Pathway to Japanese Literature

Author: Toyoshima Yoshio

It was late spring.

We—the four of us: myself, my wife, our son, and our maid—relocated to a new residence.
Since we didn’t have that many furnishings, everything was more or less tidied up within five or six days. With relief, I sat on the veranda smoking tobacco and gazed absently at the garden.
Though it could barely be called a garden—a mere six or seven tsubo—under two or three planted trees, vivid green weeds were sprouting here and there.
As I looked at them, my spirits lifted.
With this new residence would come new happiness—such was the thought that welled up within me.
Then I called out to my wife in the other room and actually spoke these words aloud.

“Yes,” my wife answered, “your salary may increase starting this month.”

“Idiot!”

I scolded her in a slightly raised voice, but couldn’t suppress the mirth in my eyes.

After a while, it was my wife who spoke up this time.

“It’s a better house than the last one, but if I may be greedy, I’d wish for a slightly larger garden... and if it were a detached house, that would truly be ideal, though…”

“Well, I can put up with that much.”
“If you start wanting luxuries, there’s no end to it.”

The second floor had a six-tatami room and three-tatami room, while downstairs contained two six-tatami rooms plus a two-tatami entrance and three-tatami maid’s room. The layout proved reasonably efficient and not particularly worn-down, making it a decent enough house for us.
Yet in truth—just as my wife said—the six-or-seven-tsubo garden sectioned off by wooden fencing felt unnaturally cramped, and worse still, sharing both roof ridge and single wall with an identically constructed neighboring house left an unpleasant aftertaste.
That said, carelessly agreeing with her would only prove my inadequacy at being reduced to this cramped rental—so I deliberately whistled airily and recited to myself that maxim about contentment being wealth or whatever it was.

And before I knew it, I had driven the points of dissatisfaction out of my mind—not so much forgotten as cast aside—and set off for my daily work.
After that, my wife no longer voiced any dissatisfaction about the house.
And both our hearts and our lives gradually settled into the new home.

However, about two weeks after moving in, one evening, my wife came out with something strange.

“There’s something strange about this house,” she said. “I hear the gate open and go out to check, but there’s never anyone there? This has happened many times.”

Thinking it impossible… I even asked the maid about it. Not only did she confirm it was true—she had actually encountered it more frequently than anyone.

I thought such nonsense couldn’t possibly be happening, but with two witnesses before me, my denials proved futile no matter how much I protested. Moreover, it had begun to weigh on my mind somehow—this business of unseen people entering and exiting our gate grew all the more eerie precisely because of its absurdity.

“Well, just keep a close eye out for now. If it’s true, this isn’t something that can be laughed off.”

And I inspected the gate and scanned my surroundings.
There was nothing unusual anywhere.

Four or five days passed in ambiguity.
Then my wife came back with an absurd report.

“The sound I thought was our gate opening seems to have actually been the neighbor’s gate.”

The matter was too trivial, so I couldn’t bring myself to rebuke my wife. To the point where one might wonder why it hadn’t been noticed until now, it seemed entirely plausible. From the gate to the entrance ran a relatively long path paved with cut stones between the garden’s bamboo fence and the wooden fence lining the roadside. That we kept mistaking our gate’s sound—identical in both structure and attached bell—for our neighbor’s could very reasonably be chalked up to wind direction or, even absent wind, one’s momentary state of hearing.

I went outside and gazed quizzically at the row houses that resembled two partitioned boxes.

And it was indeed strange.
Facing the same direction, of the same age, same size, same shape, and likely the same layout—from the two adjoining wooden fences, each revealed near its entrance a single pine tree and a slightly shorter cypress with nearly identical branching patterns.
The two houses were completely identical, built from blueprints drawn with an architect’s plumb line that didn’t deviate by a fraction of an inch.
Though two houses, they were a row house with a single spine running through them—fused together and immobile.

"They're exactly the same, aren't they?"

After entering the house, I said this to my wife.

“Well that’s only natural—they were built to the same design after all.”

