Pathway to Japanese Literature

It was winter.
Or perhaps it was around the time winter was beginning.
In the late November or early December of my thirtieth year.

I have almost no memory of that time.
As I had written in my recollections from when I was twenty-seven, I had spent many long years trying hard to forget this matter.
And it was when the obituary of that person arrived that those efforts became unnecessary.
I tried for the first time to recall that person and those days, but by then I had already forgotten everything—there were only scattered fragments, and even now, nothing coherent remains.

It was dusk.
No—it had turned to dusk at some point.
When that person came, the only thing I clearly remember is how terribly disheveled my face looked.
I hadn’t shaved for nearly a week.

I detest this bearded face of mine.
Not merely unkempt or shabby—it reeks of outright villainy, laying bare my squalid soul.
A beard clouds even the eyes.
Gloom and wickedness.

And yet lazy as I am, I couldn't bring myself to shave this beard.
My beard was stiff, requiring me to steam it with a towel first—a process I found unbearably tedious.
While working with my cheek propped on my hand, my beard would scrape against my palm.
This would make me imagine my own dull, murky eyes growing irritated—but lazy as I was, there was nothing I could do.
I tried not to look in mirrors; tried not to remember.

I had returned after breaking free from that clinging, dragging existence with the woman from 'Where To?'.
To my mother's house in Kamata.
The woman from 'Where To?' and I had spent two years evading her husband's pursuit before finally holing up in an apartment near Urawa Station.
There we made our final break. I went back briefly to tie up loose ends at my old Omori apartment before returning to Mother's house.

Then, around the third or fourth day, that person came to visit. It had been four years. She seemed to have clairvoyantly perceived my return to my mother’s house from afar. She had been constantly watching over me and, unable to wait any longer for my return, had come. She had also been fully aware of the woman I had just parted with.

I wondered why on earth this was happening. I could think of no one who would inform that person of my movements. This mystery clung to my head for twelve years and would not let go. It was last spring that I came to know the truth.

I suddenly received a letter from a complete stranger—a Mr. M from Yamaguchi Prefecture.
It was as follows.

I am writing to you so abruptly.
Before that—though I have just carelessly written "abruptly"—for me, writing this letter to you has been a ten-year wish, so allow me to briefly explain the reason.

Around 1935 (at that time I was a student at Waseda’s Second Academy), I had the honor of viewing Ms. Yada Tsuyoko’s works in the magazine *Sakuhin* at her home in Shimo-Ochiai.
Indeed, I was granted the privilege of viewing several of them, but among those, the only title I can recall is *The Degenerate Enters the Mountain*.
However, though I say I have forgotten the titles, the intensity of my impressions at that time was such that you would not believe me even if I were to tell you now.
This may sound somewhat pretentious, but there were times when I would walk around Totsuka repeating your name.

Around that time, I happened to learn that you were living in an apartment owned by an acquaintance from my hometown.
The acquaintance I mentioned was a man named Sagawa. The apartments were Midori-so in Omori Tsutakata and Jūnten Apartments, and it was in the latter that I discovered you were staying.

After hearing stories about you from the caretaker, I was too frightened at the time to bring myself to meet you.
That caretaker would say such alarming things about you that many times I lingered before your room only to abandon hope and turn back.
(Omission)

Then, ten years later, while reading your postwar works, I came across an article in your diary titled "On Gesaku" and was left dumbfounded.

At that time, I used to visit Ms. Yada nearly every day.
Leaning on Ms. Yada’s magnanimity, I would sit silent like a spoiled child, noticing her lonely face—neither vacant nor contemplative—and the shadows of her complex smiles, until my thoughts grew clear and piercing.
Ms. Yada is a lonely person.
Why is this person so lonely? Could there truly be nothing to warm the heart of one blessed with such beauty and talent? I was always asking myself these questions.

"You and Ms. Yada were in that kind of relationship?!
Ms. Yada too had moments of happiness; as I recollect those days, my thoughts grow painfully clear.
(Omission)

Enclosed in the letter was a photograph, along with a note saying that if it could be of some use.
It was a photograph taken from the window of Mr. M’s boarding house, capturing Ms. Yada’s room window—nothing but a roof, a window, and sky in the frame.

