Pathway to Japanese Literature

It was a balmy midday in early summer.
Yasukawa hoisted the wicker trunk stuffed with Tsukino’s kimonos onto his back and headed toward his home.
Behind Yasukawa walked Tsukino, carrying a small handbag with vacant eyes as she drifted along dazedly.
Behind Tsukino trailed her three coworkers: one lugging a garish purple lady’s trunk, while the other two—each hoisting one end of unidentifiable large bundles—walked in a tangled procession.
It was such a grand procession that children came running out from the depths of the alleyway to cheer and see them off.

The mistress of a small bar had absconded.
Unbeknownst to anyone, she had sold the bar’s rights, so from the next day onward, the proprietor changed and the three waitresses were permitted to stay without difficulty—but people were at a loss over what to do with Tsukino, niece of the absconded previous mistress.

Tsukino was suffering from lung disease.
She was twenty-one years old.
She was irritable-tempered, selfish, and capricious.
She couldn’t focus on one thing for long—abruptly walking out mid-conversation—and when angered, would refuse meals to sit all day in a dark corner of the room.
After erratic periods that bounced like a ball, she would tell lies so convincing even acquaintances couldn’t detect them—causing others trouble—then spend half a day weeping; this was her habit.

The new mistress took an instant dislike to Tsukino the moment she saw her. When she discovered the lung disease, as if encountering a god of plague, she squeezed her eyes shut to escape, then shrieked from the adjacent room in a shrill voice for her to get out within three days. The fact that Tsukino had no lover had now become a source of headaches for everyone.

Yasukawa had long been a regular patron of this bar and knew Tsukino’s circumstances. On the evening when—in the same manner that wind had drifted aimlessly through the gaps in the door—the utterly meaningless notion of taking in and sheltering this girl had swelled to fill every corner of Yasukawa’s mind, he proclaimed his resolve before his wife Matsue with a brazen delight, as though performing some grandly noble deed.
“Do as you please,” said his wife.
A veritable aphorism.
Yasukawa also let out a wry smile.
And yet, having promptly decided on “Then do as you please,” it was akin to children squabbling and seizing on each other’s faults—but there stood a five-foot-tall man in wretched form.
Matsue—who had never imagined this would come to pass—even in the moment when the bizarre procession halted at her gate and the neighbors dashed to the back gate to crane their necks, could not abandon a curiosity that made her feel like a spectator on high ground observing it all.
But when the women in gaudy kimonos—their faces glistening with sweat from nose to brow—unceremoniously hurled their luggage onto the threshold with a heave-ho and barked as if at a dog shop’s storefront, and when finally she beheld her own husband—drenched in sweat and at the nadir of exhaustion yet bearing the massive trunk with an Atlas-like gravity—Matsue involuntarily let out a shriek and retreated to the kitchen.
Without thinking, she slipped into her geta and stumbled dazedly outside.
When she emerged into the reeking square—half playground for brats, half garbage dump—hot tears welled up as though charging toward the vastness of the blue sky.

The Yasukawa couple were dependent on his mother's household. To be precise, it should have been called his brother's household, but with his brother dead and his sister-in-law also dead—leaving only three children behind—it was his mother who managed the finances there. Yasukawa referred to his own mother as "Mother O'taki." It was Matsue who first started calling her "Mother O'taki." O'taki disliked Matsue, so Matsue hated O'taki. Yasukawa thought Matsue's position seemed pitiable, so he too promptly began referring to her as Mother O'taki.

During the time when Yasukawa and Matsue had managed to set up a household of their own, in the midst of their direst straits, Yasukawa unfortunately contracted appendicitis.
Having failed in her hoped-for means of raising money, Matsue—now with all options exhausted—visited Mother O’taki.
Even if there was discord between them, she wouldn’t abandon her own child’s appendicitis—or so Matsue thought.
Mother O’taki had some savings left to her brother’s children, but she had stashed away an even larger secret hoard.

O’taki was reading the newspaper with her reading glasses on.
Throughout Matsue’s plea and even after it ended, she kept the newspaper pressed to her eyes, her lips pursed into a tight へ-shape.
Matsue repeated the same plea three times.
O’taki stood up somewhat flustered, brought out Toyama’s medicine bag from the back room, and told her in a rapid-fire manner to find the necessary medicine from this bag and take it home.
When Matsue realized that the culmination of her utmost endurance was not even a single yen but merely patent medicine, she felt herself on the verge of fainting in a fit of rage—and only then did she become aware of her own figure walking down the road, desperately wishing to flee the demon’s presence at the earliest possible moment.

Afterward, when Yasukawa met O’taki, first and foremost she delivered her lecture: “See here—you’ve become sturdy without anyone’s help, haven’t you? A man can’t become respectable by leaning on others.”