Certainly, it was perfectly clear logic—but even so, it felt strange.
According to my wife, the neighboring household also contained a salaryman much like myself—apparently three or four years my senior—who similarly had a wife, a maid, and two children.
In three or four years, even I would reach that age, and there would likely be about one more child.
And both households seemed equally poor.
They would live out similar days, grow old in the same way, taste the same measure of suffering and joy, leave behind about the same modest savings, and die in the same manner.
Even now, morning and evening when we gathered in the dining room for our modest meals, those next door were likely doing the same.
The entirety of both lives was probably bathed in the same amount of sunlight, shining with equal brightness...

While thinking such thoughts, I found myself compelled to gaze at the neighboring house's nameplate—Arimura Michio—with peculiar fascination during my morning and evening commutes. If we exchanged nameplates and swapped places—or left everything unchanged while becoming them and them becoming us—there might be neither inconvenience nor unnaturalness, our lives continuing undisturbed in their current rhythms.

On evenings when I stood on the slightly chilly veranda with my post-dinner haze—casting eyes that had finished scanning the evening paper toward the dim garden or tilting my head to gauge tomorrow's weather in the narrow sky—I'd let my imagination wander: perhaps at that very moment, the neighbor was engaged in identical motions. Turning abruptly to see the closet's decorative paper door left ajar after retrieving the child's futon, I imagined drilling through the thin wall within the closet and calling out, "Mr. Arimura..."

“Hey,” I called out to my wife, “if we tore down the wall between us and the neighbor and lived together, it might be interesting.”

My wife let out a derisive smirk, but after a moment’s pause, she said:

“That might be interesting—because the neighbor’s wife is prettier than I am.”

“And Mr. Arimura next door is probably more handsome than I am.”

“See there? We’d be the only ones losing out.”

“On the other hand, the neighbor might be wealthier.”

“Well, that’s only natural. They’ve been out in the world… working longer than we have, you know.”

Stumbling over our words at first, then suddenly struck by how ridiculous that phrase “been working” sounded, we burst out laughing.

But in truth, it wasn’t a laughing matter—it was an awkward, peculiar, downright bizarre sensation.
And yet I had never once met the people next door face-to-face. More than wanting to see their faces, I found myself increasingly itching to peer into their lives.
At the same time, an anxiety began sprouting on one flank—the fear that from their side, our lives might be seen through completely, that every last thing might be overheard.
Though these feelings contradicted each other, they tangled together and somehow seized me in this strange way.

“Why do you keep obsessing over the neighbors like that?” my wife asked me.

“Because the houses are too similar in shape,” I answered.

However, it seemed there was more to it than that.
And that something—which even he himself couldn’t comprehend—gradually began taking clear shape.

It was a certain Saturday night.
After returning home once, I went out to town with four or five friends for dinner—intending just to eat—but it ended up involving drinks. As the alcohol took effect, things dragged on; we then stopped by another place for more drinking. By the time I parted ways with everyone and began heading home alone, I was thoroughly drunk.
Even so, my mind remained clear.
And like the brightly burning electric and gas lights lining the streets, my thoughts shone brilliantly.
The faces of people packed into trains and crowding the avenues all seemed deeply familiar yet strangely new.
Just as one lifts a large stone to watch ants scurry frantically from their nest below, I imagined how amusing it would be to see this city’s houses swept up into the sky and countless people scrambling about in confusion.

The sky was hazy, and the stars were faint.
The lukewarm air carried a choking scent of fresh greenery here and there as it drifted into the side streets.
It was a pleasant evening.
Everything felt calmly settled.
Though I wanted to keep walking endlessly, I went straight home without detour as if fulfilling an obligation.

When I neared the house—perhaps because my concentration had suddenly slackened—I noticed my legs were unsteady.
Then, as I stumbled momentarily, I caught the gate with my fingertips, steadied myself, flung it open in one motion, and with the lingering momentum slammed it shut.
I strode briskly along the stone-paved path to the entrance and threw open the lattice door forcefully, but losing my footing on the entryway's concrete floor and staggering side to side made my head swim, jumbling everything before my eyes.
Even so, without faltering, I headed straight to the familiar tearoom.
I tossed off my hat and mantle, then even shed my haori jacket, sat down before the long brazier, and first tried taking a smoke.