It was no wonder that Ms. Yada knew my movements over those several years as if she could grasp them in her hand.
My room in that apartment was across from the caretaker’s room.
There, a woman came daily.
Mr. M must have known my movements—even things I kept secret from friends.
And all of that had likely been relayed to Ms. Yada."

For those three years, I had been fixated on that person.
To phrase it thus—yes, that was indeed the case.
My emotions had grown deranged around that person.
Love, one might say, constitutes a variety of madness.
The more distant became the figure of that person dwelling in my heart, the more profound my madness deepened.

I came to think of that person as one who possessed the most defiled soul and defiled body in this world.
Thinking this way, I had come to believe it with absolute conviction.

And to further demean and humiliate that defiled person, I thought to imagine the most noble of women.
Then, before I knew it, that too had become Yada Tsuyoko.
This madness-like conflict also manifested itself in unexpected corners of mundane daily life.

And when I parted with the woman from "Where To?", I had resolved that I absolutely must bring this madness-driven resolution to its conclusion. Whether through a marriage proposal, a more violently mad act, or even rape—I believed that some single decisive act was absolutely necessary.

Yada Tsuyoko must have been the same. The two of us, separated, were apparently writhing in similar agonizing madness.

When that person came to visit, I was just sitting alone in the tea room next to the entrance.
And then I went to answer the door.

That person was pale and stood glaring at me.
She was silent.
She seemed only able to keep glaring.

I was the one to speak up: “Please come in.”

Seated across the table, we glared at each other.

I couldn’t forget how my bearded face troubled me.
Compared to my distracted state, Ms. Yada seemed wholly consumed by a single conviction.
At length, she fixed me with a piercing glare and spoke.

“When I saw your face, I meant to shout just one thing, slam the door, and leave at once.”
“I love you—that one phrase alone.”

I didn’t even seem surprised at that. From the very beginning, there had already been something unusual—I must have already known this was the day we would confront our most crucial matter.

What surprised me most was the expression “to shout just one thing”—the repetition of “to shout.” That was not a word that person would normally use. There was a madness-tinged menace hanging there. I thought that person might have gone a little mad.

That person had closed her eyes.
She had said what needed to be said.
And then, having closed the door but not left, she remained there before me—nothing more than that.

In that case, what I myself needed to say was nothing more than a single thing. I, however, unlike her—who had committed herself with single-minded determination—still retained enough leeway to grow anxious about whether expressions like "love" or "romance" might sound idiotic in their phrasing and enunciation. Thus passed the time I spent obsessing over word choices and modes of expression.

“I too had loved you.”
“For four years, like a madman, I had been obsessing.”
“In this room—from that day four years ago when you came to visit—it had been like madness.”
“So to speak, from then on, it was as if I had done nothing but obsess over you.”

When I finished speaking these words, it seemed to me she had abruptly risen to her feet—but in truth, she had only lifted her face.
Her face had turned deathly pale, drawn tight with rage, and contorted with madness.

“Four years ago—why, four years ago—”

Strangely, wearily, she repeated.

“Why didn’t you deign to tell me that four years ago?”

And then, faintly, she added.

“Four years…”

Then that person—her vacant eyes still open—dazedly collapsed and fell into a catatonic state.

I must have thought of many sorrowful things.

What I thought or said afterward—I can scarcely remember any of it now.

“Let’s go outside.”

I remember saying “Let’s go outside” and going out.
My body and mind were strangely taut, and against the cold’s assault, I felt we had no choice but to keep walking.
It was already dusk.
A cold wind was blowing.

We walked from Kamata to Omori, and then from Omori to Oi.

★

When we parted in Oimachi, from that moment on I was gripped by unbearable anxiety and anguish.
We had indeed made plans to meet again three days later—of that much I was certain.
Whether I could endure waiting those three interminable days without respite—I scarcely slept at night—but concerning such madness, I now lacked both the fortitude to recollect it and any desire to commit it to paper.

Though love’s passion may share a single madness, that person’s heart and mine were never one.

About that person's heart, I could say many things—and though I think none of them would likely be wrong—yet to express everything completely remains difficult.

My soul was desolate, worn down, even bestial—but that person had matured.
That seemed to be the natural consequence dictated by women's inherent character.

