Pathway to Japanese Literature

I

The clods of earth were so hard they could not be broken apart unless struck with a hammer.—Oka, sitting cross-legged on the wooden floor, gazed up at me as I sat rigidly upright on the chair beside him. He crushed the clods into handful-sized portions, soaked them in water, then retrieved each adequately moistened chunk in turn and kneaded them like pastry dough.

Sweat beaded on Oka’s forehead.
As I watched the state of his labor, I too felt heat coursing through my entire body.
We began work at seven in the morning and did not exchange a single word until noon.

It was a day of severe cold.

It was the atelier—a makeshift hut that Oka had built with his own hands.
The surrounding walls had only their base layer for plastering completed; since they had not yet been plastered over, from inside, the outside scenery glistened through the latticework.
I could see a blue sky.
Beside the atelier's lawn, chickens, rabbits, and goats were playing.
At the window, the cage containing the owl we had captured was basking in the sun.

It was the fourth winter since this atelier had been built.
Oka, a sculptor who produced roughly one work per year, had created pieces such as "Rabbit," "Chicken," and "Owl" in this atelier—and this year he chose 'me' as his model.

In the sky, a shrike was singing a melodious song.
Oka placed the kneaded clod of earth on his palm, gazed at it for a short while with a fantastical look, then—after intently comparing it to my face and figure with an expression of terrifyingly meticulous experimentation—exclaimed, "Alright!"
With a nod, he plopped it into the jar beside him.

Before long, the jar was filled to the brim with earth as flexible as rubber.

“This amount here is just enough for your bust—now, next comes the pillar.”

Oka washed his dirt-covered hands in the bucket’s water and, without a moment’s pause, set about the next task.
His Daruma-like face was flushed red with the breath of excitement.
Oka took up a saw and created a flat board approximately two shaku square.
And then, at the center of the board, he drove a wooden rod—approximately equal in height to my eyes from my chest—through from the backside and erected it vertically atop a single nail.

Now, after setting that upon the workbench, he used the main pillar as a core rod, traced with his fingertips the form of me that should take shape there, then soaked coarse straw rope in water and—facing the wall—swiftly cut it.
The splashes flew through gaps in the wall and showered down onto the Japanese aralia leaves beneath the eaves.
He grabbed one end of the rope and once more lashed the air with a whip-like crack, then with powerful gritted lips spiraled it around the pillar with a creaking strain.

As I watched this scene, I felt a strange vibration within my body. This single pillar corresponded to my spinal cord, and the coarse straw rope wound in a spiral shape equated to my internal organs and nervous system—so I imagined.

“Now, let’s begin—!”

This was Oka’s first utterance when he first took up the clod of earth to begin "fleshing out" "me."

I inadvertently felt within myself an affected tightness akin to the moment one assumes for a formal photograph.

“Please keep your mind free,”
“And keep thinking freely.”

As he spoke these words while staring at my face, Oka pressed both palms’ worth of clay firmly onto the pillar in one motion. That Oka had initiated speech struck me as peculiar—so much was he by nature taciturn when sober. The pillar instantly transformed into an earthen rod resembling a hundred-me candle, soon swelling its mid-lower section to thrice its original thickness until it took on a bottle shape. In that chaotic air, it seemed as though clouds and smoke had coalesced to form an amoeba.

He had finished the first day’s work.

To prevent the bottle-shaped sculpture from freezing, Oka carefully wrapped it in multiple layers with wet rags, then finally covered it with a blanket and tied it around the shoulders with thin cord.

“If I leave it like this—even if you take a few days off… it’ll hold up.”

“I intend to come as often as possible every day, but if there were ever too long a gap between sessions—could that disrupt your creative mood?”

Steeped in passive uncertainty, I ventured this timid question.

“Three years—” Oka’s eyes rolled wildly as he groaned, a faint smile emerging.
“Three years—even if you vanish that long, I’ll endure.”

The kerosene stove had exhausted its fuel, its flame extinguishing itself at that very moment.

