Pathway to Japanese Literature

Humans, pigs, dogs, chickens, and ducks all lived in that house, yet both their dwellings and individual food provisions had scarcely changed at all.
There stood a warped structure resembling a storage shed—the tailor couple rented downstairs while a mother and daughter occupied the attic space, the latter now bearing a child of unknown parentage.

The room Izawa rented was a cottage separated from the main house—reportedly where the family’s tubercular son had once slept—though not too lavish a shack even for a consumptive pig.
Still, it contained a closet, toilet, and cupboard.

The tailor couple ran their tailoring business while also serving as sewing instructors for the neighborhood (which was why they had moved their son with tuberculosis to a separate cottage) and held positions as neighborhood association officers. The attic daughter had originally been a clerk at the town office, where she stayed overnight and reportedly engaged in impartial relations with all other officers—over a dozen men—excluding the town chairman and the tailor, ultimately conceiving a child by one of them. So the town officers pooled funds to have the child dealt with in this attic, but society abhors waste—one of the officers was a tofu shop owner who kept visiting even after the daughter became pregnant and hid in the attic, until she essentially became his mistress. When the other officers realized this, they immediately stopped their pooled contributions and insisted that the tofu shop owner should bear this transitional month's living expenses, leaving seven or eight people—a greengrocer, watchmaker, landlord, and some shopkeeper (five yen per person)—refusing to pay, while the daughter continued stomping her feet in frustration to this day.

The daughter had a large mouth and two large eyes, yet despite this, she was terribly emaciated.
Disliking ducks, she tried to give leftovers only to the chickens, but the ducks would snatch them from the side, so she ended up chasing the ducks in anger every day.
The way she ran - with her large belly thrust forward and buttocks pushed back in an oddly upright posture - resembled that of ducks.

At the exit of this alley stood a tobacco shop where a fifty-five-year-old woman lived with her face powdered white, having expelled what might have been her seventh or eighth lover and now agonizing over whether to replace him with a middle-aged monk or perhaps some middle-aged shopkeeper. Young men who went to buy cigarettes through the back door found she would sell them a few (albeit at black market prices), and though the tailor suggested "Mr." (meaning Izawa) should try going through that back entrance too, Izawa fortunately managed without relying on the old woman's services due to receiving special rations at his workplace.

However, across from that street lived a widow of modest means behind the rice rationing office, who had a brother (a factory worker), a sister, and two children—though these actual siblings had entered into a marital relationship. But while the widow silently allowed this as being more economical, her brother found himself a woman. So they needed to dispose of the sister by marrying her off to an elderly relative in his fifties or sixties, and the sister drank cat poison. After drinking it, she came to the tailor’s place (Izawa’s lodging) for her lesson and began suffering, ultimately dying—but when the neighborhood doctor provided a heart attack diagnosis, the matter was quietly hushed up. “What?” When Izawa asked in astonishment, “What doctor would provide such a convenient diagnosis?”, the tailor looked dumbfounded and asked, “What do you mean? Isn’t that how it works elsewhere?”

In this area, cheap apartments stood clustered together, with a fraction of those rooms inhabited by mistresses and prostitutes.
These women had no children and shared the common trait of keeping each of their rooms clean; because of this, they were favored by the managers, and the disorderliness and immorality of their private lives never became an issue.
Over half the apartments had become munitions factory dormitories, where groups from the Women's Volunteer Corps also resided - there were lovers of some section chief, wartime wives of department heads (meaning their actual wives were evacuated), executives' mistresses, and pregnant corps members taking leave from work while still collecting salaries.
Among them was a woman who maintained a household as a 500-yen mistress and became the object of envy.
Next to a Manchurian rōnin who supposedly made killing his trade (his sister being the tailor's apprentice) lived a shiatsu instructor, and next to that resided a master practitioner carrying on tailor Ginji's tradition. Behind them dwelled a navy lieutenant who daily ate fish, drank coffee, opened canned goods, and consumed alcohol. Though this area's waterlogged ground—where digging just one shaku deep brought seeping water—made proper air raid shelters impossible to construct, the lieutenant alone possessed a cement-reinforced shelter grander than his own home.
The two-story wooden department store along Izawa’s commute route had closed due to wartime shortages, yet its second floor hosted daily gambling dens. The gang boss who controlled these operations would glare at queuing citizens while maintaining a perpetual drunken stupor, having commandeered several national taverns.

Izawa was a man who became a newspaper reporter after graduating from university, then turned cultural film director (still a trainee who had never directed solo) - at twenty-seven years of age, he should have possessed some knowledge of life's underbelly, having grasped fragments of insider information about politicians, military men, businessmen, and entertainers. Yet he could never have imagined the ecosystem of this rundown shopping street surrounded by small factories and apartments would be like this.
When Izawa suggested it must be because people's hearts had grown coarse since the war began, the tailor answered quietly with a philosopher's expression: “No, not at all. It’s been this way here since long before.”

But the greatest figure was Izawa's neighbor.

This neighbor was a madman.
He possessed considerable assets, and his deliberate choice to build his house at the very bottom of the alley likely stemmed from the madman's peculiar logic—an extreme aversion to intrusions by thieves or unwanted visitors.
For upon reaching the alley's deepest recess and passing through this house's gate, one would find no proper entrance—nothing but latticed windows stretching as far as the eye could see. The house's true entryway lay diametrically opposed to the gate on the structure's far side, meaning one had to fully circle the building before gaining access.
This configuration caused unwanted intruders to abandon their attempts while creating a system where those wandering in search of the entrance would have their presence detected—for the neighbor detested worldly mediocrities.
The house was a two-story building with numerous rooms, but even the knowledgeable tailor knew little about its internal mechanisms.

The madman was around thirty years old, had a mother, and a wife of twenty-five or twenty-six.
Though people said only his mother should have counted among the sane, her severe hysteria made her storm barefoot into the town council whenever rations displeased her—the neighborhood's sole female warrior—while his wife remained an idiot.
One auspicious year, he had experienced a spiritual awakening and embarked on a Shikoku pilgrimage clad in white robes, where he found kinship with an idiot woman somewhere in those lands and brought her home as his pilgrim's trophy bride.
He cut a dignified figure of masculine beauty, while she carried herself with the refined grace befitting a well-bred daughter from proper stock—her narrow, vexing eyes notwithstanding—her features blending antique doll-like melon-seed contours with Noh mask elegance. Side by side, they appeared nothing less than an intellectually profound pair of beauties.
He wore thick myopic glasses, perpetually wearing an expression of weary melancholy as though exhausted from reading ten thousand volumes.

