Pathway to Japanese Literature

Author: Hori Tatsuo

It was as though death had opened a season all its own.

On the road to the deceased’s house, automobile congestion gradually increased.
And because the road was so narrow, each car now spent more time stopped than moving.

It was March.
The air was still cold, but no longer so difficult to breathe.
Before anyone knew it, a curious crowd had surrounded those automobiles and pressed their noses against the glass windows, trying to get a good look at the people inside.
That turned the glass windows white with fog.
And inside them, their owners wore uneasy smiles as if heading to a ball while looking back at them.

When one saw through one of those glass windows a noblewoman—eyes shut tight, head resting heavily against a cushion as though she were a corpse—

“Who is that?”

That’s how the people whispered to each other.

That was the widow Saiki.
The automobile’s stop—which had seemed longer than any before—appeared to rouse the lady from that catalepsy.
Then, while saying something to her chauffeur, the lady opened the door herself and stepped out of the car.
Just then, as the car ahead began to move, her vehicle started forward again, leaving its owner behind.

And almost simultaneously, the crowd saw.
A single young man—hatless, his hair tousled—pushed through the crowd as if parting waves, approaching the lady who appeared like flotsam bobbing up and down there; all the while smiling with feigned familiarity, he seized her arm—

When the two of them finally managed to emerge from the crowd, Madame Saiki seemed to notice for the first time that she was nearly leaning against the arm of an unfamiliar young man.
After releasing her arm from him, she cast a look that seemed to inquire at him while—

“Thank you very much.”

she said.
When the young man realized she didn’t seem to remember him, he answered with a slight blush.

“I’m Kouno.”

The young man’s face—which Madame Saiki seemed unable to recall even after hearing his name—nevertheless appeared to reassure her somewhat through its refined features.

“Is Mr. Kuki’s residence already near?” the lady asked.

“Yes, it’s right there.”

While giving this answer，the young man turned toward her with a look of surprise.
Suddenly，she came to a stop there.

“Excuse me，I wonder if there isn’t somewhere around here where one might rest.
I’m feeling rather unwell，you see…”

The young man quickly found a small café nearby.
When they stepped inside, however, the table reeked of dust, and the leaves of the potted plant had turned completely gray.
The young man appeared belatedly concerned about it for Madame’s sake, but Madame herself did not seem to mind it all that much.
The young man considered that perhaps the potted plant’s leaves had turned gray because they were mourning his sorrow.

When the young man noticed that Madame’s complexion had somewhat improved, he said with a slight stammer.

“I... I still have some business to attend to... I’ll return right away...”

And then he stood up.

When left alone there, Madame Saiki closed her eyes again and imitated a corpse.

What in the world was that commotion—like some sort of ball or something?
I could never bring myself to step into their midst.
I should simply return home like this…

Even so, Madame decided to wait until the young man returned. Because somehow she had begun to feel she might have met that young man somewhere before. Come to think of it, she thought there was something about him that resembled the deceased Kuki. And that resemblance evoked a memory within her.

It was several years ago.
By chance, she had encountered Kuki at Manpei Hotel in Karuizawa.
At that time, Kuki had been accompanied by a fifteen-year-old boy—she realized now he must have been none other than him.
While looking at the cheerful-looking boy, she said with slight spitefulness: “He resembles you quite well. Isn’t he your child?”
When she said so, Kuki smiled defiantly and fell silent.
Never before had she felt so hated by him than at that moment…

Henri Kouno was, in fact, the boy from Madame’s memories.

As for Henri, of course, there was no way he could have forgotten that Madame he had encountered together with Kuki in Karuizawa several years ago.

At that time, he was fifteen.

He was still a cheerful and innocent boy.

It was much later that he recalled wondering whether Kuki had been quite fond of Madame.
At that time, he had only understood that Kuki seemed to sincerely respect Madame.
That had gradually transformed her into his unassailable idol.
At the hotel, Madame’s room was on the second floor, facing a courtyard where sunflowers bloomed.
And she remained shut inside that room nearly the entire day.
He, who had never had the opportunity to enter there, often looked up at that room from under the sunflowers.
It seemed something sacred, beautiful, and somehow unreal.

That hotel room frequently appeared in his dreams afterward. He could fly in his dreams. Thanks to that, he was able to see inside the room through the window glass. That changed its decorations unfailingly with each dream. Sometimes in English style; other times in Parisian style.