After that, Yasukawa tightened his belt further and came rolling into Mother O’taki’s care. The child harbored not a shred of innocent desire to cling to his mother. Even if fed by an enemy, one would likely sense some warmth in their charity; yet thrown into prison and having secured food at last, they could devour each meal as naturally as breathing air—free from all trivial heartaches that might disturb the mind. Living in O’taki’s house meant inhabiting a prison devoid of stimulation—pilfering an utterly peaceful daily existence like white clouds. The meals O’taki provided were as purely material as prison rations—one couldn’t imagine such food existing outside that context—and they bore no stigma of obligation to any benefactor. Even if O'taki underwent hardships to support them, they remained utterly unfazed; though O'taki likely felt neither hardship nor inconvenience. It must have been akin to tossing fish bones to stray cats that had wandered in. If that were so, then it would be best if they were stray cats. They ate their meals like strays; the mere fact that they didn’t eat with that excessively sentimental, human-like manner was itself a blessing. There was no affection or love beyond her intent to utilize. To rephrase—this refuge, so masterfully free from mental entanglements that it allowed no love or affection beyond utility—could not be imagined outside a prison.

It was a story from when Yasukawa was a child.
He had been ordered to carry the rice tub from the kitchen to the tearoom.
The tub proved too heavy for a child; each step dragged it forward until its edge caught on the threshold—sending him lurching headlong with violent force.
Rice cascaded across the tatami mats as he screamed and rolled about, a fingernail torn clean off.
In O’taki’s eyes, only the scattered grains registered—the child’s injury remained invisible.
A hatred single-minded and jagged swelled up, branding the boy’s life with an indelible impression of a demonic fiend.
O’taki seized the child by his collar and dragged him into the storage shed.
She shoved him toward the back with full strength before bolting the lock without hesitation.
In that instant, her unfeigned heart discarded all pretense of calculation to expose its true form.
He was a child unworthy of a single day’s rice ration.
Crying wildly from pain that pierced his skull’s core, the child comprehended his mother’s heart—a paralyzing sensation of self-obliteration gripped him without cease.
That discarded wound—not even worth mourning spilled rice—now inflicted such unbearable agony upon him; this cruel irony birthed self-mocking absurdity and vertiginous rage within.

After that, the child grew up utterly exhausted even by hatred.
There was only weariness in place of hatred—so much so.
There was no time he answered his mother’s questions more brusquely.
When the same question was posed by someone on the roadside, he would still answer with warmth and affection in his heart.
For instance, when meeting O’taki after ten years apart, he would be told to talk about how he had been living during their time of separation.
Then he thought there was nothing as degrading as answering that question.
What life I had led during the ten years we hadn’t met was none of her damn business—whatever life I’d led had no connection to anything anyway.
If complete strangers were to shower me with the same question in a passing greeting, there might be a way to answer with the ease of a casual encounter.
Being subjected to the same thing in the guise of a mother only makes my anger swell.
The color drained from his face, his tongue turning as dry as sand until his words grew hollow.
The child who had met her after ten years—without uttering a single word in response—abruptly stood up and went to gaze at the garden.

Even after receiving such heartless treatment, O’taki’s expression remained unchanged.
Just as when she inflicted the same heartless acts upon her child, even when subjected to such treatment herself, her expression remained immobile.
O’taki’s unyielding expression had become for Yasukawa the most agonizing object of dread.
What secret bond lay concealed between O’taki’s immovable countenance and the fact of her motherhood?
At this thought, a purely blind terror welled up in the child’s heart.

It was not long after Yasukawa had come rolling into O’taki’s care.
In her voice, harboring the same eerie calm as always, O’taki said that milk delivery was an early-morning business; as the saying went, early to rise earns three pennies—the clear dawn air was good for the body and refreshing for weary hearts, so if one were to choose a human trade, none could be more blessed than they.
What did that mean? Yasukawa wondered.
Does that mean you’re telling me to become a milkman too, since it’s a blessed trade?
Yasukawa was a man who, from the start, did not distinguish between trades—be it milkman or day laborer—and had never loved such work due to his innate laziness and weakness; yet he had come to think that when things became truly unavoidable, he might as well take up such jobs.
But to hear those words from his mother’s mouth—she who wasn’t in financial trouble!
This was unbearable, and he thought it utterly impossible.
Since Mother led such a wearisome daily existence, she must have had all sorts of capricious notions—he concluded this was simply one of those meaningless whims.
He glossed over even the ambiguous matters, and that day ended just like that.

It was the evening of the next day.
As he stepped out for a walk through the gate, he encountered a milkman hauling his cart.
The man smiled at him with unsettling familiarity.
Having forgotten yesterday’s conversation with O’taki about milk delivery work, Yasukawa turned his face away and kept walking.
Suddenly the milkman quickened his pace as though chasing after him and called out:
“Are you a live-in student here? Or just a freeloader?”
“Yeah,” Yasukawa answered.
“You’ll be working at our shop then,” the man declared.
“No—I’ve got other work lined up now,” Yasukawa replied curtly.
They parted without another word.

Yasukawa found himself more dumbfounded than angry or sorrowful.
Before he had even broached the matter yesterday, Mother had already nearly finalized a contract with the milkman.
That hollow affectation in her casual tone!
What chilled him with demonic intensity was how O’taki’s expression—neither urging nor opposing, neither consenting nor betraying even a flicker of sorrow—remained a transparently feigned mask of indifference even as he halfheartedly dismissed her will.
Now understanding how that indifferent face had concealed an unforeseen contract with the milkman, he couldn’t help but dread the existence of even more unfathomable capabilities lurking behind it.
It evoked the deeds of witches from ancient tales.
When he fruitlessly sought connections between that and motherhood, he could only envision a pitifully powerless despair—like a five-year-old child crushed beneath nothing but the word “mother.”

