Pathway to Japanese Literature

〈1949 Kanda〉

I was watching the queue in front of the movie theater as I passed by. The figure of a young lady in a light blue neat overcoat casually caught my eye. There was something undeniably forlorn about people waiting for time to pass—and around that young lady’s shoulders too trembled a ray of loneliness. Even were she to watch this movie about to start all alone, how much warmth could she possibly find? Seemingly fortunate, yet pitiable young lady. I absentmindedly muttered such things within my heart. Then—by some chance at that moment—the young lady turned toward me. Her face was gray, its entire surface covered in burn scars. I saw it. Why must that young lady seek dreams within the movie all alone—the reason…

Every morning, as soon as I wake in this room, something icy blue streaks down my spine. Am I truly existing here? Am I drifting in the void, being swept away to some unknowable abyss? Where could such sensations be welling up from? Could it be from the anxiety that I too will have to vacate this room again in the near future?

I was alive in that instant. I was not struck down. Suddenly, darkness slid down over me, and I staggered with a groan. At that moment, I heard my own groan. The things falling onto my head were collapsing debris. But I felt as though I was struck by something far more terrible. Everything flashed by in an instant. A tremendous speed passed through me. From that moment on, the word “sudden” no longer felt strange to me, and from that moment on, I was a person cast out onto the earth… I remember that night. The city of Hiroshima burned all through the night. I was lying in the hollow of the riverbank embankment, listening to people’s wails. In that state where almost nothing could be discerned about what would happen next, there was a strange stillness. It might have been that strange stillness of a world where the Earth was already on the brink of destruction and people stood at death’s doorstep. In the dim light, injured people and refugees crouched in a crowded mass. 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, his character became discernible. “Just stick with Uncle. If you stick with Uncle, you’ll be fine,” the man kept saying, glancing back at the child he was leading.

“This child is lost and has been following me since this morning.” Moved by the man’s presence in that indiscernible state, I felt as though he were shielding the lost child. The lost child, the man protecting him, and even I—we were all leaning on something utterly incomprehensible. So even if the world had vanished at that moment, it wouldn’t have seemed particularly strange to me. But the world did not vanish. When dawn broke, I found myself once again in the very midst of the catastrophe. I don’t know what became of that lost child afterward. Was he truly protected and saved by that man? Or was he abandoned?

As I walked through the jostling crowd, amidst the noise seeping from all directions, there was a jazz guitar sound carrying a strangely mournful tone. When I suddenly became aware of it, right before my eyes walked an old man with an air of peculiar sorrow. The small bundle of luggage hung by a rope from his shoulders swayed in quick, tiny shakes, tinkling rhythmically in time with the guitar’s notes. Looking closer, I saw the old man’s leg was lame. He likely didn’t even realize what kind of pitiful figure he cast anymore. That strangely sorrowful, heartrending sight—compelled by the jazz rhythm to flit about the ground—might have been a phantom born from countless wails. As if being swept toward some unknowable horizon, as if luring others toward that same horizon, his form gradually melted into the crowd.

I left my room late at night and tried walking through the midnight streets. Then, in the alley, there was a man walking from trash can to trash can, scavenging for something as he went. The man was darting between the trash cans, swinging a flashlight and a sack.

On Densha-dori’s pavement, I saw another man. He had attached a contraption to the tip of a bamboo stick and was plucking cigarette butts with it. From butt to butt he darted about, his movements etched with that same peculiar rhythm all cornered people share. Why do those driven to desperation move with such identically strange cadence? His figure overlapped with mine. Am I too—denied even a “room”—just another man scurrying across this earth?

I was dimly dreaming in the depths of this room’s icy blue chill. Children whose homes were burned, denied shelter, gradually weakening… in Greece, Poland, Romania… such images flickered through me in fragments. I thought that it was because of the photos that had been displayed on the street pavement during the day. In that photo, the lip beneath gaunt cheeks was sucking soup with a spoon. In that photo, emaciated shins without shoes were darting across the sand. In that photo, under a swaying tent beside a makeshift shack on a wooden bed, round shoulders receiving injections rippled. I realized that those images were still infiltrating me and threatening me. Then, from somewhere, the sorrowful sound of an accordion reached my ears. Then, drawn by that sound, I felt as if I were trudging along the street with a crowd. But the place where I was remained utterly unlit. In what seemed like a dim underground passage, a crowd of children appeared to be trudging along in a line around me. I should have walked along with the flow of children. And suddenly, that flow came to a halt. Right before my eyes, the white net wall for catching stray children smoothly slid down.

