Pathway to Japanese Literature

Speaking of Hasebe, he was a man of some renown among us.

One time, during the lunch break, he invited a colleague with a promise to return by one o'clock and went out to the billiard hall located in the same building as the company.
And he wouldn't let go of the cue stick.
The colleague left first when the clock struck one, but he returned unhurriedly some time after three o'clock, blowing out cigarette smoke.

It was the end of the month, and company affairs had reached their peak of busyness.
He was summoned by the Managing Director and harshly reprimanded.
From what I later heard through an office clerk, he had kept utterly still with his head bowed throughout—so perfectly contrite and conscience-stricken did he appear—that even the Managing Director ultimately relented and forgave him with a wry smile.

However, on his way home from the company that day, while walking to the tram stop with the colleague who had played billiards, he said the following.

“Well, I was scolded alright, but I didn’t make a single excuse.”
“I turned the tables on them completely.”
“Because you’d say to me, ‘Don’t you understand responsibility?’ right?”
“Since it grated on me, I told them plainly: ‘I fully grasp responsibility.’”
“If we suppose I neglected company work from one to three-thirty, I’d only need to handle extra duties for those two and a half hours. If work still remained after that, I could stay late into the night—or even overnight if the building closed…” When I laid this out, the Managing Director looked thoroughly disconcerted.
“So I pressed further and proposed what I called a reform of working hours.”
“It’s mistaken to think fixed attendance hours alone improve efficiency.”
“Employees should work whenever they please and amuse themselves otherwise when disinclined—thus letting them choose any hours between dawn and midnight would be most ideal. Interdepartmental coordination could be managed through written memos and such… don’t you agree?”

“After saying such things, didn’t you get an even harsher scolding?”

“Well… I didn’t actually say it out loud. That Managing Director doesn’t understand a thing, so I kept quiet for his sake—but if there were one who did understand, and if I had spoken that way, I imagined how amusing it would have been and enjoyed that thought. Thanks to getting scolded, I was able to enjoy a small, interesting dream.”

“Oh, how dull.”

Laughed at by his colleague, Hasebe wore an expression that betrayed his lack of conviction in their dismissal. Before long, this episode had become fodder for gossip within the tedious company. Yet upon reflection, had working hours truly been reformed according to Hasebe's proposal, he himself would likely have exploited this system most thoroughly—indeed, to such excess that even he might have found it burdensome.

There exists a story such as this.

This was from the time when he was working at a certain school.
He had quit the company and, finding himself in dire straits for sustenance, become a school teacher through the assistance of a senior.
Being a company employee was not suited to him... but neither was being a teacher.
He had the most absences among the teachers.

When the end-of-term exams concluded, the homeroom teacher for each subject had to grade and submit their reports by a set deadline.
If the deadline were delayed even by a single day, it would cause issues with the grade announcements.

Hasebe hated looking at exam papers.
He always tended to fall behind.
A reminder came from the school.
And so, on a certain day when matters finally came to a head, he had to grade nearly two hundred exam papers within a single day.
“Today, no matter who comes, I’m not here,” he instructed the people of the house.

It was mid-July, and bright sunlight fell upon the veranda.
Within that light, two or three red ants crawled about.
He happened to notice them, swatted down a fly, and gave it to the ants.
The ants dragged the fly—many times larger than their own bodies—three or four steps, but when they could no longer manage, they briefly moved away from it, quickly returned to sniff around its vicinity, then darted off into the distance.
Soon after, a swarm of ants—interspersed with larger ones here and there—approached the fly. No sooner had they clustered around it than they began hauling it away with forceful tugs.

He stood up, swatted down even more flies, and gave them to the ants. The number of ants steadily increased. They emerged not only from one hole but from various holes around. The area turned crimson. The small ants were primarily responsible for transporting them. The large ants scurried about as if commanding them or searching for more food. When some pulled left while others pulled right, the large ants briefly lent their strength and promptly tipped the scales in their allies' favor.

The flies were dragged away one after another.
In the end, he gave them half-alive flies and watched with apparent fascination as they buzzed their wings only to be swiftly conquered by the swarm of ants.
In the end, he placed a large lump of sugar there and, lying prone on the veranda, began watching the ants suck at it or bite off pieces to carry away.