But strangely, the layout felt awkward.
Hmm—I noticed—the long brazier’s position had changed.
Alongside the thought that it had been clumsily rearranged, my wife’s face surfaced in my mind.
Thinking she might have already gone to bed, I called out “Hey, Haruko,” and when I jerked my head up, there at the room’s entrance threshold stood a slender, fashionable woman with perfectly round eyes opened wide.
Though not cowed by her imposing air, I gave a quick bow.

“You’re here… Um… Where has my wife gone…?”

In the middle of saying this, I suddenly realized. When I looked, in the far corner stood a woman who appeared to be a maid—unfamiliar to me—staring in my direction with an expression caught between laughter and tears. And everything about the room—from the long brazier to the tea cabinet to the clothes hanging on nails—stood completely different from my own house.

Damn!

The moment this thought struck me, I lost all composure. Unable to endure another second, I grabbed the discarded hat and cloak, muttered “Excuse me,” and bolted outside without another thought.

As my drunkenness cleared and I looked around properly, I realized I had mistaken my own house for the neighbor’s and shamelessly barged in.
Not only had I sat down before the long brazier, but what in the world had I said when greeting that woman who was undoubtedly his wife!... Stealing my footsteps, I passed by my own house, waited awhile before returning, then—taking utmost care to open and close both the gate and entrance lattice without making a sound, even holding my breath—finally slipped into the tearoom.
My wife, who had been doing needlework, and the maid, who had also been mending something, perhaps sensing my presence, abruptly turned and looked in my direction.

“Oh, you…”

My wife silently returned the look.

“Why did you come home so stealthily?”

“Was that all there was to it?” I thought with some relief, flinging off my hat and mantle before sitting down there.
And I drank tea to settle my nerves.

“Oh! Where’s your haori?”

Startled, I looked down at myself and realized I wasn’t wearing the haori.

“Damn!” The words escaped me before I could stop them.

“What have you done?”

“I left it there.”

“What? Where?”

“At the neighbor’s house.”

“The neighbor’s house?”
“Oh! How on earth?”

There, I had to recount the whole incident—how I’d stumbled into the neighbor’s house in my drunken state and then rushed back out—just as the events vaguely lingered in my mind. The wife and the maid stared at me with dumbfounded expressions, their eyes fixed solely on my face. To cover up my embarrassment, I steered the conversation toward dealing with the aftermath.

“When tomorrow comes, could you go over there, apologize properly, and get my haori back?”

My wife didn’t respond for a while, but eventually answered in an affected manner.

“No, I won’t go on such an inconsiderate errand.”

“But it’d be awkward for me to go, and I can’t exactly send Ochiyo. You going over is the most reasonable option, don’t you think?”

Even so, my wife refused to go.
“What you yourself caused, you yourself should handle—that’s only natural,” she insisted.
“Since you’re more familiar with the neighbors than I am,” I said.
“However, I only went as far as the entrance to greet them, but you went all the way to sitting down by the long brazier,” she said.
“But that was just a drunken mistake,” I said.
“Men are such convenient creatures—thinking you can just blame everything on alcohol,” she said. …And so our water-arguing dragged on without end.
Before long, I grew strangely gloomy, cut the conversation short, and burrowed into my futon.

The lingering drunkenness from my bad awakening rose strangely to my head again, bringing a distant, eerie headache that creaked like someone pacing in the attic above. I wanted to forget everything and began counting the throbs of my headache, but before I knew it, I was completely drained and fell asleep right there.

The next morning, I briefly awoke at dawn, but in a harsh hangover-like mood where everything swirled hazily like a dream. Then I drifted in and out of sleep again.

It must have been around ten o'clock when I was awakened by my wife.

“You—I’ve brought back your haori.”

With a laugh, she waved the navy silk crepe single-layer haori.
I bolted upright.

“You went?”

“Well, I had to go—what else could I do?
“You couldn’t very well go yourself, and we couldn’t send the maid either—there was no one else but me, was there?”

I watched her with a strange feeling as she calmly repeated back exactly what I had said last night.

“When I went there, they turned out to be surprisingly unpretentious people.”
“And last night, Mr. Arimura had also been out drinking with friends until late, so when you barged into their house while they were away, they were quite startled, I hear.”
“They only knew someone had seen it but didn’t know who that person was from anywhere, so they were at a loss about what to do with the haori.”
“When I explained and apologized, they all burst out laughing.”
“Mr. Arimura has also made a strange mistake before, I hear.”