I was utterly incapable.
My novels—several written per year—earned no money, generally amounting to meager writing fees. The closest thing to steady income was anonymous critiques for the To Newspaper, and even those brought only about twenty yen. The rest came through loans from publishers and friends—a life where I drank alcohol even when I couldn't afford food.
I was also receiving support from my brother back home and had occasionally borrowed substantial sums from Takemura Shobou.
There was no doubt I had spent all those hard-won loans on alcohol.

Yada Tsuyoko had already gained considerable fame by that time, but her works did not inspire my admiration, so through reuniting with her, I instead seemed to lose all motivation to strive.

“You’re a genius,” Yada Tsuyoko would tell me, “so act arrogantly! Stubbornly persist! Never falter! You must see this through!”
Whenever she would tell me, “It’s wrong to rot away, give up, and throw everything aside,” I would only coldly scorn that person’s pretentious triviality of playing the dutiful wife—What nonsense, I’d think.
I was merely hollow.
I felt a vague, foolish dejection.
I am not expressing resentment over being pitied by my lover.
At such times, I may have relentlessly mocked the emptiness of her fame.

It could not have failed to reach her.
She suddenly said hysterically.

“I do not for a moment think of finding contentment in this shabby vanity of putting on airs as a female writer or being flattered and coddled into complacency by Japan!”

I was left utterly dumbfounded by that overblown display.
However, her face was drained of color, sharpened, and stiffened.

“When I had just graduated from girls’ school, there was the first person who proposed to me.”
“Because I did not accept his proposal, he now wanders Manchuria drinking himself to ruin—unable to endure remaining in Japan where I live—yet declares me the only woman in his life, insisting in his heart that I am his wife regardless of society’s judgment.”
“He was rough, wild—a drunkard prone to seizure-like fits of passion—yet within his soul dwelled a pure, radiant light.”
“There are times when I want to abandon Japan—abandon everything—and fly off to Manchuria, to that person.”
“Because in that person’s heart dwells a pure light.”

In your chest lay none of that. Neither light nor dreams—only gloomy boredom and eyes brimming with malice. She might have been uttering such words, but—how trite—my heart neither stirred nor faltered, remaining utterly bored.

Yet there must exist something unsweetened. Contrary to expectations, things deceptively saccharine in appearance often conceal profoundly bitter cores—the heart of a woman in love, with its depth, chill, and sharpness of gaze, seemed beyond comparison to those superficial, reflexively sweet words and gestures.

For instance, that person—while saying things like “Because you’re a genius”—would mercilessly subject my entire being to realistic observations through a malicious sharpness that refused to settle into such flattering perspectives.

For instance, with cold eyes not deigning to mingle even fleetingly with such saccharine views as my incompetence, my poverty, or the misfortune of an unrecognized genius, she scrutinized with harsh clarity the actual reality of the incompetence and poverty I now inhabited.

To put it plainly, her true nature was rather like this.

It was not that her true feelings were declaring “You’re a genius” about me—rather, my vanity-driven scheming heart had been trying to make that person say “I’m a genius, hence unfortunate, poor, and lazy.”
She found the filthiness underlying my vanity’s mechanism unbearable.

As the year turned, I felt it was just after the New Year period when I left my mother’s house and moved into the attic of the K Hotel in Hongo.

This hotel, I was told, had burned down in the war damage—a three-story Western-style wooden structure from the Meiji era, atop which something like a clock tower, roughly three tatami mats in size, protruded.
The place I rented and lived in was this clock tower.
I had to climb an especially narrow staircase.
When the wind blew, it would sway as if about to snap off and fall at any moment, so it was the kind of tower where one would take refuge at a friend’s house until the wind subsided.

I could no longer endure the bleak life in that old Japanese house with my mother; but another major reason was that the woman I had parted from might come. If I were to meet that woman, I had a premonition I would be dragged helplessly back into that old rotten bond once more. Because about a week after I had reunited with Yada Tsuyoko, I had already begun to feel our bond—having laid bare that intense love—seemed incapable of progressing any further.

Yada Tsuyoko would say, “That’s not fair to the woman you parted from.”
Such obligations and sentiments—I would casually evade giving a clear response, yet deep within my gut, I maliciously pierced through whatever lay beneath that person’s words and utterly scorned it.