Exiting the atelier and descending the terraced mulberry fields, here too stood a square makeshift hut.
This too was a house handmade by Oka. He had previously used this place as his woodcarving studio, but ever since Kura Kankichi and Tsurui Daijirou came to live here, he had completely vacated it for the two of them.

In the hearth, a fire burned vigorously.
Crucian carp were being grilled.

“If you scorch them like that, you won’t be able to eat them.”

“I’m the one eating it.”
“You grill your own damn portion.”

“That’s the fish I caught.”

“No—yours is this smaller one here.”

When we opened the door, the two were arguing about the fish.
All along, Kura had scorned Tsurui by denouncing him as a tasteless mountain ruffian, while Tsurui in turn mocked Kura as a fish-obsessed lecher—such was the state of their relationship.
Though they were a pair who constantly raised opposing views and clashed over every matter, be that as it may, having lived together in one hut for nearly a year now, they could not be considered complete enemies.
Despite this, whenever either of them met someone else alone, they would invariably denounce the other as an enemy and curse them.
It was undoubtedly the result of an unnatural way of living.

The two, upon seeing our faces, had been waiting to raise a toast for Oka’s commencement of work; as for the sake—just how many *shō* should they manage to procure?
they called out repeatedly.
We wondered—which liquor store would willingly hand over a single barrel of sake to us?
After deliberating at length on this matter—since the master of a certain sake brewer in the neighboring village seemed to desire Oka’s previous year’s creation “Wood Owl”—Tsurui boldly volunteered for the role of using his silver tongue to coax it out of him.

Oka and I, along with Tsurui and Kura, were each seated facing one another around the square hearth.
When I occasionally looked toward Oka through gaps in the flames, his gaze remained steadfastly fixed upon me.
And there he was—tracing some outline with his fingertips through the smoke, unbeknownst to anyone else.

That night I ended up getting dead drunk and staying over at Tsurui and the others' cabin.—When morning came and I went to check on the atelier, Oka was already kneading clay from the jars.

"Not up for it today?"

When he said this, I—

“Sitting here is about all I can manage…”

As I said this and leaned against the model chair, Oka removed the blanket from the bottle-shaped sculpture and set to work.

By the day’s work, the shoulders of the bottle-shaped form became a slightly flattened wall, and the roundness of the head reached a perceptible degree.

Just as the work had ended, my wife came, concerned that I hadn’t returned home the previous night.
Oka explained in detail on my behalf about how we had overenthusiastically celebrated the commencement of our work with too many toasts.

“This is me,” I said, pointing at the swollen bottle-shaped form.

“It’s still too early to see your likeness in this, but—” she began, laughing softly at its haphazard appearance— “even so, you can tell this is the front, can’t you?”

Having said that, she gazed quietly at the "I" clay lump, which still showed no more human likeness than a stone Jizo.

Oka wrung out a tattered rag and began wrapping "I".

"How many more days until it starts to look like him?"

"Well—if we can keep going tomorrow and for another two days or so... we should be able to start using the spatula by then..."

When Oka said that, she turned toward me,

“Now, don’t take any breaks and keep at it.”

she urged.
“What if you stayed here for two or three days?”

“That—would be impossible.”

Oka interjected and pointed to the hut below the mulberry fields.
“You mustn’t fall ill.”

Oka speaking even this much was rare!
I thought.

Even so, since I began sitting on the model chair, I had come to feel myself transforming into a man of few words—somehow different in character from who I’d been until now.

From the hut beneath the mulberry fields, though the sun had yet to set, raucous drunken voices already rose.
Tsurui’s silver tongue had borne fruit—the four-*to* barrel had arrived.
In addition to Tsurui and Kura, a different man’s hoarse voice and a woman’s birdlike singing voice were mingling.

Two

The song billowing from the hut went: *Tanuki, oh tanuki! / The temple garden’s bathed tonight / In flawless moonlight, bush clover in full bloom— / Gather your crew and come on out! / A tipsy moon-viewing spree! / The priest’s soused beyond belief— / Drunk, drunk, thumpety-thump! / You there, don’t hold back—beat that drum! / Thumpety-thump goes the belly drum…*

I couldn’t recall the exact lyrics, but it was undoubtedly a playful nursery rhyme of that sort—with everyone chorusing “thumpety-thump…” in unison after each verse, mimicking the sound of belly drumming.

