Pathway to Japanese Literature

It's been nearly a month since I came to the island, but what a windy place this must be.
On the first day I arrived, when I climbed the steep slope from the beach up the cliff, followed behind a large cow laden with baggage along a path through sparse hazel groves and camellia-lined trees to Kamitsuki Village, and saw nearby woods and field shrubs all competing to sprout new buds; and when, as the path rose and fell until emerging beside a cultivated slope, I saw that entire hillside—even up to the gently sloping skirts of the dormant volcano’s midsection—shrouded in smoke-like pale green, I felt as though I’d bypassed a month or two and leapt straight into mid-spring.

After all, it was just last night that I had been waiting for the steamer to depart from Reiganjima, where a wind as sharp as a blade still blew cold.

But from the third day, the wind began to blow.
And rain.
What a strong wind this must be.
The islanders saw the trees swaying violently and immediately declared it a west wind or the usual wind, but I couldn't tell where it was blowing in from.
It felt as though it was gusting in from every direction.
The absence of dust was its distinguishing feature, but instead it contained salt.
Most areas along the coast abruptly became cliffs, with either jet-black lava from relatively recent flows standing sheer or massive accumulations of jumbled rock formations.
Waves crashed against them, spray was blown, and the sea spray—like mist—raced up the cliff, crawling thickly over the broad slope.
The fodder in the fields and the new buds of hazel trees were incessantly exposed to sea spray, so their leaf tips turned a rusted brown, shrinking as if pressed by a trowel and curling upward.
The wind showed no sign of abating.
It blew with unrelenting force all day long, continuing for two or three days on end.
It was as if it were trying to bore a hole through the very center of the sky.

After the wind came a day or two of calm.
What air this was—so luminous yet languid, so intoxicating in its drowsy allure.
The tree buds finally regained their vigor and began to glisten.
A mountain dove flew straight from grove to grove, its wings beating with a firm clatter.
Japanese bush warblers, brown-headed thrushes, woodpeckers, and all manner of nameless small birds called back and forth as they flew through dense camellias and slipped between dimly lit thickets.
On the mountain slopes, pastured cows moved slowly—some high up, others lower down, still others sideways—their black-and-white mottled bodies creating a vivid, eye-opening impression.
So no matter how far away a cow might be, even one crouching motionless in the woods immediately caught the eye.
And they appeared astonishingly large.

Seeing such days, I moved from Kamitsuki Village to Ako Village, about four ri away.
Then came the wind again.
Soon the rain came.
In the dimly lit room with the door tightly shut, violent noises pressed in from all directions; occasionally, a distant, dull rumbling-like sound arose from nowhere, and soon, with terrible pressure, redoubled both rain and noise, bearing down on the storm shutters outside and the corrugated iron roof.
No matter what I tried to think about, no matter what I tried to do—it was all futile.
Sounds invaded every corner of my body, seething and swarming.
And that dull, shudder-inducing rumble of distant wind.
There’s no getting used to it.
An endless, endless menace.
Suddenly, the wind shifted direction.
Then, this time it came blowing from the north, and suddenly water began flowing into the house’s earthen floor.
The earthen floor was just like a small river.
I removed the board that had been blocking the southern gap until then and now let the water flow through there to the outside.
Ah, blow, blow.
Blow and blow and smash everything to pieces!

The wind finally ceased.
The cries of cows came drifting from beyond the woods.
At the butter manufacturing workshop located at the opposite end of the house from my room, the sound of the separator rotating emitted a distant rumbling.
I passed by the cowshed, gazed endlessly at the bulging muscular shoulders of the large breeding bull tethered in the lower grassland there, and then emerged onto the cliff top by the sea.
On the cliff top, dead grass remained thickly grown.
A narrow path ran along the cliff edge.
Following that path brought me out onto a wide promontory.
A withered grassland edged by jet-black lava.
I lay down there and smoked a cigarette.

