Pathway to Japanese Literature

Die!

Though there existed a bond between him and me that could not be severed, we did not meet all that often.
I was always terribly busy.
Being poor meant I had to keep working without a moment’s rest just to eat.
Yet he remained perpetually idle.
He spent his days carefree—daydreaming, wandering about, drinking sake.
This did not mean he possessed any wealth.
He had repeatedly caused me financial trouble.
“Why don’t you work instead of burdening others?” I would say, yet he always calmly replied, “I’ll work soon.” Because this carried not mere lip service but a sincerity that seemed rooted in genuine conviction, I inevitably ended up believing that “soon.”
But that “soon” never arrived in the present, perpetually postponed further ahead.
It was like a shadow figure when you have the sun at your back.
It kept advancing further ahead.
Yet he made no effort to chase it down.
Instead, he idled about carefree.
How he managed this—without even a shadow of hardship—somehow struck me as strange.
But I lacked the luxury to dwell solely on his secret.
I was busy securing my daily bread.
And so it seemed a busy person and an idle one could not meet often.
It must have been something like a misalignment of opportunities.

However, one evening, I encountered him in an unexpected place.

Though I may say I'm busy, it's not as though I worked nonstop from morning till night every day.
Such a thing wasn't possible for a human being.
Occasionally, physical respite and mental recuperation were necessary.
In that sense, I drank absurd sake and became thoroughly drunk.
There was no wind—the air sat lukewarm as the sky hung hazily misted.
It was the kind of evening where walking outside made entering a house feel suffocating.
At times like this, someone would surely die in a hospital.

At a dimly lit alley corner where sewer work had torn up the ground, a large concrete pipe lay on one side of the street.
Absurdly large and round.
Drawn to it, I began poking at it with the tip of my cane.
It was just a steady tapping, like striking rock.
As I kept tapping with steady admiration, a man abruptly emerged from the hole at the pipe's tip.
That was him.
Even though it was warm, he was still wearing a winter coat.
His long hair was tangled and unkempt, devoid of luster; a fatigue-induced flush rose to his pale cheeks, and his eyes held an unwavering intensity.
When he noticed me, he flung the hat he was holding onto the pipe.
He seemed angry.

“What are you doing?”

I was appalled.

“You’re the one who should explain what you were doing.”

He did not answer that, and after picking up his hat and placing it on his head, he stared fixedly at me.
I felt myself being despised and lowered my eyes.
Then he took my arm and started walking.

“I discovered something interesting,” he began.
“When I thought it was no longer possible and told Chiyoko so...”

That “it’s no longer possible” notion of his was, from my perspective, an utterly absurd way of thinking.
As I mentioned before, he was living almost entirely off debt.
From friends, he borrowed as much as he could.
He then borrowed from loan sharks.
When he couldn’t pay the interest, he borrowed from other loan sharks.
Proceeding in this way, it was clear he would soon reach a dead end.
However, he remained unperturbed.

Yet another “soon” lay in wait.
“I’ll work soon, and the debts…”
Because his confidence was so immense, he ended up taking on even others’ debts.
When those in trouble came to him for help, if he could manage it, he would give them a small amount of money; if not, he would guarantee their loans.
Even when all of it came crashing down on him, he never once made a sour face.
The debts he had guaranteed for others may have even exceeded those he incurred himself.
He owned some land in the countryside, and when truly desperate, he would sell it or put it up as collateral to borrow money.
So it could be said he held out relatively long.
However, even as those debts kept increasing, he would say, “I’ll work soon.”
That “soon” did not readily arrive.
For some reason, even he himself did not seem to understand.
Human life is governed by habit, and for him, spending his days idly while thinking he would work soon may have become a kind of habit.
And when at last he could no longer make ends meet, he tried calculating all his debts and was shocked.
The amount had reached an unexpected sum.
There he made a resolution: to work.
However, for that purpose, he felt it necessary to first settle those troublesome, nagging debts.
For that purpose, he attempted to bundle all the land together as collateral to raise four or five thousand yen.
However, he couldn’t do that.
He might have managed a thousand or two thousand yen, but that was a partial amount that fell short.
He tilted his head.

He found it strange that he couldn’t raise the intended amount. For him, financial matters were all elementary school arithmetic. Borrow this much, proceed like this, repay this much incrementally. The calculations became clear. However, the very debt meant to serve as the foundation could not be secured. That was an utterly perplexing matter to him. That wasn’t how it was supposed to be. Water flows from high places to low places. At present, since his water level was insufficient here, he had intended to draw from elsewhere for now, and once work increased the volume, redirect it to other channels. That is what caused the discrepancy. In short, the time for borrowing money and the time for repayment—that is, the time for working—were too far apart. That the latter period did not precede the former was also something that struck him as strange.