He turned twenty this year.
Holding the same dream, looking slightly sadder than before, having grown a bit thinner.

And even earlier, when he had seen Madame—who looked as if dead inside the automobile—through the glass from among the crowd, he had nearly convinced himself he was dreaming while walking...

While the crowded funeral had made him completely forget the emotion of death, Henri Kouno—having returned from the venue—rediscovered that emotion of death together with Madame Saiki in the dust-covered café.

To him, those things seemed difficult to approach.
Therefore, to approach them, he tried to feign sadness as much as possible.
But his own sorrow—far deeper than he himself realized—prevented him from succeeding.
And foolishly, he stood there.

“How did it go?”
Madame raised her face toward him.

“Uh, it’s still terribly crowded.”
He answered in a fluster.

“In that case, I shall not pay my respects over there and return as I am…”

While saying this, Madame Saiki took out a small business card from her obi and handed it to him.

“I must apologize for failing to recognize you earlier… When you have leisure time, please do come visit my home.”

Henri, realizing Madame had remembered him and now hearing this offer from her, grew even more flustered and began frantically searching through his own pockets.
And finally managed to take out a business card.
That was Kuki’s business card.

“I don’t have my own business card, so…”
Saying this with a smile like a timid child, he flipped over the business card and there—

Henri Kouno

—he clumsily wrote the name.

As she watched this, Madame Saiki—who had been wondering where this young man and Kuki resembled each other so much—finally discovered their point of similarity through her own peculiar method.

He was like Kuki turned inside out.

Thus did these two chance-met individuals come to understand each other with a swiftness neither could have anticipated—perhaps because their unseen mediator had been death itself.

⁂

In Henri Kouno, as Madame Saiki had discovered, there lingered an air of Kuki turned inside out.

In terms of physical appearance, he bore little resemblance to Kuki.
If anything, one might say they were polar opposites.
But that very opposition instead made their spiritual resemblance all the more striking to some.

Kuki had apparently been deeply fond of this youth.
This fondness must have enabled the boy to swiftly discern his mentor's vulnerability.
Kuki was a man who sought to cloak his timidity from the world, permitting it to surface only through his peculiar brand of irony.
It could be said he achieved partial success in this endeavor.
Yet the more thoroughly he concealed that weakness within himself, the more intolerable it grew.
Henri had watched this tragedy unfold before his very eyes.
And Henri—who shared that same timidity—had chosen instead to drag his own fragility into plain view.
How far he might succeed in this remained a question for the future—

Kuki’s sudden death had, of course, thrown this young man’s psyche into disarray.
Yet through some cruel means that made even Kuki’s unnatural death seem utterly natural to him.

After Kuki’s death, Henri was asked by the bereaved family to begin organizing his collection of books.

Every day, having entered the musty library and remained there, he diligently continued that work.
This work seemed to suit his sorrow.

One day, he discovered something like an old letter fragment sandwiched between the pages of a worn-out Western book. He thought it looked like a woman’s handwriting. Then he read it nonchalantly. He read it again. Then he carefully placed it back where it had been and slid the book as far back into the depths as possible. When he looked at the cover to remember it, it was Mérimée’s Letters.

For some time after that, he kept repeating it like a mantra.

Let us see which of us can cause the other more suffering…

When evening came, Henri returned to his own apartment.

His room was truly in disarray.
It appeared to have been scattered with the same persistence he applied daily to organizing Kuki’s library.—One day, when he entered that room, he discovered something floating iridescently atop a heap of newspapers, magazines, neckties, roses, and pipes—exactly like oil floating on a puddle.

Upon closer inspection, it was a beautiful envelope.
When he turned it over, "Saiki" was written.
And that handwriting immediately reminded him of the old letter he had discovered some time before in Mérimée’s Letters.

He carefully cut open the envelope while faintly floating an old man’s smile.
With an air of knowing everything…

Henri would use two kinds of smiles in that manner. Childlike smiles and old man's smiles. In other words, he distinguished between those directed at others and those directed inward.

Because of such smiles, he believed his own heart was complex.

For Henri Kouno, the reason his second meeting with Madame Saiki was conducted in a much deeper mental state than the previous one was due to such episodes. Madame Saiki’s room, unlike his dream, was quite modest in its decorations. It was neither British in style nor Parisian in style. And it somehow made him think of a first-class cabin salon.

You should notice how he occasionally cast upon Madame Saiki a gaze like that of someone feeling seasick.