Because it would also be unfair to Ms. O.
“Ms. O will commit suicide,” she said.
That person and Ms. O, the female writer, had been lovers—more than mere friends.
Should it become known about that person and me, Ms. O would commit suicide—so she claimed.
Naturally, I did not believe such words.

In the bleak three-tatami space of the clock tower, I furtively scrutinized the famous female writer—commonplace at her core, the dutiful wife type—who sat there utterly incongruous with the room while pretending not to notice her.

What this female writer feared could not possibly be obligations to the woman I had parted from or consideration for her lesbian lover.

What this female writer’s mediocre common sense most feared was my poverty, my incompetence.
What she feared was the bleakness of this clock tower and the reality of me living there like a monkey.

She might possibly believe in my talent. Moreover, through some fateful compulsion, she may indeed harbor a love bordering on madness toward me. However, there existed a force that restrained her. Her true eyes and heart remained anchored in this reality I inhabited, making it the actual standard of evaluation.

She screamed.

“I do not think for a moment of finding contentment in the shabby vanity of playing the female writer or being flattered and pampered into complacency by the likes of Japan!”

And she claimed that she wanted to abandon Japan along with everything else and go off to Manchuria.

That's a lie.
A huge lie. A complete and utter falsehood.

I thought coldly.
In fact, I was groveling incarnate.
Her heart spoke.
That my poverty and my incompetence were shabby and filthy.
Fine.
I accepted abjectly.
Indeed, I was a human with a filthy, wretched soul.
But what of your true heart in all this?
Are you not the one clinging to that petty, hollow reputation?
That reputation was your reason for living.
That was vanity.
It was pretense.
Was it not that very vanity which, despite your affection, refused to acknowledge my reality?

Even a vain person might occasionally harbor dreams of a solitary soul—casting aside both fame and Japan to vanish into Manchuria.

But I think everything was my own selfishness.
I was abject, despicable, yet arrogant.

When I once used the word "woman" in conversation, you corrected me with "a woman" in that honorific way. I became flustered—uh... uh... "woman... person"—correcting myself in a shrill voice and apologizing, but burning with bitter resentment, I utterly despised you.

To clarify—I had referred to a certain female acquaintance as "that woman." Then Yada Tsuyoko would insist on "that woman," she said. My speech might be crude and rude, but even if changing from "that woman" to "that woman" with polite language—what substance does that refinement hold?

Disgusting vulgarity, disgusting vanity—that was your unadorned self.
And that—not merely lacking hollow reputation—made the clock tower’s resident consider himself as wretched as a monkey.

However, in the years that followed, whenever I wrote, I was troubled by this persistent anxiety.
I agonized over whether I might have inadvertently used crude expressions where "that woman" was insufficient and "that woman person" became necessary.

And shamefully, each time I wrote the character for "woman," I would choke up and painstakingly rewrite it as "woman person"—countless instances beyond reckoning.

This too defines what I am.
Why could I not—being precisely this sort of person—humbly accommodate and accept Yada Tsuyoko's ordinary vanity?

In other words, I was arrogant after all.

★

When I recall that time, what comes to mind is that I loved with a madness bordering on insanity.
However, what I realize is this: love may be madness, but it is not pure.
As for madness or madmen—that world fixated on a single thing, so to speak—it was not because they obsessed over it purely, but because their manner of obsession contained a complex and impure distortion, and I came to think that this distortion was ultimately the very essence of madness.
In other words, it would stand to reason that what drives humanity to madness might be humanity’s own impurity.

However, mad love is readily seen as something pure.
Even I normally consider it pure at first glance—at the very least, given its frenzied intensity, one could call it pure.
In other words, as a matter of passion alone, it should tentatively be called pure.

We tend to harbor strong yearnings for older women around seven or eight years old in childhood, but this is animalistic impulse and thus lacks the human traits that would lead to nervous breakdowns.

Adult love belongs to humanity.
Even if passion's intensity alone were pure, humanity cannot possibly be pure.

Yet at that time, I lacked the experience to discard the notion that heightened passion signified purity.
Thus I accumulated much suffering over my own impurity while conversely relying on passion's peak intensity, laboring to single-mindedly preserve it.
Recalling each of those instances would be pointless.

It was a mistake to have reunited with Yada Tsuyoko now after all this time. I had kept wanting to see her. Yet there was also the thought that it would be better not to meet—that we must not meet. Why was this? For me then, it had been nothing but an anxiety and fear whose true nature I couldn't grasp—and that had been correct.