“What kind?”

“He himself said his was a bit more improper than yours when telling the story, but...”

According to her account, the neighbor’s husband had gone out for a walk with his wife one day and waited while strolling about as she did some shopping.
The shopping had taken an annoyingly long time, and as he grew impatient waiting, he first paced around near the store or stood still, but later began walking a bit farther away. As he stewed in irritation, it seemed his wife had slipped out of the store unnoticed at some point—he recognized her retreating figure from behind as she walked briskly off in another direction with an air of nonchalance.
In his irritation, he chased after her and hissed, “What were you dawdling around for?” Grumbling about how absurd it was to make someone wait so long only to head home alone, he caught a glimpse of her stopping and turning around—only to find she was a complete stranger he’d never met before.
He was utterly flustered and, just like me, apparently slunk away in a panic.

“In your husband’s case, since it was his own home, that was fine,” he said with a laugh, “but in my case, dealing with someone else’s wife—now that was quite a predicament.”
“And he said, ‘Let’s take this as an opportunity for you to drop by from time to time…’ ”
“Is that sarcasm?”
“No, I’m serious.”
“Huh.”
But at that moment, I suddenly perked up and leapt up energetically.
And then I splashed water over my head, and a delightfully refreshed mood came over me.

“Hey, why don’t we start barging into the neighbors’ place together from time to time?”

“What on earth are you saying? You’re getting carried away again.”

“And then, did they say anything else at the neighbors’ place?”

“No, nothing really…”
She seemed to pause and consider.
“They were just saying the same thing as you.”
“That both houses look so much alike—strangely identical…”

So strangely identical... I repeated to myself, feeling an eerie sensation creep over me as if the sun had suddenly dimmed.
Even now, there was no guarantee someone might not mistake my house for theirs and come barging in.
My wife—or worse yet, even I—might be mistaken for someone else at any moment.
If that were to happen…

And so, with those feelings still not yet fully settled within me, that evening I went with a friend to a certain café and found myself recounting all that had transpired since moving.
And truth be told, while I had been vaguely expecting some decisive words from that always-so-serious friend of mine to put my mind at ease, he waited until I finished speaking and said—with strangely glittering eyes—
“That’s fascinating. To tell the truth, I’m a chronic offender in that regard myself. I thought I was the only one and had been feeling rather uneasy about it.”

“A chronic offender?”

“Well…I suppose so.” He paused, the coffee cup hovering near his lips. “But if I just put it in vague terms, you’d never grasp it properly. Let me try to explain that feeling in detail.”

He gulped down a mouthful of coffee, throat working audibly, then swept a sharp glance around the café before beginning to speak.

“As you well know, I’m by nature a gloomy, taciturn man prone to melancholy. But under certain circumstances, I suddenly become cheerful and lively. At such times, my state of mind is exactly like a sky that had been overcast suddenly clearing, with beautiful sunlight pouring down all around. And I become filled with an extremely cheerful, buoyant mood—forgetting most errands—and wander the streets as if in a giddy trance.”

“There are so many people passing by—so very many. Their faces all seem so familiar—hey! I even feel like calling out— If it were just that, it’d be fine—but I often make some truly absurd mistakes. A face I glimpse in passing comes to seem like that of an acquaintance. So I chase after them, peek from the side, and realize it’s a case of mistaken identity. They give me a strange look in return; I get flustered and end up fleeing in silence. But even afterward, I can’t help feeling somehow bothered. Actually, even though that person is my acquaintance, I can’t help feeling that both of us—due to some strange circumstance—might have mistaken each other for strangers.”

“Then again, there’s this sort of thing too.”
“When someone approaches from ahead, their face feels unmistakably familiar.”
“And not just familiar—it’s like recalling someone deeply close.”
“But try as I might, their name won’t come to me.”
“They keep drawing nearer.”
“I’d rest my hand on my hat, caught between bowing and not bowing—only for them to walk straight past like I didn’t exist.”
“Left dumbstruck watching their retreating back, I’d realize it was my mistake all along.”
“Yet even then, something feels unresolved—like that explanation doesn’t quite cover it.”