Yasukawa considered revenge against his mother.
Even if he were to ostentatiously break the contract with the milkman, before that hollow expressionless face, it would likely only deepen his defeat.
Yasukawa's anger and hatred were too immense; to direct these at "O'taki" would be misplaced resentment—yet there remained a selfishness beyond reason, like a child clinging to "mother."
That night he took out one of the family heirlooms—Ōta’s scroll—and exchanged it for five hundred yen.
To do this so showily was not so much an act of revenge as an attempt to escape—under revenge’s guise—the anguish of remorse.
He continued his nightly indulgences, yet his mother kept confronting them with that same cold expressionless face.

After that, he would openly exchange family heirlooms for money and go out carousing.
There was no longer any pretense of justification.
He had become a slave to dissipation.
Even this his mother continued to observe with her cold, immovable countenance.
It possessed a chill and severity surpassing maternal dread—something evoking divine or demonic judgment.
Though in truth, even divine judgment could never have restrained such a profligate.

And so came the final act—the capricious decision to take in the girl wasting from lung disease.

Even as Tsukino’s raucous procession passed before O’taki like some squawking flock of birds, O’taki maintained her swamp-cold impassivity, not uttering a single word of reproach as she stared fixedly at the garden.

Matsue had long since lost all affection for her husband.
This estrangement was nothing new.
She had grown sick of their destitution—sick too of Yasukawa’s spinelessness that promised no escape from poverty.
When they were reduced to crawling into O’taki’s house, she felt utterly wretched.
His obliviousness to others’ suffering enraged her—how he carried on as if hoarding all the world’s gloom for himself! How he dressed mere lusts in elaborate pretensions of profundity! Once his nightly debaucheries began, Matsue could think only of vengeance.
The revenge she envisioned? To live happily with another man and make Yasukawa choke on that knowledge.

Matsue spent much of her days lost in waking dreams.
There had been a man who proposed marriage when she was still a naive girl.
It wasn’t that he lacked anything—she had refused simply because marriage held no interest for her.
Later she met Yasukawa and defied her parents to live with him.
Rumor held that this man now worked at a prestigious company, had risen through the ranks, and remained unmarried still.

Matsue came to believe that rumor.
Matsue’s daydreams painted this: the man would come to seize her—the visceral vividness of her phantom self had compelled him to remain unmarried—he resolved to take her by force, he could endure no longer.
And the two would find happiness.

——Yet Matsue came to realize. None of these fantasies ever concluded by binding their happiness together in some grand "happily ever after." When she unconsciously sank into daydreams only to abruptly return to herself, it was always at that moment when she made Yasukawa recognize her resentment—imbued with such fierce hatred. The vision of newlywed bliss remained faint and emaciated like a symbol, while the image of hatred she forced Yasukawa to acknowledge overflowed with raw, carnal vitality. The hollowness of it all being mere dreams. When she realized this, days when her heart lay calm brought relief; days when storms raged within made her despise reality as if mad.

Yasukawa had a close friend named Toyama.
Yasukawa called him a true villain.
It was a kind of term of endearment.
A man who could love no one but himself.
Through the severity he turned inward, he had attained loneliness.
He alone was human; others were merely objects.
He was a villain embodying that very cold-bloodedness.

Toyama’s ferocious visage had gradually seeped into Matsue’s harsh reality like shadow puppetry.
Day by day, an imperceptible shift occurred in her daydreams—the fantasies of that old man’s empty promises faded, while secret visions of Toyama took root.
Matsue refused to call it love.
Because love is gentle.
And love is pure.
Lilies and roses befit its form.
She clung to this belief.
Yet the dreams she conjured of them both were lewd and filthy, suffocating.
Only flesh writhed in those visions.
When this realization struck, Matsue burned with unbearable frustration.
Stolen—everything—her maidenhood, her life, her money, her love, her purity.
All of it—that man Yasukawa had done this.
Yasukawa was villain, scoundrel, demon.

That villain was the one who did this to me.
He swapped out my soul for a filthy one while I slept.

Driven out by Tsukino and her entourage’s arrival, Matsue circled endlessly around the square while avoiding weed thickets, weeping with bitter frustration. How far must that villain torment someone before he’s satisfied? They say in olden times people would desecrate corpses when execution alone couldn’t sate their hatred—yet in Yasukawa’s insults toward her, she felt only the cruelty most fitting for a snake, ×××××××××××××××××××××××××××××, trembling violently at its terror.

“I should run away,” Matsue thought. No matter where she fled, there was no destination anyway—once night fell she would have to return whether she wanted to or not—yet her desire to escape raged as if pursued. In any case, she had to process it; she couldn’t endure otherwise. I should run away to Toyama’s place. “I’ll go and tell everyone—everything that villain has done,” Matsue thought. Vitality and sorrow abruptly welled up within her once more.

The dirty boarding house where Toyama lived required climbing the stairs with shoes on.
No matter how quietly one walked, the stairs emitted an unbearable metallic clangor so intense it made one’s consciousness reel.
The clamor of those footsteps instilled in Matsue a terror she would never forget for the rest of her life.

Toyama was absent.
The tension that had gripped her suddenly slackened, she felt.
That was for the best, she told herself.
In any case, she thought that having come this far was sufficient to settle her feelings.
However, the lingering regret of needing to leave a letter clung hazily to her mind and would not let go.
Matsue leaned against the corridor window and gazed at the scenery outside.
At that moment, Toyama returned.