That way, the morning slipped by quickly.
When afternoon came, he peered at the remaining sugar and embarked on a new, crueler game.
He plucked aphids from young bush clover shoots at the garden's edge and fed them to the ants.
He excavated earthworms from the soil near the back door and offered them to the ants.
For earthworms too large to drag away, he hacked them into two or three pieces with a stick and delivered them still writhing in torment.
He experimented with various other insects.
Caterpillars required being split open at the wound for the ants to bite into them.
The ants never approached the slugs.

Under the blazing July sun, he—with sweat beading on his forehead and ignoring whatever anyone said—became engrossed in the eerie spectacle of live insects writhing as ants swarmed them, and ended up spending until evening that way.
Even as the sun set, his head remained dizzy at its core.

When night fell, he—as if regaining his senses for the first time—set about examining the exam papers. He chain-smoked cigarettes, occasionally let out heavy sighs, and without sleeping a wink all night, managed to grade over two hundred papers by around seven in the morning.

"I may be a lazy person, but I know how to fulfill my responsibilities."

When his mother complained to me about the ant incident, he declared proudly.

But after spending the entire day engrossed in watching the battle between ants and insects, he said nothing about what purpose it served or where the interest lay.
He himself probably hadn’t understood.

And it wasn’t just ants—Hasebe had a habit of becoming engrossed in trivial things.

Because his mother had contracted pneumonia and her condition was quite severe, I decided to visit her one day.

It was around two o'clock in the afternoon at the end of March.
The spring sunlight was shining brightly, but the air still held a chill, and the tree buds had yet to swell.
Despite this, his mother—who had pneumonia—lay in a room with the shoji doors wide open, while he stood barefoot in the garden by the veranda.

"Oh, I'll be right there—please wait just a moment."

Then with his clumsy hands, he resumed the gardening he had likely started that morning.
I closed the shoji doors tightly, added charcoal to the brazier to make steam rise, exchanged a few words with his mother, then lay down and spread out newspapers and magazines—occasionally peering at him through the lower glass panels of the shoji.

Though it was called a garden, it was a narrow space of seven or eight *tsubo*, but the plantings and stone arrangements had been quite elaborately arranged.
He had rolled up his hem, gone barefoot, brought out shovels, hoes, and shears, and was haphazardly working over it all.
He rearranged large stones, replanted trees, redid these tasks over and over, removed the dragon’s beard grass around the stones only to replant it again, dug a hole in the corner of the garden, piled up soil in one section with the excavated earth, and meticulously tamped it down with his feet—all while the task he claimed would be done “right away” showed no sign of ever coming to an end.

During breaks from work, he would sit down on the veranda for a moment, smoke a cigarette with his muddy hands, and call out to the room.

"How are you feeling..."
"Shall I open the shoji?"

I was shocked and said that with her having pneumonia, the shoji mustn't be opened.
However, he excused himself by saying it would only be a moment, slid the shoji open a little, gazed at his mother's face—her eyes half-closed in drowsiness—and then returned to his gardening work.
After that, I stretched my back and reached for the shoji.

“It’s still not particularly warm out, so wouldn’t it be better to keep them closed?”

“Yes….”

Mother gave an ambiguous reply and formed a kindly smile.
I paid no heed and closed the shoji completely.

Such things were repeated two or three times.
And after several hours, when the sunlight had already been blocked by the neighboring house's roof, he finally washed his feet and came inside.

“Ah, I’m exhausted.”

I felt somewhat indignant.
Not only did I think there was no justification for leaving the shoji wide open in the room where his pneumonia-stricken mother lay sleeping—no matter that he was working in the garden—but I actually spoke up and reprimanded him.
But he remained composed.

“Well, that’s true… But… it’s already quite good enough. Right, Mother? It’s fine, isn’t it?”
“It’s really quite nice today, isn’t it?”

“Yes, thanks to your graciousness… Have you finished the garden work yet?”

“I’ve finished it completely. Now it’s all sorted out.”

The parent and child smiled at each other with unclouded eyes. Then, still wearing that same smile, he turned to me and said:

“Once I take something into my head, I become just like an infant…”

“No—I shouldn’t have kept you waiting so long.”

“Oh, it’s nothing…”

With only that exchange, I could do nothing but force a bitter smile, at a loss for words. He was digging obsessively in the garden; his sick mother lay watching him. For the first time, I felt I had glimpsed what this scene meant to them both—and bitterly regretted my earlier meddling.