“Tell me—do such chance resemblances between strangers really occur so often? Are all human faces truly that alike? I once made a point of carefully examining every face among the people lined up across from me on the train. Yet each one was completely different. There isn’t a single face so similar to another’s that you might mistake them. Of course siblings and twins may share considerable likenesses, but even among those, how many pairs exist that you could genuinely confuse for one another?”

“But these kinds of things I mentioned keep happening to me.”
“And they always occur when my mind is pleasantly relaxed.”
“You know—when people’s hearts are buoyantly cheerful, do they tend to jumble everything together?”
“Or is this sensation something only I ever feel?”

“It happened one day.”
“I decided to visit a certain friend—let’s call him B—and walked to the tram stop.”
“At that moment, I was having what I might call—though it’s strange to put it that way—a fit of cheerfulness; in any case, I was in an extremely pleasant mood.”
I was walking along the sidewalk curb, lightly tapping my feet like a Western child.
Then up ahead, I saw a certain acquaintance—let’s call him N—standing there.
I briskly approached and gave a slight nod.
He returned the nod.
“And we had this conversation—‘Where are you off to?’ ‘Just to Kanda.’ ‘I see… My house is right over there, so please drop by when you’re in the area.’ ‘Yes, thank you—I certainly will.’ Just then, the tram arrived.”
N boarded it.
I was headed in the opposite direction.
“Well then, I’ll take my leave,” we said and parted ways.

“Then about thirty minutes later, I went to B’s house.
To my surprise, N was already there.
A strange feeling came over me, and I asked, “Didn’t you say earlier that you were going to Kanda?” Then N looked like something didn’t add up.
When I listened carefully, I found out he had already been talking at B’s house for over two hours.”

“When they heard my story, both B and N burst out laughing.”
“And in the end, they concluded it was me who’d mistaken the person.”
“Come to think of it, that man I spoke with at the tram stop before—let’s tentatively call him NN—that NN must’ve been quite an easygoing fellow.”

"But for me, the distinction between N and NN just wouldn't come clear."
"Their faces seemed different yet somehow the same—blurring into a tangled haze in my mind."

"When I traced back through my memories—though I'm terrible at remembering everyday matters—I recalled meeting N five or six times."
"Once on a train, once at an exhibition, about twice on the street, once in the Imperial Theatre corridor—and then... Of course I shouldn't count times like when we were first introduced at a friend's place or met there afterward... Well, there seemed to have been others too."
"And upon closer reflection, though those encounters had been nothing more than brief exchanges of greetings, I could no longer tell for certain whether they'd been with N or NN."
"So I pressed N about each instance."
"It turned out while N did remember meeting once at an exhibition and once on the street, he seemed unable to recall any encounters in the Imperial Theatre corridor or on the train."
"And in short, everything had somehow become utterly incomprehensible."

“It was several days later,”
I encountered N by chance on Ginza Street.
After exchanging greetings, I was first to ask:
“You’re N, right?” He answered with a laugh,
“I’m the real N.”
“If you need to hear a name to be sure who someone is, that’s a problem.” Only then did I finally feel relieved.

“Actually, needing to hear a name before feeling certain about someone’s identity—that’s truly problematic.”
“But with N specifically, I’d become strangely intimidated.”
“Those similar faces would split into two or merge into one inside my head.”

“After that, there was a dimly lit rainy day.
I was hanging onto a strap in the crowded train, musing carefree thoughts like what if this train were to overturn... when there stood N right across from me.
Suddenly noticing him, I was about to call out when from across the way, they beat me to it with a nod.
At that moment, I became convinced it had to be NN.
‘No, this isn’t N.’
So I decided to have a proper talk with NN and put a decisive end to whatever mutual misunderstandings we’d had up until then.
And as I approached, I was told from across the way:
‘I must take my leave here.
My boarding house is ○○ Hall over there, so if you could just...’ And he got off the train.
I was completely dumbfounded.
‘When I put together what I’d heard in passing, that boarding house was N’s after all, you see.’”

He rested both elbows on the table, leaning slightly forward with his gaze fixed intently on one spot—those eyes where something unnervingly glinting and something deeply gloomy alternately surfaced—and I absently watched them, failing to notice even when his words trailed off. After a while, I finally prompted.

“And then what happened?”