When Matsue met Toyama, she discovered a self entirely different from who she had been until then.
She did not even cry.
While recounting the entire story, she occasionally let out a wry smile as if it were someone else’s affair.
But occasionally, faint tears veiled her eyes.

“I know that woman,” Toyama said.
“I too sometimes went drinking at that bar.”

And then he began speaking admonishingly.

“This holds no significance substantial enough to disrupt your marital life.”
“That woman is neither an object of Yasukawa’s romantic affection nor even of his carnal desire.”
“Were she truly his lover, he would obsessively contrive ways to conceal it—the very act of openly taking her into his home makes that abundantly clear.”
“I too had long sensed Yasukawa’s dangerous propensity for such acts.”
“Yasukawa acts with excessive impatience.”
“An inclination toward heroic intensity in his way of life operates with exceptional force in that man’s character—his worldview and sundry abstract anxieties must inevitably develop into political concerns.”
“Though drawn to communism since youth, the individualistic education and introspection that shaped him permit no deception in rash action, leaving him still smoldering internally in this wretched state.”
“He yearns for wealth and honor yet nurses a critical spirit harsh enough to despair prematurely of their futility; though craving love, he grows bored and despairs of its triviality before ever grasping it—such is his condition.”
“To put it plainly, that man dwells utterly exhausted within chaotic contradictions of reason and instinct, unable to seize any belief or truth worth clinging to.”
“He even harbors a passion verging on madness to live through literature, yet his doubt over what to write leaves him despairing as if that inextinguishable fervor had cooled.”
“In essence—though I am no different—he exists in a state where life’s fundamental meaning eludes comprehension.”
“Hence his desperation to undertake some endeavor through which he might perceive himself as living.”
“Though mere anxiety, it wagers survival’s very essence—this near-desperation might equally drive blind passion.”
“Yet paradoxically, the pursuits he most desires—those with purpose and value, those imperative like politics or literature—prove most arduous due to his confusion and doubt regarding their inherent worth.”
“For this impatience itself springs from those very doubts.”
“Thus he inhabits this peculiar state: imposing upon himself only those utterly foolish, meaningless tasks—tasks that by no means entangle with his own confusion—precisely because they’re worthless, yet devoting himself to them with passion’s final dregs.”
“He feels not the slightest infatuation toward Tsukino.”
“Likely he bears no interest whatsoever.”
“Tsukino’s meant to be so inconsequential that discarding her like a stray when unneeded would stir neither regret nor sentiment.”

“In other words, taking in Tsukino is nothing more than embracing meaninglessness itself.”
“That very point—unnoticed even by himself—is both the critical pressure point and key to this act.”
“He tries to impose meaningless tasks upon himself.”
“Through them, he attempts to glimpse his own existence or grasp something he might call his life.”
“Apart from this wretched mechanism of forging semblances of meaning from void, we cannot so easily find ways to become conscious of our survival—of what might be termed life.”
“Moreover, he has a mother he clashes with—and then there’s you.”
“Since neither you nor his mother would ever show Tsukino kindness, he must wage war against the household’s antiquated order to provide for her—in short, expend tremendous effort.”
“This too forms part of that miserable mechanism—through the agony and chaos of staking his home’s destruction, even his own ruin, to apprehend life’s meaning and passion—unnoticed by himself, or rather, something he knows all too thoroughly.”
“It was merely necessary to clash with order and convention through the most meaningless tasks, thereby generating passion and chaos.”
“The sorcery of a romantic spirit derailed from its tracks.”
“But since such passion and romantic sentiment cannot endure forever, were you to cease opposing him and leave him be, he’d find himself stranded—nowhere left to direct that passion—and end up howling.”
“That would be wise.”

There was nothing in Toyama’s analytical exposition that struck her as unfamiliar.
No—if anything, it was Matsue who had seen through her husband’s psychology to a degree that bordered on excessive, surpassing even what Toyama had articulated.
That Tsukino was not an object of Yasukawa’s love had been evident to her from the very day he first spoke of the woman—discernible from his tone alone—and had been confirmed the instant she first laid eyes on Tsukino.
Yasukawa did not love Tsukino—this stood as Matsue’s unwavering conviction.

When Matsue had finished hearing Toyama’s lengthy analysis, not only was it entirely unsurprising to her, but she realized for the first time that she herself had known it far more clearly. And then Matsue was shocked to realize that her wandering the square earlier, weeping and staggering, and being driven by that desperate urge to flee—all of it had actually stemmed from her hatred of her husband’s supposed infidelity. Nonexistent adultery! Even now that she understood that, however, the hatred did not change.

“But Yasukawa is cowardly!”
“Even if bringing that strange woman into the house has nothing to do with romance, it’s solely to torment me.”
“No, I understand perfectly.”
“It’s to humiliate me.”

Matsue said.
And she wiped the overflowing tears.
While shedding tears of frustration over having spoken those words, Matsue felt she had clearly realized that what she had said was nothing more than a misunderstanding.

"That is a misunderstanding," Toyama said once more, stating what Matsue had already fully understood.

“That is your selfishness.”
“I understand how galling these events must be for you, but coddling that resentment to such extremes does you no good.”
“Because he’s making himself wretched with his own hands.”
“In short, Yasukawa has been driven to such depths that he can’t struggle free unless he takes in that sort of woman.”
“Of course you bear no obligation or responsibility to tend to it.”