One day during an air raid drill in this alley where officials were demonstrating procedures, this man watched while cackling in his kimono; then suddenly reappeared in full air raid gear, snatched a bucket, shouted strange cries of "Hey!" and "Yah!" and "Hoo-hoo!" as he drew water and hurled it, propped a ladder against the fence to climb onto the roof, barked commands from above, and finally launched into a grand lecture.

It was at this moment that Izawa realized the man was mad; this neighbor would occasionally invade over the fence to dump buckets of leftovers in the tailor's pigpen while hurling stones at ducks, then suddenly kick chickens while innocently feeding them—yet Izawa had considered him a respectable man and had been quietly exchanging silent bows with him.

But where exactly lay the difference between the madman and ordinary people? If we must identify a difference, it would be that the madman was fundamentally more reserved than ordinary people—he cackled when he wanted to laugh, delivered speeches when he felt like orating, hurled stones at ducks, or spent about two hours poking at pigs’ faces and rumps. But fundamentally, they were far more fearful of public scrutiny, and strove to painstakingly insulate the core of their private lives from others with meticulous care. This was why they had designed the entrance to require circling completely around from the gate, and their private lives were generally quiet, sparing of needless chatter toward others, and contemplative in nature. One side of the alley was lined with apartments that loomed over Izawa’s cottage, perpetually overflowing with the sound of running water and the vulgar voices of women. A pair of sisters engaged in prostitution lived there—on nights when the elder sister had clients, the younger would pace endlessly through the corridors; when clients came for the younger, the elder walked the late-night hallways. Just because the madman cackled with laughter, people considered him a different breed altogether.

The idiot wife was exceptionally quiet and docile.
She would only mumble something timidly under her breath; her words were barely audible, and even when they could be heard, their meaning remained unclear.
She knew neither how to cook nor prepare rice; if made to do it, she might have managed, but when scolded for blunders would only grow more timid and blunder further. Even when collecting rations, she could do nothing herself—merely standing there while neighbors handled everything.
People would say that being the madman's wife made her idiocy only natural—one shouldn't expect more—but the mother remained furious that a woman couldn't even cook proper rice.
Yet ordinarily she was a refined old woman, except when seized by extraordinary hysteria that made her more ferocious than even the madman himself. Among those three mad souls, the grandmother's shrieks stood out as overwhelmingly loud and pathologically disturbing.
The Idiot Wife had become so fearful that even on peaceful days she stayed perpetually nervous, startling at footsteps. When Izawa called out a greeting, she'd grow dazed and freeze in place.

The Idiot Wife also sometimes came to the pigpen.
The Madman would boldly intrude as if entering his own home, pelting ducks with stones and poking pigs’ cheeks, while the Idiot Wife slipped in soundlessly like a shadow to hide in the pigpen’s shade.
This place served as her refuge, but whenever she came here, avian-like shrieks of "Osayo-san! Osayo-san!" would typically erupt from the old woman next door. With each cry, the idiot woman's body would flinch and tilt as if resonating with the sound, requiring long repetitions of motion—like an insect struggling against resistance—before she could finally bring herself to move.

Journalists and cultural film directors were the basest of base trades. All they understood were the trends of the times; their entire existence revolved solely around keeping pace with shifting currents, while pursuits of selfhood, individuality, or originality held no place in this world. In their daily conversations, terms like "self," "humanity," "individuality," and "originality" overflowed disproportionately compared to those used by company employees, government officials, or school teachers—yet these concepts existed merely as linguistic constructs, as absurd as spending one's savings to seduce women while claiming hangover agony represented human suffering. They exhausted themselves crafting fabricated passages like "Ah, the rising sun's inspiration!" and "Thank you, soldiers!" with tear-jerking sentimentality; the thud-thud-thud of bombing sounds; people frantically throwing themselves down; the rat-a-tat-tat of machine guns—producing films while convincing themselves this constituted true war representation. Others claimed there was nothing they could write under military censorship, though they possessed no alternative truths—the authenticity inherent to writing itself remained independent of such restrictions. In short, these people across all eras carried nothing but hollow selves devoid of substance. They swayed with prevailing winds, modeling expressions on cheap novels while believing they captured the zeitgeist. In truth, an era amounted to such shallow folly—what relation could this war overturning Japan's two-millennia history and its defeat bear to human truth? A nation's fate moved solely by will bereft of introspection and mob recklessness. When they started spouting about individuality and originality before department heads or company presidents, those superiors would turn away with implicit disdain before parroting lines like "Thank you soldiers!" and "Ah, the rising sun's inspiration!" with eyes theatrically moistening—that defined journalists; indeed, that defined the era itself.

When I asked, “Must we spend three full minutes transcribing His Excellency the Division Commander’s tedious speech verbatim? Is it necessary to document every last note of the workers’ awkward morning ritual chants?”, the department head snorted, turned his face away with a click of his tongue, then whirled around to crush his precious cigarette in the ashtray before glaring. “Hey! What value does beauty hold in these raging tides? Art is powerless!”
“News is the only truth!”
He bellowed this final declaration.
The directors formed their cliques, the planning staff theirs, creating a world of camaraderie reminiscent of Tokugawa-era long swords, processing talent through obligation and personal connections to establish a hierarchical system even more corporate than regular company employees.
Through this system, they defended their own mediocrity, condemned artistic individuality and genius-led competition as sinful union violations, and established a comprehensive mutual aid organization to alleviate talent poverty through collective support.
Internally they functioned as an organization for alleviating talent poverty, but externally became an alcohol procurement squad; this gang would occupy national taverns, down three or four beers each, get drunk, and droned on about art.
Their hats, long hair, ties, and coats were those of artists, but their souls and spirit were more company-employee-like than actual company employees.
Izawa believed in the originality of art and could not abandon the uniqueness of individuality; therefore, not only could he find no peace within the system of social obligations, but he couldn’t help detesting their mediocrity and vulgar, base souls.
He became an outcast from their clique—even when he greeted them, no replies came, and among them were those who glared.
Boldly barging into the president’s office—was there any theoretical necessity linking war and artistic impoverishment?
Or was it the military authorities’ will? If all you wanted was to document reality, a camera and a couple of fingers would suffice.
“For what special mission do we artists exist—to analyze through what angles and structure this into art?—” The president turned his face away mid-thought, grimacing as he puffed his cigarette, his expression beginning with a bitter smile that said Why don’t you quit the company? Afraid of being conscripted?, then shifting to one that scolded Just focus on doing average work according to company plans—if you can collect your monthly salary that way, stop thinking unnecessary thoughts—you’re getting too cocky; without uttering a single reply, he gestured for me to leave.
What else could it be but the basest of base trades?
There were times when being drafted as a soldier in one fell swoop—saved from the agony of thinking—made even bullets and starvation seem more like a peaceful paradise.