During those three years of not meeting her, she had ceased being her actual self for me.

During the nearly two years I lived with the woman from "Where To?", I could think of nothing but leaving her—or rather, running away. And yet, I also wondered why I couldn’t just abandon myself and renounce the world altogether.

I probably—no, I certainly didn’t know what I was living for back then. There were many times when I thought of things like suicide or abandoning the world. And I think the main force that kept me living vaguely, striving to survive, was probably the concept of "winning and losing"—the desire to win.

What is victory?
It varies from person to person，but the correct answer seems to lie not in individual differences.

For example，a shogi player would say that becoming a Meijin is victory.
A sumo wrestler would say that becoming Yokozuna is victory.
In those places，the limits of worldly victory are clear，yet there is no such thing as victory itself.
As for myself—though people called me a popular writer—what the fact of being a popular writer gave me was that there existed no real sense of worldly victory even there.

Human desire is always an endless craving for what one lacks.
And victory is no different.
True victory is merely being prayed for toward what one does not actually possess.
And even in the state where one has comprehended the logic that victory cannot exist and seeks fulfillment in defeat itself, there should still be no victory.

But I wanted to win.
I thought I could not lose.
As to what or toward what—I do not know.
The compulsion to not lose, to win—even if this was worldly impatience—in my case, it was simultaneously, and more so, nothing other than the animalistic life force itself.

I would sometimes fly into a rage when the woman from “Where To?” sought nightly amusement.

“Are you living just for that?!
“Is that why you need me?!”

For me, this must have been the time when I should have been angry about such matters.
It didn’t have to be that particular woman.
No matter which woman it was, I think it was a time when I couldn’t help but be angry about that matter.

I cursed women’s menstruation.
I thought women’s carnal desires were filthy.
This same I—more lustful than any woman, possessed by filthy desires—would clutch money and rush off to red-light districts, even make special trips to distant country towns to buy inn prostitutes.

Each time I burned with this frenzied anger at women's carnal desires, I would recall one special woman—Yada Tsuyoko—as something sacred.
Of course, that was absurd.
Of course, even at that time I had been aware of its absurdity—I simply couldn't help but act that way.

There was no way that even I at that time could have been unaware that Yada Tsuyoko as a female body was filled with the same measure of filthiness and sadness as all other female bodies.
On the contrary, each time I burned with frenzied anger at the filthiness of women's carnal desires, I was rather made to painfully and bitterly accept that Yada Tsuyoko was no different—indeed, through that woman's female body, I was being taught Yada Tsuyoko's female body.

And yet, each time I burned with frenzied anger, I would also recall Yada Tsuyoko's very same female body as one special sacred thing.

That Yada Tsuyoko must have been the principle of survival I had devised—the mechanism of magic.
To say I was rejected by society would be an overstatement, but I—resentful toward the world, hiding from people, having lost hope, lost confidence, utterly bereft of any standard for living—had no choice but to entrust what became the fire of my life to this mechanism of magic.

Even if it was a mechanism, regardless, for those two years I lived by Yada Tsuyoko. I made that the fire of my life. Even while knowing its absurdity, I was parasitizing that dream.

★

When I reunited with Yada Tsuyoko and the chaos subsided, what fixed itself in my vision and revealed its unshakable essence was Yada Tsuyoko's female body.
At that anguish, I groaned.

The Yada Tsuyoko I had dreamt of and longed for over three years was no longer the real Yada Tsuyoko. She was a yearning of mine that existed only in dreams, something special. Today I could comprehend that truth, but back then I could not. My lover was the special Yada Tsuyoko nurtured within dreams, and I could not comprehend that she had ceased to be the real Yada Tsuyoko. I simply continued to be shocked, to doubt, to grow ever more deeply confused by reality’s pain and strangeness.

The real Yada Tsuyoko bore no resemblance to the Yada Tsuyoko of my dreams; instead, she looked astonishingly like the woman I had just parted with.
Rather, they were one and the same.
Because they were the same female body.
However, at that time, for the sake of my beloved's honor, I could not permit myself to adopt the view that they were the same—and so my understanding grew dimmer, plunging me ever deeper into confusion.