But in reality, Hasebe might not have cared at all about his mother.
In other instances, he seemed to have no thought of his mother whatsoever and was completely engrossed in his own whims.

He seemed unable to resist becoming engrossed in one thing or another.
Even after I came to know him, he became engrossed in billiards, in Go, and in tennis.
There had been a time when he frequented the suburban tennis court nearly every day.
He would prepare outfits for it and buy as many as three rackets.
And all such funds were provided from his mother’s meager allowance.
He received only a meager salary and had no assets to speak of.
Thus, the family’s livelihood was primarily supported by the money his mother received from the government—owing to his deceased father’s meritorious service—though even that was a meager amount.
They were always poor.

When he was engrossed in billiards, his mother seems to have struggled the most.
He simply couldn’t settle down unless he went to the billiard hall every single night.
Moreover, when he did go, he would often return past midnight.
His mother was awake and waiting.
Because of this, the two of them once had a fight.

“Even if it’s careless to sleep without locking the front door, if you stay awake waiting up for me, I can’t even focus on playing billiards properly, can I?”
“If you insist on staying awake waiting forever, Mother, then I’ll be stubborn too—I won’t come home at all, not until daybreak….”

After such incidents, from then on, Mother began going to bed first.
She locked the front gate and pulled only the inner lattice and door shut.
He would climb over that front gate and come in.

And he always had the ashen complexion of someone sleep-deprived.

However, these indulgences of his would periodically shift focus.
He would become engrossed in Go, frequenting the Go club day in and day out, only to abruptly stop going over some trivial trigger.
And when he and his friend passed by the Go club or such places, he would glance sharply in that direction and begin speaking in a tone of indignation.

“When I see crowds of people lined up at the Go club, I feel strangely depressed—in such a cramped space, several people sit face-to-face all day long clutching small black and white stones, tilting their heads in deep thought. What’s even enjoyable about that? It feels like the people of a ruined nation—or perhaps fin-de-siècle vagrants… though even that feels too inelegant a description. They’re truly the vagrants of a ruined nation! When I think there are people like that even in Japan… it feels strange.”

This was not a joke—he said it with utmost seriousness.

"But you too, before..."

"I went every single day, but since it wasn’t interesting, I quit cold turkey—didn’t I?"

And he clamped his mouth shut in annoyance.

Such things were still on the harmless side, but...

At one point, he turned his attention to collecting art books.
He would scour used bookstores and buy intriguing art books.
However, with his meager wallet, it was no easy task.
Even by scrimping extremely on his pocket money, he could barely manage to buy three or four books a month.
And when he found an interesting art book despite having no money, he would even take kimonos to the pawnshop.

Before long, he lost interest in art books as well.
Once his interest waned, he would cleanly break away—when his pockets were empty, he would take out the art books he had painstakingly acquired and sell them off at used bookstores.
“They’re awful—they won’t take them for even half of what I paid!”

Despite indignantly saying this, he would hand them over at half the price.

If I were to give examples, there are countless more, but in any case, Hasebe continued to shift his interests restlessly in that manner.
And once he took an interest in something, he would become utterly absorbed in it for some time.
Why this happened was something no one could understand.
Moreover, he had never shown interest in his duties; whether as a company employee or a schoolteacher, he was the most disloyal of slackers. Nor had he ever engaged in any coherent study of other matters. In short, he did nothing but indulge in secondary amusements—distractions divorced from earnest living, both spiritually and materially—wasting his time away.

“If he starts womanizing on top of all that, we’ll really be in trouble,” the friends said to one another.

But fortunately, Hasebe did not take a step in that direction.
As a single man, his conduct was quite respectable.

He had a peculiar way of viewing human bodies.

One evening, he encountered a friend on the street.
The friend was on his way to the public bathhouse, carrying a towel and a soapbox.

“How about we play a round of billiards?”
“You can take your bath afterward.”

He was engrossed in billiards at that time.
The friend, thinking it would be troublesome if they got detained, tried to slip away, but he wouldn’t release him.

The billiard hall was unexpectedly empty.
The two men started their game.
The friend had intended to stop after about an hour, but perhaps because no other opponents were waiting, he wouldn’t allow it to end.
The more the friend resisted, the more persistently Hasebe pressed him.
In the end, the friend resigned himself and kept him company until past eleven.