While Izawa’s company was drafting plans like “Don’t Let Rabaul Fall!” and “Send Planes to Rabaul!” and creating storyboards, the U.S. military had already bypassed Rabaul and landed on Saipan.
Before their planning meetings for "The Saipan Decisive Battle!" could even conclude, Saipan had been annihilated, and U.S. planes from that very Saipan began flying overhead.
“How to Extinguish Incendiary Bombs,” “Body-Crashing into the Sky,” “How to Grow Potatoes”
“Not a Single Plane Shall Return Alive”
“Power Conservation and Aircraft”
It was a strange passion.
Strange films that instilled bottomless boredom were produced one after another; raw film stock grew scarce; functioning cameras became few; and the artists’ passions frenziedly blazed forth: "Kamikaze Special Attack Unit," "Decisive Battle for the Homeland," "Ah, the Cherry Blossoms Have Fallen."
Their poetic fervor raged as if possessed by some demonic force.
And endlessly tedious films like pallid paper were being made while tomorrow’s Tokyo stood on the verge of becoming ruins.

Izawa’s passion had died.
He woke up in the morning.
The thought of going to work that day made him drowsy; as he started to doze off，the air raid alarm blared; he sat up，wrapped his puttees，pulled out a cigarette，and lit it.
Ah，if I took a day off work，I’d run out of these cigarettes，he thought.

One night, having stayed out late and barely managed to catch the last train, Izawa found there were no private railways running anymore, so he had to walk a long stretch of nighttime streets back to his house.
When he turned on the light and found the ever-present bedding strangely absent—since there had never been any instance of someone cleaning or even entering during his absence—he suspiciously opened the closet to find the Idiot Wife hiding beside the stacked futons.
With anxious eyes, she gauged Izawa's expression and buried her face between the futons, but upon realizing Izawa wasn't angry, relief overflowed into familiarity, and she settled into a calm so profound it was almost bewildering.
She would only speak by muttering under her breath, her utterances bearing no relation to his questions—stringing together fragmented phrases that vaguely summarized her own obsessive thoughts.
Izawa deduced the circumstances without asking—likely she had been scolded and fled here in desperation—so he omitted other questions to avoid causing unnecessary fear and asked only when and how she had entered. The Idiot Wife muttered various incomprehensible things before rolling up one sleeve and stroking a spot (which bore a scratch), dividing time into minute segments with phrases like "It hurts," "It still hurts now," and "It hurt earlier too." From this he gathered she had entered through the window after nightfall.
She had also tried to convey that she’d dirtied the room by walking around outside barefoot before entering, saying "I’m sorry," but as he pieced together meaning from her mutterings—wandering through countless dead-ends—he couldn’t decisively determine which path connected to that "I’m sorry."

It would be difficult to return the terrified woman by rousing The Madman at midnight; yet considering what misunderstandings might arise from sending her back come morning after letting her stay overnight—given that he was dealing with The Madman—Izawa couldn’t even begin to imagine.
Oh well—a strange courage welled up in Izawa’s heart.
While its essence was merely being drawn to the allure of curiosity and stimulation toward the emotional numbness of daily life, so be it—regardless, viewing this reality as a trial was simply necessary for my way of living.
He told himself there was no need to think of or fear anything beyond the immediate duty of protecting the Idiot Wife through the night.
He kept telling himself there was no shame in feeling strangely moved by this utterly abrupt incident.

After laying out two beds and having the woman lie down, he turned off the light. No sooner had a minute or two passed than she suddenly rose up, slipped out of the bedding, and seemed to be crouching in some corner of the room. Had it not been midwinter, Izawa might have let it go and slept, but on this exceptionally cold night, merely splitting one person's bedding between two of them was enough for the outside air to press directly against their skin, leaving their bodies trembling uncontrollably from the cold. When he got up and turned on the light, the woman was huddled by the doorway with her collar pulled tight around her neck, her eyes bearing the desperate look of someone who had lost all means of escape and been driven into a corner. If he said, "What’s wrong? Go to sleep," she would nod with disarming immediacy and burrow back into her bedding, but no sooner had he turned off the light than a minute or two later, she would rise again in the same manner. When he led her back to bed, assuring her there was no need to worry—"I won’t lay a hand on you"—the woman stared with frightened eyes, muttering something apologetic under her breath. When he turned off the light for the third time just like that, this time the woman immediately got up, opened the closet door, went inside, and closed it from within.

Izawa was infuriated by this persistent behavior. He roughly threw open the closet door. "What exactly are you misunderstanding here? After all that explaining I did, you go and shut yourself in the closet—this is beyond insulting! Why did you flee to a house you clearly don’t trust at all? You’re mocking me, bringing unwarranted shame upon my character, acting like some victim—enough of this farce!" But when he realized this woman didn’t even possess the capacity to comprehend those words, he thought there could be nothing more absurdly pointless than this—that slapping her across the face and going straight to sleep would be the most sensible course. Then the woman made a strangely conflicted expression and began muttering something under her breath—phrases that seemed to mean "I want to go home," "I shouldn’t have come." "But I have nowhere to return to anymore," she said—Izawa’s chest tightened at her words—"So just stay here safely through the night. I only got angry because you’re acting all self-important like some victim when I meant no harm. Don’t hide in the closet; sleep properly in the futon." Then the woman stared at Izawa and muttered something rapidly. “Huh?” "What is it?" And Izawa was so startled he nearly leapt into the air—from within her muttering, he had clearly heard: "I’m disliked by you." "Huh? What... did you say?" When Izawa instinctively widened his eyes and asked again, the woman's face fell as she repeated tediously—"I shouldn't have come," "You hate me," "I didn't think that"—then stared vacantly at some arbitrary spot.

Izawa finally came to understand.