The cacophony—booming bellows from hoarse throats singing off-key, yet with performers striking poses as if delivering hymns—forced upon listeners a grotesque discomfort. Then came a woman’s voice, absurdly disruptive, evoking a shrike’s cry that slashed through one’s core with its mindlessly feigned ecstasy. Listening closer, each sound resembled unnatural growls from various beasts, demanding farcical descriptors. These disparate noises—never coalescing, each screamed to its limit—struck me as all the more amusing precisely because they erupted in broad daylight across serene winter fields: a troupe of bewildered monsters reveling drunkenly under endless sun.

The night kagura of Otakedō had burst forth into the broad daylight of the countryside sky—struck by such a delusion, I felt a rare pounding in my chest.

“Ah, it’s begun, it’s begun—ah ha ha ha!”

I suddenly threw back my head and roared with laughter—but noticing how this mirth flew from my mouth to scatter across the serenely clear azure sky, when I looked up, what I perceived bore no resemblance to "laughter"—rather, it felt like the crow tengu’s music meant to intimidate mankind. Lately, such rumors had utterly vanished, but in truth, around here up until my childhood, tales of tengu appearances had been rampant, chilling the hearts of those plagued by nightmares.

The sleep deprivation from the previous night had finally taken its toll—I could no longer bear to sit rigidly on the "model chair," so I begged Oka to halt his work and left the Atelier. Yet when bathed in the suffocatingly mild sunlight rising from the softly hollowed mulberry fields at my feet, I lost all sense of humanity, utterly intoxicated by a disordered dream.
And so, while straining my ears in the soundless void between heaven and earth—a bottomless brightness—I found myself engulfed in a formless tornado of colossal wingbeats akin to the hollow roar of a seashell, nearly suffocating, when suddenly I was rescued, so to speak, by the bizarre chorus erupting from a hut in a corner of the mulberry fields, and thus escorted back to solid ground.

The hut now contained a pandemonium of unprecedented frenzy, as if it were on the verge of bursting into the very zenith of intensity.

I took my wife’s hand,

“Let’s go see! Let’s go see—”

I exclaimed buoyantly.

They stood on tiptoe atop the hill, arms held horizontal like kites catching wind.—Then, as if transformed into gliders, they dashed down the smooth lawn in one breath.
Truly, it was a blue sky so perfect that had they glided across the lawn and reached its edge, they might have taken flight in splendid fashion with a flutter.

“This is fun! This is fun! Hah-hah-hah…”

The lawn was so soft—as if we were barefoot or wearing thin-soled sandals—that neither my wife’s footsteps nor mine made a sound.

“Kites! Kites!”

Carried away, I flapped my arms like kite wings, and my wife mimicked me, buzzing a propeller drone through her lips as we were reeled straight toward the commotion—as though pulled by an invisible string from the hut’s window.

However, my wife feared that if we were to sink into that raucous hut now, we would all too easily transform into drunken earth moles who’d forgotten the distinction between night and day—so she proposed we play a while longer on this lawn: "Why don’t we bring a straw mat from Oka’s atelier to use as a sled and slide down this slope?"
my wife proposed something along those lines.

I agreed, took off my coat, and discarded my shoes and socks to prepare for exercise.
My wife also did as I did,

“One, two, three!”
“Now climb all the way up!”

Having said that, she assumed a starting stance.

And so we began dashing up the hill like rabbits.
When we had just reached the midpoint, I deliberately let my legs slip,

“Ah!”

I shouted.
The lawn’s sensation—like a carpet woven from moderate softness, gentle slope, and brightness—compelled me so.
Yet once I began sliding down, the slope proved far steeper than imagined or observed—so steep that my body flipped over completely, head and all, like a barrel.
Following me, my wife lay flat on her stomach and immediately began tumbling down like a spinning windmill.
I waited on the lower lawn and caught her deftly in my arms just as her rotations were about to stop.

The two of them doubled over laughing.

While we repeated such play, the chorus of the intoxicated resounded ceaselessly from the hut.