“Yes—I absolutely refuse to care for her.”
“The only thing I want to do is take revenge.”
“Because I’ve been tormented all along, you know.”
“I’ve thrown my entire life away, you see.”

“As for that matter, half the responsibility lies with you as well.”
“Because as long as the two are living together, it is—in any case—a fact beyond mere reasoning that one party is fully accepting the other.”
“In any case, it would be wise not to overly agitate your nerves.”

And Toyama added with a laugh.

In the end, Matsue had merely visited Toyama and confirmed through his own words only what she had already known.
There was to be neither salvation nor consolation.
However, Matsue was relieved as if she had fulfilled her duty.
Certainly, the duty had indeed been fulfilled.
Because returning home was no longer such a painful thing.

Matsue argued with Yasukawa daily over Tsukino.
She would accuse him by insisting Yasukawa loved Tsukino.
She pressed him, demanding to know if there had been misconduct between them—if they’d been forced to take her in with no alternative.
Matsue’s complexion stood bloodless and deathly pale.
In desperate half-madness, she would react violently to Yasukawa’s trivial words, pressing close as though clinging to him.
Her relentless persistence made Yasukawa feel visceral disgust until he too grew half-mad with irritation.
When these clashes led Yasukawa to slap Matsue’s cheek with full force, and he saw her—with deranged intensity—wailing and swinging fists to strike back, Yasukawa became utterly consumed.
He straddled Matsue, throttled her neck, then raised his foot to kick her down.
Matsue resisted in complete frenzy.

And yet Matsue knew through and through that Yasukawa did not love Tsukino and that no physical relationship existed between them.
Toyama had already pointed out the same fact, and even had she relied solely on her own judgment without anyone's assistance, she likely could have arrived at the same conviction without a shred of doubt.
Though knowing all too well there was no misconduct between the two, the nerves nevertheless seethed incessantly with anger over their imagined transgression—Matsue herself stood dumbfounded, unable to comprehend why.
Was this what they called jealousy?
Yet it struck her as absurd that she clearly recognized this jealousy's foundation to be entirely baseless.
Even while thinking thus, once she reached the point of impulsively confronting Yasukawa about Tsukino, she would become utterly consumed by half-mad frenzy.
This too must stem from how she'd been tormented day after day—the ferocity of that hatred now manifesting thus—and Matsue kept thinking she might truly lose her mind before long.

However, Matsue did not notice—that even though she knew all too well there was no relationship between them, the reason she was tormented by this obsessive delusion was precisely because she herself harbored an illicit love for Toyama.

Matsue was castigating herself over her own illicit affair. If Yasukawa were to commit the same infidelity, the weight of her self-reproach would lighten.

Each time Matsue accused him of adultery, Yasukawa would examine how his mind could so clearly affirm the accusations' groundlessness, and compared to his countless past entanglements with women, it became unmistakably apparent that with Tsukino alone, she wasn't even XXXXX. Such clarity was rare for him. Seizing this immediately—like capturing a demon's head—he would declare the accusations baseless with such triumphant zeal that even his own figure, proclaiming it all in such smug satisfaction, struck him as ludicrous. Eventually, the same replies night after day grew tiresome, and he developed a habit of responding as if humming a tune—yet the tension in his heart had likewise, through sheer inertia, become akin to that very humming. The humming had rather laid bare his true nature. In some indeterminate span of time, he came to know that Tsukino's wasted body too had become an unquenchable ××× object.

He had never loved Tsukino from the start.
Yet she was not an unpleasant presence.
However eccentric his whim might have been, he would never have taken her in had he found her unpleasant.
Through taking Tsukino in, he imagined a shaft of morning light piercing his exhausted and cornered daily life—the faded realms within and without regaining fresh breaths of revival.

However, as most would see it, Tsukino’s character was not befitting of that.
Tsukino was gloomy, spiteful, stubborn, and selfish.
Her hair was reddish and frizzy.
Her eyes alone harbored a strange silence like a swamp at dawn—forever half-open in a haze, perpetually containing a motionless sea that lingered dimly even after sleep or death in unexpected places like book spines or paper crevices, evoking a distant gaze fixed on nothing yet something all at once.
Tsukino had wasted away pitifully—her wrists translucent like shade-grown stems with sorrowful blueness; cheekbones jutting painfully; her fleshless face holding waxen death tones—yet within that gaunt outline Yasukawa read childishness and nobility alike. Still she held no feminine charm.
But Yasukawa was fine with that.
Even were she unbeautiful to all eyes—everything existed through his perception.
And through his lens alone did sheltering this homeless consumptive—gloomy and spiteful—feel like triumphant conviction: bedrock for revival’s dawn-light.
First came exhilaration.
He became utterly drunk on impulse.
He spoke to unresponsive Tsukino only to notice himself—tears welling from inexplicable passion—yet felt no suspicion.

“Look at the lush green depth of that grove.”
The two went out for a walk together, and he said while pointing it out to Tsukino.
“Look, a bird is flying.”
“Ah, look—a beautiful locust is perched on that wheat ear.”