A breeze arrived from the north.
To the south over the sea rose Mikurajima's blue silhouette—jutting abruptly from the waves as though solidified mid-ascent.
Between that island and Miyakejima where I stood, tidal currents wrinkled into ripples that swelled into choppy waves flowing vast across the sea's surface.
I turned my body northward and gazed in that direction.
Blue.
Everything was blue.
Kōzushima, Shikinejima, and Niijima lay strung across the horizon at measured intervals.
Beyond them—where I supposed the Izu Peninsula must lie—all dissolved into hazy indigo void.
A color of impossible distance.
From that depth emerged countless small clouds—some swelling as they neared overhead only to vanish; others arranging themselves in languid procession across sea and sky from north to west.
What soul-devouring creatures those clouds were.
As I watched them, an unexpected surge of sorrow seized me.
I remembered—the life I'd abandoned in Tokyo; those two years of suffering that felt less meaningless than inexorable.
And still it torments me now.
I feel I can never escape it.

Since coming to the island，I had come to think about my wife and children more than anything else.
Even though I hadn’t particularly intended to think about them，they would come.
An oppressive，indescribably unpleasant feeling accompanied them.
Yesterday morning too，I had such a dream—I had killed my children for some reason.
And in that dream，I understood this clearly.
I felt as though my entire body were being hacked apart by blades.
Then，without knowing why，I came to realize that what I had killed was not just my children but also my wife.
"Why had things come to this?" I wondered.
It felt as if this matter had long been preordained within me.
An inexplicable，irresistible oppression and a sad—truly sad—state of mind left me almost incapable of understanding anything.
As this unfolded，I found myself sitting on an unnervingly hard chair，before me a table like those found in cheap diners，upon which sat a cup holding a reddish-black liquid that shimmered faintly，the color of coffee.
As I looked at it，I understood that I had used this substance to kill my children and wife.
Then my wife—who should have been dead—was there diagonally before me，thrusting her pallid，large flat face toward mine as she said through tears，"You killed me and our children."
I couldn’t answer.
My wife then pressed her face against mine as if grinding bone against bone and said，"Drink it."
How terrified I must have been.
"Since you killed both our children and me，you must drink it too，" she said in an altered voice.
What an unbearable，terrifyingly inevitable threat this was.
I remained silent，gazing at the liquid.
The moment I saw it，it glimmered dully and quivered.

She fell silent after that, stared at me, and waited for me to drink.
I absolutely had to drink it.
I didn't know why—I had to drink it.
There was nothing to do but drink.
I didn't want to.
I hated it so much I thought my body would be crushed.
But saying "I don't want to" wasn't permitted.
She remained waiting in the same form as before.
She didn't move a muscle.
Those detestable eyes. What hateful eyes they must be, I thought.
But I felt I was no longer permitted to hate.
She was already dead.
I thought about the children who had died in the same way as her.
Unbearable—so sad that screaming wouldn't begin to express it.
On top of that, the agony of knowing I too must die pressed down on me—heavy, heavy—like a house on the verge of collapse.
It was a long, very long time.—And then, I awoke.
Ah, I hadn't killed the children.
Thank goodness, thank goodness, I thought.
And then—I hadn't killed my wife either—thank goodness, thank goodness, I thought.

But for some time, I could not escape from that oppressive, unpleasant mood.
Of course, this was something confined to this moment—a temporary thing.
But that was what my reason said; in another part of me, I could never believe it to be temporary.
I could not feel at ease.
This was how I had become after two years of illness.

Similar things had happened to me several times.
I saw various frightening things in my dreams—in those long, long states of half-sleep.
At that time, my family lived in debt.
My wife hit upon the idea of working herself, leaving early each morning and returning at night.
I did not leave my room.
Or rather—I couldn’t leave.
Day and night, I lay on the bed.
And day and night, I remained awake.
Nights passed swiftly; daytime stretched interminably.
But what could such distinctions have meant to me?
I could not sleep around the clock.
The children did not approach me.
They played alone, almost without making a sound.
I felt my own powerlessness, felt despair, and cried aloud by myself.
I would lose all sense of time—or feel it flowing with a thunderous roar.
Inside my body gaped a large, pitch-black hole.
Everything that had occupied my heart until then—the certain things, the desired things—all vanished; their outlines blurred, leaving nothing in their wake.