But what made Henri’s psyche so uneasy was not only due to such an environment but also because, while reminiscing about the deceased with Madame Saiki, he constantly tried to keep up with her feelings, stretching himself beyond his years as much as possible.

This person must have loved Kuki too—just as Kuki had loved this person.
Henri thought.
However, this person’s hardened heart could not touch his fragile heart without wounding it.
Just as a diamond cannot touch glass without scratching it.
And this person too was suffering from wounds she herself had inflicted...

Such thoughts were constantly trying to lift Henri to a place his age could not reach.

Eventually, he saw a seventeen- or eighteen-year-old girl enter the drawing room.

He realized that she was Madame Saiki's daughter, Kinuko.
The girl did not yet resemble her mother very much.
That somehow made him feel he didn’t like the girl.

He felt that a seventeen- or eighteen-year-old girl was too distant from his current state of mind.
He found her mother’s far more vivid than the girl’s face.

Kinuko, for her part, through the sensitivity unique to a girl, seemed to perceive that Henri’s feelings lay distant from her. She remained silent and made no attempt to join their conversation.

Her mother noticed it immediately.
And her delicate consideration would not allow it to remain as it was.
While showing motherly concern, she tried to bring the two of them closer.

She began to obliquely talk to Henri about her daughter.
One day, Kinuko had been invited by her school friends and entered a used bookstore in Hongo for the first time—so it was told.
When she happened to pick up a Raphael’s artbook that was there and look inside, she found a bookplate inscribed *Kuki* on its frontispiece.
And she wanted it very much…

Suddenly, Henri interrupted.

“That might be something I sold.”

Madame Saiki and her daughter looked up at him in surprise. Then, showing that characteristic innocent smile of his, he added:

“I’d received it from Mr. Kuki long ago, and four or five days before he passed away, I ended up having no choice but to sell it. Now I’ve come to deeply regret it, though…”

Why he had felt compelled to confess his own poverty before these affluent ladies was something even Henri Kouno himself didn’t fully understand. But somehow, this confession pleased him. He gazed rather contentedly at them, who seemed greatly shocked by his own unexpected frank words.

And Henri himself too eventually began to be surprised by his own childlike frankness…

⁂

What had until then been nothing more than a figment of his dreams—the Saiki household—suddenly became a reality that entered Henri’s life.

Henri carelessly threw it in among the clutter of newspapers, magazines, a necktie, roses, a pipe, and memories of Kuki and such.

He did not mind such disorder in the slightest.
Rather, in that chaos he found the lifestyle most suited to himself.

One evening, in his dream, Kuki handed him a large artbook. While thrusting one of the paintings from it toward him,

“Do you know this painting?”

“It’s Raphael’s *Holy Family*, isn’t it?”

he answered uncomfortably. He felt that it was likely the artbook he had sold off.

“Take another good look,” Kuki said.

There, he looked at the painting once more.
Then, though it did resemble Raphael’s brushwork, the Holy Mother’s face in the painting looked like Madame Saiki’s, and the infant’s like Kinuko’s. Feeling unsettled, he tried to look more closely at the other angels when—

“Don’t you get it?” Kuki laughed with sarcasm...

Henri woke up.
When he looked, there beside his own cluttered pillow lay a single familiar, impressive envelope.

"Oh, am I still dreaming…?" he wondered even as he hurriedly tore open the envelope, but the wording inside the letter was clear.
It said to buy back the Raphael artbook.
And along with it was a single money order.

He closed his eyes again in bed.
as if trying to convince himself he was still in the midst of that continuing dream.

That afternoon, Henri, who had come to visit the Saiki household, was carrying a large Raphael artbook.

“Oh, you went to the trouble of bringing it? You could have just left it at your place.”

Even as she said this, Madame Saiki promptly accepted it. Then, sitting in a rattan chair, she quietly turned its pages one by one… when suddenly, with a rough motion, she lifted it to her face. And then she appeared to be sniffing the book’s scent as well.

“There seems to be a scent of tobacco.”

Henri looked up at Madame Saiki in surprise. As he instantly recalled that Kuki had been extremely fond of tobacco, he noticed her face was now so pale it unsettled him.

“There’s something about this person that carries an air of a sinner,” Henri thought.

At that moment, Kinuko called out to him from within the garden.

“Would you like to see the garden?”

While thinking that leaving Madame Saiki alone would be more to her liking, he followed Kinuko into the hushed garden.