“If that work has begun, does that mean we can’t move to Tokyo until it’s finished?”

What my wife meant were my modeling work and matters concerning my elderly mother living in the same town as us.
We had resolved to abandon "town life" and move to Tokyo, yet kept missing opportunities for so long.

"It's not that we can't move—as long as you come here sometimes, that'll suffice."

The two of us lay down on the lawn and looked up at the sky.

“Hey there, hey there!”
“Turn this way!”

Hearing such calls, when we turned to look, Kura Kankichi was leaning halfway out the window, vigorously waving this way.
He was not exactly a hunchback, but due to the curvature of his back and his diminutive stature—coupled with disproportionately imposing features—and further owing to his habit of brazenly courting women of any sort whenever opportunity arose, everyone had nicknamed him “Notre-Dame’s Quasimodo,” though—

“I see—”

As I looked at Kankichi—his face contorted in the backlight of evening glow—it indeed seemed he resembled not Quasimodo of Notre-Dame but rather one of its gargoyles. He had introduced himself as a painter and, one spring about a year prior, arrived at my doorstep—disheveled and from who-knows-where—to beg for lodging; yet before I knew it, he had befriended the hut’s denizens and now resided among them.

He had turned to me on a couple of occasions and said things like,

“Your wife is in love with me.”

He had said things like that before.
It seemed he was a misinterpretor who mistook ordinary kindness as something special meant only for himself—that was all I thought.
However, I had come to direct a curious eye toward Kura’s peculiar vanity.

“Everyone’s waiting, you know—won’t you hurry over?”

Kura was calling out at the top of his voice.
Then Kura suddenly vanished—apparently having been grabbed by the collar and pulled back in—and Tsurui Daijirou leaned out.

“Did you hear the song all the way to the atelier?”

I nodded and answered that that was why we had come out.

Tsurui bore the nickname “Horse,” though there was nothing particularly horselike about him—yet his voice’s peculiar depth did seem to evoke some equine association—or so I found myself thinking anew.
Compared to Kura’s diminutive stature, Tsurui was a hulking man of six shaku—nearly six feet tall.

That booming voice in the chorus was Tsurui, and that shrill one was Kura—I realized this.

III

As we hurriedly tried to finish getting ready, Daijirou began frantically waving his hands and urgently beckoning us over just as we were—so without further ado, I slung my coat over my arm, my wife did the same, and with our muddy bare feet shoved into shoes, we dashed toward the hut.
The hut still thrummed with their raucous chorus, roused as if this were their final stand, and was at the peak of frenzied revelry.
The "thumpety-thump" chorus repeated in such a wildly disordered rhythm that it made one’s hair stand on end.
When I got drunk, I too always became as frivolous as that—if I were to turn into such a boisterous flag-waver, it was no wonder serious people would scorn me—I thought.

When I opened the door, the song abruptly ceased, and at that moment, I involuntarily—

“Ah!”

I exclaimed in a low voice.
For inside a hut measuring about two tsubo—good heavens! There were people everywhere!
There was no counting them—a teeming swarm of bodies crammed together like sparrows.
In the thick swirl of stifling liquor fumes and tobacco smoke, countless disheveled men and women lay drunkenly entangled in heaps upon one another.
――And after we had entered, once the door was closed behind us, the hut—possessing only a single small window akin to a prison’s barred opening—grew dim as a cell, and I, having plunged in from that brightness, required considerable time for my eyes to adjust, much like when entering a daytime movie theater.

“Come on, we’ve been waiting for you—sing it for us, that Nancy Lee song—”

Alongside such a growl, a teacup was thrust before my eyes. I had always been their leader in singing matters—nearly all their repertoire, old and new alike, came from my instruction. The raccoon song they’d been chanting was an exception—

“See? We’re hopeless without you! Damn it all—even I’m shocked at how rotten our memories are! After you drilled us a million times on Nancy Lee and Ring-a-Ding Banjo and the Flag Song and Yankee Doodle—the moment we try singing ’em, they all turn into that same blasted thumpety-thump tune!”

