Pathway to Japanese Literature

It was just past mid-October, and snow had fallen on the peaks of the mountains surrounding the lake, enough to make them appear faintly white.
The following day brought a slightly warmer southern wind, the sky cleared, and a large moon rose in the evening.

“Oh, what a beautiful moon…”
“Let’s go outside.”

Without exactly inviting him—yet not refraining from it either—I tossed out the words and draped my coat over myself, winding a scarf around my neck.

“Wait.”
“Will this do?”

He meant whether I was cold.
Hirata—who had merely layered a post-bath yukata and tanzen over his shirt—hurriedly threw on a jacketet, tightened his obi anew, slung a matching overcoat over his shoulder, and trailed after me.

Such things—trivial matters—should have meant nothing yet now irritated me.This moonlit lakeside stroll—one we might never take again—should have been preceded by tender words exchanged between us by emotions meeting in quiet harmony as we prepared to go out.I was also at fault but Hirata was more so.When I suggested going outside did he not merely follow me like a dog?First of all his appearance was disgraceful.Even after bathing I maintained proper attire until bedtime yet Hirata from the very day we had arrived at this inn had been sitting cross-legged in his yukata and tanzen drinking sake.If you called this composure then so be it—but it didn’t seem like resolve.If pursuers came we would likely be meekly dragged back;and if I were to say ‘Let’s do it now ’ he might agree to die with me almost indifferently—meaninglessly.That wasn’t being obsessive.If he were truly obsessed he would actively urge me toward death.

No, I won't die together anymore.
Instead, I'll take you on moonlit walks along the lakeshore.

It was a moonlit night as abruptly bright as lights flickering on after a blackout.
In front of the inn was a square with a bus office that served the mountain roads, though it was already shut tight. The inn stood alone with no other houses around, not a soul in sight, and beyond the dark grove of trees, the lake water shimmered.

“It’s rather warm.”

Hirata buttoned one clasp on the chest of his overcoat, which was slipping from the shoulders of his tanzen.
He didn’t look like someone deep in thought.

I buried my face deep into my scarf, up to my cheeks, and descended the gentle slope toward the lake. I stepped off the road and stood on the sandy lakeshore. A chill air flowed in from over the lake’s surface.

Hirata took out a cigarette and offered me one.
The lighter’s flame appeared as faint as a firefly’s glow.
In that brightness, the ripples on the lake’s surface leapt silver-white.
The far shore grew hazy, embraced by a peninsula jutting into the lake, where several lights glimmered.
It was a small town located about one ri along the lakeside bus road.

What they called a town was merely a hamlet centered around this lake’s shrine, lined with a few dozen inns and shops.
Three days ago, we went there.
For my part, if this lake were to become our final resting place, I had wanted to see what they called this lake's shrine.

The shrine was an ordinary, rather rundown one.
However, being autumn foliage season, tourists were swarming about, leaving me disenchanted.
There were even groups that pulled up in trucks.
—We had been thoughtless.
We had counted solely on the secluded mountain lake and forgotten about the autumn foliage season.
But I secretly considered that perhaps the more sightseers there were, the less likely we’d attract attention—and if it truly came to the worst, we could simply flee.

Behind the shrine lay a steep, winding path.
They relied on rocky outcrops and tree roots, crawling their way up.
It was quite far.
The grove was dense, offering no visibility.
Suddenly, they emerged onto the cliff edge.
Atop a sheer cliff too high to peer down and see what lay beneath, an iron ladder hung.
Young people were ascending and descending.

A short distance to the side from that iron ladder, we sat down.
The treetop of a large tree growing midway down the cliff was right before our eyes.
Directly below appeared to be a deep abyss.
That abyss spread even more profoundly, becoming a deep indigo lake surface so still that not a ripple stirred.
This side was a peninsula jutting into the lake, and the opposite shore too was a peninsula.
On the peninsula’s mountains, coniferous trees were abundant, the broadleaf trees turned autumn hues, and reddish-brown rock faces could be glimpsed among the cliffs.
They cast shadows upon the glassy lake surface.
The depth at the lake’s center in that area was about three hundred fifty meters, the water’s transparency remarkably high, and moreover, a beautiful indigo hue.

I edged my body toward the cliff's brink.