He grew slightly weary.
He grew fed up.
He thought that in such a world, it would be fine to die already.
From the beginning, he had no strong attachment to life.
He had not a shred of that presumptuous notion—the idea that because there were many things he ought to accomplish, he simply had to keep living.
If he had been doing something while alive, it would have been acceptable to die at any time.
Despite such feelings, at present, he was not working at all.
Therefore, all the more, it came to be that he could die at any time.

However, the claim that he wasn't working at all was his own subjective assertion.
He did work a little.
But he insisted that this wasn't true work.

As debts mounted in tandem with his alarm, he resolved to abandon various trivial jobs and devote himself to real work—prompting him to devise a plan for settling liabilities.
Needless to say, he was a literary man.
Literary types insist on distinguishing between real work and trivial jobs.
Yet this distinction was purely subjective—something even God himself likely couldn’t comprehend.
Thus, wanting to do real work might in truth amount to nothing more than wanting to work seriously.

If being plagued by debts prevented him from working seriously, and if this chaotic world made settling those debts impossible—then perhaps dying would be better. In this way, his readiness to die at any time shifted into actual contemplation of suicide.

“When I told Chiyoko that...” he continued to tell me.

Chiyoko was what you might call his lover.
The term "lover" struck him as slightly odd, but to tell the truth, it was the real name of the geisha who shared this mutual infatuation with him.

“It’s no use anymore.”
“I think I’ll die,” he said with a smile.
Then she answered him without showing any particular surprise and smiled back as well.
“In a week or ten days,” he said, and she replied.

“Then I’ll make sure to be ready by then.”

It was utterly simple.
At that moment she was fiddling with the lamp cord when suddenly, a single tear welled in her eye; as if to conceal it, she smiled again.

He felt a profound chill.
Normally, one would ask all sorts of questions—why it couldn’t be avoided, how much debt there was, what assets existed, what the income amounted to—and verify whether things had truly reached the point where death was necessary.
To want to keep loved ones alive, to want to live together, to live and love—to think such things was human nature.
Yet she did not ask a single thing.
She knew nothing concrete about his situation.
He had not spoken about any of the financial matters.
When he abruptly declared he was thinking of dying since it was no use anymore—stating this with a faint smile—she said she’d prepare herself as well.
What greater coldness could there possibly be?
As he gazed coldly, she managed a smile with tears in her eyes.

He turned that coldness over in his mind.
And before any clear understanding could form, he found himself resolved to die with her.
When he had vaguely contemplated death before, he had never once considered dying alongside her.
Dying had been something he would face alone.
Yet suddenly, touched by her icy words, he resolved they should perish together.

“That is the discovery,” he said to me.

Perhaps there was nothing more to be done about it—I too had come to feel this way—and so, led by him, I went to meet her: Chiyoko.

In a back room where the corridor was polished to a striking sheen, the alcove’s fresh flowers remarkably vibrant, and the framed scroll on the lintel exuding an antique air, he and I began drinking sake. We were both quite drunk but still seemed capable of drinking much more. When he looked at his cup, he was beaming with delight. I found myself sinking into contemplation.

After being made to wait quite a while, Chiyoko arrived out of breath.
“Oof, I can’t breathe.”
That served as her greeting to him; she immediately straightened her posture and after a moment’s pause offered me a proper greeting.
I had met her several times before with him.
Compared to previous encounters, she had become considerably thinner.
This lent her large frame a somewhat translucent quality.
Even so, I often found myself nursing resentment toward her.
I even wondered whether half the responsibility for his idle days and current financial crisis might not lie with her.

Moreover, liquor’s intoxication makes people talkative and blunt. “Don’t burden him too much,” I told her. “Burden…” She glanced toward him as if finding the notion absurd. “You fool,” I said to her. “He’s talking about living or dying.” “Oh, I’m the same way,” she replied airily, casting another glance his direction. “He says he’ll die with you,” I told her. “Then I’d be glad,” she accepted plainly, looking at him again. I felt utterly foolish. She kept giving these distracted replies, my words hitching rides on her gaze only to crash into him. All the while, that man sat grinning faintly as he drank his sake with apparent delight…

I felt anger rising.
Thinking, "Might as well beat this bastard," I stood up, and he too staggered to his feet—we grappled with each other.
Admittedly, it was drunken folly—so absurd that Chiyoko watched with laughter—but when I gave him a shove, he staggered feebly, clung to Chiyoko’s shoulder, and slid down to her flower-patterned lap.
The large shadow of her hair tied in the Shimada style enveloped him completely.