At the morning street corner, I fixed my eyes on the retreating figure of a young woman walking right before me. In the refreshing morning light and lively air, her quick, short steps showed no trace of abnormality. She was neatly dressed and appeared healthy. But when my gaze suddenly settled on the shoulder seam of her expressionless coat, for an instant, the figure before me fragmented into pieces. And from every direction, the faces of suffocated victims and fiery screams closed in around me. Startled, I had to steady myself. ...After a while, when the turmoil within me subsided, I resumed tracking the woman’s retreating figure with my eyes. The woman was already about to vanish into the crowd. In her form lingered what seemed an indistinct yet dangerous fissure.

But isn’t it true that within any human figure, a dangerous fissure indeed lies hidden?

I remember how those people burned to death by the atomic bomb’s rays wore expressions of mysterious inorganic matter—more like statues than human beings. From within the violently swollen mass of flesh, spindles and cylinders silently surged upward and flowed. It was the rhythm of profound shock responding to sudden assault. All convulsive rhythms entwined and sought to seize space. Even now at times I see the town before my eyes quiver upward in fear—an image crystallized into a single posture floating before me. Then each person in the crowd flows silently with inorganic matter’s mysterious expression—cylinders and spindles.

One day, in a crowded cafeteria, I suddenly looked around and was astonished. Due to the slanting rays streaming through the window, nearly all the faces swarming under the dimly lit ceiling were distorted. Muscles hollowed by toil, soot-stained skin, and tangled hair swirled together within shabby clothing. For an instant, I felt as though I were sitting inside a grotesque oil painting.

Each time I passed that young man on the pavement—the one whose face I’d unconsciously memorized at this cafeteria—I felt a faint yet undeniable irritation. That he had long curly hair and wore a gaudily bright suit was striking enough to catch my attention, yet none of this seemed reason enough to dislike him. But the mere fact that he ate similar meals at the same place and time as I did would suddenly become unbearably repulsive to me. Within me still lurked a childish tendency that wanted to violently reject things. Thus whenever I saw the hunchbacked man across the table—always hunched over manipulating his chopsticks—that same faint distaste would well up. But once, I was startled to see that hunchbacked man on the street, drenched in sweat as he hauled a cart. The childlike core still remaining within me was nearly shattered. However fiercely I might now detest the outside world, that world might reject me even more fiercely.

As I passed by the eaves of a hardware store, I suddenly felt uneasy about the items that caught my eye. So many utensils would eventually find their way into cupboards in various homes. But now I even felt as though I had lost the names of those utensils. Alumite... nickel... I tried forcibly to recall something I was on the verge of forgetting. But something slipped away from me. When you were alive, I had been surrounded by furnishings in the house without any anxiety. For a long time, the names and shapes of items in my house had become utterly ordinary to me. Now, those countless tools and clothes seemed to me like a dream. Burned to ashes, those dreams could no longer be contained anywhere.

And so, those dreams dissolve hazily into the air and drift flowing across the ground. Since parting with you in death, since losing what is called “home,” I who wander this earth can only watch countless flowing things recede into the void. But even now, this ground must still bear countless houses where under their eaves, endless cycles of melancholy and affinity repeat. There must be special expressions and signals—ones that could only pass meaning beneath those eaves—packed densely within them.

The sensation of the veranda from my burned-down hometown house reawakens in my dreams. Which part of that veranda's floorboards was it? I think it was where the beautiful grain of the maple's russet knots became visible.

In that area, my deceased mother sat and told stories of thunderstorms to my young self. From there, the trunk of a pine tree—which twisted grandly from beside the well and stretched high into the sky—stood directly before my eyes. “That is the sky above that pine tree. “With a crack, a pillar of fire shot up.” “A crimson pillar like giant fire tongs….” “And then, before long, there was a fire.” “The lightning had struck Mr. Kagawa’s roof.” “How can I describe how terrifying that moment was?” “It was still morning.”