“What do you mean? That’s all there is to it—it’s still unresolved.”
“Still unresolved? That’s a problem.”
“Ah, that’s a problem.”

Then, as if suddenly remembering, we sipped our thoroughly chilled coffee.
And we were given another hot cup.
Blowing on it to cool it down, he said to me through the steam.

"Mine is people's faces, and yours is people's residences—both are a bit of a problem, aren't they?"
"If these two were combined, you'd have a proper madman."

Speaking of lunatics, he and I and even the neighbor might already be halfway to losing our minds. And then before my eyes came a hazy vision of a chaotic world—faces layered haphazardly over faces, houses jumbled together with houses, all blending into an indistinguishable mess. I can't afford to be careless! This thought made me unduly anxious, so I hastily parted ways with my friend and started home. What if someone's broken into our house? What if my wife gets mistaken for someone else's? No—what if I myself, entertaining these very thoughts, misrecognize my own home or wife? What if I mistake myself for someone else?... The sheer absurdity only amplified my unease, driving me to quicken my pace frantically.

And yet on the other hand—why? Why?
I kept pondering intensely in the depths of my mind.
Then I myself—cast out upon the ground like a stone slab—and my life began coming sharply into view from a distance.
On this Earth, I possessed not a single patch of ground to call my own nor one house that belonged to me, no stores of food or money to sustain myself, barely scraping through each day as it came. What's more, lacking any firm ideals or principles to lean upon, I was living a life without understanding why I existed—passing days in a daze.
Both materially and spiritually, I was utterly destitute.
Was that the problem...? Yet even so, didn't I still have ample fresh air and warm sunlight?
What did it matter if I mistook houses or confused people?
The true fault must lie in how we rigidly establish hierarchies and settle into complacent conformity.
How delightfully absurd it would be if we all stripped naked, joined hands, and danced about together!
To possess nothing at all—that itself is a form of strength.

Thinking in that way had put me in an extraordinarily refreshed and cheerful mood, yet even so, whenever my thoughts turned to my house, wife, and child, I found myself growing inexplicably uneasy.
What on earth was I supposed to do?

Unable to tell where my own mind was directed, I fell into a strangely suspicious mood, yet still took care not to mistake the neighbor’s house for my own as I stomped inside.

My wife, who had just put our child to sleep, heard my footsteps and came out to greet me.
I came face to face with her at the room’s entrance.
It was unmistakably my wife.

“You’re Haruko, right?”

“Oh, you!... Did you go and barge into the neighbor’s again by mistake?”

I glared sharply at my wife’s face, frozen in utter exasperation without so much as a blink, and then at the maid’s face across the way—stifling a giggle while putting on a stern expression—when suddenly finding myself absurd, I burst into loud laughter: “Ahaha…”

“As if I’d make a mistake. On the contrary, I was practically worried whether I might not be the one being mistaken.”

“Worried?!... If you’re the one being mistaken, why care how often they mix you up?”

“Fine... That’s right—whether I make mistakes or get mistaken for someone else, why should I care? It doesn’t bother me at all.”

And then I became foolishly happy and paced around the room in circles. Languishing inside such a tiny house even felt wasteful somehow.

“Hey, let’s go out for a walk together.”

My wife didn’t reply, watching me with a puzzled look.

“You don’t believe me, do you? That’s no good! …Come on, let’s try going outside together. It feels nice out.”

“But…”

“It’s that ‘but’ of yours that’s the problem. Let’s go. You always used to want to take walks with me back then, didn’t you?”

My wife pursed her lips briefly before her expression softened into a smile. Smoothing her hair hurriedly, she entrusted our sleeping child to the maid and followed me outside.

“It would’ve been nice to bring the child along.”
“But they’re already asleep—it’d be cruel.”
“In that case, we’ll just take them out during the day again.”

It was a serenely clear evening. A faint, almost imperceptible breeze carried the fragrant scent of fresh greenery from somewhere. And after walking awhile, I treated my wife to coffee and sweets, then stopped before a plant nursery on our way back. While replying distractedly to her words as she browsed trees for our garden, I gazed vacantly at leaves splashed cleanly with water—until it all grew strangely tedious and absurd.

“If only there were a fire!”

Muttering such things to myself and imagining them, I conjured up a bright red flame in my mind.