As the girl proceeded deeper into the garden with Henri following behind, her steps grew increasingly awkward.
She failed to recognize this awkwardness stemmed from Henri walking behind her.
Instead she devised a reason only an adolescent girl could imagine.
Turning back to face Henri, she said:

“There are wild roses around here, so it would be dangerous if you stepped on them.”

The season was still far too early for wild roses to be in bloom.
And Henri could not tell which were wild roses by their leaves alone.
He too had unconsciously begun to walk awkwardly.

Kinuko herself had not noticed in the slightest, but her heart had gradually begun to waver from around the time she first met Henri—though to say “from around the time she first met Henri” was not entirely accurate.
It might have been more precise to say it began around the time of Kuki’s death.

Up until then, even though Kinuko was already seventeen, she had still preferred to live under the influence of her dead father.
And she did not attempt to possess her mother’s diamond-like beauty but instead gazed at it, remaining always on the side that loved it.
However, when she first saw how deeply her own mother grieved over Kuki’s death, she had merely found it unexpected. But before long, those womanly emotions of her mother’s awakened a certain dormant layer within her.
From that moment on, she began to harbor a secret.
However, without trying to know what it was.
—And from then on, unbeknownst to herself, she was tending to view things through her own mother’s eyes.

And before she knew it, she began to gaze at Henri through her own mother’s eyes.
To put it more accurately, within him—as her mother saw—was Kuki turned inside out.

However, it could be said that she herself was hardly conscious of all that.

At one point, Henri had come to visit while her mother was away.

Henri wore a slightly troubled expression, but even so, he ended up sitting down in the parlor as Kinuko urged.

Unfortunately, it was raining.
That’s why they couldn’t go out into the garden like last time.

The two sat facing each other, but there was nothing in particular to talk about. Moreover, by imagining that the other was surely bored, each came to feel as if they themselves were bored.

And so the two of them sat for a long time in an unnaturally stifling silence.

However, they were so absorbed that they didn’t even notice the room had grown dark.—When Henri finally realized how dim it had become, he startled and took his leave.

Afterward, Kinuko felt what seemed like a headache.
She blamed it on the tedious time spent with Henri.
But in truth, it was more akin to a headache from having lingered too long near the roses.

⁂

The first signs of such love began to appear in Henri as well, just as they had in Kinuko.
Due to his disorganized lifestyle, Henri mistook those signs for mere lassitude and blamed them on the disparity between the women’s unyielding nature and his own fragile disposition.
And recalling the principle that “a diamond scratches glass,” he thought it better to distance himself from them swiftly before he too was wounded like Kuki.
Then he addressed himself in his peculiar way:
—That Kuki’s very death which had drawn him near to them now conversely served to drive him apart.

And with that surprisingly simple way of thinking to distance himself from them, Henri shut himself away once more in his cluttered room and tried to live entirely alone. Then, this time, true weariness arose from within that tightly closed room. However, Henri himself—while jumbling together the genuine and the counterfeit—waited only for a single sign that might rescue him from such things.

A single sign.
That came from his friends who were enthralled by the casino dancers.

One evening, Henri stood with his friends in the casino’s backstage corridor that smelled like a kitchen, waiting for the dancers.

He quickly became acquainted with one of the dancers.

That dancer was small and not particularly beautiful.
And she was completely exhausted from dancing over ten times a day.
But that reckless air and seemingly cheerful demeanor attracted Henri.
He tried to make himself as cheerful as possible to win the dancer’s favor.

However, the dancer’s seemingly cheerful demeanor was nothing more than her poor artifice.
She too was just as timid as he was.
But her timidity was of a kind that, in its desperation not to be deceived by others, sought instead to deceive them.

In trying to steal Henri’s heart, she joked around with all the other men.
And trying not to let him slip away from her, even though she had made a promise with him, she deliberately left him waiting in vain.

Once, Henri tried to place his hand on the dancer’s shoulder.
Then the dancer swiftly withdrew her shoulder from his hand.
And while watching Henri’s face redden, she believed she was stealing his heart.

How could two such timid lovers ever manage to get along for long?

One day, he was waiting by the fountain in the park for the dancer.
She did not come.
Since he had grown accustomed to this, he did not find it particularly painful.
But then, abruptly, he began thinking of another girl—Kinuko—rather than the dancer.
And he fantasized about what it might be like if the person he waited for now were not that dancer but Kinuko.
...Yet realizing at once how absurd this fantasy was, he blamed himself for attempting to escape his present pain over the dancer through it.

