Pathway to Japanese Literature

1

Café Shanoaru was packed with customers. Even after pushing open the glass door and entering, I couldn't immediately spot my friends. I stood still for a moment. Jazz hurled a slab of raw flesh onto my senses. At that moment, the face of a smiling woman was reflected in my eyes. I stared at it with awkward intensity. Then that woman raised her white hand. Beneath that hand, I finally discovered my friends. I moved toward them. And as I passed by that woman, her gaze and mine intersected without clashing.

There, three young men silently surrounded a table, appearing annoyed by the orchestra. Even when they saw me, they only exchanged slight signals with their eyes. On that table, amidst the smoke, a whiskey glass glowed coldly. I sat there and joined in their silence. I used to meet them here every night.

I was twenty. I had lived almost entirely in solitude up to that point. But my age no longer granted me the equanimity needed to live in complete solitude. And as the season turned from spring to summer that year, there was nothing that seemed unbearable to me.

At that time, these friends invited me to join them at Café Shanoaru. I wanted them to like me. And I agreed. That evening, I met a girl whom Maki, one of them, was obsessively trying to claim as his own. That girl was laughing boisterously amidst the orchestra. Her beauty made me think of a fruit so perfectly ripe it might fall from its branch at any moment. It had to be plucked before it fell.

The girl’s precariousness drew me in.

Maki had been desiring her with the voracity of a starving man. His fierce desire awakened my first desire within me. My misfortune began there.…

Suddenly, one of them arched backward in his chair and turned toward me. He was mouthing something. But the music wouldn’t let me make it out. I leaned my face closer to him.

“Maki’s trying to pass a letter to that girl tonight.” He repeated it in a slightly raised voice. At that voice, Maki and another friend turned toward us. They smiled with grave sincerity. Then they returned to the same silence as before. I alone turned pale. I tried to hide it with cigarette smoke. But the silence that had felt comfortable until now suddenly began to suffocate me. Jazz tightened my throat. I snatched the glass. I tried to drink. But the sight of my own frenzied eyes at the bottom of the glass frightened me. I couldn’t stay there any longer.

I fled out to the veranda. The dimness there cooled my frenzied eyes. There I could stare at the girl buffeted by the electric fan in the distance without anyone noticing me. The way her face contorted from the wind bestowed upon her an unexpected divinity. Suddenly, the lines of her face wavered. She turned toward this direction and began to laugh. For an instant, I believed she laughed upon recognizing me staring fixedly at her from the veranda. But I immediately realized my own mistake. The figure of me standing on the dim veranda couldn’t possibly be visible from her direction. Had she been signaled by someone to come? I began to suspect that was Maki. She turned resolutely in this direction and began to walk.

I felt my hands as heavy as fruit. I placed it on the veranda's handrail. The handrail covered my hands in dust.

2

That night, like a speeding bicycle toppling over, my heart suddenly gave way. I had indeed drawn every rhythm of my mind from her. Now I lost all of it at once. It now seemed I could no longer rise again by my own strength alone.

“There’s a phone call for you.” With those words, Mother entered my room. I did not respond. Mother scolded me. I finally lifted my face to look at Mother. “Please just leave me alone like this.” I made that expression to Mother. Mother looked at me with concern and left the room.

Even when night fell, I no longer tried to go to Café Shanoaru. I no longer tried to go to her place or to my friends' places. I remained motionless in my room. And I exerted every effort to do nothing. I leaned my elbows on the desk and propped up my head with both hands. Under my elbow lay a book that always remained open to the same page. And on that page was depicted such a monster—he possessed a skull so heavy he couldn't even support it himself. And he always rolled it around himself. Periodically, he would open his jaw and peel off grass moistened by his own breath with his tongue. And once, he unwittingly ate his own leg. And yet, nothing felt as dear to me as this monster.

However, it is impossible for a person to live longer in such pain through that manner. I knew that. And yet, why did I not try to extricate myself from that pain? The truth was, I had been waiting without even knowing it myself. I had been waiting—waiting for her love to be directed at me rather than Maki; waiting for one of my friends to come to me in shock bearing that news; waiting, in other words, for a single miracle.

One night at dawn, I had a dream. Maki and I were lying on our backs asleep on what appeared to be the grass in Ueno Park. Suddenly, I woke. Maki was still sound asleep. I saw her emerge from across the grass with another waitress, approaching us while conversing in hushed tones. She was telling the other woman that the one she truly loved was actually me, and that what she’d thought was Maki delivering my letter had in fact been Maki’s own letter. And they passed right before us without noticing us at all. I felt an abnormal happiness. I stole a glance at Maki. Maki had opened his eyes before I knew it.