Leaving them there, I departed.
A sense of unease surged up.
His frailty and haggard appearance remained etched in my mind.
Chiyoko’s demeanor—as though she’d discarded everything—also troubled me.
Though he had spoken of her cold words, he was likely using them to express something beyond their literal meaning.
This is dangerous, I thought.
But for a man like him to commit suicide...
This thought somehow struck me as even comical.
To be ready to die at any time meant nothing less than being free to live indefinitely.
That meant entrusting it to nature.
Entrusting matters to nature stood in complete contrast to willful suicide.

Forget it.
I was busy.

Yet at times, his figure would surface in my mind.
It interfered with my work.
I frowned and questioned him.

“What the hell do you see in a woman like that?”
“A simple, ignorant woman of that sort is blind to life as much as she is blind to death.”
“She’s a floating weed carried by the current.”
“About clinging to that floating weed and being swept away together—what exactly have you discovered?”
“Drop the pointless sentimentality.”

“Everything you’re spouting is just logic.”
“I only know facts.”
“She and I love each other.”
“Love isn’t intellectual—it’s a bodily secret.”
“Try embracing someone with joined lips for thirty minutes.”
“If you can endure that yet still cling together—that’s true love.”
“Disgust means you’re faking it.”
“Sex means nothing.”
“The body’s constitution holds love’s secret.”
“Those who know this secret don’t care about living or dying.”
“This is what I discovered.”
“There exists a love both physical and fated.”

“But putting that aside—what about you yourself? You want to work, you want to live—isn’t that what the financial settlement was for? If there’s a love where life or death doesn’t matter, why not work to let it survive naturally? If you spend your days like this, it was clear from the start you’d face financial deadlock. Once you’re at a deadlock, panicking won’t save you. To try relying on others’ help—that’s cowardice.”

“Once more, you’re just spouting logic.”
“I’m already sick to death of logic.”
“Human productivity… In spiritual productivity, there exists an ebb and flow like the tides.”
“When this tidal rhythm coincided with external misfortune, many artists starved or took their own lives.”
“Had I remained at low tide, I wouldn’t have bothered with financial settlements.”
“It was precisely my confidence in reaching high tide that made me endure those distasteful exertions to work.”
“That I lived such disorderly days was also meant to hasten the tide’s arrival.”
“The timing simply proved slightly misaligned.”
“If this world renders such misalignments irreparable, there’s no sense fretting over them.”
“If this world truly refuses to let me work, then I’ll simply take my leave of it.”

Very well. I understood.

“But tell me clearly—do you truly have the will to die? Can you muster that level of resolve?”

There was no reply, and I was left alone.
His figure had vanished.
Had my words been too cruel?
When terms like "will" or "resolve"—used in such fashion—were reflected back at me, I felt a surge of resentment and grew sullen.
To die for... Ah, I even felt compelled to apologize to him.

Every time we met, I could see him gradually losing vitality.
A somber shadow seemed to settle over him, growing darker by degrees.
Growing concerned, I investigated his financial circumstances through various means.
What I found shocked me.
The situation proved far worse than I’d imagined.
Defaults accumulated everywhere—debts of almost servile nature among them—but what particularly drew my attention were both his assumption of others’ loans and an accelerating tendency to shift debts into obligations from professional moneylenders.
To be fair, given his social standing, even the total liabilities didn’t amount to an outrageous sum. Yet precisely because of this, transferring debts into high-interest professional loans struck me as reckless—a maneuver made without any regard for future consequences.
A certain fatalistic recklessness permeated these actions.
Examining past records revealed how his initial misstep—contracting that first small debt—had set him sliding ever deeper into the credit system’s economic quagmire.
Had he rigidly maintained a cash-based existence, would he truly have starved during that ebb of creative productivity?

To further clarify his thoughts regarding this reckless approach with no future prospects, I subtly probed Chiyoko. She too appeared to be in dire straits—her payments to the kimono dealer were often delayed, and she seemed to have started frequenting the pawnshop. What never quite made sense to me was how Chiyoko had recently begun taking extreme care of her body—abstaining from alcohol, minding her diet, even tending to the slightest hangnail on her fingertips. In this regard, he was no different—not merely due to financial constraints, but actively striving to curb his beloved liquor and cut back on cigarettes. This could be interpreted in various ways depending on one’s perspective.

However, I could not afford to concern myself solely with him.
For his sake, even being interrupted in my work became a problem.
It did worry me, but there was nothing to do except keep watching a while longer.

As I walked along the pond’s edge thinking about work, someone tapped my shoulder and said, “Hey.” The pond’s lotus and algae had not yet sprouted; upon its flat, damply stagnant surface, forest shadows and town lights reflected in equal measure, inviting fragmented meditations—but when I raised my eyes and turned around, he stood there.

“Even you take walks in places like this?”

He studied my face with curiosity and smiled.
Yet even to me, his radiant expression felt unnatural.
Though more gaunt than before, the shadows had lifted from him—his eyes now lucid pools.
When I asked what happened, he explained he’d finished some job through ten sleepless nights.