The woman hadn't been afraid of him at all.
The situation stood completely reversed.
She hadn't come solely because she'd been scolded and found herself driven to desperation.
She had calculated Izawa's affection into her plans.
But what event could have possibly made her believe in his affection?
Their interactions around the pigpen and alley—exchanging brief greetings like "Yaa" four or five times at most—when he reflected on them now, everything had been abrupt and utterly farcical. Before Izawa lay only the imposition of the idiot's will and sensibilities—in short, something fundamentally non-human.
After turning off the light and letting a minute or two pass—with her slipping out of the futon in shame from believing herself disliked because his hand didn't touch her body—whether this constituted genuine sorrow for the idiot or whether Izawa could trust this interpretation remained unclear.
Ultimately she shut herself in the closet.
With no words existing to judge whether this expressed the idiot's humiliation and self-abasement, regardless of circumstances, there remained no path but for him to descend to her level.
Why did such half-baked human judgment even matter?
Would it disgrace humanity for him to share this idiot's guileless heart?
I too needed this idiot-like heart—childlike and innocent—more than anything.
I'd forgotten that somewhere amid the anxious thoughts of fretful humans, becoming filthily stained while chasing illusory shadows until utterly exhausted.

He laid the woman down in her bedding, sat by her pillow, and stroked the hair on her forehead as if lulling his own child—a three- or four-year-old daughter—to sleep. When she opened her eyes dazedly, they held exactly the same innocent simplicity as a young child's.
"I don't dislike you," Izawa began with awkward solemnity, "human affection isn't expressed through the body alone. Since humanity's true home lies in its origins, you're essentially always dwelling there—" but of course this wouldn't reach her. What value did words hold anyway? What proof existed that even human affection could be genuine? Where in this world could truths worthy of entrusting raw passion exist? Everything was mere shadows of illusion.
As he stroked her hair, an urge to wail surged through him—this fragile affection without even a fixed form felt like his life's ordained fate. Here he sat, mechanically caressing those strands of destined hair, overwhelmed by a sorrow beyond reason.

What on earth would become of this war? Japan would lose; the U.S. military would land on the mainland, and perhaps most Japanese would perish. It seemed nothing less than another supernatural destiny—or rather, divine providence. Yet he had an even more trivial problem. A problem astonishingly trivial yet looming before his eyes, constantly flickering and refusing to leave—the anxiety about his roughly 200-yen salary from the company. How long could he keep receiving it? Might he be fired tomorrow and left wandering the streets? When collecting his monthly pay, he would tremble fearing simultaneous dismissal, yet upon receiving the envelope feel such overwhelming happiness at this one-month life extension that it left him dumbfounded—though reflecting on this pettiness always made him want to weep. He had dreamed of art. How could a 200-yen salary—mere dust before that art—entwine itself around his bones and become such immense anguish shaking his existence's foundations? Not only life's outer form but its very spirit and soul were confined to 200 yen, and that he could calmly stare at this smallness without going mad only deepened the pity. "What good is beauty in such turbulent times?" "Art is powerless!" The department head’s absurd shout—"Art is powerless!"—pierced Izawa’s chest with sharp, tremendous force carrying an entirely different truth. Ah, Japan would lose. Compatriots would collapse like crumbling mud dolls, blown-up concrete and brick debris mingling with countless legs and arms swirling through air until everything became a flat graveyard devoid of trees or buildings. Where would they flee? Into which holes be driven? Where blown away with their shelters? It felt dreamlike, yet if he survived, Izawa found his curiosity stirring rather for that fresh rebirth—for life upon stone-littered fields in an unpredictable new world. This fate would inevitably arrive in six months or a year, yet despite its certainty, it remained but a distant plaything from some dreamworld. The decisive power of mere 200 yen blocking all vision before him, uprooting every living hope—strangled by yen even in dreams, tormented, all twenty-seven-year-old passions bleached away—was he not already wandering aimlessly across reality’s dark wilderness?

Izawa wanted a woman.
The voice crying out for a woman had been Izawa's greatest hope, yet life with her became confined to 200 yen—pots, kettles, miso, rice, all bearing the incantation of 200 yen. A child born under this 200-yen incantation would emerge, and the woman herself would transform into a demon possessed by the incantation, muttering daily like some cursed familiar.
The light in his chest, art, even the glow of hope—all had vanished, and life itself was trampled like horse dung by the roadside into a squalid mess, left to dry up and scatter away in the wind without a trace.
Even the nail marks were disappearing.
The woman’s back was entwined with such incantations.
It was an unbearably petty life.
He himself lacked even the power to judge the pettiness of this reality.
Ah, war—this great destruction! With its bizarrely impartial fairness, everyone was judged; Japan transformed into a field littered with stone fragments, clay dolls collapsed one after another—what poignantly immense affection nihilism held—was this not?
In the arms of the god of destruction, he wanted to sink into sleep, yet whenever alarms sounded, he would instead come alive and wind his gaiters.
The only purpose each day was to play with the anxiety of existence.
When the air raid alarm was lifted, he would feel disappointed, and the loss of despairing emotions would begin anew.

This idiot woman did not know how to cook rice or make miso soup.
Standing in ration lines was all she could manage; even speaking wasn't something she could do freely.
Like the thinnest pane of glass, she resonated even with the faintest breezes of emotion, merely accepting and letting human will pass through the creases of bewilderment and fear.
Not even the 200-yen evil spirit could take residence in this soul.
Wasn't this woman just like a sad doll created for me?
Izawa envisioned an endless journey where he and this woman embraced each other, walking through a dark wilderness as they were buoyantly carried by the wind.

And yet, that this thought felt somehow abrupt and seemed like an utterly absurd notion was likely due to an utterly petty human shell eating away at the core of his heart. And knowing this—why did this sincerity of thought and affection, welling up so naturally within him, feel entirely illusory? Is there some essential law that deems that apartment's prostitute—or some noblewoman—more human than the idiot woman? Yet it was a preposterous state of affairs—as if that law existed with unyielding authority.

What am I afraid of?
As if that 200-yen evil spirit—here I was trying to sever ties through this woman, yet still bound by its incantation!
What I feared was nothing but society's pretenses.
This so-called society meant nothing beyond ration-line meetings of apartment prostitutes, mistresses, pregnant volunteer corps members, and landlords screeching in duck-like nasal voices.
Though no other society existed anywhere, I couldn't bring myself to believe this obvious truth.
I trembled before this strange law.