“You’d been sleeping soundly, hadn’t you?” I said. “Was it me?” Maki made a strange face. “Wasn’t it you who’d been asleep?” I found I had closed my eyes without realizing. “There—you’re falling asleep again.” As I listened to Maki’s voice, I sank deeper into sleep once more.

Then I truly awoke upon the bed. And that dream made me clearly aware of my own unconscious expectation for a miracle—one I hadn’t even realized I’d been harboring. That expectation of a miracle, while stirring up pain within me once more, grew even stronger through it. And that, collaborating with the unbearable loneliness of night, forcibly dragged me back to Café Shanoaru.

Café Shanoaru. There, nothing had changed. The same music, the same conversations, tables stained in the same manner. Among these things I desired to find her—unchanged from before—and Maki too, while I alone remained terribly altered. But at once I felt a dark premonition. To my eyes she appeared as naught but one avoiding my gaze.

“What’s this? You’re looking damnably sullen.” “What’s wrong?”

I answered my friends while trying to assume my usual pose. "I was a bit unwell." Maki stared at me. And he said to me.

“Now that you mention it, the other night you did look awfully miserable.”

“Yeah.”

I stared at Maki with deep suspicion. I fear others seeing me suffer. And yet, from the instinct of a wounded man who cannot resist probing his own injuries with his fingers, I found myself gripped by a desire to clearly identify what was causing me such anguish. After fruitlessly searching for her face, I said while staring at Maki again: “What happened to that girl?” “Huh?”

Maki deliberately affected a look of incomprehension. Then he suddenly smiled as though grimacing. Then it spread to my face as well. I felt myself beginning to lose sight of my own will.

Suddenly, a friend’s voice shattered that silence. “Maki’s finally managed to catch that one.”

And then another voice sounded. “This morning was their first time sleeping together.”

A feeling I had never experienced before wrenched at me. I didn't know whether that was pain or not. My friends were moving their mouths incessantly. But I no longer caught any words after that. I suddenly felt that the smile which had infected me earlier was still floating upon my face. This was truly unexpected even to myself. Yet I felt myself growing terribly distant even from this surface of my own being. Through that, like a diver, I measured the depth of the pain into which I was sinking. And just as the sound of waves clashing and surging at the sea's surface barely reached the ocean floor, so too did the music and clatter of dishes barely reach me.

I made an effort to float upward through alcohol’s power as much as possible. “He drinks like through a hole.” “He looks pained.” His lips were trembling. “What’s tormenting him?”

While gradually floating upward, I finally became aware of those friends' seemingly concerned gazes. Yet they did not see through me at all. I succeeded in making them believe I was ill. I no longer had even the strength left to search for her face.

After leaving Café Shanoaru and parting from my friends, I got into a taxi alone. As I was weakly jostled about, I stared at the driver’s broad shoulders. The surroundings suddenly grew dark. To take a shortcut, the taxi cut through the forest of Ueno Park. “Hey,” I involuntarily tried to reach for the driver’s shoulder— it had suddenly reminded me of Maki’s broad shoulders. But my heavy hand refused to detach itself from my body. My heart was constricted by sadness. The headlights illuminated only a portion of the lawn. At that lawn’s sight, this morning’s dream suddenly revived within me. In the dream, her face drew near enough to touch mine. Yet that face only clumsily comforted me.

3

Midsummer Days.

The intense sunlight, just as it obscured the goldfish in the bowl from clear view, did not let me see the sadness within my heart distinctly. And the heat numbed all my senses. I could hardly comprehend what exactly surrounded me. I simply dazed amid the smell of frying pans, the glare of reflected laundry, and the roar of automobiles passing beneath the window.

But when night falls, my sadness becomes vividly clear to me. One by one, various memories come flooding back. The park comes to mind. Then that one memory alone rapidly grows larger, and all other recollections end up hidden behind it. I am terribly afraid of this memory. And trying to tear it away from myself, I begin to flail about like a madman.

I walk without caring where. I walk simply because I don’t want to inhabit myself. It is necessary for me to remain distant not only from her and my friends, but even from myself. I fear all memories, and I fear performing any single act that would bring me new memories. For that reason, I refuse to do anything other than stain the sidewalk with my own shadow.