“If you take the lead and sing first, we’ll be able to follow—so come on, start from the top and give us a proper performance.”

“—What’re you being so shy for?”
“Quit dawdlin’ or I’ll wring your neck!”

Requests came from all directions, but I couldn’t simply get carried away—not only due to my timid nature, but also because I noticed quite a few unfamiliar faces among them.
And though I was no good at drinking like that, I closed my eyes and gulped down the sake in the teacup—but felt not the slightest effect.

“Come on, sing, sing, you modern man…”

As he said this, I noticed the man who had lunged at me from the opposite corner—exhaling with a *haah* to blow the unbearable foul stench of his breath into my nose—was none other than the Priest of Ryokuzanji Temple.
He was the resident priest of a dilapidated temple adjacent to the atelier’s hill, and whenever he heard singing from here, he would drop everything, leap over the hedge, and come rushing without fail.
Four or five days prior, having seen Tsurui—unusually clad in work clothes—tending to the roses in the hedge, I approached to ask for some blooms when—

“Right now, I’m trying to block the priest’s path, you know.”
“Ever since the sake barrel arrived, he’s been making overnight visits, you see.”

While pointing toward the temple, he was mending a hole in the hedge.
Suddenly recalling this, I stretched up to the window and peered at the hedge—where Tsurui had grumbled while mending it days before—now bearing a tunnel of flowers even larger than before, gleaming like a mirror.
Kura and Tsurui would frown upon that priest as being unpriestly—a man skilled only in brawling and lewd talk, utterly worldly—but to me, they themselves seemed rather the ones who truly fit those very words.

“The only time those bastards butter me up—callin’ me ‘Priest Ryokuzanji’ or ‘Great Teacher’—is when I come back with booze bought from my egg money! But now that my hens’ve stopped layin’ and my income’s dried up, they flip on me quick as turnin’ a hand over!”

The term ‘those bastards’ referred to Kura and Tsurui right before our eyes, but the priest bore down on me in a tone seething with indignation.
――“I saw it myself—that bastard Tsurui blockin’ up the hole in the hedge! Damn fool—I could bust through that flimsy mess in one breath! …Ha ha ha… C’mon now—drink! Drink up, and let’s get singin’!”

“T-t-t…”

The words I tried to utter suddenly began to stammer uncontrollably for some reason.
“T-t-t... What’s... wrong with your chickens?”

Beside me sat a strikingly beautiful woman—or so I thought—utterly incongruous in this hut with her modern Western-style bobbed hair and dress. Unlike the others, she alone sat in an unladylike posture akin to cross-legged lounging, sipping whiskey from a flask-topped glass before her. Yet time and again, she would fix her gaze intently on me, whether due to my imagination or not, with an unbearably saccharine stare that I found impossible to ignore.

“I’d hatched a grand scheme to make a killing off cold-weather eggs, but then that damned weasel struck recently and sucked most of my hens’ blood dry! Now all I’ve got left are five roosters—and as for the two hens that survived? They’re clingin’ to their nesting boxes like mad, creatin’ a right disaster of things…”

“W-well, that’s… uh…”

I offered sympathy half-heartedly.

Meanwhile, over there, a fierce fight between Kura and Tsurui broke out.

"My, how loud Dai-san's voice is..."

With that, the woman giggled softly and looked up at my face once more.
That woman's voice from earlier—the one I'd described as "a shrike-like soprano that induced an insensitively false state of euphoria, cutting to the quick"—it was her!
It occurred to me, but this time her voice didn't strike me that way at all.

“...Um... well... I... it’s embarrassing to say something like this directly...”

The woman continued, pressing her crimson lips with the back of her hand, her round eyes remaining entranced as they never left me. “For years and years now, I’ve been such an ardent admirer of your works,” she murmured richly.

“Oh… I see…”

I answered, intending to remain composed, but suddenly my chest began to pound violently.

“Hey, you dimwitted drifter! You’re a thief! Put on those rags you came here in and get out!”

Tsurui’s voice grew increasingly louder.
We were so accustomed to such things that none of us were surprised, but their exchange of insults gradually intensified, dominating the space.