“It’s dangerous,” Hirata said.
I met his gaze.
He too met my gaze but immediately looked away.

I was gripping the thin shrub trunk with one hand.
A shudder ran through me; if I let go, I might plummet.
But in broad daylight, right where people would notice immediately—who would ever throw themselves into the water here?

“It’s okay now.”
“For now.”

Into his eyes, which had turned toward me, I spoke again.

“I won’t do it alone.”

“I know.”
“I don’t want to be left alone either.”
“It’s dangerous—come over here.”

“Then what do you plan to do?”

“We’ll discuss it properly later.”

What could there possibly still be to discuss?
Hadn’t we made a promise?
When I kept staring fixedly, he rephrased his words.

“Let’s think more thoroughly.”

“Living?
“Dying?”

“They’re both the same.”
“Don’t you know that already?”
“Well….”

Without clinging to the outstretched hand, I withdrew from the cliff edge.

And she stood up.

“You fool,”
“did you think I was going to jump from here?”

“I never thought that.”
“You did think that.”
“That’s why I said it was dangerous—because I wasn’t thinking that.”

“Then what if I were to slip and fall?”
“It’s genuinely dangerous.”

“It really is dangerous...” I repeated.

“Let’s go.”

What a foolish conversation that had been.
I decided to stop teasing him.
He seemed to have become strangely depressed.
He hung his head and walked in silence down the slope.

At the bus stop, they found they would have to wait about two hours.
There being nothing of interest to do, they decided to stroll along the lakeside path.

The clouds gradually thickened, and the sky grew threatening.
When they were about halfway back to the inn, the rain began.
They took shelter under a tree.
When they started walking again, before long it began to rain once more.
They took shelter from the rain in the Inari shrine surrounded by cedar groves.
Since the rain had stopped, they hurried to head back, but a faint clap of thunder sounded, and this time it turned into a considerable downpour.
A place to take shelter could not be found.
The shade of a large tree offered no better refuge from the rain.
While continuing on drenched, in the middle of the field there stood a small hut - roofed but open on all sides.
They darted inside.
There were wood scraps and straw fragments, so they built a fire.

It wasn’t particularly cold, yet Hirata seemed to be trembling oddly.
He kept adding wood scraps to the fire, and when they burst into flames, he rubbed his hands together gleefully.

“Ah, now we’re saved.”

The rain fell hard, and within it, the bonfire in the hut was both sorrowful and beautiful.
My heart leaped.
Hirata would hold me close.
He would steal my breath with a passionate kiss.
He would never let me go.
But none of that happened at all.
He forgot to smoke his cigarette and kept busily drying his jacket and trousers.
I stared at the bonfire flames and sank into desolate thoughts.
Breaking free from that state, when I looked around, through the curtain of rain, I could see the sheer mountainside.
The entire mountain was ablaze with autumn leaves, but the spectrum from red to yellow appeared hazy and indistinct.
My eyes grew hazy, and I wanted to cry.

“What are you spacing out for?”
“Try drying your clothes.”
“Look how much steam’s rising now.”

Warm steam wafted from his clothes.
But none of that mattered in the least.
The dampness inside my shoes bothered me more than my soaked clothes.
Sadder still than the squelch in my shoes was this sodden weight in my heart.

Wasn’t he—not I—the one whose emotions had grown clouded?
The bus had come winding down that mountainside above, through the pass over there.
At the summit, it would stop to let passengers disembark.
There the view would abruptly open up, revealing the lake spread out below in one sweeping vista.
Cradled between mountains on all sides and embracing two peninsulas, the lake water stretched vast and profoundly blue.
While the opposite shore remained a hazy blur, the nearby mountains and peninsulas—studded with somber conifer groves—blazed with autumn colors so vivid they startled the eye.

I felt my body and mind stiffen, and in that instant, I turned to look at Hirata.

“Huh.”
With just a single word—a sigh nearly devoid of emotion—Hirata leaned forward, moving his head this way and that as he looked around.
He neither said anything to me nor fixed his gaze anywhere, instead scattering his vision in a dazed manner.