Buried within Henri’s disordered life yet ceaselessly growing, a pure love had thus abruptly shown its face.
But it retreated again without being noticed by him…

As for Kinuko, she had at first watched Henri distancing himself from them with something of a relieved feeling.
But when it passed a certain point, this time conversely, it began to torment her.
However, for the girl’s heart to admit that this stemmed from love for Henri, it was far too rigid.

As for Madame Saiki, she regarded Henri’s growing distance in this manner as rather being her own fault for not giving him opportunities to visit. However, for Madame Saiki, seeing Henri was more often painful than pleasant. And the more time carried Kuki’s death further away, the more she desired nothing but calmness. Therefore, even as she saw Henri gradually distancing himself, she left it as it was.

One morning, the two were driving an automobile through the park.

By the fountain, Henri was walking with a small woman—they noticed this almost simultaneously.
The small woman was wearing a yellow-and-black striped coat and laughing cheerfully at something.
Beside her, Henri was walking with his head bowed, deep in thought.

“Oh!” Kinuko uttered softly in the car.

At the same time she thought her mother might not have noticed Henri and the others. And she tried to feign ignorance of it herself.

“I think some grit got into my eye…”

For her part, Madame Saiki too secretly wished Kinuko had not seen Henri and them. Then she thought perhaps there really had been grit in her eye and she hadn’t seen them after all.

“That gave me quite a fright…”
With those words, Madame Saiki concealed her face, which had turned pale from her emotional state.

⁂

However, that silence lingered long between them.

From then on, Kinuko often went out alone for walks around town.
She blamed the oppressive feelings in her heart on her lack of exercise.
She refused to acknowledge even a trace of the emotions within her—the desire to be alone away from her mother, or the thought that she might encounter Henri again while walking like this.

She was retouching the figures of Henri and what seemed to be his lover like an inept photographer.
In that photograph, the small dancer was transformed into a splendid young lady of high society like herself.

She felt an indescribable bitterness toward Henri and his companion.
However, of course, she did not realize this was jealousy toward Henri.
For whenever she saw any couple around Henri’s age, she tasted that same bitterness.
And she believed this bitterness was directed at lovers in general—though in truth, whenever she saw any couple, she would unconsciously recall Henri and his companion…

She stared at her own figure reflected in the display window as she walked.
And then she compared herself to the couple she had just passed by.
At times, her reflection in the glass contorted her face strangely.
She blamed it on the poor-quality glass.

One day, upon returning from such a walk, Kinuko found a man’s hat and shoes in the entranceway that looked somewhat familiar.

And the fact that she couldn't clearly recall whose they were made her slightly uneasy.

"Who could it be?"

As she thought this and approached the parlor, from within came a voice like a broken guitar.

That was the voice of a man named Shiba.

As for the man called Shiba—"That guy's just like a wallflower."
"You know how at balls, when people can't dance, they often end up clinging to the walls?"
"In English they call such people Wall Flowers... and Shiba's position in life is exactly that." As she recalled Henri having said such things once—then she suddenly found herself thinking of Henri...

When she entered the parlor, Shiba suddenly stopped talking.

But immediately, Shiba began speaking to her in that broken-guitar-like voice.

“I was just in the middle of speaking ill of Henri.”
“He’s become completely unmanageable lately.”
“He’s gotten tangled up with some worthless dancer or something…”

“Oh, is that so?”

The moment she heard that, Kinuko smiled sweetly.
With apparent cheerfulness.
And even as she laughed herself, she felt it had truly been a long time since she had smiled like this.

To make this long-slumbering rose bloom, a single word had sufficed.
That word was "dancer."
She began to think that the person who had been with Henri was someone like that.
I had only ever imagined them as people of my own standing.
And yet I had believed only such people could become Henri's companions.
...That's right—perhaps Henri doesn't love someone like that at all.
Maybe the one that person truly loves is me after all.
Yet because he thinks I don't love him, I wonder if he's trying to distance himself from me.
He must be living with such a dancer to deceive himself.
Someone like that doesn't suit him at all...

That was the arrogant logic typical of a girl. However, in most cases, girls do not include their own emotions in that calculation. And in Kinuko’s case as well, it was the same.

⁂

At times, though no bell had rung, she would feel as if she’d heard its sound and go to the entrance herself; all the while wondering if the device was broken and the bell wasn’t working, Kinuko waited constantly for something.