“I must at least fulfill my work obligations.”

I wanted to ask if this was his so-called true labor, but his beaming countenance satisfied me into silence.
Then he announced he’d made an intriguing discovery, smiling with childish delight.
I braced for another evasion—but this proved wholly different.

He spoke of how hearing sparrows chirp as dawn faintly broke through his all-night vigil had brought him genuine delight. A large chinquapin tree stood by his study window where many sparrows gathered. Sparrows seemed to be dawn’s first awakeners, immediately bursting into cheerful song upon rousing. He scattered rice grains along the outer eaves for them, which they would devour unnoticed. Yet they never approached while observed, remaining untamable however one tried. But on completing his work that morning, as he stood vacant-eyed contemplating the brightening sky, the sparrows came right beside him to peck at the grains. When he shifted attention toward them, they scattered instantly.

“It must be a coincidence,” I said.

“It’s no coincidence. That’s simply how nature works.”

He seemed to believe it completely. And he said this discovery made him truly happy. While talking about such things, he invited me out—to drink aged rice wine with nothing but light Chinese dishes, he explained. He said there was no need to worry since some money had come in.

As we walked along together, he suddenly stumbled and fell—as though a bone in his leg had snapped. When I offered my hand, he got up immediately, though his eyes were brimming with tears. I looked away.

This was the man who always laughed at me for being a crybaby during plays and movies. The man who had never once shown tears before. When I took notice, his steps were unsteady and devoid of strength. He must have pushed himself terribly hard working.

In an ordinary Japanese-style room at a rosewood table, as we drank old sake with two or three dishes between us, he put on a lonely expression and asked if it would be all right to summon her.
This concerned Chiyoko.
I’d already grasped his meaning but kept quiet.

She came wearing everyday clothes adorned with a black collar.
She still seemed cheerful.
Altogether I received from her a profoundly insubstantial impression.
Perhaps it was her unpolished roughness—that whimsical cheerfulness of a spirited tradeswoman—that created such an impression; I had jokingly likened it to an airplane.
She who seemed perpetually aloft like an airplane and he who was inherently unhurried and unattached—their rhythms might have been compatible, but when they both fixed their hearts so single-mindedly on each other like this, even I began to fear it would end in ruin.
He told her too about the sparrows.
She seemed struck by something and fell into deep thought for a while.

“How about a four- or five-day trip? Maybe a week,” he said with characteristic nonchalance.
“Will that be all right?” she asked.
“It’ll be fine,” he answered.
Money—it must have been about money.
And with that, the plan was settled.
This is madness, I thought.
This isn’t the time for such things.
Yet…a vague dread began to take hold of me.
In trying to shake it off, I only sank deeper into gloom.

After leaving that place and parting from the two who said they would stroll around the pond, when I found myself alone, I walked with my head hung low, lost in thought for some reason.
I wanted to make those two happy—though they acted so recklessly, they were capable of earnest work and stable lives… Such thoughts filled me as a vague resentment toward society took root.
Is the weight of societal institutions too crushing?

Late that night, when he appeared, I was overcome with profound sadness.
It resembled the sorrow of parting.

So—he’s going on a trip.

“I intend to go.”

“You’re not planning to die, are you.”

“Rest assured. I cannot muster the will or resolve to die. But a natural death can’t be helped.”

“Don’t you feel any urge to resist?”

“Against what? I revere nature. I don’t want to distort it through resistance.”

“Taking refuge in nature is cowardly.”

“Perhaps that’s true.”
“Life is artificial, you see.”
“But when one grows weary of various matters, pure nature comes to mind.”

“That is a loss of will.”

“What matters most to me is sensibility over willpower.”

“Become beasts.”

Rather than that—he wanted to become a baby.

At that, he formed a very subtle smile.
I recognized that smile.
When he would lie sprawled for an hour or two watching clouds in the sky, when observing ants in the garden, when seeming to recall some distant dream of long ago—it was that same guileless smile he would let slip.
It was also the smile he wore when tucking a bulging wallet into his breast pocket.
At such times, he bought more useless things than practical ones.
There was once when he became obsessed with purchasing a massive natural stone over ten feet tall—an uncanny rock that, depending on how you looked at it, resembled a standing raccoon dog.
When I asked what he meant to do with it, he had given me that same smile.
This would often make me irrationally irritable.

Even now, I gazed intently at his face with a certain irritation.
His face, which had been clear, suddenly looked sad.
It was a sorrow that, even as its grip weakened, could not bring itself to depart.
“Idiot!” I shouted.
And then I shouted after him as he walked away.

“Die! Just die!”

I, who had been mocked by him as a crybaby, unwittingly let tears fall once more. Troublesome him, obstructive him, him who was half my very being—I had loved him.