From that moment, the target of my heart's longing vanished somewhere far away.
Had the mountain lake's crisp air been too harsh for Hirata?
Or was this simply how men—men over forty, men of discretion—were meant to be?
Perhaps the inn being crowded with sightseers had been a problem.
Yet we were shown to a relatively quiet room.
What difference would it make if there had been fewer guests making less noise?
Hirata had oddly lost his passion.
A train journey of less than twenty hours from Tokyo shouldn't have left him so drained.
The night before at the mountain's base, we'd slept soundly.
And at the lakeside inn—oh, how shameful—I found myself shaking him awake as he lay there drunk and entranced.
He seemed to have aged abruptly.
To have grown old and even foolish.
Where had that vitality and wisdom gone?

No matter how bright the moonlight was, distinguishing objects even slightly far away remained quite difficult.
From the lakeshore, one could neither make out where the mountain pass descended here nor find any trace of the hut where they'd sheltered from rain and built a fire.

“I wonder where that hut is.”
“Right, it shouldn’t be far.”

I already knew we couldn't see it.
Beyond the thickly growing grove of trees, it lay set back slightly.
Hirata kept busily searching for it.

“The autumn leaves don’t show well under moonlight.”

“Yes, the colors fade away.”

“There are all sorts, from red to yellow.”
“Is that due to the nature of the leaves?”

“Who knows.”
“You’d have to ask a botanist…”

After that, I fell completely silent.
Couldn’t he give a more thoughtful reply?
Botanists… that’s especially awful.
The old Hirata would have offered some poetic delight at a moment like this.
Back then, I never wearied of talking with him—hours spent on the most trivial things.
But since arriving here, he truly wasn’t himself.
Was it those cursed bear carvings?

At the souvenir shop in front of that shrine, among various goods, there were bear and toad wood carvings. Hirata gazed at them for a long time. And after returning to the inn—perhaps from the annex under construction—he picked up a single piece of wood with beautiful grain and began carving a bear with his knife.

I had only gone as far as the shrine and had no desire to venture further out. Although sightseeing boats went out on the lake every day, I did not want to ride them either. They were sure to be things like such-and-such rock, such-and-such pine, such-and-such inlet, such-and-such island. On the distant opposite shore, there was a swift current that drained the vast lake—nearly eighty square kilometers of mountain streams and spring water—through a single outlet, but I felt no urge to go see that either. It probably wouldn’t be much different from an ordinary mountain stream. There didn’t seem to be any other particularly noteworthy sights. I merely wandered near the inn. Hirata also showed no desire to venture far and leave me alone. Instead, he wandered nearby; the rest of the time, he borrowed newspapers to read meticulously or carved wooden bears. Why on earth had he taken up carving bears of all things?
“It’s because there’s no work to do outside,” he said.
Had writing poetry become too bothersome for him?
Every night, he drank unfiltered sake.

He was a poet.
He had taught foreign languages at a private university and had translated foreign poetry into Japanese, but his true vocation should have been writing poetry.
I had my heart gouged by the pure, innocent emotion of his poetry.
What had become of that poetry?

To ask that much was terrifying to me.
I myself had secretly obtained poison and kept it hidden in the bottom of my bag.
He too had probably hidden poison somewhere.
We both dimly sensed this about each other yet never spoke of it openly.
Poisoned drowning—that was the easiest way—we had once whispered to each other in passionate embraces.

But we had only sworn to stay together in life or death; we hadn’t truly steeled ourselves for dying.
External circumstances alone had grown urgent.
My husband, who had sensed my relationship with Hirata, had fathered two children with another woman and registered them in the family registry as if they were mine, yet he harshly interrogated me about my affair.
I insisted I was innocent.
My husband became even more enraged and threatened that if I were not innocent, he would kill the other party without hesitation.
Was it something like male honor?
I know my husband’s character—he was truly capable of killing.
Hirata too had a wife and children.
His wife was the daughter of his academic mentor.
If the matter became public, he would lose both his position at the school and his social standing.
Moreover, rumors about our relationship were already rife among our acquaintances.
Moreover, both I and he had been resorting to desperate financial measures, and in that regard too, we were on the verge of collapse.
Taking advantage of my husband’s departure on a trip, Hirata and I fled to this lakeside.
We had no regard for consequences.

Under these circumstances, was it unreasonable to demand that he risk his life for poetic creation?
Even if he could no longer write splendid poetry, I wanted his heart—his spirit—to remain within it.
How could that—this time-killing with wooden bear carvings—be happening?