“Am I waiting for Henri?”
There were moments when such thoughts would suddenly occur to her, but they would immediately slip across the impermeable surface of her heart.

One evening, the bell rang.
Even knowing the visitor was Henri, Kinuko did not readily try to leave her room.

When she finally entered the parlor, Henri—apparently having walked hatless, his hair disheveled—glared briefly at her with a pale face.
After that, he did not turn to look at her again.

Madame Saiki, faced with this Henri, was meticulously sliding the small fruits from the plate of grapes she held into her mouth.
Madame Saiki, prompted by Henri’s disheveled state before her, suddenly recalled encountering him on the day of Kuki’s funeral procession—and from there, found herself unable to stop the flood of thoughts—but she tried to divert her mind from them by moving her fingers even more meticulously.

Suddenly, Henri said—

“I think I’ll go travel for a while.”

“Where to?”
Madame Saiki raised her eyes from the plate of grapes.

“I haven’t clearly decided yet…”

“Will it be long?”

“Yes, about a year…”

Madame Saiki suddenly suspected that Henri might be going to such a place together with that dancer, while—

“Won’t you be lonely?” she asked.

“Well…”

Henri gave a thoroughly disinterested reply and that was all.

As for Kinuko, throughout that time she remained silent, staring at him intently as though trying to paint his portrait. And while her mother found traces of the dancer’s influence in Henri’s uncombed hair, awkwardly knotted necktie, and sallow complexion, Kinuko saw in those very same features only the painful anguish of a young man suffering for her own sake.

After Henri left, Kinuko entered her room and involuntarily closed her eyes.
Her eyes hurt from having stared too intently at Henri’s red-striped necktie earlier.
Then within those closed eyes, red stripes continued flickering endlessly…

⁂

Henri departed.

As the city grew distant and smaller the more he watched it, it seemed to him that only one face he had seen before departing gradually grew larger.

A single girl’s face.
A face as holy as Raphael’s painted angels.
A single mysterious face, ten times the size of the real thing.
And now, it alone stood isolated from all things, expanded, and sought to obscure every other thing from his eyes…

“Is this person the one I truly love?”

Henri closed his eyes.

"But... it doesn't matter anymore..."

He was so exhausted, wounded, and despairing.

Henri—this victim of chaos had until now been utterly unable to discern his own true heart.
And without any thought, to distance himself from what he truly loved, he had tried to live with another woman—and moreover, because of that woman, he had been made so exhausted he no longer knew what to do.

And where was he now about to arrive?

Where to?...

Suddenly, as the train came to a stop at a station, he hurriedly jumped off.

It was a small seaside town with a name reminiscent of some chemical.

And the sorrowful traveler, not even carrying a single trunk, upon exiting the station, immediately set off into that unfamiliar town with no purpose whatsoever.

However, as he walked on, he abruptly began to feel strange.
...The faces of passersby, some flyer eerily lifted by the wind, graffiti on walls that felt indescribably unpleasant, scraps of paper snagged on power lines—those things were wringing out some ominous memory within him.
Henri entered a small hotel and then went into an unfamiliar room.
A room resembling every hotel room.
However, even that tried to make him remember something and began to torment him.
He was tired and very sleepy.
And he tried to blame all of that on his fatigue and sleepiness.
He slept a little.
...When he woke up, it had already grown dark.
The damp wind entering through the window informed Henri that he had come to a town he did not know.
He got up, then left the hotel again.

And once again, walking along the path he had traversed earlier, he pursued the inexplicable sensation within himself—unchanged since that time—like a dog chasing its tail.

Suddenly, a thought struck Henri, beginning to make everything clear to him.
What had been tormenting him all this time—wasn’t it death’s cipher?
The faces of passersby, flyers, graffiti, scraps of paper—weren’t these all ciphers death had been inscribing for him?
Wherever he went, the town clung to these marks of death.
—To him, they simultaneously became Kuki’s shadow.
And somehow he couldn’t escape the conviction that Kuki had come here years ago—that walking unnoticed through these streets just as he did now, Kuki too must have felt this same suffocating pain……

And so Henri finally began to understand—that the deceased Kuki had been ceaselessly living on his reverse side, still powerfully controlling him even now, and that his failure to realize this had been the cause of his life’s chaos.

And so in this way—distancing himself from all things while vividly feeling a single death on the reverse side of his life, at once unbearably near yet impossibly distant—walking through this unfamiliar town without purpose began to seem to Henri an inexplicably pleasant rest.