Meaningless, ambiguous, unbelievable things—those were all that remained.
――I felt perplexed when writing about these things.
There were no legitimate, satisfactory words.
And again—the things that had occurred around me and the things that had occurred within me—what were they supposed to be?
Not everything existed.
None of it held any meaning.
At that time, I had believed I was ill, but now I did not even believe that.
Both then and now, I was lonely.
That was my true feeling and my entirety.
Ah, what this loneliness was like—I did not intend to explain.
Before coming to the island, I had spoken with a friend and said, "I am lonely."
I had recounted it in an impossible manner—in a comical way.
And he had laughed, and I had laughed.
But I knew that their laughter had been entirely different.
There had been no other way to speak of such things except in that manner.
If I were to attempt to speak seriously, that very act would have become truly comical and truly unpleasant.
But the fact that I was lonely was also temporary and also meaningless.
Then where, in what way, did permanent things—meaningful things—exist?

Why I came to feel inclined toward this place, I do not know.
Who could know such a thing?
Everything felt loathsome to me—unpleasant, unbelievable.
Though my insomnia has much improved of late, I feel I can never return to how I was before.
Let me go forth.
Where to?
How should I know where?
My wife now works to support herself and our three children; I too had initially lent my efforts to this endeavor. Yet inexplicably, as her plans began succeeding, I grew unbearably aggrieved and wanted to destroy her work.
Nor was it only her work—all such convenient, orderly progressing tasks seemed somehow intolerable to me.
Explain it however you will—this truly occurred within me.
Only—let her go forth.
I am I.

A few days before departing for the island, I went to see another woman—one separate from my wife.
It wasn't to meet her.
If I just went there, I knew I could meet her.
I had reason to go there.
To borrow travel expenses.
I had not seen that woman in four years, had avoided every opportunity that might lead to meeting her, and had lived without uttering her name.
Hearing her name was painful.
Even so, I heard through others that she had married and borne a child.
It had been two years since I stopped trying to meet her.
Both before and after that time—how I must have yearned to meet her eyes again, to see her once more, to hear her voice.
But I did not go.
Something made me refuse to go.
The misfortune of meeting her—I had thought it through exhaustively four years prior.
Since hearing she had married, this resolve of mine only strengthened.
Ah, how desperately I must have wanted to go.
How incessantly I must have thought of her.
How she must have materialized in my daily life at odd moments—in my fantasies.
What this truly meant—I did not fully understand.
Fantasizing about her had formed no small part of my existence.
How my heart must have been agitated by thoughts of her.

But when that time came, I was no longer afraid to meet her.
I do not know what occurred within me.
How I must have desired to meet her and yet feared it all this time.
If we were to meet, I would cease to be myself and might end up disturbing her as well—this I feared.
Ah, she must be left undisturbed.
I am a person who must remain outside the bounds of her life.

Yet, I now felt the loss of their meanings.
I went without hesitation, without a second thought.
I expected nothing.
Just as I have a wife and children, she now has a husband and child.
I swear I expected nothing and feared nothing.
What could possibly happen now?
And besides, whatever happens—even if she becomes unsettled and I cause her husband pain—what does it matter?
I had met her husband several times.
He had long been one of my acquaintances.
I had once talked with him at length.
It had exerted a certain influence.
He knew everything.
And he knew the reason I still avoided every opportunity to meet her.
He was a certain type of man.
I liked a certain part of him.
Furthermore, there was something about him that irritated me.
I felt a certain comical quality in all those things—myself included.
I felt a desire to mock them.

She noticed I had come and hid for a while.
At least, she made no attempt to come out.
Her husband was the first to call out.
As if that were some form of permission, she greeted me in a bright voice that carried clearly.

“Hello,” I greeted.
I turned toward the source of the voice.
She sent a maid to call me to come for tea.
I went to her and her husband’s house and sat down on the veranda.
I could not look directly at her.
Her husband looked at me, then at her—rudely.
He probably wanted to see what had happened between her and me.
I found it a bit amusing, thinking how very like him that was.
And that was all.

I showed no emotion.
After some time, I took my leave.
I walked out through the gate.
She came from the sitting room where we had been moments before to the window overlooking the entrance, hastily slid open the glass pane, and said, "Goodbye."