It was an astonishingly short (and simultaneously infinitely long) night.
Though he had thought the long night would continue endlessly, before he knew it darkness paled to dawn, and the cold morning air turned his entire body to senseless stone.
He had done nothing but stroke her hair at her bedside.

★

A different life began from that day on.

However, it was neither different nor changed in any way except for the addition of a woman's physical presence to one house.
It was a hollowness so stark it felt like a lie; indeed, not even the faintest bud of new growth could be found in his surroundings or within his mind.
The only thing that changed was his rational acceptance of the event's abnormality; in their actual daily life itself, not even a shift as minor as rearranging desks had occurred.
He went to work every morning, and in his absence, the idiot woman was left inside the closet of his home waiting for his return.
Moreover, the moment he stepped outside, he would forget all about her entirely, left with nothing but a distant feeling as though such events had occurred ten or twenty years prior—now grown uncertain in memory.

War, that thing, was strangely a healthy amnesia.
Truly, the astonishing destructive power of war and its transformative effect on space could compress centuries of change into a single day, make events from a week prior feel like they happened years ago, and relegate occurrences from a year before to the deepest recesses of memory, buried beneath layer upon layer.
It had only been recently that the roads near Izawa and the buildings surrounding factories had been demolished, creating a chaotic uproar like swirling dust throughout the town—and even their remnants remained uncleared—yet it already felt as distant as a commotion from a year prior, so that when one looked upon the great transformation that had altered the town’s appearance for a second time, it had become nothing more than an ordinary landscape.
Within one of the miscellaneous fragments of that healthy amnesia, the idiot woman still loomed hazily.
Amidst those miscellaneous fragments—the splintered remains of an evacuated station-front izakaya that had queues until yesterday, the gaping holes of buildings destroyed by bombs, the bombed-out ruins of the city—lay only the idiot’s face, scattered among them.

However, the alert sounded every day.
At times, the air raid alarm would also sound.
Then he fell into an extremely unpleasant state of mind.
It was a concern that an air raid near his empty home might have caused unknown changes, but the sole reason for this anxiety was whether the woman had panicked and rushed out, exposing everything to the neighbors.
Due to unease over unforeseen changes, he couldn't return home before dark each day.
How many times had he rebelled vainly against this wretched inability to overcome vulgar fear? He considered confessing everything to the tailor, but despairing of such baseness—for it was merely a pitiful ploy to ease anxiety through minimal disclosure—he could only curse and seethe at his own essence being vulgarity incarnate like the rest of society.

He had two unforgettable faces of the idiot woman.
At street corners when turning, on company stairways when climbing, escaping train crowds—in these unexpected places he would suddenly recall two faces, whereupon all his thoughts would freeze, and a surge of emotion would solidify into despair.

One of those faces was the idiot's face from when he first touched her body.
Though the event itself had been pushed into the distant past of memory by the very next day, only her face came to be recalled, severed from all else.

From that day on, the idiot woman was nothing more than a body waiting in readiness—no life existed beyond that, not even a shred of thought. She had constantly been merely waiting in readiness. The mere act of Izawa's hand touching part of her body meant all she consciously registered were physical acts—both her form and face merely waited in readiness. Astonishingly, late at night, Izawa's touch alone would rouse identical responses from her sleep-dulled flesh; the body alone remained perpetually alert, ever waiting in readiness. Even in sleep! Yet if one asked what occupied her waking mind, there had originally been only void—what existed was but a soul's coma and living flesh alone. When awake, her soul slept; when asleep, her body remained awake. What existed was only unconscious animal craving. It was merely a body that stayed vigilant through all hours, stirring with worm-like tireless twitches.

Another face—it happened to be Izawa's day off when a two-hour daytime bombing struck a nearby district. Without an air raid shelter, Izawa crawled into the closet with the woman, hiding behind a futon as their shield.
The bombing concentrated on an area four to five hundred meters away from Izawa’s house, yet the house shook as though the very axis of the earth were trembling, and with each explosion’s roar, both breath and thought ceased.
Though both fell from above, incendiary bombs differed from regular bombs in their dreadfulness as much as a grass snake does from a viper. Though equipped with an especially eerie clattering sound, incendiary bombs produced no ground-level explosion noise—the sound simply vanished overhead like a dragon's head followed by a snake's tail, except here there was no tail at all—and thus lacked that definitive sense of terror.
But bombs—though their falling sound may be faint and low—dragged a single rod-like noise akin to pouring rain, and since these bastards ultimately unleashed an explosive roar that tore through even the axis of the earth itself, their sheer dreadfulness concentrated in that single rod defied description; as for the despairing terror when their thudding footsteps drew near—there was no surviving it intact.
Moreover, since the planes flew at high altitude, the buzzing sound of U.S. aircraft passing overhead resounded with an extremely faint nonchalance—it was exactly like being struck by a massive axe wielded by a monster looking elsewhere.
Because the attackers' situation remained unclear, the strange distance of the roaring explosions caused intense anxiety—and then from that very space extended the whoosh of a single rod-like sound of pouring rain.
The terror of waiting for the explosion—this bastard stopped all words, breath, even thought.
The despair of "This is finally the end" lived and glowed with a coldness verging on madness.

Fortunately, Izawa’s hut was surrounded on all sides by two-story buildings—apartments, the madman’s house, the tailor’s residence, and others—so while some neighboring houses had shattered window panes and damaged roofs, his hut alone remained without even a crack in its glass.
Just a bloodstained air raid hood had fallen into the field in front of the pigpen.
In the closet, only Izawa's eyes were glowing.
He saw.
The idiot's face.
The despairing anguish of clutching at emptiness.

Ah, humans possess reason.
Even in the direst of times, some measure of restraint and resistance still retains its shadow.
That there isn't even a shadow's worth of reason, restraint, or resistance—to think it could be this wretched!
On the woman's face and entire body, terror and anguish laid bare to death's window congealed.
Anguish writhed, anguish struggled, and anguish shed a single tear.
If a dog's eyes were to shed tears, it would be utterly grotesque—just as grotesque as a dog laughing.
Tears without even a shadow of reason—how utterly vile they are!