Before long, Henri—surrounded by countless pieces of driftwood emitting a pungent odor—found himself standing foolishly on the dimly lit shore.
And so the shells, seaweed, and dead fish scattered at his feet were reminding him of the chaos of his own existence.
Among the driftwood was mingled the corpse of a small dog.
As it was intermittently gnashed at by spiteful waves with white fangs and tossed about, Henri gazed fixedly at this spectacle while gradually beginning to feel his own heart pulse with vivid intensity……

⁂

After Henri departed, Kinuko fell ill.

And so one day, she finally confessed her love for Henri for the first time.
She lay on her sickbed, her face as pale as a corpse’s, thinking these thoughts over and over.

Why did I act that way? Why did I keep making nothing but spiteful faces in front of him? That must have tormented him. And this must be how we drove him away from us. Besides, he always seemed worried about being poor... (this thought briefly reddened the girl's cheeks)... so maybe he didn't want Mother to think of him as some kind of seducer. It's true he was afraid of Mother. Driving him away like this was Mother's fault too. It wasn't all my fault. Maybe absolutely everything was Mother's fault...

Such tangled soliloquies had carved an expression onto the daughter’s face—bitterly resentful and ill-suited to a girl of seventeen—before she knew it. That was truly an act of defiance toward herself, but she mistakenly believed it to be defiance toward her mother instead...

“May I come in?”

At that moment, her mother’s voice came from outside the room.

“Fine.”

When Kinuko saw her mother enter, she suddenly wrenched her ferocious face toward the wall.
Madame Saiki could only think she had done that to hide tears.

“A postcard came from Mr. Kouno,” Madame Saiki said nervously.

Those words wrenched Kinuko’s face toward Madame Saiki.
Now it was Madame Saiki’s turn to avert her own face.

—Lately, Madame Saiki had completely lost her youth.
And she couldn’t help but feel that her own daughter had somehow drifted far away from her.
There were times when she thought of her own daughter as if she were a complete stranger.
And even now, it was so……

Kinuko read Henri’s nervously written characters on the back of the seascape postcard.
He had written only that he intended to stay there for a while, having taken a liking to that coast.

Kinuko, from the postcard, abruptly turned her ferocious face toward Madame Saiki while,

“Isn’t Mr. Kouno going to die?” she abruptly questioned.

Madame Saiki seemed startled in that moment by the terrifying gaze of an unfamiliar girl glaring in her direction.
But that girl’s gaze suddenly made Madame Saiki recall the terrifying look in her own eyes—one she couldn’t help but show to the person she had loved when she had been around the same age as that girl.
And then Madame Saiki appeared to notice for the first time—both how strikingly the unfamiliar girl resembled her younger self and that this girl was in fact her own daughter.
Madame Saiki quietly let out a sigh.
The daughter was in love with someone.
Just as I had loved that person long ago, she loves him.
And that must surely be Henri…

However, in the next instant, Madame Saiki felt as though the feminine emotions long dormant within her were awakening once more. After Kuki’s death, the same psychological mechanism that had awakened Kinuko’s latent feminine emotions through her own anguished state now arose again—as if in reaction. And this occurred with such vivid freshness that it nearly made her believe Madame Saiki too loved Henri in precisely the same way as Kinuko did—.

The two of them remained silent for a while.
And just as that silence seemed about to affirm Kinuko’s terrifying words exactly as she had uttered them moments before, Madame Saiki finally reclaimed her maternal duty.

And so Madame Saiki answered with a self-assured smile playing on her lips.

“...That isn’t the case at all... It may be that Mr. Kuki is the one haunting him. But doesn’t that very reason mean he might find salvation instead?”

From the first time she met Henri Kouno, the sharp intuition that had allowed Madame Saiki to perceive how Kuki’s death was interwoven like the weft in the fabric of his existence—and how this had made him into an unfortunate young man who could only comprehend life by fixating on death—now revived within her once more. And even as it did so, this intuition made her realize that to make Kinuko understand Henri’s misfortune, the simplest of paradoxes she had just uttered would suffice.

“Is that so…”

Kinuko answered like this—at first still with an expression tinged with pain as she looked up at her mother’s face—but soon the girl’s gaze, now fixed intently on her mother’s aged yet divine countenance, began to resemble that of a child gazing up at the Madonna in an old painting.