And suddenly, he was crying.
He never once considered that such a self was that of a liar, a shallow sentimentalist, and an insufferable romantic.
In their true form, he came to understand only the sincerity with which everything could be purely accepted.
Apart from the lost memories of his boyhood days, it was with the sincerity of believing he might one day come to know it again.

He did not find handling Tsukino’s spittoon unpleasant.
That devotion too was sincere.
There was no pride to secretly harbor, nor did he feel compelled to dissect it with the scalpel of critical scrutiny.
Curing Tsukino’s illness appeared as his delightful duty, and when he thought of this duty, he felt overflowing strength and joy.

Yasukawa's devotion to Tsukino struck Matsue not as ironic but absurd. Yet she recognized both its fervor and a certain purity. Seeing this dedication—never once granted to her—lavished so stubbornly on a woman he didn't even love, Matsue felt superiority rather than jealousy. What he offered Tsukino proved neither love nor passion—merely their absence. It resembled less human connection than a child's fixation on some broken toy. She fancied herself the sole rejecter of this wretched dynamic, deriving scornful pride from Yasukawa's pathetic retaliation against her spurning. Not merely tormented herself—she now tormented him in turn, exacting vengeance through his degradation. Let that bastard try loving me beyond the grave! Tears streaking her cheeks, she swore with iron resolve: I'll despise that villain through eternity itself.

Tsukino was a terrible liar.
Moreover, she had sticky fingers.
A moment's carelessness, and one or two yen would vanish in an instant.
On days when money disappeared this way, Tsukino would go out as though fully confessing her crime through the act itself.
He couldn't bring himself to resent that foolishness.
She seemed to go watch moving pictures.
She would buy geta sandals, detachable collars, rings costing twenty or thirty sen each, then likely went to show them off to former coworkers at the old shop.
It was said she'd suddenly blurt out—with the eerie gloom of a witch-like crone—that she was being loved, afterward carving deep nose wrinkles that suggested neither smile nor triumph nor self-mockery, remaining vacant-eyed in dazed silence for some time.
Such stories filled Yasukawa with unbearable emotion.

“If you want money, I’ll give it to you, so don’t steal. You mustn’t hold back—say anything openly,” Yasukawa finally admonished her one day.
Tsukino immediately burst into convulsive sobs.
“If you think I’m such a lowly person, I’ll go back to my old shop! I’ll never take even a single penny from anyone!”

Yasukawa, stumped by her stubbornness, did not pursue the matter further.
Instead, he would quietly leave about one yen every five days next to the pillow where Tsukino lay sleeping, but there was no change in how the money would sometimes disappear.
In the worst instances, the same thing would happen three or four times in a single day.
That was no longer due to the need for money.
It was not solely due to kleptomania either.
On days when such things happened—even though Yasukawa did not particularly make an issue of it—Tsukino’s gaze would reveal a stubborn, cold defiance like that of a wild beast, creating an eerie sensation that seemed to corner him instead.
Yasukawa had a peculiar thought.
Could it be that this was Tsukino’s strange way of expressing affection? It wasn’t impossible.
Tsukino had an untamed wildness—a whip-like resilience unaccustomed to people.
If such a Tsukino were to show affection to someone, would she not have no choice but to express it in this manner—like a bird pecking at someone’s eyes as a token of goodwill?

For instance, Tsukino saw Yasukawa’s devotion—resembling that of a servant attending a saint—and since she could not possibly comprehend his abstract agonies and conflicts, she might have come to believe in the abnormal affection he directed toward her.
Viewed through such a lens, Yasukawa’s devoted ministrations might have appeared as those of a divine acolyte serving a goddess or a slave bound to a queen.
The guileless man, haltingly unable to voice the feelings in his heart yet resigned to his servile station and persistently clinging to her—this might have struck her as comical, gratifying, and even pitiable.

Such things had happened.
One day, Tsukino turned to Yasukawa and said that her uncle had opened a large factory in such-and-such part of Yokohama; that if she returned there, she would be like a queen; and that she wanted to go back.
Had Tsukino possessed any place to return to, she would have been sent back there long ago.
It was precisely because she had nowhere to go that Yasukawa’s capricious notion of taking her in had taken root.
Since this was clearly a lie, Yasukawa paid it no heed and muttered distractedly—"Anyway, you should rest properly here"—whereupon Tsukino suddenly flushed crimson with rage, shrieked as if maddened that he meant to prevent her from meeting her uncle, and collapsed into wailing sobs.
The matter did not end there.
Still convulsing with tears, Tsukino declared she wouldn’t return immediately to Yokohama but insisted he bring her uncle regardless.
"It’s a well-known factory in that area," she pressed urgently, "so if you go there and tell them about me, he’ll surely come rushing over in his private car this very day—go there now!"
Hearing this vehement tone, even if half-fabricated, the existence of an uncle in Yokohama seemed beyond doubt.
Whether he would come or not was irrelevant—Yasukawa resolved to go investigate regardless.

He came to the place in Yokohama he had been told about and, after going back and forth through an excruciatingly long railroad crossing, scoured every nook and cranny of the industrial district—but such a factory was nowhere to be found. No one even said there had ever been one in the past. Yasukawa returned utterly exhausted. When he returned home, Tsukino had just come back from the pictures, wearing an expression as though she’d forgotten all about the Yokohama matter. But upon hearing that her uncle’s factory didn’t exist, she convulsed with rage—flailing her limbs and thrashing about as she wailed. When the pitch of her wail shifted sharply higher, she suddenly sat bolt upright, grabbed whatever books and inkwells were on the desk within reach, and hurled them at Yasukawa. “Liar!” “You didn’t even go to Yokohama!” Tsukino foamed at the mouth, her crushed mutters repeating as she hurled objects.