Her voice carried a restrained emotion that struck my ears more clearly than anything.
I departed without turning back.
Something had stayed my hand.
That was all.
Ah, why does such futility persist so vividly in my mind even now as this lingering impression?
I do not cherish it.
Yet it remains.
And it will likely visit me often—

It was evening when I arrived at this house.
I entered the bath.
It was located inside a small hut that stood independently in the front garden of the main house.
No sooner had I entered than fierce smoke from firewood choked my breath, and tears streamed incessantly from my eyes.
The place I entered was a small earthen floor with two stoves lined up at the entrance.
Next to them was the bathtub.
Smoke billowed out from both the bath's fire hole and the two stoves.
On one side of the earthen floor was a wooden flooring area where a small handheld lantern was placed.
In that dim light, I saw beyond the wooden flooring a three-tatami space of straw mats; the surrounding plank walls were blackened with soot, cracks gaping here and there through which wind blew to churn the smoke, several garment-like items hanging on the walls, and at the matted area multiple filthy sweat-stained sleeping futons piled up.

The inside of the bath was dreadfully cramped.
No matter how skillfully I tried to submerge my body in the water, my chest and above along with both knees remained sticking out.
I painstakingly bent my torso and legs like a shrimp.
At that moment, a strange groan came from the corner where futons were piled up.
Peering through the dimness, something moved beneath futons with cotton stuffing spilling out—there was someone there.
I immediately realized this was the institutionalized idiot I'd heard about beforehand.
But having never seen him before, trapped in the bathtub without visual confirmation, I felt vaguely unsettled.
The darkness pressed thickly—only two feet of space existed between tub and wall, leaving nowhere to wash properly.
When sufficiently warmed, I climbed out immediately.

The next day I saw that idiot.
He wore a filthy indigo-patterned kimono with its hem torn and dangling nearly a foot long, emerged from the hut, walked hurriedly while swaying his upper body side to side, and shuffled unsteadily toward the kitchen entrance before moving on to the wellside.
He noticed me standing in the front garden, squinted my way for a moment as if dazzled by light, then abruptly flashed an ingratiating smile and bowed.
After entering the hut, he reappeared moments later to crouch beside the sunny veranda of the main house, propping his elbows on a raised knee and resting his chin in his hands.
When a family member called out telling him to greet me, he made an ambiguous expression—half-hearing, half-annoyed—muttered something under his breath, then suddenly stood up and came before me to bow.
They said he was thirty, but his face hovered ambiguously between youth and age.
There was something fractured about his expressions—as if two conflicting visages coexisted.
His disproportionately large head and strabismus made it impossible to tell which eye observed me.
Whenever he spoke, his face assumed an exaggeratedly solemn, world-weary look.
He resumed his original crouched position.
Though he'd been gazing toward the mulberry fields with what seemed like profound melancholy, that contemplative air vanished abruptly, leaving his features twisted into an unreadable grimace.
Something had entered his vision and seized his interest.
Narrowing his eyes, he stared fixedly at one spot.
I tried tracing his line of sight to discover what captivated him so, but found nothing noteworthy.

He detested working.
He would sleep all day covered with a futon.
When the mood struck him—be it fair weather or rain—he slept and sang songs whether in the mountains or woods.
He feared matches; show them and he would run away.
And he constantly wanted food.

One evening afterward, I was taking a bath.
At that moment, Masa-san—his name was Masao—returned.
He entered the hut, and due to the smoke-filled interior and the usual dim lantern, it seemed he couldn’t quite discern who was in the bath.
He stared fixedly in my direction for a long while with a sullen air, but upon realizing it was me, he stopped looking, spread his legs to squat by the stove at the entrance, and gazed through the open doorway toward the kitchen entrance while warming himself by the fire.
There were sounds coming from the kitchen, but no one emerged.
He suddenly stood up smoothly, went out of the hut, and thrust his hand into the small bucket placed there.
He quickly grabbed something.
Without entering the hut, he sauntered around half its perimeter with feigned nonchalance while putting what he held into his mouth—all clearly visible through the window left open to vent smoke.
He came back again.
Squatting to warm himself by the fire, he kept watch on the kitchen entrance.
He stood up smoothly again and thrust his hand into the bucket.
In the same manner as before, he circled halfway around the hut and returned.
Throughout this time, he paid no attention to me whatsoever.
For that reason, he must have scrutinized the bath earlier.
Those actions were performed with a swiftness and cunning not seen in ordinary people.