One night, a young woman with a yellow belt comes chasing after me, smiling as she passes by. I pursue her with a certain pleasure. But when she slips into some shop, I walk away without waiting even a moment. I forget her immediately. Two or three days later, I again notice a young woman with a yellow belt walking through the crowd. I quicken my pace. Yet even when I catch up and look at her face, I can no longer tell if she's the same woman from days before. And finding myself this dazed becomes something my sadness takes delight in.

Occasionally, small bars facing the sidewalk drew me in. In the dimness thickened by smoke, I befouled my table with cigarette ash and liquor stains. And in the end, that befouled table made me recall the long, long sidewalk my shadow had stained all night. I felt an extreme fatigue. As soon as I left there, I hurled myself into a taxi, then hurled myself into bed. And I fell into sleep like a stone.

One night, while walking through the crowd, I was gazing blankly at a young man approaching from ahead. Then that young man stopped in front of me. That was one of my friends. I suddenly laughed and grasped his hand.

"Oh, it's you." "Did you forget me?" "Oh, I've completely forgotten." I said with deliberate cheerfulness. Yet even as I looked at him, I couldn't miss how my failure to recognize him - this very daze of mine - seemed to be wounding him. "Why didn't you come to our place?"

“I didn’t meet anyone.” “I didn’t want to meet anyone at all.” “Hmm… Then you don’t know about Maki either.”

“I don’t know.”

Then he started walking in silence without saying a word. I had a premonition that what he was about to tell me concerning Maki would surely turn my heart upside down once more.

However, I followed him like a dog.

“That woman was an angel.”

He pronounced the word “angel” with contempt. “Maki used to take that woman out to baseball games and the cinema all the time.” “At first, she was apparently quite bewitching—that’s how Maki put it.” “But then he went and indirectly proposed they sleep together.” “That’s when she suddenly changed her whole attitude toward him.” “And her coldness after that? It tormented Maki like he was dying.” “Is it that she doesn’t understand a man’s heart at all, or that she gets off on tormenting them? Who knows.” “Arrogant bitch or just plain stupid—take your pick.—Hey! Whiskey!” “And you?”

“I don’t want any.” I shook my head. I felt as if it were someone else’s head.

“And then,” my friend continued. “Maki suddenly vanished somewhere.” “Just when we were wondering what happened to him, yesterday he slunk back like a stray dog.” “Turns out he’d been in Kobe for a week—every night crawling through bars till his swollen desires got wrung dry.” “Now he’s got that look like he’s purged all the worms from his gut.” “Bastard’s more practical than I ever took him for.”

While feeling my head gradually filling with the buzzing of bees, I silently listened to my friend’s story. During that time, I occasionally looked up at my friend’s face. It made me recall how dazed I had been earlier, staring at that face in the crowd without realizing it was him, and then it made me recall all the pain that had made me that way.

4

For several days prior, I had been training myself not to recall her face at all. That had made me believe she no longer existed. But this was akin to having grown accustomed to the disorder in my room until I no longer minded it, or having come to believe that the pipe buried beneath a stack of books no longer existed. The chance to remove those books would lead to discovering the pipe beneath them.

In that manner, she who had reappeared before me simultaneously reawakened within me a love for her that was no different from before. Yet my reason had piled between her and me my once-wounded pride and all memories of pain. Nevertheless, through those barriers, a single aching doubt—that perhaps she had truly loved me after all—crept into my being. That is love's unmistakable symptom. And in acknowledging this, I could not help but taste the despair of a patient shackled to incurable illness.

Time corrodes pain. Yet it does not sever it. I rather desired to be operated on. That very impatience of mine gave me the bold idea to go alone to Café Shanoaru to meet her.

I looked around the café like a first-time customer. The familiar waitresses who glanced at me and smiled with affected curiosity—several of their faces blocked my view of what I sought. My eyes hesitated before finally finding her among them. She was leaning against the orchestra box near the entrance. That unnatural posture made me believe she knew I had entered yet still feigned unawareness. Like a patient anxiously tracking a surgeon’s every movement, I kept my gaze fixed solely on her.

Suddenly, the orchestra began. She softly detached herself from the orchestra box. Without looking at me, she walked toward me with feigned nonchalance. And when she was five or six steps away, she slightly raised her face. Her eyes collided with mine. Then she suddenly formed a smile and approached me with labored steps. And stopped silently before me. I too remained silent. I could only remain silent. The suffocating silence during surgery.

