kept me in their thoughts. I understood how during those days, sustained by kind things, I breathed freely. Yet my sensitive heart already secretly envisioned upheaval approaching from afar. Not even that premonition could break me. I wished to accept fate honestly and taste life. So intensely did I still yearn for experience as that boy.

I read Barbusse's Hell under the electric light in that boarding house room. It was a lukewarm, quiet evening. I felt as though surrounded by soft walls. But the protagonist of that story sat alone in a desolate Parisian boarding house room gazing into the abyss. He who lived in utter solitary loneliness had no children. Therefore were he to die, the dotted line continuing since humanity's dawn would snap abruptly at his point. This vision of emptiness made him shudder with something like dread. Even I - that boy yearning for experience - felt a bottomless void peering in from there.

I, then a student, became friends with a mysterious man around that time. (This human figure still disturbs me from afar even now...) When I first came to know him, his family had already fallen into ruin, leaving him nearly penniless and cast out onto the streets. The father who died alongside the bankruptcy was actually his uncle, while his true father had long since passed away. Moreover, the mother he had until then believed to be his birth mother turned out to be his foster mother. These truths had finally become clear to him at that time.

“That’s why such things happened.” “As a child, I had both hands bound with rope by Father as punishment for mischief and was shoved into the closet.” “After a while, I found myself crying and screaming inside that closet.” “The ropes binding me came undone on their own.” “Yet there I was, weeping and begging him to tie me up again because they’d come loose.” “Could there exist such a pitiful child?”

But perhaps what drew me to that friend back then was indeed that extraordinarily sorrowful human aspect within him. Cast out onto the streets, he would spend nights on park benches, and on the tenth day there were times when he teared up at managing to get a bowl of rice. Such wretched circumstances were still an unknown world to me, but on my friend’s face was an expression of something straining with all its might. At times I felt as though I were gazing up in awe at some mysterious inexhaustible brightness lurking within him. Whenever he met me he would talk endlessly about poetry. Though his manner of speaking held elements that remained frustratingly incomprehensible to me, an intense heat throbbed painfully through my being; walking through the city together we seemed to gaze at the edge of some distant world. The universe history humanity’s entire flow—everything became a chaotic jumble and came swirling dizzily into us.

Then, he kept his eyes burning with rage against the monster that sought to strip humans of their survival. While battling poverty, he gradually carved out a path for his livelihood. When he formed a connection with and married an unfortunate woman, he eventually built a small house through his own efforts. Time and again, the monster's hand reached toward that small house, but... And so time flowed onward.

That friend's house had been spared from the war's flames and still stood upon the earth. Having lost my dwelling, I sought temporary refuge at his home. Yet when I met my friend after long absence, his countenance had darkened into profound gloom. He resembled a man dragged downward by some oppressive weight. There remained in him the aspect of one straining against limits yet unknown. Beneath his prison-heavy expression flickered traces of unbearable tenderness. Could such sorrow dwell within a human being? I marveled in secret. But this heaviness now saturated every corner of the small house—I understood its hopelessness. The household's wife kept fearsome silence, her sealed lips trembling with caged fury. At moments this dwelling seemed caught within earth's splitting groan. The slightest tremor might have shattered those walls to dust. Still my friend persisted in writing verse. Once he showed me his notebook. There sang forth—in their barest extremity—the earth's countless gashes: humanity's miseries teetering at ruin's edge. One sensed a hand faintly raised toward light—amber sun through coal-cloud rifts. Was he not overburdened by all human suffering—both endured and imagined—like some lion clamped to abyssal rocks in mind's black sea? Then one day my friend departed on an unannounced journey. Not long after, I too fled that strangling house.

That friend never returned from the journey he had embarked upon. But before long, letters began arriving at my place with frequency. Every time I read them, I felt shaken by something fierce. He obtained a lover in a distant northern region and ended up settling there.

“I’ve told almost no one about this life of wounded sorrow imposed upon me through years of despairing flight and steps toward suicide, but now those suicidal preparations have ended.” “Now a woman’s figure has appeared.” “I ascend through the radiance of her gaze, plunging deeper and deeper into the abyss.” “Here at last I saw light that could fathom the depths.” “My salvation began with the snow spirit glimpsed in blizzards.” “This woman—a virgin who knows her own folly yet resignedly casts herself aside to purely sustain her mother.” “Holding her naked form, I share in a bond through which she remains eternally virgin.” “I shall never leave this place.” “I cannot conceive any thought outside this gaze’s luminous sphere.” “I am resurrected.” “For the first time I face truth itself.” “I have come to know what they call life’s purpose—what they name existence’s equilibrium……”

This was an excerpt from that letter—but had he truly embarked on a splendid life with a new lover in that land of snow and icicles? But that appeared to be a cramped communal life in a narrow house within back-alley slums, shared with his mother, older sister, and lover. He began sending me letters almost without cease. It became clear he wrote poetry with ferocious momentum constantly, his heart always ablaze in that hovel. I prayed that all the wounds this friend had sustained on this earth would be healed here on this earth. Yet before long, my friend’s letters gradually came to take on a tone nearing despair.

“It’s an abyss, an abyss—wherever I look, nothing but abyss.” “I think the time I spent in solitary confinement in that prison was when I was happiest.”

“Deceived by tomorrow’s light—this despair of being unable to despair in humanity—is agony.” “In all humanity, only the victims are right.” “Moreover, almost all are perpetrators.”

This was the creaking and groaning born from their cramped communal life in a narrow back-alley tenement—an aged mother, a spiteful older sister, and his lover all dwelling together. ……Had my friend smashed his head against a wall of darkness? Having suffered countless wounds to his soul and despairing of humanity, my friend finally cried out such things.

“What a miserable thing.” “In a life that has no purpose other than procreation, only women and children are light.” “All else is pretense.”

I could not take in these words without awe. ...And yet, in a dwelling scarce on fuel, subsisting on weeds to stave off hunger, this friend had now—in the very depths of misery—gained a new child of his own. A new human child...

The landscape bites me. I bite the landscape.

Ah—two biting each other—you and I

I knew the hour before sunset lured me here. Once I reached this moatside pavement, something icy-cold would paradoxically warm me. Cars flowed incessantly right beside me, but the sky above my head grew hushed as its light gradually faded. My eyes looked up at the chimney atop the Western-style building as if seeing it for the first time. A mass of black smoke floated and moved silently. Beside it hung a crescent moon still devoid of color. I knew that moon would begin glowing as I walked toward the bridge ahead. Across the moat's water stood a tree on a stone cliff, its branches splayed like frenzied dancers... The green leaves lingered in my vision like final embers of extinguished light. I still remembered how these trees had blazed dazzlingly under midsummer sun. But now those ahead seemed dissolved faintly into air. Was the air trembling this way? Was it I who trembled? Or you who were dead? These shoes with worn-down heels, this overcoat threadbare as paper—I knew I'd survived and walked here now. Did you know—that I walked like this... The light grew fully dim, leaving the wide road across formless. A girl walked toward that haze. Her shadow faded piece by piece.