“Say whatever you want—I’ve read every single letter you wrote to O-Haru, y’know.”
“……Hmph, hmph, hmph—”
“That’s some fine prose.”

Kura Kankichi turned his back on Tsurui with a derisive sneer.
Then Tsurui suddenly began tearing at his hair,

“Aghh, so frustrating!” he shouted, then collapsed in tears, bawling.
And then: “That bastard Kura kept it a complete secret that he couldn’t write a single character—then he quietly copied the letters I wrote and handed them straight to O-Haru as if that weren’t enough, all while slandering me to no end!”

Shaking and crying, Tsurui shouted at the top of his lungs to no one in particular.
Was Tsurui really forty years old?
I wondered.

“Tsurui—”
The priest called out.—“That letter—Kura had me copy it for him.”
“If you want every last detail, you should’ve made that lotus tunnel high enough for my stature…”

Meanwhile, this “admirer” of my works

“Um… are you his younger sister?”

was asking my wife.
When my wife faltered in response, flustered beyond words, I moved to answer in her place—but just then came the sensation of someone slowly tightening their grip on my hand beneath the table’s edge.

My wife?
So I thought, but when I looked, my wife was on the other side of the priest, pressing her flushed cheeks with both palms.

Startled, I tried to pull my hand away, but my wrist was seized with full force.—A peculiar shudder—neither cold nor numbness—seized my entire body, and when I realized it was that woman—
The alcohol poured into him seemed to solidify into a block of ice—then in an instant, transformed into arrows that clashed and raced from his crown to his toes, piercing through him in rapid succession with a whizzing force—until he felt as though his own body had turned into a bottomless glass cylinder.

At that moment, outside the door, someone called my name,

“Are you there? Are you there—”

A voice called out as it drew near.
--I couldn’t even respond.
I must have rolled my eyes in anguish like someone choking on mochi!
Recalling it now fills me with such shame I could die, but at that time, my entire body trembled violently—my efforts to keep those around me from noticing only tangled into further disarray, leaving me frozen in place.

When the door opened and a sudden flash of light poured in, I was glad to have been released at that very moment; feigning nonchalance as I pressed a palm to my forehead, I found cold sweat had formed into beads.

“Ah, you’re here.—Quite a commotion…”

It was Oka.
Oka stood beside me with a bright red face,
"You... I've done something truly inexcusable."
he said sheepishly, his eyes darting about.

“…………”

“Have mercy on me, you—I’ve made a terrible blunder.”

As Oka kept repeating these apologetic prefaces, I found myself engulfed in a cloud of unease—but upon finally hearing his reason, it turned out that after three consecutive days of work, he had progressed to the point where faint traces of eyes and nose could be perceived on the bottle-shaped “me.”

“If only I’d wrapped another cloth around it—carelessly left it as it was from the day before, and now it’s completely frozen through…”

he had said.

“As for starting over, I don’t mind, but—”

I finally managed to utter words.

In other words, my bottle-shaped clay statue had frozen and crumbled away because the rags wrapped around it had been insufficient.

“My apologies—really—”

“Well… I-I don’t mind—anyway, I’m just sitting here on a chair. You’re the one who’s been made a fool of…”

“My apologies, my apologies—”

Repeating this, Oka grasped my hand.

Some time later, I came alone to the atelier and saw for myself: indeed, the bottle-shaped “me” had lost all moisture and turned to stone. When I experimentally tapped it with the handle of the metal spatula, it crumbled away with each strike, vanishing without a trace in the blink of an eye.

I sat vacantly on the modeling chair, gazing out at the approaching dusk outside.—The image of that woman remained vividly in my mind.

“It’s completely ruined!”

It was my wife who had followed me there.
I was so startled I nearly leapt into the air.

“My goodness—it’s this bad!”

My wife murmured mournfully as she gazed at the crumbled earth.

“……”

I felt such unbearable guilt toward her that I resolved to confess what had happened earlier—yet even so, there was no way to phrase that mere incident, nor could I frame that woman’s actions as purely proactive without somehow exposing my own cowardice to myself—and so I reconsidered, telling myself it hardly warranted formal discussion—but still I couldn’t withstand the strange throbbing in my chest as wave after tidal wave of emotion came surging forth.