After leaving the billiard hall, the two men wandered aimlessly and came upon a certain bathhouse.
The bathhouse was still open.

“You were going to take a bath, weren’t you?”
“This time I’ll join you,” he suddenly declared.

“But it’s too late now.”
“The water’s filthy—it’s no good.”

“Who cares?”

And then he took the lead, entered the bathhouse, borrowed a towel, and got into the bath.

Amidst the thickly swirling steam, a crowd of naked people was packed in.
From the glass-covered ceiling, cold drops were falling.
The water was lukewarm, and the hot bath had grown shallow at the bottom.

He soaked in the bath for a long time but, without washing anywhere, hurried his friend and left.

On their way back, he said such things to his friend.

“I tried going to the public bathhouse after a long time… Even though I’m poor, my house does have a bathroom, you know…”
He let out a wry smile.

“Public bathhouses are strange places, aren’t they? When there’s such a big crowd—how should I put it… It seems like some sort of crowd psychology takes over. There are times when only one or two people stay in the bath while everyone else moves to the washing area, and other times when they all come rushing into the bath at once. How peculiar. And when a crowd pours into the bath—I measured it—the water level ends up differing by a good foot and a half. You realize that many bodies get thrown into that big tub to make the water rise a whole foot and a half? The women’s bath must be the same way. In both baths, men and women are packed together like potato sprouts, all in utter chaos. It’s complete madness.”

“Huh? ‘Chaos’… What do you mean?”
“What do you mean ‘what’? …It’s chaos, isn’t it.”
What exactly Hasebe had perceived as chaos remained unclear to his friend, and of course, even after hearing the story, I couldn’t grasp it either.

However, I once heard a strange confession directly from Hasebe—something that may or may not have been related to that.

At that time, we were drinking and were quite drunk.
I, concerned about his temperament, kept chattering on with various admonitions.
He had been listening quietly but suddenly spoke up.

“What you say is right.”
“There are times when even I can’t control myself.”
“It’s only because it’s you that I’m confessing this—I’ve even done something utterly shameless.”
“...One late night, I was walking alone through a dim back alley.”
“Then I suddenly came face-to-face with a young woman who looked like some sort of maid.”
“Let me clarify—as you know, I’m not particularly driven by carnal desires.”
“I occasionally visit disreputable places—well, I do satisfy certain physiological needs—but I never let things go too far.”
“It’s utterly uninteresting.”
“I may lose myself to billiards, Go, or tennis—but never to women.”
“That was my secret pride.”
“But that night—a cloudy, stifling night—when I encountered that plump body visible in the dark, I somehow found myself blurting out ‘Good evening...’”
“A ridiculous greeting.”
“But I wasn’t drunk.”
“Completely sober.”
“And as I spoke, I instantly grabbed her hand.”
“By the time I came to my senses, she was letting out a metallic clang of a voice while lunging at me like a warrior.”
“I... I suppose my mind was in disarray—I shoved her away and fled at full speed.”

A nauseating smell of hair oil—whether real or imagined—stubbornly lingered in his nostrils.
And overwhelmed by an indescribably pitiful, wretched feeling, he wandered about the bright boulevard like a dog.

“When I think back on that time, I’m dangerous—truly dangerous.”

For a while, I gazed vacantly at his gloomy eyes.

“You probably don’t have such experiences, do you?”
“No—likely no one has such experiences at all…”

“Well, any man might have such momentary impulses, but between feeling and action…”

“You mean there’s a distance.”
“But to me, that distance feels terribly small… Exactly as you say, I may lack reflection and self-restraint.”
“Yet if that’s natural—what should I do? …What should I do?”

From beneath a gaunt forehead crowned with disheveled, coarse hair, he peered at me with a somber gaze.
I felt a certain chill.

That chill might have stemmed from my petty moral sense.
Because Hasebe had managed to pull off a truly remarkable feat.
But if one were to step back and consider it, there was something within him that made one think—had the circumstances been slightly different—he might have committed even a grave crime with utter naturalness.

“If I didn’t accept it… I thought he might kill me… so…”

When Hasebe asked why she had accepted the ring, she had reportedly answered in that manner.

