Pathway to Japanese Literature

March 6th The novel he had been certain he would finish by the previous day had likely not even reached one-fifth completion. And that, too, was an immense source of anxiety. When a person writes down their thoughts and reads them back, they feel as though it were all a lie—is one of their hearts impure? Lately, it's not that I have nothing I want to write at all. Can't I find the words?!

When I belatedly thought that by today I would have to abandon all this and that—I was struck by a frantic urgency as those formless things seemed on the verge of taking shape, only to feel instead an unexpected lightness, as if exhaling in relief. How Mother must be agonizing! How utterly exhausted she must be from waiting! Out of such considerations, I had forced upon myself this bureaucratic scourge to drag matters out until today—but it had been pure folly.

The manuscript—those dirty scraps of paper that deserved to be discarded as useless anyway, that brought nothing but boredom when he thought of continuing—since there had been no time to burn them, he carelessly threw them into the desk drawer. And he deliberately stirred up a childish fervor. “Once I’ve dealt with the ninth, I’ll set off on my travels right away.” He thought he ought to return home immediately. If things were going to turn out like this, I should have left Tokyo then as planned during New Year’s—that would have been wiser without a doubt. Even so, I was struck by the contradiction of having become “unartistic” since throwing myself into writing novels.

When I resolved to do it, I still felt a serene calmness untouched by anything one might call worldly. In a room of a riverside hot spring inn, the figure of myself who would likely keep writing things not even present in my current dreams floated vividly into view. After all, this would be the first time I’d ever set out on a journey with pen in hand.

“You two can stay in Odawara, you know.” “That’s fine.” “Shall we return here around May?”

Having missed the train we had decided on by a mere minute, we had to wait at the station for nearly two hours. Since proceeding like this would mean arriving home around midnight—should we start over tomorrow? And how about we go sightseeing in town tonight? When he turned to consult his wife, she shook her head nervously. She refused. “If we don’t go today, it’ll be a problem.” “But even tomorrow…”

It had been nearly half a year since he had ridden a train. Even if I said I rode one, the last time had only been to Odawara. From Tokyo. There was no particular reason to dislike it—but if we were to go straight through on an express train without turning onto that △△ Line—how would that be? Would I feel like getting off? "I’d probably feel like getting off then," he thought. Mentally, too, I felt tormented by such sentimentality. “I feel like there’s not enough time to eat…”

“But there’s a whole two hours!” “No, I just... don’t feel right about it...” “So we’re meant to stand here like this for two hours?” “That’s why I’m saying...”

“Do you intend to keep drinking even after we get home?” The wife brought up the matter of drinking. With a slightly anxious look. “Why do you always have to ask things like that right away?!” “—” “Even so, two hours feels half-baked?” “Like this or something?” “Is that the Marunouchi Building over there?”

“The farther the journey, the more convenient it would actually be... If only I’d left when I had the chance before...” “I don’t care.”

As we exchanged such words while dawdling about, our five-year-old son—who seemed to have already internalized his father’s dawdling disposition—

“It’s bento time! It’s bento time!” he shrieked in his practiced imitation of station attendants’ shrill calls, kicking at his mother’s legs with his shoe tips while pounding them repeatedly. At home she would have endured such behavior calmly, but here she affected an odd pretense and laughed with forced “Ohoho”s. Then she flushed red. I too felt struck by the sensation of my own face reddening slightly. “Idiot!” I reprimanded in a somewhat performative manner, as if conscious of bystanders’ eyes.

“You’re the one who’s way more of an idiot!” The son stuck out his chin and glared spitefully. Around this time, he would often quarrel with the neighborhood children. I had often witnessed it but never once reprimanded him. Moreover, we as a couple often had savage arguments. She, out of sheer vexation, turned to him, “You’re the one who’s way more of an idiot,” she had once said with stifled resentment.

The wife picked up their son and rushed out of the waiting room. While I thought my wife’s movements appeared unnatural and contemptible, I hurriedly took my bag and followed after her. “He won’t come out—it’s truly a problem—”

"That’s not true." "When we go outside, he seems to deliberately not listen."

“Maybe a little, that might be true. When we’re outside, you don’t scold him, so…” As I said this, my wife formed an unpleasant smile. I did too. We were not the sort to wait together for two hours in a sparsely populated corridor. We lingered restlessly with unsettled hearts. When we suddenly noticed, our son was striding with self-conscious bravado into the restaurant right before us. It was his habit in such moments—straining himself to step on each of our legs. —My own heart whenever returning home always contains a similar deliberate pretense— I suddenly thought.

Earlier, when we were in the waiting room, there being nowhere to sit, we stood among the crowd; but he had been running around the benches like in a horse race, darting in and out of the entrance to the corridor. He must have entered that restaurant thinking it was just like before, since it too was packed with customers sitting around. —We clicked our tongues and gave chase.