On the large rotten wood lying on the sandy ground, I sat down and rested my forehead in both hands.
Both my palms and forehead felt cold.
A faint lapping sound reached the shore near my feet.
Hirata was wandering around there.
He came near and suddenly called my name.

“Ms. Mitsuko.”

I remained still.

“Ms. Mitsuko.
My life has become dull.
Everything seems utterly absurd.
I don’t know what to do.
Hey, I’m begging you—won’t you tell me to do this or that or something?
Anything trivial, anything significant—it’s all fine.
I’ll do whatever you say.”

I raised my face.
He was bathed in moonlight from diagonally behind, looking like a rigidly standing shadow figure.

I started to speak but stopped.
I had simply wanted to call him by his given name, Yoshihiko, instead of Mr. Hirata.
And I wanted to cry.
But my heart was chained by something cold and hardening.
I am lonely.

He would do exactly as I said.
If I started walking in silence, he would follow behind me.
If I slipped smoothly into the lake, he would follow me even to its deepest depths.
That was how I felt.
And that fact, in the moonlight, made me lonely.

I stood up and started walking.
He immediately followed behind me.

Several casting nets were lined up and hung across trees to dry.
Beside them stood a tall wooden ladder, like a watchtower.
It was fastened with supports and fixed to the ground.
It was a fish observation tower.
This was the hime trout artificial breeding facility; if they released the hatched fry into the lake water, the matured parent trout would return three years later to the release site to spawn, guided by their homing instinct.
They return in schools.
It was the fish observation tower used to ascertain the arrival of the fish schools.

Hirata had climbed a few rungs of that ladder the other day.
When he couldn’t see anything, he immediately came back down.

The ladder stood rigidly white and stark against the night sky.

I stopped and spoke with a frustrated urge to stamp my feet.

“Won’t you please try climbing that?”
“All the way to the top.”

He looked at my face with a puzzled expression.

“I want to climb it myself, but it looks too shaky. You try climbing instead.”

“That won’t do a bit of good.”

“It’s a test.”
“You’re testing your own courage.”
“You’re testing your courage.”

“Don’t need courage for this...”

He thought for a moment but tried to take off the overcoat draped over his shoulder.

"That's enough. Really, that's enough."
I hurriedly stopped him.

They went past the ladder and emerged onto the road.

On one side of the road was a small ditch where water from the fish breeding ponds trickled through.
Even into this meager current, trout would sometimes swim upstream.
They would pass through culverts flowing into the lake, leap up rapids, trace depression after depression, swim half-exposing their backs while crawling across sandy shallows—all to spawn upstream.
I found one such trout.
That must have been instinctual.
It must have been acting in reckless abandon.
Yet how brave and proactive it was!
That was the figure of a woman in love.

Could it be that I am no longer in love?

What about men?
What about Hirata?

“Let’s go see the trout. What would they look like seen in moonlight, I wonder.”

On a slight rise from the road stood several concrete pools lined up in rows.
In spring and summer they apparently kept carp and crucian carp there, but come autumn these pools teemed with hime trout.
Caught in seine nets when returning to spawn, they had been separated into males and females before being released.
Mountain water cascaded down from above; against this current the school lay motionless, yet at the faintest sound or shadow they exploded into chaotic swirls of panicked dispersal.

We crept closer, muffling our footsteps, but moonlight filtering through cherry trees planted poolside obscured clear vision.
As our eyes adjusted, dark shapes materialized—trout churning violently in every direction.
They must have startled at our approach.
Though parent trout over three years developed reddish tinges on their skin and fins, beneath the dappled moonlight through the grove they appeared only as ink-black shadows.
When we stood motionless observing them, the fish gradually coalesced into calm clusters.
The slightest shift of posture sent them scattering anew.
How exquisitely sensitive they were!

We went on looking at the ponds one after another.

“It’s just like daytime.”

When I remained silent, Hirata spoke again.

“All the ponds are the same.”

No, it was different.
I knew that.
The colors and sensations differed completely from daytime.
But regardless of the ponds sharing identical shapes, their contents varied tremendously.
I bumped against it and stopped seeking fish forms, fixing my gaze on the water's surface instead.
I had watched the artificial insemination process many times.
It was performed daily in the building above.