One afternoon, after taking a stroll along the coast and emerging through a path in a deep thicket that submerged my back to the rear of the shrine, I thought I heard voices nearby. But when I stood on the stone steps before the hall of worship and peered across the precincts, there was no one there.
When I had walked a little further, I saw someone standing motionless in the dimness of the hall of worship.
It was Masa-san.

“What are you doing?” I asked, and he assumed his usual pose of being deep in thought with a melancholic look,

“Yes, I’m visiting the shrine,” he responded.

He had attended Tokyo Commercial School until just before graduation, and perhaps because of that, his speech retained a great many student-like qualities.

“Visiting the shrine?” I asked back.

“Yes, I’m in retreat,” he answered melancholically.

I peered into the building.
The interior was dark, with wooden flooring, and filled with dust.
He remained standing motionless before me, his strabismus eyes—unclear where they were looking—staring back at me warily, like a child whose solitary play had been intruded upon.

“Won’t you go back?” I said, and he

“I’ll stay longer, you see,” he answered.

It was his habit to append “you see” at the end of everything he said.
Then, as if avoiding me, he went to a dark corner, leaned his back against the plank wall, crouched down, pressed his entire face between his raised knees, and started muttering something.
Occasionally, he giggled quietly.
When I urged him to return once more, this time he said, “Yes, I’ll go back,” and stood up.
But just as he precariously descended from the high wooden platform and took five or six steps forward, he spun around and said, “I’m still staying, you see,” before retreating back inside.

He too had days when he was in a good mood.
The melancholic expression vanished from his face as he swung his long body about, walking here and there, running some ten steps, and saying "Good day" to anyone he encountered.
At such times, when neighborhood children came around, he would become utterly ecstatic.
Staggering unsteadily yet bustling about around the children, he called out things like "Hey there, Renko-chan!" and "Careful now! You'll fall if you run!"
An expression of discordant joy would surface on his sallow face.

In this house there now lived another man called Tami-san—a fellow over forty with an unsound mind.
He was short in stature, bald, with a small hooked nose and sharply defined eye contours. As I looked at him, from within his sunburned, dirt-stained, grimy appearance there somehow emerged the impression of an Italian farmer.
No dullness could be detected in his expression.
He worked diligently.
Every morning, he took six or seven cows to the mountains for grazing.
There, he spent the day tending to the cows, and when evening came, he descended from the mountains with firewood on his back, driving the cows along.
Because he was not at home all day, I had few opportunities to meet him at first.
I went to the mountains where he was grazing cattle, going there for three days straight to lie around all day and listen to his stories, but I couldn’t find him or the cows.

One evening, I met him as he came down from the mountains behind the house, and when I told him about that, he crossed his arms, planted both legs firmly, and stared intently at me while,

“Ah, it’s you. There were geta tracks,” he said.

Afterward, whenever he was about to head to the mountains, he would invariably peer into my room, making slight drooling sounds as he pointed and said in a halting tone, “The mountains—over there,” but since I could never figure out what he meant, I ultimately gave up on visiting him there.

Tami-san would set out wearing a strange hat made from a blue-dyed hand towel over his bald head.
When he lay down on a warm day in the mountains, they said the cows would come over and lick his bald head to wake him up.
A household member told me that,

“Hey, Tami-san, the cows’ll lick ya,” they teased, and he would make a completely guileless face.
“They’re dear little ones, you know. I know them well,” he said, narrowing his eyes and laughing.