Mother’s face still bore the expression from that moment she had seen the pillar of fire in the sky above the pine tree. Though this happened before I was born, something faintly communicated itself to me through Mother’s expression. “When you were still in my womb, there was a fire nearby.” “That time too—I didn’t know how to describe it—I was so shocked.” There was something strangely hypnotic in Mother’s expression as she spoke these things—something that pierced through me. Perhaps I had sucked in her frightened heartbeat from Mother’s breast. It comes to seem like the prayers of women—those struggling to survive on this earth. (And so I can almost see the expressions and words of those many girls who endured Hiroshima’s tragedy—when they become mothers—as they recount that time to their sons.)

In the tatami room of that burned-down house, a refreshing early summer breeze always rustled through. Indeed, as a child, I must have been exceedingly delighted by refreshing things. My deceased father too seemed to have enjoyed imagining things in the gentle breeze. On a cool rattan mat, he would hold my boyhood self on his lap and tell me stories. "When you grow up... Let me see—I'll tell you about when you become an adult." "When that time comes, you'll live in a great big house." "And you'll have a fine, fine wife." "That's right—among your brothers, you'll be far and away the luckiest one."

Father, engrossed in his prophecy, would describe in minute detail what clothes I would wear then and how that house’s garden would look—each element meticulously rendered. Perhaps it was a dream conjured by the breeze. Yet I wonder—did my deceased father still wish to entrust me with some singular vision? From the small north-facing window on that house’s second floor, a pitch-black night sky perpetually peered inward. Even the faint creak when opening that shutter felt connected to something watching from beyond. My late sister often spoke of stars. In her eyes dwelled a mingling—something fearing the abyss yet yearning toward it. The room stood narrow and hushed. To my boyish self, peeling back that roof to reveal an infinite world seemed to resonate bone-deep within me. Could it be that from those days, something uncanny had been captivating me—peering into my very core? …You would understand, wouldn’t you? How fiercely that child within me craved beauty—the veined wings of ladybugs, cherries’ gloss, rainbows trapped in soap bubbles—mere glimpses hurling my soul into distant wanderings. My eyes drank colors until my mind blurred at its core. For that child, only beauty’s veiled world proved unbearable. (So perhaps what I most desperately sought within you was nostalgia for childhood itself.)

Sometimes in the bustle of this town, I catch glimpses of a girl who resembles your childhood self. When I see the small girl’s neat, even somewhat sorrowful face, I wonder if you might still be growing there. Then I recall the child you once dreamed of—the child darting and leaping through wild fields, radiant with happiness, their whole body brimming with the joy of being a child…… Does such a child still exist somewhere on this earth, still growing even now?

As I walk, I feel my footsteps quietly falling into rhythm. When I turn from the tram street into a meter-wide alley, the blue sky visible between tall buildings stands starkly beautiful. Does such a beautiful sky truly exist here in this city? But I know. When I staggered through scorched ruins near starvation—even then—a mysteriously pure light spilled down from celestial heights. That I survived—that I still live now—something urges me to carve this truth fiercely into my bones. I count my footsteps like measured breaths.

I was absently listening to the many children below my room’s window chanting in unison, Roar Roar Roar Roar Roar Roar

I listened vaguely to them imitating the fire's roar. On the chilly road where evening dusk was settling, the children grew excited by the voices they themselves had whipped up, each behaving as though they were a flame. Truly, were these children burning wildly—possessed by something? Was this that horrific night of air raids returning to their eyes—were they now playing amidst flame reflections? But—

Roar! Roar! Whoa! Whoa! Whoa! The children’s voices gradually took on a rising pitch, as if they were all now staring at the same shared vision. And it now seemed to have transcended melancholy and reached the pinnacle of joy.

I was ceaselessly surrounded and buffeted by noise. Across the road, this window directly faced a row of houses on the opposite side, but the ceaseless sounds rushing in through the window made it seem as though the town and road themselves were barging uninvited into this room. With deep contemplation, I surveyed this room that temporarily sheltered me now, filled with pity. But ultimately, it seemed I was the one being abandoned. At times, I found myself dazedly sitting in the room enveloped in evening dusk, not even turning on the light, while being jostled by the commotion outside the window. At such times, the sound of geta clogs approached outside this room’s window. Then, someone pulled the cord dangling from the streetlight pole outside the window. With a soft sound, a light came on there. And then, I realized I had been left behind. Were the children finding joy in pulling that streetlight’s switch cord—in such a trivial, simple act? The children in this neighborhood—who had no playground but the road—for some reason preferred to gather around the streetlight right in front of my window. Yet there must have been some infectious momentum lurking among them, for when one child let out a shout, the commotion instantly spread across the entire road. I had come to memorize the voices of the boy and girl among them who constantly initiated the shouting. But once the commotion spread, shouts surged forth one after another, swirling around… I suddenly recalled the colors of images reflected in the running, shouting children’s heads. My body burned with heat, and something warm swaying above my head had constantly been over me. I had been running through the tunnel. But suddenly, the futility of running around like that seized me. I came to a stop. Everything had suddenly turned cold and clammy. From that time, I had been a child left behind.