When I was twenty-seven, looking at Yada Tsuyoko's face brought me salvation and tranquility.
At thirty, I found the heartrending pain after separation unchanged from my twenty-seventh year, but whenever we faced each other, there was only anguish—no deliverance, not a trace of serenity in my heart.

The instant I sat opposite her, every sense concentrated into a hunting dog's sharp vigilance—sniffing out each detail of her female form: Doesn't this resemble that woman? Isn't that identical to her? Driven to extremity by these revelations of corporeality, I twisted in agony.

Yet, the twenty-seven-year-old Yada Tsuyoko was rather frivolous and wanton, while the thirty-year-old Yada Tsuyoko was strained and devoid of composure.

The twenty-seven-year-old Yada Tsuyoko would persistently urge me to take trips with just the two of us, inviting me with phrases like wanting to wander around Kamikōchi alone together or trying to visit Oze Marsh.
Though it was summer at the time—she wore lightweight, short clothes with arms and bare feet exposed—I could not bear to look directly.
However, that person back then was rather innocent, I suppose.

The thirty-year-old Yada Tsuyoko was armored.
She never spoke of wanting us to travel together.
I didn't say it either.
At twenty-seven, we couldn't confess our love, yet simply facing each other brought peace, with sweet dreams lingering.
At thirty, we confessed our inescapable love to each other, armed ourselves, and could do nothing but glare—reduced to utter paralysis.

Both I and that person had become adults.
Through my two years living with the woman from "Where To?", I came to know Yada Tsuyoko's female body via hers, and though bewildered by the glaring distance between that person from my dreams and this one in reality, I spitefully scrutinized this person's female body.

I think that Yada Tsuyoko, too—upon discovering the distance between the me nurtured in her dreams and the real me—was caught more off guard than I, lost her composure, and found herself confronting something irreconcilable. Though I could not discern what experiences had made Yada Tsuyoko into such an adult, I thought that what she had discovered in my actual being—scrutinized, spitefully gnawed all the way to its core—was something far more worldly and irredeemable than the female body of hers I had been gazing upon. Even back then, I had thought so.

Previously, I stated that what kept me alive at that time—in any case, something like the fire of my life—was victory and defeat. Reflecting now, it seems that since my boyhood I had harbored an unconscious inclination to perceive victory in the form of defeat.

From age twenty onward, I had most frequently considered renouncing the world, attempted to become a monk, and even after realizing such a life was impure and turning to literature instead, what I felt kinship with was the literature of dropouts—one of my yearnings was to be a dropout myself.

In matters of love too, I seem to have repeated the same pattern.
This repetition had set itself in motion from beyond my conscious awareness—but what did it give me today?
I don’t understand.
What I have gained—perhaps I should consider it to be what exists today, what I am now in the act of writing, this very thing being written here and now.

However, today I cannot help but believe that my ability to remain this composed stems from Yada Tsuyoko already being dead.

When I reflect upon it, though the human heart proves childish—what stands perfectly clear in theory never holds true in reality—it seems we remain powerless against this folly even while recognizing its stupidity.

So long as Yada Tsuyoko lived, the chasm between dream and reality could never be practically bridged; I doubt my confusion would have found respite until death claimed one of us.

Yada Tsuyoko.
You were a woman of strong self-conceit.
You continued to say things as if I were a genius.
Yet your spiteful eyes—from the most worldly of places—looked down upon and despised me.

Moreover, you strained to show me sweet, crumbling words and an artificially saccharine demeanor—as though I were your lover, your one true husband.
The effort you exerted may have been directed at me alone—never before or since.
But it remained an effort.
Even as you did so, you hated me, looked down on me, despised me. To feign that warped, crumbling sweetness, your hatred, contempt, and disdain fermented into madness and burrowed into my chest.

You too must have been the same. However, I never called you a genius or anything of the sort. Nor did I even call you a talented woman. I had no composure. However, I certainly did say that you were my one and only desperate lover. With all my heart, I said it as if shouting. Because I truly believed that to be the case. Yet at the very moment of shouting it, I would always realize it was counterfeit—flustered, confused, wearied by the awkwardness, the inability to maintain appearances, the emptiness. This awkwardness made me feel as though I were some lecher defiling you right then and there—but this was simply because I was no actor, because I utterly lacked composure. But that must have dealt you a terrible blow. You must have thought you were receiving the greatest humiliation from me, being utterly despised. You were already an adult, but not enough of one to see through my behavior—that it stemmed from me not being an actor, from my lack of composure. You too were no technician of love.