When his night work was finished, he would come hesitantly to my room.
And he would say, “Write a letter for me.”
He had relatives in Tokyo and Chiba, but none wanted him to come; even when he sent letters, they didn’t reply. At the end of last year he had sent butter, but there had been no response to that either—so he wanted me to write him a letter, he said with a slurping sound.
When I began writing, he seemed to find it difficult to speak,

“And then, um—could you write that I’d like them to send some sweets? Five chocolate bars, yes yes—because chocolate’s tasty, you see,” he said.

He was born in Nihonbashi and had attended Gyosei Middle School through his third year.

He shared a hut with Masa-san.
He had heard from the household that after everyone finished bathing, he would give Masa-san a bath, but I had yet to witness it.
He would occasionally take Masa-san to the mountains, but Masa-san—trailing behind Tami-san as he led the cows—would follow with his usual tangled gait, a gloomy expression on his face, swaying unsteadily after him.
But Masa-san would slip back down from the mountains unnoticed.
Tami-san was Masa-san’s cohabitant and also his senior.
Once, I heard Tami-san shouting at Masa-san repeatedly as he prepared to leave for grazing.

Tami-san came out to the doorway, his face red and his expression strained, waiting for Masa-san to emerge.
Masa-san came out.
He was much taller than Tami-san, but his slender legs were stuffed into straw sandals—one somehow worn normally, the other now sideways—and he emerged dragging that foot.
While Tami-san tightened his loosely hanging obi for him, Masa-san—with eyes whose focus was unclear—looked around gloomily and irritably, his forehead creased with wrinkles.
Those wrinkles were strange wrinkles; whenever something happened, they would suddenly emerge with startling clarity.

Tami-san roughly pulled Masa-san’s hand and ordered him to untie the cow’s tether fastened at the base of a hazel tree beside the cowshed.
Masa-san stood there lankily, his forehead creased with those characteristic wrinkles.

“If it’s come loose, then loosen it!” Tami-san commanded sharply.
Because he was still standing, Tami-san shoved Masa-san’s shoulder.
Masa-san cautiously approached the base of the hazel tree, but as the cow lowered its head inquisitively, its horns came right before his eyes.
Masa-san emitted a strange, strangled “A—ah!” and tried to pull back his hand, but Tami-san stood behind him and would not allow it.
Continuing to cry “A—ah!”, Masa-san could barely manage to shield himself from the cow’s horns using the hazel tree, let alone grasp the tether.
Tami-san suddenly turned crimson.
And then, suddenly grabbing Masa-san’s arm, he shoved him toward the base of the hazel tree.
Masa-san finally untied the rope.
The cow meekly followed along.
Then, as if remembering something, Masa-san suddenly threw down the rope and went into the hut.
Tami-san shouted, “What’re ya doin’?!” but he wouldn’t come out.
Masa-san finally emerged.
For some reason, he had tied a black string around his left ankle.
Tami-san turned crimson again.
“What the—what’s this?!” he yelled, chasing after him and trying to tear off the string.
Masa-san let out that “A—ah!” cry and desperately resisted.
Tami-san shoved his shoulder.
He was burning with such a strange anger that even to an outsider’s eye, one might wonder why he was so enraged.

Masa-san held the end of the rope, his face sullen, staggering unsteadily along the path between the sparse hazel grove and mulberry fields; behind him followed the short-statured Tami-san, carrying a backpack frame and walking bowlegged. They passed by the cowshed, gathered the other cows there, and as those mottled black-and-white backs glistened sharply in the sunlight, they climbed up the sloping grassland and vanished into the woods where new buds had sprouted in unison.—

When night deepened, the sound of the two of them arguing in the hut across the garden reached my ears.

“That is mine. I received it.”

“Shut up,” Tami-san reprimanded in a low voice.

“That is mine.”
“I was given it.”
“I was given it, you know.”

“Shut up.”

“I was given it.”
“Shut up!”

“It’s mine.”
“Shut up already!”

—.

Eventually, they too fell silent.
All sound ceased.
With the lamp extinguished, the inside of the house was pitch dark.
A sound came from a small dry branch or something falling onto the tin roof.
I am awake.
I am awake, and I recall how today during my midday walk, when I lay down in a sunlit clearing in the woods, my heart suddenly grew heavy for some unknowable reason, and I couldn't get up for a long time.
What are these things?
All these things—