In the evening, on my way out to eat through the cluttered road, I heard a gentle voice say, “I found the evening star.” Then within me, thoughts that had been churning suddenly stilled as if water had been poured over them. Do stars emerge at dusk through all ages? Do children always find them and rejoice? Then I passed by a girl sitting on a roadside mat at play. The area still held daylight. Something beautiful seemed to brush against my vision. Looking closer, torn orange peels lay arranged on the mat’s paper like buttons or such. But am I but an empty traveler passing through such sights?

The first time I left my hometown and set out on a journey was in a spring long past. In the narrow room of a back-alley boarding house in Tokyo, I felt for the first time as though I had become completely alone. Yet through the window of that room, spring sunlight fell softly upon the neighboring black wooden fence, while blue grass sprouted across the narrow garden’s surface. Enveloped in tender air that seemed to cradle me, though now solitary, I knew my mother and sister back home still held me in their thoughts. During those days I understood myself to be sustained by gentle forces, breathing unreservedly. Yet some sensitive part of me secretly traced visions of cataclysm approaching from afar. Even this premonition I refused to suppress. I wished to accept fate with open hands and taste life’s essence. So deeply did experience still beckon me then—a boy yearning.

I read Barbusse’s *Hell* under the electric light in that boarding house room. It was a tepid, quiet evening. I seemed to be surrounded by soft walls. But the protagonist of that story sat alone in a desolate Parisian boarding house room, staring into the abyss. In his utterly solitary existence, he had no children. Thus were he to die, a single dotted line continuing since humanity’s dawn would be abruptly severed at his point. This vision of emptiness made him shudder with something like dread. The boy I had been—still yearning for experience—felt as though a bottomless wind cave were peering back through that void.

I, a student at the time, became entangled in friendship with a mysterious man. (This human enigma still disturbs me from afar even now...) When I first came to know him, his household had already collapsed into ruin, leaving him virtually penniless and cast adrift in the streets. The father who perished alongside the bankruptcy was in truth his uncle; his true father had died long before. Furthermore, the woman he had until then believed to be his birth mother turned out to be an adoptive parent. These truths finally became clear to him at that time.

“So something like this happened too.” “When I was a child and misbehaved, Father would tie my hands with rope as punishment and shut me in the closet.” “After a while, I’d be in there crying and screaming.” “The rope binding me would come undone by itself.” “Then I’d beg through my tears to be tied up again because it had come loose.” “Could there ever be such a pitiful child?”

But perhaps what vaguely drew me to that friend back then was indeed the figure of a human being within him—one whose sorrow transcended ordinary bounds. Cast out into the streets, he would spend nights on park benches or teared up over a bowl of rice he finally obtained on the tenth day. Such miserable circumstances were still an unknown world to me, but on my friend’s face was the expression of something straining with all its might. At times, I felt as though I were gazing up at an inexhaustibly bright, mysterious power lurking within him. Whenever he met me, he would constantly talk about poetry. His way of speaking held something frustratingly beyond my grasp, yet his fierce fervor reached me as if throbbing through my veins. As we walked through the streets, it felt as though we were gazing at the edge of a distant world. The universe, history, the flow of humanity—everything turned into a jumbled chaos, and it felt as though it was all swirling and rushing into us.