Just as I was desperate, your warped and crumbling sweetness was equally desperate—perhaps because you were no performer and lacked composure.
The confidence to make that judgment does not exist now and assuredly never will in the future.

Yet that crumbling sweetness carried something deranged within it.
There was a helplessness like a pulley suddenly slipping into motion—unable to halt itself, powerless against its own momentum.
It lasted but an instant.
Then already—already—you were hating me, despising me, scorning me with redoubled maddened malice.

As for your crumbling sweetness—like some utterly inept graft—it would abruptly display an affection as cloying as a cat’s mewl.
By that imbecilic sweetness and malice-filled hatred, contempt, and scorn worthy of a madman’s depths, I was tossed about mercilessly.
Even if you held no intent to manipulate, what I received was manipulation alone.

The same thing—you must have wanted to say it to me too, to shout it at me.
You must have cursed me as well.

We sat facing each other for thirty minutes—an hour at most—and from that alone were left utterly exhausted, as though we had glared at each other for ten years.
At the moment of parting—though I could not see my own face—I do not believe it showed any less terrible exhaustion than yours.
You had aged like an old woman—emaciated, fallen silent—and when the one-yen taxi began to move, you stared at me with lead-gray eyes before closing them as though you could bear no more, and departed.

After we parted, it was as painful as those days when I was twenty-seven. However, the fatigue during our face-to-face meetings was even more severe. Every time we met, we were in a hurry to part.

★

The day I last met Yada Tsuyoko was that very day.
We parted at dusk, though it seems snow had not yet begun to fall then.

That day, through special delivery or some such method, she had asked me to come to the French restaurant before Imperial University around two or three o'clock—she wanted to treat me—and there we ate while I drank a little.
It was a dimly lit restaurant.

I was not drunk at all.
From the moment I received the special delivery that day, I had resolved.

I had resolved that even if it meant resorting to violence against Yada Tsuyoko.
Rather than seeking consent through those warped, affected exchanges of twisted sweet nothings, I wanted none of it.
"No need for discussion"—that was my resolve.

During the meal, we must have spoken of trivial matters without betraying a hint of this intention. Yet given how our conversations had always been painfully clumsy to begin with, such ulterior motives could hardly escape the other's notice.

Having become aware of each other's ulterior motives, we were completely at a loss.
I knew Yada Tsuyoko had seen through my hidden intentions and perceived that she was considering various responses to them.

Every time I sat facing Yada Tsuyoko, I always felt a resistance like an iron wall.
She must have felt the same from me.

This iron wall-like resistance didn't mean Yada Tsuyoko was rejecting physical intimacy.
On that point, it was rather inverted.

We had mutually come to know something beyond the physical.
The physical was something superfluous.

We had already given each other something beyond the physical.
There was no reason to reject the physical.
We had exchanged what lay beyond the physical, and the hatred and scorn that followed had already begun.

Through the woman from “Where To?”, I had already come to know Yada Tsuyoko’s woman’s body thoroughly—despising it and scorning her carnal desires.
Yada Tsuyoko too, through some conduit, must have come to know my man’s body thoroughly.

We were carnal beings too. Their hearts must have permitted their bodies to each other with such ease that they desired it and wished for nothing else. They had seen through this in each other too.

We who had seen through the brittleness of each other's carnal desires and scorned one another—particularly in her case—must have felt compelled to erect an iron wall of resistance against that very scorn. When she was twenty-seven, she could casually propose a pleasant trip for just the two of us—so why hadn't we carried it out then? There is a time for giving one's body without reservation. Yada Tsuyoko had been cursing it. Now that hatred, contempt, and scorn preceded that body—wasn't it too cruel?

It was on this day that Yada Tsuyoko stated it clearly.

Having mutually recognized each other’s ulterior motives and thus finding ourselves at an impasse, I was forced to endure an even more irritably seething, hollow agony of time.
So when I urged, “Let’s go,” and invited her to my room, Yada Tsuyoko appeared relieved.
It seemed to say—Good grief, what a pointless accumulation of exhaustion we’d piled up, hadn’t we?