“What’s wrong? You’re completely listless. Are you disappointed?”

“That’s not it—... I’ll start fresh on this work tomorrow, so I’ll come early then. For today, I think I’ll just head home as I am.”

From the hut, the chorus rang out once more.
And just as before, a woman’s bird-like soprano mingled among them.

I felt a slight jealousy akin to resentment toward that cheerful woman’s singing voice.

“That person handed me her calling card.”

When my wife held out a small calling card, I saw that it read “Ogura Rirako.”

“She says she’s studying art—”

“…………”

“And she says that after painting, her next favorite thing is whiskey.”

My wife, staring fixedly at me as I gazed unblinkingly at some absent point, began to say such things.

IV

One day, we began drinking at Oka’s atelier, and I became more deeply drunk than I had been in recent times.
Then I was utterly senseless.
Perhaps because there were too many people, even the faces of those around me had all become indistinct.

When I opened my eyes in the morning and looked around—though I couldn’t tell where I was—I found myself lying on a gorgeous futon in what seemed to be a stylish room.

When I looked beside me, another identical futon lay alongside mine, its occupant completely buried head-first so I couldn’t tell who it was—but truly thunderous snores rumbled forth. … The growling surged like monstrous waves, so eerie to witness that I thought, *To hell with whoever it is*—and sprang upright.

“...What’re you... spoutin’... bastard... Guh-guh-guh...”

Suddenly, such a sound rang out; when I looked carefully, it turned out to be the sleep-talking of the slumbering man. As I cautiously tried to slip out of the room, his mutterings continued incomprehensibly—then soon transformed into an indescribably strange cry, something akin to a bird’s shrill call if forced to find a comparison, resembling an agonized scream.

With such a piercing cry, perhaps even his own dream would wake?
I thought and turned to look, but that person still appeared peacefully settled in the abyss of Muou.

In any case, he was a man among men—a formidable one at that—whose face, clouded with dissipation, needed no verification. Without a word, I tightened the sash of the haori I had slept in, all while his snores and sleep-talk continued unabated. Then, as he turned over, he kicked the wall beside him with such force that the house creaked.

Yet he had not only failed to awaken from his dream but, with only his head buried under the covers, now lay fully exposing two brutish legs—hairy and ogre-like—which I suddenly noticed. Moreover, the leg that had just kicked the wall remained in that very posture, propped casually against the wall’s middle section as if resting.—The other leg (I find documenting such details utterly mortifying but feel compelled to do so—) sprawled across the hem of my futon, its knee bent at a sharp right angle.
Moreover, one arm had thrust upward above his head, sending the pillow flying off in an unintended direction.

Who could this be—the priest perhaps, or Village Chief Kamo of R Village?—The reason I tilted my head in contemplation was that the priest had always boasted of his own napping posture while dubbing his snores "thunderous," and moreover, the elderly Village Chief Kamo of R Village—a prodigious drinker—had once declared while pointing at me: "I have a habit of blurting out all secrets in my sleep, so I can’t risk staying anywhere careless—but with you," he had said, "I could travel anywhere without concern." Thus I associated it with either of these two men. Yet if I—merely observing this sleeping figure—were to conjure an acquaintance and miss the mark, even were it my private muttering, I would be forced to endure profound shame—so extraordinarily fierce and indecent was this person’s sleeping form.

Furthermore—though I truly ought to refrain from describing this (for later, this person would be revealed as a man named Okuda Rinshirou, and I would come to be mercilessly tormented by him; though resentment had gnawed at my insides, I could never persuade that detestable Okuda to yield, leaving me grinding my teeth in frustration—and upon reaching such a pass, I would recall this very sleeping posture of his to privately vent my pent-up indignation—) Ah, but I shall stop here—not only is it discourteous, but such descriptions would condemn me as cowardly…….

--I reflexively covered my face with my sleeve and fled the room in a flurry.

It was a peaceful morning.

That building was a seaside inn at the edge of town where I occasionally sojourned for writing work and such.