She was an attendant in the faculty room of the small private university where he worked as an English teacher.

To put it simply, the incident was straightforward.

In the faculty room of the private university where he worked, there were two female clerks.
One was a twenty-two- or twenty-three-year-old woman with frizzy hair and a severe face; the other was a girl of sixteen or seventeen, with thick hair, regular features, a neatly pretty appearance, and an innocent demeanor.
To that young female clerk, he had once bought a gold ring with a blue gemstone and forced her to accept it.
Under normal circumstances, it would have been nothing out of the ordinary, but occurring within the school's premises, it became a serious issue.

Around 4:30 p.m. that day, the Student Supervisor, who had been handling administrative tasks in another room, suddenly entered the faculty room.
When he looked around, in the corner of the room, the younger clerk was weeping quietly while the older clerk comforted her.
There was no one else present.
Finding this strange, the Student Supervisor pressed them for an explanation but could not get any answers.
Eventually, they left.
About fifteen minutes later, the older clerk returned and explained the situation to the Student Supervisor.
According to her account, when the younger clerk had been alone earlier, Hasebe entered and abruptly thrust forward a gold ring.
She refused.
However, he glared at her with terrifying ferocity—his demeanor suggesting he might beat her to death if she resisted—and forced her to accept it.
After Hasebe left, she stood there dazed by sudden terror until the older colleague returned to the room and noticed the gold ring clutched in her hand.
When suspiciously questioned about it, she abruptly burst into tears—or so the story went.

Upon hearing this account, the Student Supervisor was at a loss over how to handle the matter.
First, he silenced her, then went to the Academic Affairs Director’s office and discussed the matter together with him, but aside from forcing Hasebe to resign, no brilliant ideas emerged.

Unaware that matters had reached this point, Hasebe went to school the next day and was summoned to a separate room by the Student Supervisor and Academic Affairs Director.
At that moment, he answered with perfect composure.

“It’s not like I did it with any malicious intent.”
“It’s a token of gratitude for her mysterious ability.”
“It’s because she possesses an ability that I could never attain, no matter how much I practiced or trained my mind.”

That ability—not quite clairvoyance, but a kind of psychic sensitivity—was what he meant.
If several bowls were placed upside down on a tray with a coin hidden under one of them, she would stare down intently and often guess correctly.
The teachers, finding it amusing, decided to give her the coin inside if she guessed correctly and often had her try.
There were times when she missed, but she usually hit the mark beautifully.

The one who found this most strange and made her attempt it most persistently was Hasebe. In the end, he would bring out every last fifty-sen silver coin he had and even try it himself. She too finally began to dislike it and ceased to readily comply with his requests. However, Hasebe alone became engrossed and continued. He purchased not only books on clairvoyance and remote viewing but also those in the field of psychic research, devouring them late into the night.

Such zeal of his was not believed by the Academic Affairs Director and the Student Supervisor, nor did he himself attempt to show it off.
That he was always single-mindedly observing the clerk's clairvoyance sessions, persistently pressuring her to perform them, and at times even nearly missing his classes because of this—all of this was indeed a fact known to everyone—but it did nothing to justify the ring incident.
Moreover, she was rather good-looking, and he was unmarried.
What's more, it had occurred in the faculty room—a place that was supposed to be sacred.

“Given that things have come to this, we’re at a loss as to how to handle the matter.”

The Academic Affairs Director spoke in such an ambiguous manner.

Hasebe finally fell silent and bowed his head before the two, but then suddenly spoke.

“I’ll take four or five days to consider my position.”

And after announcing that he would take a leave of absence for four or five days, he left the school gates.
The young female clerk did not come to school that day.
Then, after coming to my place and explaining the circumstances—whatever he had been thinking—Hasebe asked me to propose marriage to the woman.

“Why do you want to get married?”

I was astonished by his unexpected decision.
But he seemed to find my astonishment strange.

“Why… I just want to try marriage.”

"That's absurd—who would get married for such a reason? Just because you want to try marriage—such nonsense..."

"No—my mind's settled. The look in her eyes when she took the ring—oh, that was beautiful. I love that look. I'll definitely marry her. Then I'll quit school. If I can't marry her, I'll stubbornly refuse to submit my resignation until they force me out."