They drained half the pond water, scooped up fish with hand nets, and placed them into submerged bamboo baskets.
Each fish in the baskets was handled individually to examine the eggs in its belly.
This concerned the female trout pond.
If the eggs were mature, a gentle squeeze would release red eggs one by one.
Only those were suitable for the procedure.
When struck on the head with a stick, the fish convulsed and its vital functions stopped.
They lined them up in a tin box and carried it to the work area.
Immediately splitting open the belly, they removed only the eggs and transferred them to a ceramic mixing bowl.

In the work area’s small tank, male trout captured from the pond swarmed.
They grabbed each one by hand, squeezed its belly, and poured the released white semen into a bowl filled with red eggs.
The spent male trout were thrown into another tank.
When stirred within, the eggs became fertilized; after allowing them to rest briefly, the entire bowl was submerged in water.
All that remained was to wait for them to hatch.

Despite my distaste, I found myself drawn to the procedure.
All trout here depend on artificial breeding, but do the females returning to spawn remember only their release points while forgetting their slit bellies?
Does instinct hold such a choice?
However viewed through fate’s lens, they dedicate themselves completely to return.
For devotion’s sake, they compete to swarm the shore.

The male trout thrown into the tank could be used about three times, waiting once more for their sperm to mature.
Three times.
What remarkable efficiency.
Unfazed, even three times.

Those matters were none of the females' or males' business.
Yet it was humans who carried out those tasks.
That truth struck my heart.

My husband had two children with women other than me.
And if I were to fall in love, he would fly into a rage, threatening to kill the man involved.
Even Hirata, despite having a wife and children, had caressed me so passionately.
Eventually, that passion might be directed toward another woman rather than me.
I'm not saying women are incapable of such things.
Women could probably do it too.
This was apart from the issue of chastity.
But women have pregnancy.
To bear a single child alone constitutes an entire life.
An entire life's active devotion.
Men have no such thing.

But I might have an infertile body.
No matter how much I squeeze my belly or split it open, no mature red eggs would emerge.

The trout's artificial breeding work was like a nightmare.
Hirata saw that—how did he feel?

“You saw that too, didn’t you?”

I pointed at the work area lying dormant in the moonlight.

“Mmm,” he said. “It was surprisingly simple and uninteresting.”

“Was it really that uninteresting?”

“I thought it would be something more intricate and subtle.”

It didn’t seem to be a lie.
Had he grown foolishly insensitive?
Had he lost even that obsessive fixation born of love?

I left the pond’s edge and descended again toward the lake.
He followed meekly.
Clattering in the inn’s wooden sandals, his tanzen and overcoat haphazardly draped about him—this was not the form of a man in love.

I still wanted to keep walking outside.
I didn't want to return to the inn's cramped room.

I’ll try walking along the sandy shore of the lake as far as I can go.

The moon had already risen quite high, the reflection of light on the lake's surface narrowed, and the offshore area darkened and swelled ominously.

“There’s a legend about this lake, isn’t there.”

“Most lakes have their legends. What’s this one about?”

Even talking became tedious.
Most legends are confined to three patterns: gods, priests, and monsters.

Broken clouds drifted across the sky, occasionally obscuring the moonlight.

“And there are ghost stories too.”

“Ghost stories... aren’t they just the same as legends?”

“No, it might be closer to fact than ghost story.”
“This lake is extraordinarily deep, isn’t it?”
“Though situated in the mountains, its central depths lie nearly at sea level.”
“So when drowning victims sink deeper and deeper, the water pressure prevents them from resurfacing—they end up wandering upright along the bottom.”
“Such things walk there in great numbers, you know.”

I truly wanted to believe it could be like that.

After a pause, Hirata said.

“That’s absurd. It might be possible that they can’t resurface due to water pressure, but since the human body’s head is heavier and feet lighter, if they were standing upright, they’d end up upside down…”

I stopped mid-step and glanced briefly at him.
He was not looking toward the open water but gazing up at the moon.
If the corpses at the bottom of the lake were not standing upright but instead upside down, swaying unsteadily—what a grotesque spectacle that would be.
I simply couldn’t believe such a thing.