I was only staring at her hand. Perhaps because I had been staring too intensely and my eyes had grown tired, her hand now appeared to tremble suddenly. Then dizziness darkened my forehead, threw me into confusion, and finally began to fade. "Oh, your cigarette ash has fallen." Her subtle indication that the surgery had ended.

The course of my surgery was utterly miraculous. Her face suddenly appeared before me vividly, with an unbelievably large presence, and would no longer depart from there. Just as a close-up face on the screen erased all else, so too did Maki’s existence, every last one of my memories, every shred of my future vanish from before me. Is this the true course of events, or merely a temporary passage? But such things were of no concern to me. What lay before me was nothing but her large, beautiful face. And besides that, there remained only a kind of excruciating pleasure that her face generated within me—one I could no longer live without.

I found myself once again venturing out to Café Shanoaru nightly, just as I had before.

My friends no longer came here at all now. That, conversely, caused me to develop a boldness I had entirely lacked when among my friends, and that boldness came to govern my actions. And she—

One night, while I waited for the drink I had ordered, there came a moment when she was clearing the table left by the neighboring customer who had departed. At that instant, as I stared fixedly at her, I discovered she moved the plates and knives with gestures so languid they seemed almost like motions underwater. This languidness appeared to me to well up naturally from her acute awareness of being watched and loved by me. I felt this languor as something supernatural, and could not help but believe she loved me.

Another night, a waitress said to me.

“What you people do is beyond our understanding.” That the woman said “you people” clearly seemed to refer to me and Maki and the others. However, I deliberately took it as referring to her and me. I disliked how that woman laughed while making her gold tooth glint. I despised that woman and did not respond at all. In such a manner, under her subtle attentions, even as I was obtaining confirmation of her love, I would at times find myself assaulted by sporadic desires. Her supple limbs made me anticipate the pleasure of tightly binding them to my own limbs like a necktie. And I could no longer look at her teeth without sensing the faint sound of them clashing against my own.

The very memory of Maki having gone out with her to parks and cinemas—a recollection that never failed to inflict pain whenever it surfaced—simultaneously made me believe in the possibility of that fantasy. How should I make that request to her? I remembered Maki’s method. The method through love letters. But that unfortunate precedent had made me superstitious. I searched for another method. And I chose one from among them. The method of waiting for an opportunity.

The best opportunity. My glass emptied. I called the waitress. She began to come toward me. At the same time, the other waitresses also began to come toward me. The two immediately noticed this and, while smiling, hesitated in unison. At that moment, she started walking toward me as if she'd resolved herself. That version of her gave me unexpected courage.

“Claret!” I said to her. “And then…” She slightly moved her foot away from my table, then brought her face close to mine. “Tomorrow morning—won’t you come to the park? There’s something I want to tell you.” “Yes…” While blushing faintly, she drew her face back from mine. Returning to her previous stance with a half-step forward, she lowered her gaze and walked away. I waited with the careless confidence of one releasing a tame bird from their palm, certain it would return. True enough, she came back bearing the claret. I signalled her with my eyes.

“Around nine o’clock will do.”

“Ah, yes…” She and I exchange slightly sly smiles. Then she leaves my table.

When I left Café Shanoaru, I had absolutely no idea how to spend the time until tomorrow morning. To me, that interval seemed excruciatingly empty. I entered bed without desiring sleep in the slightest. Suddenly, Maki’s face floated up. But immediately her face floated up over it, and while laughing slyly, hid it away. Then I slept for just a brief while.—And when I rose from bed, it was still early morning.

I paced around the entire house, spoke loudly to anyone I encountered, and hardly made any attempt to touch my breakfast. My mother treated me as if I were mad.

5

At last she came. I stood up from the bench while letting my stick fall. My heart beat violently. I couldn’t see her face clearly. I sat down on the bench with her again. I had grown somewhat accustomed to being by her side. I realized I was seeing her face for the first time in sunlight. It looked slightly different from the face I had always seen under electric light. The sun bestowed fresh raw flesh upon her cheeks.

I stared at it, deeply moved. She appeared afraid of being stared at so intently by me. But she was being careful. She hardly moved. And occasionally let out a light cough. I was constantly chattering away about something. I desired silence while fearing it. What I desired was the silence that only holding her hand and pressing my body against hers would have permitted us.

I talked about myself. Then I talked about my friends. And occasionally I asked about her. But I was not waiting for her reply. As if fearing that, I began talking about myself again. And my talk suddenly touched on friends. Suddenly, she interrupted me.