Even if this madness were merely to mask shame over having her weakness laid bare, without an arrogant heart she could never have performed such derangement.
Conceit too was a matter of character—had she been a noble-born beauty graced with elegance, such haughtiness might at times have been an asset. But for this scrawny woman with disheveled crimson curls—this mantis-like emaciated creature—to carry herself like a queen was grotesque even as abstract conception.
The reality was an unspeakable monstrosity—the grotesquery of grotesqueries—Matsue thought.
To witness such spectacle made blood reverse its coursing through her veins.

“Shut up! Anyone who seriously engages with that idiot is a complete moron!” Matsue, perhaps even more enraged than them, could not help but scream hysterically.

“It was obviously a big lie from the start. This mantis-like woman is the factory president’s daughter?! To claim a private car will come to pick her up—she’s just spouting whatever she wants! There’s a limit to getting carried away! To begin with, you’re the one wrong for letting her spout such nonsense—it’s so absurd it’s beyond discussion!”

Matsue was blinded by tears. If Tsukino would be her opponent—or rather, even if Yasukawa took Tsukino’s side—she stood holding her breath, ready to fight them both in a bloody brawl.

Yasukawa did not engage with Matsue. He did not engage with Tsukino either. The objects that were thrown and hit him left some scratches, but he didn’t even feel like getting angry.

Yasukawa felt what Matsue had sharply perceived—but from a different angle, and even more acutely. She was being conceited. Indeed, she was being conceited. He had to admit that this was not a matter of Tsukino’s inherent character, but something entirely relative to himself. After all, it was because she mistakenly believed his devoted manner of service was for love. Tsukino’s conceited state, as he had felt before, was like that of a queen looking down on slaves. That was indeed comical. Yet as Tsukino hurled books and inkwells at random, Yasukawa suddenly noticed his own strange composure—neither getting angry nor dodging as if he were an idiot or invincible, letting whatever hit him hit and letting the painful wounds hurt, standing there silently like this without finding it particularly unpleasant or even foolish in the slightest. He thought that he didn’t particularly mind becoming Tsukino’s slave. On the contrary, he felt that if he simply left this state of affairs to its natural course, the most innate tendency within him would enshrine Tsukino as a queen, reduce himself to her slave, and then slide inexorably—utterly unchecked—all the way down to an immovable dead end. Even if he reached that dead end, he would feel no remorse—a terribly carefree sensation, as if he were a dementia patient utterly unperturbed.

While aimlessly kneading such emotions, he was vaguely groping toward something entirely different. As if driven by a slave's animosity, Tsukino's emaciated body became the object of his depraved desires, and pursuing its grotesque freshness with dreamlike detachment granted him an indolent pleasure akin to a stroll on an unseasonably warm day. She was this grotesque, arrogant queen—like a chicken with peacock feathers stuck on its head. It was a carnality that whetted the appetite like roasted meat. Through pride of a different stripe, it was a body that had bloomed like a flower for the first time, and the act of mercilessly plucking and trampling that flower reserved for him an exquisite pleasure. The phrase "licking one's lips" fit most perfectly within the heart anticipating this banquet. That I had taken Tsukino in, that I had responded with guileless sincerity—all of it was an unconscious mechanism, a meticulously calculated process to make arrogance blossom—I even felt a terribly smug satisfaction.

The flower of arrogance clung to Yasukawa’s weary head, and he could not sleep that night.
His once fierce expression suddenly slackened, becoming formless like something sodden, and he grew intensely anxious that his face might now be etched with shameless depravity and the lewdness of an octogenarian.

It was the height of one such day.
When Yasukawa tried to enter the second-floor study to retrieve a book, Tsukino was there taking a nap.
×××××××××××××××××××××××××××××××××××××××××××××××××××××××××××××××××××××××××××××。

Yasukawa knew his own nature was twice as cautious and cowardly as others, yet in sudden moments—be it an earthquake, a fierce dog, or a fight—even as his heart raced like a rapid bell, he reflexively found the courage to hold his ground.
He found himself somewhat embarrassed when people unexpectedly praised him for having nerves of steel, but there were times when such pretense proved utterly ineffective—times when something like ×××××××××× became the most instinctually extreme case of all.
To any object even slightly resembling ××××××, he would involuntarily avert his eyes.
An unbearable discomfort would well up, and he would flee.
That had nothing to do with any sense of purity in Yasukawa; he could not help but recognize—without reservation toward anyone—that the stronger such shame grew, the more intensely his lecherous impulses flared.

When he saw Tsukino’s ×××× figure, Yasukawa involuntarily twisted his neck away.
His body reflexively turned in the opposite direction.
Yasukawa frantically scrambled down the stairs, his urge to escape uncontrollable. After circling through every downstairs room in rapid succession, he suddenly became aware of water in the kitchen. Though his throat held no trace of thirst, he gulped down a mouthful while wincing at the liquid’s unbearable bitterness.