However, as we walked in oppressive silence along the path to my lodging, Yada Tsuyoko suddenly spoke.

“Four years ago, when I invited you to Oze Marsh, why didn’t you agree to go? From that day on, I had been ready to give you my body. But now… it’s no longer possible.”

Yada Tsuyoko had meant to lay everything bare, but at that time, I remained incapable of understanding any of it.

I thought more spitefully, more filthily.

First I thought she was now obsessively making excuses for having voluntarily tried to offer her body four years ago. Then, having mutually seen through each other’s ulterior motives as we walked toward that single room, I concluded that her bringing up the matter of the body herself was nothing more than false modesty.

“Why won’t you?”
I asked.
“Not today.”

she answered and concluded.

“Not today.
Another time.”

It was as if she were humming or chanting a Buddhist prayer—that was how she spoke.

I no longer responded.
I had simply despised her false modesty with single-minded intensity while stirring up base carnal desires.

In all my wandering journeys, there were two books I never let leave my pocket. They were pocket editions of *Dangerous Liaisons* published by NRF—the books I cherished above all else until 1941 (Showa 16), when a flood struck Odawara during my absence and swept them into the Pacific.

I had underlined just a single passage in this book. It was the section of the letter from Madame de Merteuil to Valmont that carried the meaning: "A woman desires to surrender to the man she loves as if she were being violated."

I was recalling that passage.
And yet, I smiled bitterly along the way at having underlined exclusively that passage, but later on, I was assaulted by self-reproach unbearable to behold and came to suffer nearly from obsessive thoughts.

★

My room was in the small tower atop the roof of K Hotel.
We climbed a special narrow staircase.

The interior of the narrow tower was occupied solely by a small bed and desk, with nowhere to sit except on the edge of the bed.

Yada Tsuyoko was sitting on the bed.
It was an iron bed, identical to those found in hospitals.

I did, after all, hesitate.
There was no longer any carnal desire at all.
What forced its way in as if constricting my throat was merely the inertia of my resolve; I found myself in a pitiful state, inching forward like some sluggish creature.

I sat down beside Yada Tsuyoko and embraced her to my chest.
Yet I have no recollection of any strength residing in those arms.

It felt like embracing the wind. All strength had drained from my entire body, but rather, it was as if the opposite of magnetism’s pull between iron and magnet was tearing our bodies apart.

My inertia, however, persisted. And then, I kissed her.

Yada Tsuyoko’s eyes were leaden dead eyes. Her face, too, was a leaden dead face. Her closed mouth was leaden dead lips.

No matter what I did, Yada Tsuyoko had by now lost all consciousness and physical strength to exert in response. She showed neither expression nor movement. Everything was dead.

I moved away from Yada Tsuyoko dazedly.
It was, I think, a state utterly beyond any other description.
I merely screamed.

“Let’s go out.
Let’s walk outside.”

And I started walking.
Following me, Yada Tsuyoko also came down the narrow staircase.
When we emerged onto the main street, I immediately hailed a one-yen taxi and hurriedly urged Yada Tsuyoko into the car.
“Well then, goodbye.”

Yada Tsuyoko formed a faint smile.
And,
“Good night.”

She bowed her head lightly.

That was our last day together.
And we never met again.

I sat thinking in the tower room until late at night.
When I finally resolved myself and finished writing the severance letter to Yada Tsuyoko, it must have been around two in the morning.
Trying to sleep while pulling the futon over my head, tears at last came spilling out.

In my severance letter, I wrote about five manuscript pages conveying this meaning: that we must not have physical bodies—since I had finally come to understand this—and that we should regard our present selves as nonexistent and agree never to meet again.

The next day, I sent it by express mail.

The town was blanketed in snow.

That day—February 26, 1936.
I recall that at the time, the bloody signs of the February 26 Incident still hadn't become conspicuous in the town—the streets were nothing but quiet snow-covered roads.

I also sent a letter to Takezuma Shobou.
A few days later, when I went to Takezuma Shobou, I found that the letter had been opened after undergoing inspection by the Martial Law Command Headquarters.

Then it followed that the final letter addressed to Ms. Yada must have been opened as well.
The cruelty of it left me utterly desolate for some time.

There was no reply from Ms. Yada.