“I wonder if it’s true.”

“What about?”

“The talk about the corpses.”
“You were the one who said that, weren’t you.”

The tone of his voice wasn’t mocking my story. That said, he certainly didn’t believe it was true either. The upside-down posture was merely a theoretical correction. Merely a theoretical correction.

I began to hum the Lorelei song but stopped.

Something suddenly came back to me.
Among Mrs. Hirata’s acquaintances, there was a middle-aged woman with strong spiritual sensitivity.
A follower of Nichiren Buddhism who had trained under an ascetic, she would enter states of spiritual concentration not only during sutra recitation but even in daily life.
And she would blurt out words received through spiritual inspiration.
Her prophetic utterances often proved accurate.
She determined people’s life and death, foresaw fortunes and misfortunes, and uncovered the curses of vengeful spirits.
Of course, she did not practice this as a profession like ordinary ascetics.
Whether asked or not, the words would flow naturally.
Once, at another household, this woman had blurted out “Escape danger” twice to Mrs. Hirata.
Neither she nor Mrs. Hirata could grasp its meaning.
Interpretation was left entirely to the listener.
His wife had told Hirata about this incident.
It happened around when my husband had been raging about whether to kill my lover.
Hirata had related it to me as an amusing story.
But it struck me to the core.
I neither believed in Nichiren Buddhism nor put stock in spiritual inspiration or auras, yet I found myself wanting to meet that woman.
Hirata had utterly disregarded it.
To him, everything was superstition.

Elimination of superstitions and theoretical corrections.

Hirata was a materialist.
That too was acceptable.
But here at this mountain lake where we had driven ourselves to desperation, I had expected him to experience a powerful spiritual epiphany.
Even materialists must possess spiritual radiance.
Wasn't his pure and innocent poetic sentiment—his passion—born not from materialism or idealism, but from a singular spiritual brilliance?
Had he let that slip away somewhere, becoming like some dull, insensate creature?

I turned sharply toward him.
I said, forcing down the twitching in my cheek.

“Will you follow where I go?”

“I’ll follow.”

“Anywhere.”

“Yes, anywhere.”

It was a careless, offhand reply.

I turned around sharply and walked straight into the lake.
Still wearing my shoes, clothes, and coat, I walked into the water.
He immediately followed after me.
The icy water lapped relentlessly upward—from knees to hips, hips to chest.
My toes were growing numb.
As I staggered and tried to submerge up to my neck, I was suddenly pulled back by both shoulders.

“Wait.”
“I’d forgotten.”
“I have the poison.”
“Drink that first, then we’ll go in together.”

Along with his fragmented words, I was pulled back by an immense-seeming force.

I flung my drenched figure onto the sandy shore of the lake.

What tremendous force that was.
And what pedantic calculation that was.
In that alone—there was no rapture or passion whatsoever.
We didn’t even hold hands.
If he took the poison, he would—like an idiot, like a dog—simply follow me with hollow persistence wherever I went.

I wanted to strike him.
I wanted to stomp on him.
And I wanted to cry.
But even that strength was no longer within me.

He tried to help me up, but because I was limp, he let go and crouched there.

“Forgive me.”
“I’m completely worthless.”
“Some part of me is paralyzed.”

He began to sob quietly like a child.
He wept endlessly.

I raised my upper body and shuffled back on my knees. A strange shudder ran through my heart—had he begun to lose his mind? Could he be turning into an idiot? As I kept staring, my body began to tremble. Suddenly, I had a strange thought—that the moon was watching me.

I stood up.
I helped him up—he was still crying.
He stood up almost entirely on his own without resistance.
I took his arm and started walking toward the inn.

I had made up my mind.
Never would I die! And die with this man? Never!
I had resolved and sworn to myself.
And yet, where had our love gone?
There was nothing left.
Even if desire alone remained—though I couldn't be certain—I wanted no part of it anymore.
Then if necessary, some trifling nurse-like duty toward this man...
That much I might still bring myself to perform.

But even that must have been nothing more than a mental fantasy of mine.

He had already stopped crying, his breathing was regular, and he walked steadily.
I gently released my hand from his arm.
He shuddered violently.
I trembled too.
But they did not draw close to each other and walked in silence.—Too earnest for a game.