Amidst the bombing raids, children aged four or five to six or seven strangely did not cry.
Their hearts pounded like waves, their words vanished, and they could only stare wide-eyed with those bizarre eyes.
The only part alive in their entire bodies was their eyes, but at first glance, these were merely wide open—not necessarily etched with any direct, dramatic expression of anxiety or terror.
Rather than normal children, their emotions were being quietly killed to the point of appearing rational.
In that moment, all adults too were only that—or rather, even less than that—because they instead displayed overt anxiety and anguish toward death, so that one might say the children appeared even more rationally composed than the adults.

The idiot's anguish bore no resemblance to the children's wide eyes.
It contained only an instinctive terror of death and anguish in its face—something neither human nor even insect-like, just a single grotesque motion.
If anything resembled it slightly, it would be the convulsions of an inch-and-a-half-long caterpillar swollen to five feet.
And from her eye spilled a single tear.

There were neither words nor screams nor groans; there was no expression.
She wasn’t even conscious of Izawa’s presence.
No human could possibly experience such profound loneliness.
For a man and woman to be alone together in a closet, with one completely forgetting the other’s existence—such a thing should not be possible for humans.
People speak of absolute loneliness, but such loneliness can only exist through awareness of others—how could there be this utterly blind, unconscious, absolute form of loneliness?
It was the loneliness of a caterpillar—the wretched visage of that absolute loneliness.
The unbearable ugliness of an anguished visage devoid of even a shadow’s fragment of consciousness.

The bombing ended.
Izawa lifted the woman up, but the woman who would react even if a single one of Izawa’s fingers touched her chest had now lost even that animalistic urge.
Holding this corpse, there was only a dark, dark, infinite falling—an endless plummet.

That day, immediately after the bombing, he went out for a walk and saw among the toppled private homes a woman's leg blown off, a woman's belly with intestines spilling out, and a woman's neck twisted off.

Izawa walked aimlessly through smoke still rising from the ruins of the March 10th air raid. Humans lay dead here and there like grilled chicken. They died in clusters. It was exactly like grilled chicken. They weren't frightening or unclean. Some corpses burned like dogs lying beside them—utterly meaningless deaths—yet there was no sorrow nor even emotion over those deaths here. It wasn't that humans died like dogs, but rather that dogs and something like them had simply been arranged and laid out like a plate of grilled chicken. They weren't dogs, nor of course were they even human.

If the idiot woman were to burn to death—wouldn't it simply be a clay doll returning to earth? If a night came when incendiary bombs poured down on this town... Izawa found himself unable to avoid awareness of his own strangely calm figure—his face, his eyes—sunk in contemplation. I am calm. And I'm waiting for the air raid. Very well. He sneered. I simply detest all things grotesque. And isn't it simply that a body which never had a soul to begin with will burn and die? I won't kill the woman. I'm a despicable, vulgar man. I don't have that much courage. But the war would probably kill the woman. All I needed was to grasp some slight clue to direct the war's cruel hand toward the woman's head. I don't know. Probably some moment was merely resolving it naturally. And Izawa waited for the air raid with extreme calmness.

★

That was April 15th.

Two days prior, on the thirteenth, Tokyo had experienced its second major nighttime air raid, causing damage in areas like Ikebukuro, Sugamo, and Yamanote. By chance obtaining a disaster victim certificate, Izawa went to Saitama to purchase provisions and returned with some rice packed in his rucksack.
The moment he arrived home, the alert alarm began sounding.

That Tokyo's next air raid would likely target this area was something anyone could imagine when considering the remaining unburned zones—the town's day of reckoning approached, whether as soon as tomorrow or at most within a month.
The estimation of tomorrow's possibility stemmed from previous air raids' tempo and nighttime formation bombings' preparation intervals being rapid enough to suggest that timeframe—though Izawa hadn't anticipated this very day becoming that day.
Hence his provisions expedition—though 'provisions run' wasn't entirely accurate—for this farmhouse had connections from Izawa's student days, his true purpose being rather to leave behind items packed in two trunks and his rucksack.

Izawa was utterly exhausted.
Since his travel clothes doubled as air raid gear, he collapsed in the room's center using his rucksack as a pillow, actually drifting into a doze during this urgent time.
When he suddenly awoke, radios everywhere were blaring furiously—the lead bomber formation had already neared and passed Izu's southern tip.
Simultaneously, the air raid siren began wailing.
This town's final day had come at last—Izawa knew it in his bones.
After stowing the idiot woman in the closet, Izawa went to the well with towel slung and toothbrush in mouth. Having acquired Lion toothpaste days earlier—that long-forgotten refreshing sensation spreading through his mouth—he found himself inexplicably compelled to brush and wash upon sensing this fateful day. First came the toothpaste's prolonged disappearance from its rightful place (an eternity it seemed), then the soap's similar vanishing act (that fragrant old cosmetic bar too)—Ah I'm panicking calm down calm down—he bashed into cupboards, tripped over desks, tried suspending all motion and thought to center himself, yet his body kept instinctively scrambling forward.
Finally securing the soap and reaching the well, he found the tailor couple hurling belongings into their fieldside shelter while the duck-resembling attic daughter wandered aimlessly with dangling parcels.
Izawa marveled at his own stubbornness in securing both toiletries, wondering what destiny held this night.
Before finishing drying his face, anti-aircraft guns roared—looking up revealed over a dozen searchlights crisscrossing madly overhead, their beams converging on a U.S. military plane floating starkly at center.
Then another plane, and another—glancing down showed the station area already transformed into flaming ocean.

At last, it had come.
When the situation became clear, Izawa finally calmed down.
Putting on his air raid hood and covering himself with a futon, Izawa stood at the eaves and counted up to twenty-four planes.
Floating starkly at the center of the searchlight beams, they all passed overhead.

The anti-aircraft guns alone continued roaring madly, while no bombing sounds occurred at all.
From when he counted twenty-five planes, the familiar clattering of falling incendiary bombs—like a freight train racing over guardrails—began echoing, though they seemed to pass overhead and concentrate on the factory district behind.
Since he couldn't see from under the eaves, he went to the pigpen's front and looked back—the factory district had become a sea of flames, and astonishingly, U.S. military planes now came successively from the exact opposite direction of those previously passing overhead, bombarding the entire rear area.
Then the radio fell silent as the entire sky became concealed behind a bright red curtain of thick smoke, obscuring both the U.S. military planes and searchlight beams completely from view.
Leaving only a northern corner untouched, the surroundings transformed into a sea of flames that gradually drew nearer.