“Are Maki-san and the others angry with me?”

Her words suddenly stripped away the drug that had been numbing my loins.

I felt the pain I had known before rising within me once more. I finally answered that I hadn’t met with Maki either since then. And then I felt as if my breath stopped. I couldn’t utter another word. Despite these violent changes in me, she remained silent as before. To me, she in that state seemed terribly cold. Before long, she noticed that I made no move to address the silence growing increasingly unnatural between us and began striving to shatter it through her own efforts. However, to achieve this, she could only clumsily exploit her light cough that had become oddly conspicuous since I fell silent.

“I’ve been coughing so much…” “Maybe there’s something wrong with my chest.” I suddenly grew sentimental about her. I could no longer tell whether her heart was hard or fragile. In the midst of excruciating pain, I began to indulge in a fantasy—one tinged with a strange pleasure—of her tuberculosis bacilli gradually invading my lungs.

She was persisting in her efforts.

“Last night after closing up the shop, I took my dog and came for a walk around here. “It was around two o’clock. “It was pitch dark. “Then someone started following me. “But you see, when they saw my dog, they went away somewhere. “It’s a very large dog, you see.” I had completely surrendered to her control. She somehow reapplied medicine to my wound and bound it up thoroughly with bandages. And I began to feel the comfort of being with her gradually balancing out against the pain of being with her.

One hour later, we stood up from the bench. I noticed that the area around her kimono's waist had become terribly wrinkled. The wrinkles formed by that bench sealed my happiness.

When we parted, we promised to go see moving pictures tomorrow afternoon.

The next day, I recognized her walking through the park from inside the automobile. My small shout made the automobile stop abruptly. I nearly fell forward as I signaled to her. Then the automobile, having taken her aboard, started off while making a half turn, and a minute later passed before Shanoaru—which, in the afternoon hour, was almost empty of customers, with only a glimpse of the waitress visible. This small adventure found favor with us timid ones.

Cinema Palace. Emil Jannings’s *Varieté*.

As I entered, I lost sight of her in the artificial darkness. Then I found something resembling her right beside me. Yet I couldn’t clearly confirm whether it was her. Because of this, my hand hesitated as it groped for hers. And as for my eyes, they could only perceive human limbs—magnified ten times their actual size—moving ceaselessly across the screen.

While drinking soda water at the basement soda fountain, she praised Emil Jannings to me. "What magnificent shoulders." Saying that, she tried to make me recall how Jannings had acted out the murder scene using only his shoulders. But what floated before my eyes then was not Jannings' shoulders, but rather Maki's shoulders that resembled them in some way. I suddenly recalled a certain day in June when I had been strolling through town with Maki. While I waited for him to buy a newspaper, I watched a woman pass in front of us. The woman passed by without looking at me, staring fixedly up at Maki's broad shoulders... In that memory, before I knew it, that unknown woman and she had traded places. Within that memory, I saw her staring intently at Maki's shoulders. And I believed she was now unconsciously conflating Jannings' shoulders with Maki's shoulders. But I was not being unjust. I found Maki's shoulders truly magnificent. And just as she desired to have those solid shoulders pressed against her own, I too found myself unable to resist desiring it.

I realized I no longer tried to see the world except through her eyes—a single symptom manifesting when our hearts become tightly knotted like neckties—always accompanied by pain intense enough to make one lose consciousness. As for me, I could no longer distinguish which of these two hearts now tangled within me was mine and which was hers.

6

When we tried to part, she— “What time is it?” she asked me. I extended the hand wearing the wristwatch. She narrowed her eyes and peered at it. I thought that expression beautiful. After being alone awhile, I suddenly recalled that wristwatch. As I walked, I thought about how the money I had received from my father had completely run out. I had to somehow scrape together a little spending money myself. First, I recalled the many books I had sold off time and again in such situations. However, almost no books remained with me anymore. It was at this moment I suddenly recalled my wristwatch.

However, I did not know how to convert such things into money. I recalled one of the friends who was accustomed to such matters. I resolved to go ask him at his apartment. I found that friend in his cramped room, face lathered in soap suds as he shaved. By his side leaned another friend I knew against a chair, puffing great clouds from his pipe. Then there was another figure—facing the wall, sprawled across the bed like a sack. To me, that shape remained unrecognizable.

“Who’s that?” “It’s Maki.”

Hearing our voices, he turned his body toward us. “Oh, it’s you.” He looked at me while half-opening his eyes.