And then, he always burned with eyes of rage against the monster that sought to strip away human existence. While battling poverty, he gradually carved out a path for his life. When he met and married an unfortunate woman, he eventually built a small house through his own efforts. Countless times the monster's hand tried to reach that small house, but... And so time flowed on regardless. That friend's house had been spared from the war's flames and remained standing on the earth. Having lost my residence, I relied on my friend's house and temporarily took shelter there. But when I met my friend after so long, his face had taken on a terribly gloomy expression. It was as though he had been pressed down by some oppressive weight. It was also a visage still straining to endure something with every fiber of its being. And beneath that prisoner-like heavy expression, something profoundly gentle faintly quivered. Could there have been such a sad human being? I found myself secretly astonished. But the oppressiveness had saturated every corner of that small house, and even I had come to understand it was beyond remedy. With a fearful expression and remaining silent, the wife of this house always harbored some intense irritation within herself. At times this small house felt as though it were amidst the groans of earth splitting. Even from the slightest moment this house seemed on the verge of collapse. That friend was still writing poetry. I once had him show me that notebook. Therein were sung, in their rawest form, the countless wounds of the earth teetering on the brink of human misery and ruin. And it seemed someone was faintly raising a hand toward a single ray of light (like amber sunlight leaking through a rift in jet-black clouds).

Was he not burdened beyond bearing—both in imagination and experience—with all human misfortune, like a lion sinking its teeth into reefs in the dark depths of his mental sea? One day, that friend left on a journey without a word. After some time, I too fled that suffocating house.

That friend never returned from his journey. But before long, letters began arriving frequently at my place. Every time I read them, I felt myself shaken by something intense. He had found a lover in a distant northern land and ended up settling right there.

“I had told almost no one about this heartbroken life I’ve been thrust into by my desperate attempts to escape through suicide over these past several years, but my preparations for suicide have now concluded.” “Now a single figure of a woman has appeared.” “I climb through the light of that gaze, passing through the abyss deeper and deeper.” “Here for the first time, I saw a light capable of reaching the depths.” “My salvation began with the snow woman I saw in the blizzard.” “This woman—knowing foolishness—resignedly casts aside her life to purely support her mother, a maiden.” “While holding her naked body, I engage in an exchange where she can remain a virgin forever.” “I will no longer leave here.” “Without being in the light of this gaze, I cannot think of anything.” “I am reborn.” “I confront truth for the first time.” “I have come to know a reason for living—the equilibrium of life……”

This was a passage from that letter—but had he truly stepped into a splendid life by finding a new lover in that land of snow and icicles? But it seemed rather to be a chaotic communal existence in a cramped house in the back-alley slums with his mother, sister, and lover. He had come to send me letters almost without cease. He wrote poetry with ferocious intensity, and it became clear his heart remained perpetually agitated within that squalid room. I prayed that all wounds my friend had sustained upon this earth might find healing upon this earth. Yet before long, his letters began taking on tones verging on despair.

“It’s an abyss, an abyss—no matter where I look, nothing but abyss.” “I think the time I spent in that prison cell was when I was happiest.”

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

This was the creaking-and-groaning born from their cramped communal life in a narrow back-alley slum house—shared among an elderly mother, a spiteful sister, and his lover. …Had my friend smashed his head against some wall of darkness? Having sustained countless wounds to his soul and despairing of humanity, my friend had finally cried out such things.

“It is a wretched thing.” “In what is called a life with no purpose beyond reproduction, only women and children are light.” “All else is deception.”

These words I could not accept without astonishment. But... while residing in a home lacking fuel and staving off hunger with weeds, this friend had now gained one new child at the depths of misery. A new human child...

The landscape gnaws at me; I gnaw at the landscape.

Ah—two gnawing at each other—you and I

I knew that the time before sunset lured me here. If I came to this moatside pavement, something cold rather warmed me. Cars ceaselessly flowed by my side, but the sky above me grew hushed as the light gradually faded. My eyes looked up at the chimney atop the Western-style building as if seeing it for the first time then. A mass of black smoke silently floated and moved. Right beside it, a still colorless crescent moon was visible. I knew that as I walked to the bridge ahead, that crescent moon would begin to glow. Across the moat’s water, on the stone cliff—a single tree spreading its branches and leaves as if dancing wildly…. The green leaves remained in my eyes like the last light fading away. I still remembered the trees around here blazing dizzily in midsummer light. But now, the trees appearing before me as I walked seemed to dissolve faintly into the air. Was the air trembling like that? Was it I who was trembling? Or could it be you who were dead? These shoes with their worn-down heels, this overcoat frayed and brittle as paper—I knew that I had survived and was walking there like that. Did you know that I was walking like that…? The light had grown completely dim, and the wide road opposite lay hazy. A single girl walked toward that hazy light. Her shadow faded away little by little.