He tried again—this time deliberately stomping up the stairs—but his footsteps echoed at barely half the volume he’d intended, and Tsukino remained fast asleep in a slightly altered position.
The thought of boldly entering to retrieve a book hadn’t been absent from his mind, but a cowering timidity suddenly constricted him with force, and before he knew it, he was already clattering back downstairs.
What should have been a fleeting glance now burned into his retinas like a violent photographic exposure—×××××××××××××× expanding across his entire visual field, swelling to fill the room’s dimensions before surging toward Yasukawa’s face in a visceral rush.

He began wandering through the downstairs rooms once more, but the impression that no one had been present during his earlier circuit now rose to his consciousness with such intensity it constricted his head. His mental stance abruptly shifted, and holding his breath, he circled through each room again while verifying their emptiness.
Sure enough, there was no trace of anyone.
Feeling there must be something—anything—he ought to consider, he stood motionless at the tearoom's center for a time, straining to concentrate, yet no thoughts arose. Only an intensely taut emptiness swirled dizzily round and round.
With a sudden violent surge as though his blood flowed backward, he charged up to the second floor.
Tsukino was already awake.
When he saw Tsukino's large, dull eyes staring vacantly at him, he [censored] Tsukino and clutched her to his chest.

There was no flower of arrogance to be found.
In reality, there was no such poetic sentiment.
That was merely a euphemism Yasukawa’s lecherous habits had arbitrarily concocted to redeem the baseness of animal desire.

If it were a flower of arrogance that must be plucked and trampled, then the noble bearing seeping out might have flashed as a light that pierced his heart.
There wasn’t a trace of such a thing.

Tsukino wrinkled her nose and showed a satisfied smile, as if she were a witch-like crone who had been eagerly awaiting his arrival.
When he recalled that expression, he involuntarily shuddered.
Yet even so, he felt a dull throbbing and an involuntary stiffening.
He could perceive nothing but the unbearable stench.

Whether it was stealing money, the look in her eyes that seemed to defy or mock him on days when such things occurred, or her other conceited expressions—they were all manifestations of Tsukino’s crude sensuality. As long as Yasukawa did not burn ×× toward Tsukino, it was not particularly on his mind; even if he were to burn ××, as long as that ×× did not exist, he could call it the flower of arrogance and perceive both its color and scent. He could not help but think that it was rather the mud of arrogance. He felt Tsukino’s gaze—now solely carnal, harboring a light of ×× with no other life beyond—piercing his every move from unexpected angles with ignorant arrogance and obsessive lust, and was tormented by thoughts as though clung to by a forest witch or mountain leech, dripping with poisoned blood.

In the midday heat, when he abruptly came upon Tsukino in the deserted room, she began to gaze vacantly at him, a tarnished something welling up from the depths of her dull, murky eyes.
When Yasukawa glared back at Tsukino’s gaze, she immediately wrinkled her nose, just like her sleeping form on that first day, and now seemed about to ×××××××××××××××××××××.
Yasukawa felt like crying.
Abruptly strangling Tsukino's neck and pressing down relentlessly until at last, he dragged out a futon from the closet with all his strength, covered Tsukino's head completely with it, then frantically rushed outside and fled through the streets.

"Everyone had become 'no good,' he thought."
What he found most unbearable was the vile stench of his poisoned blood clinging to his nostrils, cloying and suffocating.
No matter which way he turned, only his own filth spread like a vast curtain across the front of his face, relentlessly pursuing him until he could bear it no longer.

Tsukino had gone out for a walk, leaving the house empty.

It was the height of midsummer noon.
In the corner of Yasukawa’s study stood a structure where a crossbeam bridged two horizontal rails—something made for hanging small items—and there he stretched a men’s sash and hanged himself.
And so he died.
There was no suicide note—nothing of the sort existed.
It had been entirely an impulsive act.

One of the children discovered it and let out a loud cry.
People came rushing over.
Matsue and the maid tried working together to untie the men’s sash and lower the corpse, but the stiffly rigid body—positioned as if standing at attention with hands glued to knees, bowing forward in an unsightly manner—refused to move as they intended.
O’taki watched with cold impassivity before calmly muttering, “They say cutting the rope to lower him means he won’t come back to life,” and walked toward them.
“Fine—I’ll handle it,” O’taki said.

O’taki had the maid leave with the children.
Then she told Matsue—the only one remaining—to go call a doctor, while she herself either intended to lower the corpse or had clung to its back like a cicada.

O’taki’s cold composure was nothing new today, but even within that grease-like clinging expressionless aura, Matsue sensed something inexplicable. Hesitating to leave for a moment, she abruptly turned toward O’taki—only to find her pressing both hands against the corpse’s waist. Far from lifting its neck to remove the sash, she was ××××××× it.
Matsue’s dazed face and O’taki’s face collided.
O’taki’s face was its usual grease-like mask of expressionlessness, showing no sign of any emotion, ××××××××××××××××××××××××××××××××××××××××××××××××。

After the funeral rites had concluded, Matsue met with Toyama once more. As days passed, increasingly terrified by the demonic visage that flickered vividly before her eyes, she told the story of the ×××××× old woman who had hanged herself.

Toyama too seemed momentarily appalled by this tale.
Yet after staring vacantly into space for some time,

"But since we must keep surviving," he said with a bored expression, his words drifting like smoke, "someone who hanged themselves ends up yanking us all by the neck anyway."