I stared back at Maki with neurotic eyes that looked angry. I thought about how I hadn’t met him for a very long time. However, the anxiety that our actions since yesterday had already become known to them and that this might be brought up sarcastically before me stripped me of all such emotions. However, all three were melancholically silent, but in that silence, I could detect not the slightest accusatory air directed at me. I discerned that immediately. Then I grew bold and, feeling toward them the same intimacy as before once more, sat down on the edge of the bed where Maki lay sprawled.

However, I could no longer see Maki in the same way as before. In my gaze looking at Maki, her gaze inevitably became mixed in. While gazing vacantly at his face, I found myself unable not to feel intense jealousy toward it. I felt the need for a new mask to hide such turmoil within me from them. I lit a cigarette and, carving a smile onto my face, finally spoke.

“How’ve you been lately? So you’re not going to Shanoaru anymore?” “Nah, not going.” Maki answered heavily. Then he suddenly turned to the friend: “There’s a way more interesting spot than that place.” “Jiji-Baa?” The friend responded while sliding his razor. The name Baa—heard for the first time. My imagination rendered it some intensely obscene den. I thought this sort of “vice hole” suited Maki perfectly for spewing out all that pent-up desire festering inside him. And comparing my eternally sorrowful self against his crude way of living—I found his approach far stronger. Then came this urge to cling to him somehow.

“Are you going there again tonight?” “I want to go, but I don’t have the money.” “Don’t you have any?” The razor swung toward me.

“I don’t have any either.” At that moment, I recalled my wristwatch. I wanted to appear adorable to them. “Why don’t we turn this into cash?”

I removed the wristwatch and handed it to Maki. “Hmm, not a bad watch.” As he said this, I stared fixedly at Maki—who was holding my wristwatch in his hand—with girlish eyes.

Around ten o'clock, we entered Jiji-Baa. While entering, I stumbled over a chair and knocked it over onto a thin man’s foot. I laughed. The man stood up and tried to grab my arm. Maki shoved the man in the chest from the side. The man staggered and plopped back onto his original chair. And as he tried to stand up again, he was stopped by the man next to him. The man cursed us. We sat around a single dirty table, laughing. Then a woman wearing a thin, semi-transparent kimono approached. And she forced her way between Maki and me to sit down.

“Want a drink?” Maki placed his whiskey glass before the woman. She made no move to take it, instead peering through its contents as though appraising their worth. One friend winked grotesquely—one eye squeezed shut, the other leering wide—while gesturing sarcastically toward them. I blinked in reply. There was something of Café Shanoaru’s waitress about her. The resemblance unsettled me deeply. Yet it called to mind a photographic plate copy— every detail of this woman coarser beyond comparison to the original.

The woman finally picked up the whiskey glass, took a sip of it, and placed it back before Maki. Maki downed the remainder in one gulp. She gradually pressed her body against him with increasing boldness—glaring from beneath her brows, pursing her lips, thrusting out her chin. These movements lent her an unexpected allure. They formed a stark contrast to the Shanoaru waitress’s reserved motions before me—motions that seemed cold precisely because of their modesty. I realized these two women appeared similar yet shared no true resemblance—alike in every aspect except all things. And there I felt I’d glimpsed Maki’s present anguish.

That anguish of Maki's gradually seeped into me. And there, my anguish, his anguish, and her anguish all mingled together. I feared whether these three elements would form an explosive mixture within myself. By chance, the woman’s hand and mine touched. "My, what cold hands you have!"

The woman gripped my hand. I could feel nothing but a professional coldness in it. However, my hand gradually grew damp from hers.

Maki poured whiskey into my glass. That gave me a good opportunity. I pried my hand away from the woman while accepting the glass. However, I was now afraid of getting any more drunk. I was afraid of myself—that I might suddenly burst into tears before Maki in my drunkenness. And I deliberately knocked over my glass on the table.

After one o'clock, we left Jiji-Baa. The taxi we rode in was cramped for the four of us. I was forcibly seated on Maki’s lap. His thighs were large and sturdy. I reddened my ears like a girl. Maki said behind my back. “Did you enjoy that?” “Damn, a place like that…” I elbowed his chest. At that moment, I clearly visualized the Jiji Bar Woman’s face in my mind. Then all at once, the face of the Shanoaru waitress also floated up. And those two faces overlapped, tangled together in my head, then faded away while spreading like cigarette smoke. I felt that I was extremely tired. I absentmindedly picked my nose with my finger. I noticed that finger was still soiled with white powder.