Knowing his temperament, I could hardly bring myself to oppose him forcefully.
In any case, thinking that I should meet with the people at the school and hear the details of the situation first..., I calmed him down and sent him home, then headed out to the school.

After meeting with the Student Supervisor and Academic Affairs Director, I heard the aforementioned account.
For the most part, it matched what I had heard from Hasebe, differing only on whether she had accepted the ring gladly or not.
Hasebe had said she was pleased, but at the school it appeared he had coerced her.
But when I imagined her feelings as she stood before him with that fiercely determined expression, it seemed both accounts might hold some truth.
And beyond such things lay even more ambiguous matters within this story.

Later, when I inquired further, I heard that her so-called clairvoyance was something rather dubious.
There were even people who said she only guessed correctly four or five times out of ten.
Moreover, it was said that Hasebe alone truly believed in it, while everyone else half-heartedly dismissed it as nonsense.
It was also said that Hasebe would expound on such difficult topics as the workings of the subconscious and the nature of spiritual senses to her, sitting there before the silently smiling young woman, pleased with himself alone.
There even emerged those who suggested he might have begun falling in love with her around that time.

One time, late in the afternoon when the red sunset glared through west-facing windowpanes—that was when it happened. He suddenly stood up, seized her, and proposed a staring contest against the sun blazing in the glass. She immediately agreed, and they stood side by side rigidly, fixing their eyes on the dazzling light. Three minutes... five minutes... She turned her face away first. Then they started over again. He kept insisting. In the end, even as tears streamed from her eyes, she stood facing that burning sunset as compelled.

However, this story might have been fabricated by someone.
Yet that there were times he remained in the faculty room until late, leaning motionless against his desk while lost in thought seemed an established fact.
However, according to the testimony of one female clerk, he never did anything like following her home.
On the contrary, there were times when she herself urged him, "It’s time to go home."
Then he abruptly stood up from his reverie, silently exited ahead of her, and hurried off without so much as a backward glance.

Even if there were various other things I did not yet know about, the motive behind his decision to marry remained utterly perplexing.
It seems that until then, their relationship had been so faint that it hardly ever came up in people’s conversations.
That faintness transformed into a sudden ring and a sudden marriage proposal.

Let me briefly state the outcome.
I met with the people at the school and learned that Hasebe could no longer remain in his position.
And so, considering Hasebe’s future and his current impoverished life, I could do nothing but sigh.

Fortunately, the incident was resolved smoothly.
Her family had fallen on hard times, but their lineage was apparently proper.
Both she and her family consented to the marriage.
Hasebe’s mother also consented to the marriage.
And then Hasebe joined a certain confectionery company.
What made the confectionery company amusing was that when he later heard the school had abolished female clerks and replaced them with males, Hasebe leapt for joy.

“Having female clerks at the school was a mistake from the very beginning.”

I was at a loss for a reply.

And when he learned that his mother had consented to the marriage, his joy grew even greater.

“Behold! It’s just as I said.”
“Heaven helpeth those who help themselves.”

He had been spouting such nonsense with pride, yet when he stood before his mother, his face turned bright red like a child’s, eyes brimming with tears.

“Mother, we two will unite our hearts in caring for you.”
“We truly will care for you.”
“Please be at ease.”

When I visited a day later, his mother herself, tears in her eyes, repeated those words to me over and over.

He was lying sprawled on the veranda, an oddly melancholic smile playing on his cheeks.

“What’s wrong?”

“Hmm….”

After giving a meaningless reply, he once again lowered his eyes to the ground.
Red ants were crawling all around.
However, he no longer even fed them, merely kept watching intently.
Then he suddenly turned back toward me.

“You, is marriage… supposed to be joyful?”

I stared at his face in surprise.
Precisely because his joy two days prior had been so great, I was left utterly dumbfounded.

“I can’t help feeling… strangely uneasy…”

And he still stared intently into my eyes.
I averted my eyes and answered.

“But you were the one who insisted so vehemently… and you were so delighted, weren’t you?”

“Well, I am happy now—of course I am—but there’s this unease… No—if I’m to speak of unease, life itself is uneasy.”

At his tone, just as I had once felt before, a chill struck me in the chest.
It wasn’t that life was uneasy—Hasebe himself was the unease.

“How about it—care for a game of Go after all this time?”

His eyes were already glaring.