The tailor couple were cautious people who had constructed their air raid shelter for storing belongings from the start, prepared mud for sealing gaps, followed every procedure by packing their belongings into the shelter and applying the sealant, and had even finished piling field soil on top.
"This fire is utterly hopeless."
The tailor stood in old firefighter garb, arms crossed, watching the approaching flames.
"Even if we tried putting it out, there'd be no stopping this."
"I’m getting out of here now."
"There’s no point dying choked by smoke," the tailor said as he loaded a mountain of belongings onto the cart. "Mr. Izawa, let’s get out of here together."
Izawa was struck by a clamorously complex terror at that moment.
His body had begun sliding along with the tailor, but when he halted the slide through a mental resistance that seemed to wrench apart his physical movement, he felt as if a scream tearing through from some corner of his heart had erupted simultaneously.
He would burn to death because of this momentary delay; nearly stupefied with terror, he once again restrained his body’s natural inclination to stagger forward.

“Well... I’ll stay a bit longer.”
“You see... I have work to do.”
“As an artist—when facing that final brink where one can truly observe oneself—I’m compelled to make this last transaction there at the extremity.”
“I want to flee... but can’t.”
“I can’t let this chance pass.”
“You must go now.”
“Quickly—every moment risks making it too late.”

Hurry, hurry.
A single moment rendered everything too late.
Everything—that meant Izawa’s own life.
Hurry, hurry—this wasn’t a voice urging the tailor onward, but one born of his own desperate need to flee even a moment sooner.
For him to escape this place, all those around had to leave first.
Otherwise, they would discover the idiot woman.

“Then take care, Mr. Izawa.”
As he pulled out the cart, even the tailor panicked.
The cart retreated down the alleyway, colliding with every corner along its path.
That became the final glimpse of the alley’s residents fleeing.
It resembled both the endless roar of waves battering stone cliffs and the infinite clatter of anti-aircraft shards raining on rooftops—an eerie susurration without pause or cadence that stretched endlessly onward. Yet this was merely the collective footfalls of refugees streaming along the prefectural road.
The anti-aircraft gunfire now rang hollow, while an uncanny vitality pulsed through this river of footsteps.
How many souls could have discerned human tread within this infinite torrent of ceaseless, toneless clamor?
The world brimmed with countless sounds.
U.S. warplanes’ roars, anti-aircraft fire, falling projectiles, explosive blasts, footfalls, shrapnel striking roofs—yet within several dozen meters around Izawa, amidst crimson skies and earth, a small pocket of darkness persisted in absolute stillness.
A dense layer of bizarre silence and madness-inducing solitude thoroughly enveloped everything.
Just thirty more seconds—just ten more—I’ll wait.
Why? Who issued these commands? Why must he obey? Izawa teetered on madness’s brink.
Suddenly he convulsed, wailed, nearly breaking into blind flight.

At that moment, a falling sound that scraped through his eardrums came crashing down directly overhead.
When he frantically threw himself down, the cacophony overhead abruptly vanished, and an eerie silence reclaimed the surroundings once more.
Good grief—trying to scare me shitless.
Izawa slowly stood up and brushed the dirt from his chest and knees.
When he raised his face, the madman’s house was spewing flames.
So they’d finally hit—he felt strangely calm.
When he came to his senses, the houses to his left and right—along with the apartment right before his eyes—were all spewing flames.
Izawa jumped into the house.
He kicked open the closet door—which actually came flying off and clattered to the floor—and ran out with the idiot woman wrapped in a futon as if cradling her.
Then, for about a minute, he remained in such a frenzy that he had no awareness of anything.
When he approached the alley’s exit, another explosive sound came crashing down overhead.
When he stood up from lying prone, the tobacco shop at the alley’s exit was also spewing flames—he saw flames erupting from within the Buddhist altar in the house across the street.
When he exited the alley and looked back, the tailor’s house had also begun spewing flames—and it seemed Izawa’s hut had started burning as well.

The surroundings were completely a sea of flames; on the prefectural road, there were few refugees to be seen, only embers flying and swirling wildly—it's hopeless, Izawa thought.

When they reached the crossroads, tremendous congestion spread from this point onward, with all people heading in one direction. That direction was where the flames burned farthest. What lay before them was no longer a road but merely a torrent interwoven with human screams and luggage—shoved and jostled, they surged forward, trampling over others, swept along until falling sounds pressed overhead. Then the entire flow would simultaneously throw themselves flat against the ground, freezing with uncanny stillness. Only several men trampled over this prostrate stream to flee onward, while most in the current—burdened with belongings, children, women, and elderly—called out to each other, halted mid-step, turned back, collided against dead ends only to be flung aside as flames already encroached upon both sides of the road.

They came to a small crossroads. The reason the entire human current here too flowed in one direction remained because the flames were farthest there, but Izawa knew there were neither open fields nor farmland in that direction—should the next incendiary bombs from U.S. planes block their path, only death awaited them on this road. One branching path already had houses ablaze on both sides, but Izawa knew crossing it would lead to a stream beyond—following that stream several blocks upstream would bring them to wheat fields.

Since not even a single figure dashed down that path, Izawa's resolve wavered—until he suddenly spotted a lone man about 150 meters ahead throwing water onto raging flames. Though attempting to douse the fire, it was no heroic sight—he merely dangled a bucket, occasionally splashing water while standing vacantly or taking sluggish steps with movements so dull and strange they defied psychological interpretation.

After all—Izawa thought—if one man could stand there without burning to death... I'll test my luck. Luck. Truly, all that remained was one stroke of luck—and the resolve to choose it.

At the crossroads lay a ditch. Izawa soaked the futon in the ditch.

Izawa linked arms with the woman, covered themselves with the futon, and parted ways with the flow of the crowd.
When he took a step toward the path where raging flames whirled wildly, the woman instinctively halted and staggered falteringly toward where the crowd streamed—as if being dragged back.
“You idiot!”
He gripped her hand with all his strength and pulled, then clasped the shoulders of the woman staggering onto the road. “Going that way means certain death.”
He pressed her body against his chest and whispered.

“When we die, it’ll be like this—the two of us together.”
“Don’t be afraid.”
“And don’t leave my side.”
“Forget the fire and bombs—the path of our lives has always been this road.”
“Just keep staring straight down this road and cling to my shoulder.”
“Understand?”
The woman gave a firm nod.