That’s right—I had clearly told my wife the day before: “I must focus on my work—carelessly idling away these past several months won’t do. Today, once the modeling session ends, I’ll return straight home. Please wait with dinner ready”—and yet here I was, having left without a word and stayed elsewhere overnight. The sheer rarity of such behavior left me feeling frail, and I hurried along the sandy beach path.

V

I rushed in through the back gate and immediately retreated to my room, trying to get some more sleep.

“Hey, good morning!”

There by the pondside, Kura—who had been sitting around a tea table with my wife—called out with an unnaturally amiable smile fixed on his face.

I’ve always disliked people who grin without cause, but Kura’s sardonic smirk I found especially detestable.

“Modeling through the night—the work must’ve advanced splendidly, no?”

“Who in their right mind would model all night?—I just got drunk.”

“Well, well!”

Kura feigned surprise with sarcasm,

“You’re as outrageously energetic as ever.”

He kept smirking slyly.

“So you weren’t here last night?”

“You must be joking—I’ve been a guest at this house since last night. Daijirou too—he’s still out cold.”

“Out cold!”
Hearing those words, I recalled the earlier scene and felt goosebumps rise across my entire body.

My wife continued knitting without ever glancing my way.—Though she was typically the sort of clever spouse who would greet me cheerfully upon returning from an overnight stay elsewhere, for some reason her expression remained unyieldingly stubborn, lips pursed in a sullen point.

In the sight of my wife’s demeanor, it was rather I whose mood soured.

“What happened to Okuda Rinshirou?”

Kura asked.

“I don’t know that person.”

“The man who came from Tokyo to see you yesterday—isn’t he supposed to be a writer…”

“Ah, that person—wait, that’s Okuda?”

I recognized the Western-suited gentleman I’d encountered at Oka’s atelier but couldn’t recall his face.

“That man didn’t come here specifically to see me—”
“He…”

I said.
At that moment, I faintly remembered how he’d fixed his eyes with exaggerated seriousness—how he’d declared in a shrill voice sharp enough to sober drunks, things like “Speaking from my artistic standpoint—” or “Ultimately I’m a symbolist—”, his nose arrogantly upturned and eyes sunken deep in their sockets.
Then I became aware of the impression I’d formed—that he was an utterly insufferable man.

“He…”
“Well, he’s apparently a friend of Ms. Ogura Rirako’s.”

“I see—”

At that moment, I was called to the telephone.
When I tried to get them to tell me their name, they would only insist on wanting me to come out and say nothing else.

“Who is this?”

I asked bluntly.
I disliked Kura, but I thought I detested that Okuda fellow even more.

“Um… it’s me…”

I immediately realized it was Rirako.
Under normal circumstances, I—being quite hardheaded in such situations—would have feigned ignorance upon encountering such coy pretense, even if I knew the other party’s name, but…

(Though, to be honest, such instances had been nearly nonexistent.)
“Ah, Ms. Ogura?”
I said cheerfully.

“Hoho, you’ve realized—good morning.”

“Well… is that right?”

“Hohoho, your eyes aren’t quite open yet.”

“No, that’s not the case at all…”

“I wonder if you realize where I’m calling from…”

“I don’t know.”

More than that—how had she figured out where I lived? Despite us never having exchanged a single letter—these thoughts crossed my mind.

“Um… are you free now?”

“Well, um… yes, I’m free.”

Despite this tedious—and altogether vulgarly saccharine—attitude of hers being precisely the sort of thing that would abstractly make my skin crawl with irritation, far from feeling any aversion, I found my heart gradually beginning to race.

“Would you care to go for a short walk?”

“However…”

I shouted.
“Why don’t you come to my house? The path is…”

“How delightful—I’d be happy to come over…”
“There’s no issue…”
A strange cough came from the direction of the garden. When I looked that way, it seemed to be Kura, but to my surprise, my wife had suddenly stood up and was glaring at me as though about to approach.
This is bad—.

I suddenly noticed—though vaguely—but even so, why had my wife abruptly assumed such an expression, and why did I myself feel this chill in my chest at her expression—I found myself rather mystified.