The nod was clumsy, but Izawa felt himself verging on madness from the emotion it stirred within him.
Ah—through those long hours of terror repeated countless times beneath day-and-night bombings—this marked the first will the woman had ever expressed, her sole response throughout it all.
Her pitiable state drove Izawa to the brink of frenzy.
Now he held a human being in his arms, and in that embrace swelled an infinite pride for the one he clutched.
The two of them ran through raging flames.
When they emerged from beneath blistering gusts, both sides of the road still churned with fiery seas—though with roof beams already collapsed, the flames' fury had waned and their heat diminished.
There too overflowed a ditch.
He doused water from her feet up to her shoulders before soaking the futon anew and draping it over them.
Scorched luggage and futons lay scattered across the road where two people lay dead.
They appeared to be a woman and man around forty.

The two linked arms again and ran through the sea of flames.
They finally reached the edge of the stream.
But here at the stream, factories on both banks spewed raging flames, making it impossible to advance, retreat, or stand still—yet upon spotting a ladder laid across the water, Izawa covered the woman with the futon, lowered her down, and leapt off in one motion.
Those who had parted ways walked through the stream in scattered groups.
The idiot wife occasionally immersed herself spontaneously in the water.
Even dogs were compelled to do likewise in this situation, but captivated by the emergence of a new loveliness within her freshness, Izawa stared wide-eyed and devoured the sight of her bathing form.
The stream escaped from beneath the flames and began flowing through darkness.
Though the fire-filled sky made true darkness impossible, within this regained murk where they lived to see again, Izawa witnessed only a daze spreading—born from immense unknowable fatigue and boundless void.
At its depths lay faint relief that struck him as oddly paltry and absurd.
Everything had turned utterly ridiculous.

When they climbed up from the river, there was a wheat field.
The wheat field was surrounded by hills on three sides, spanning about three blocks square, with a national highway cutting through the hills at its center.
The houses on the hills were burning; at the field's edge, a bathhouse, factory, temple, and something else burned—each blaze differing in color through white, red, orange, blue, and varying shades.
Suddenly wind began roaring through the air as a mist-like spray of fine droplets came pelting down everywhere.

The crowd still snaked along the national highway.
Resting in the wheat field were hundreds of people—a negligible number compared to the winding crowd on the highway.
Beyond the wheat field stretched a hill covered in mixed woodland.
In those wooded hills, there were scarcely any people.
The two spread their futon beneath the trees and lay down.
At the edge of the field below the hill, a farmhouse burned, its flames reflected in the figures of several people throwing water.
Behind it stood a well where a man worked a clattering pump to drink.
Targeting that spot, about twenty people—old and young, men and women—came running from all corners of the field.
They clattered the pump and drank in turns.
Then they shielded their hands against the collapsing house's flames, circled it to warm themselves, leapt back from falling fireballs, turned faces from smoke, and kept talking.
No one helped extinguish the blaze.

The woman said she was sleepy, and among her mutterings—things like "I'm tired," "My legs hurt," "My eyes hurt"—about one in three was "I want to sleep."
"Sleep well," Izawa wrapped the woman in the futon and lit a cigarette.
While smoking what might have been his third or fourth cigarette, the all-clear alarm sounded in the distant beyond, and several police officers walked through the wheat field announcing the lifting of the alert.
Their voices were uniformly shattered, no longer resembling human voices.
Those in Kamata Police Station’s jurisdiction were being notified to gather at Yaguchi National School, as it had survived the fire.
People rose from the field ridges and descended to the national highway.
The national highway was again a wave of people.

However, Izawa did not move.
A police officer came before him too.

“What’s with that person? Is she injured?”

“No, she’s tired and sleeping.”
“Do you know Yaguchi National School?”
“Yes, I’ll rest a bit and go later.”
“Show courage.”
“Over something this trivial.”

The police officer’s voice ceased. His figure vanished, leaving only two humans finally remaining in the grove of mixed trees—two humans, yet wasn’t this woman still just a lump of meat? She slept deeply. All people now walked through the smoke of bombed ruins. All people had lost homes; everyone walked without considering sleep. Now only the dead and this woman could sleep—the dead never to wake again, while she would eventually awaken yet add nothing to this slumbering meat-mass through waking. She emitted faint unfamiliar snores resembling a pig’s cry. Truly this woman herself was a pig through and through, Izawa thought. Then he suddenly recalled a childhood memory fragment—a dozen children chasing a piglet under their gang leader’s orders. After cornering it, the leader sliced off part of its rump with a jackknife. The pig showed no pain nor special cries, just kept fleeing as if unaware of its missing flesh. Izawa imagined himself and the woman tumbling through dirt clouds and collapsed buildings while U.S. forces landed—heavy shells roaring everywhere, concrete structures exploding overhead as American planes dove with machine guns strafing. Behind crumbled concrete lay the woman pinned by a man who twisted her down mid-carnal act while tearing and eating her buttock flesh—her dwindling flesh ignored as she dwelled only on lust.

As dawn approached, the cold set in. Though Izawa wore his winter coat and a thick undershirt, the chill became unbearable.
At the edges of the wheat field below, a vast expanse of fire still continued burning.
He wanted to go there and warm himself, but fearing the woman might wake up, Izawa found himself unable to move.
He found himself unable to bear the thought of the woman waking up for some reason.

While the woman lay deep asleep, he thought of leaving her behind, but even that had become too bothersome.
When someone discards something—even just scraps of paper—they must have at least some resolve and fastidiousness to do so.
All that remained was that both the resolve to abandon this woman and any sense of fastidiousness had been lost entirely.
There was not a shred of affection, no lingering attachment—but neither was there even the resolve to abandon her.
It was because there was no hope for tomorrow left to live for.
Even if he were to abandon her form tomorrow, would there be any hope somewhere?
What did he have to live for?
He didn’t even know where there might be a house to live or a hole to sleep.
The U.S. military would land; all manner of destruction would arise between heaven and earth; and war’s destructive fury would pass judgment on everything.
He had ceased thinking.

When night began to pale, Izawa thought he would wake the woman and—without so much as glancing toward the bombed-out ruins—search for someplace to sleep before setting out for the most distant station possible. Would the trains be running? As he rested against the fence of railroad ties surrounding the station, Izawa wondered whether the sky would actually clear this morning—whether sunlight would pour down upon me and upon the back of the pig beside me. It was because this morning was excessively cold.