It was a spacious dining hall, but so crowded here that there were almost no vacant seats. We unintentionally came to a halt at the entrance.

The child’s figure appeared lower than the tables; I swept my neck around like a searchlight, casting my gaze here and there, but couldn’t even glimpse his head. I tried to call our son’s name, but no sound emerged. Scanning the entire dining hall would be arduous, I thought—my body jolted with tension. In places like this too, we couldn’t blend in; merely entering made us grow stiff with self-consciousness.

By the time we passed Yokohama, Son had fallen asleep.

I’ll go anywhere as casually as possible from now on—maybe take you all and depart for Odawara on the ninth evening—there are a great many tunnels there! Though the Atami route is a bit gloomy... when we went to Yamakita, I thought they’d coupled locomotives front and back—am I right? When I mentioned such things, my wife fixed her gaze with curious eyes and insisted she absolutely wanted to come along.

She had grown tired of the round trips between Tokyo and Odawara.

“Mr. X is here.” When they exited through the ticket gate, the wife pointed at an automobile driver standing there. When the great earthquake had destroyed their dormitory, our house—which happened to be in that town at the time—did not collapse, so we had provided most of it to Mr. X and his group. We ourselves grew lively and were saved from that anxiety. Mr. X had been a young driver acquaintance ever since.

He drove us slowly through the late-night Baraku streets. All along the way we discussed why we hadn't come since last summer! Mr.X deliberately detoured to keep talking. He dropped us off before Little Baraku at the town's edge—but even as my wife tried to stuff the paper-wrapped fare into his pocket he kept refusing with booming laughter. Laughing all the while—since the road was too narrow to turn back—he drove straight ahead without stopping.

We pounded on Baraku’s gate where light leaked through the cracks.—Who’s there? A voice challenged us, but pretending not to hear, I kept pounding relentlessly. “I never thought you’d actually forget,” she said critically,“but then again,given who you are...” She had struggled considerably over this—Mother treated me with affectionate reproach as if I were some carefree soul． Being told“Well‚that’s just like you”—even by my own parents—made me squirm． Moreover‚she’d say selfish things like“Don’t send letters—replying is such a bother‚”so I held back…though once tomorrow came‚I planned to send a telegram…

“Still, it turned out well in the end,” Mother said, laughing as she repeated those words twice. We spoke mostly of amusing things, effortlessly.

“We hold the memorial service the day before and visit the grave on the ninth—I know that perfectly well! But then X-ko claims we can get everything done on the ninth in one go… How stubborn!”

“That’s been since long ago—” “No, it’s simply that in my father’s country they said it was done that way, Mother.” “I’d already sent out the letters in your name yesterday—the rest I thought we’d discuss once you returned, but now that it’s come to today, I can’t keep saying such things anymore, so I’ve mostly decided—”

“That’s really—Ha….” “Well, that’s exactly why I’ve been thinkin’ I just gotta go back home today no matter what…” “What’ll we do if we miss the train!”

We talked ceaselessly about trivial matters, and when dawn began to break, we went to bed.

March 7th

I woke around noon. When my eyes abruptly opened, I thought it was my usual Tokyo room. Just being here was enough; having no other business, I took some money from Mother and went out to town.

The weather was fine. Thinking back to how I’d fidgeted impatiently at my desk in our Tokyo home made it all seem somehow absurd.—Now I felt a tranquility that might actually let me work calmly.

But here, I resolved not to think about "work." When I thought of that, "matters of home" became a hook that snagged into the roof of my mouth. And I put an end to other imaginings. Just who has cast this fishhook?! Even so, there’s no doubt it’s a highly skilled angler—manipulating the line, even threading it through seaweed, expertly handling the rod. Hiding among the rocks and having grown somewhat accustomed to the pain, I was about to drift into dreams when—not so fast!— And drags. Gives no chance to shake free—yank! I won’t thrash my head or kick my tail anymore, so if you’re going to reel me up, just do it properly—no need for this absurd caution—.

And yet, wasn't spring about to arrive again? As I voiced such preposterous complaints in that way, my thoughts kept shrinking smaller and smaller like an insect. Those works of mine were precisely equivalent to the wails of a hook-swallowed fish thrashing about while drenched in mud. Emotions were attempting to solidify while remaining distorted. With jaw hung slack and mouth gaping open all the while—yawning it did, occasionally even singing diversionary ditties—yet from this mouth denied opening and closing, no clear voice could possibly emerge; there was only something like the rising and falling tones of a conch shell's drone.

When evening came and I returned, the aunt from Shizuoka had also arrived. She was the widow of T, the paternal second son who had died five years prior. T had been a doctor. This aunt was now independently managing a pharmacy in the vicinity of Shizuoka.

I mentioned how I’d been thinking of visiting Shizuoka soon. In Shizuoka there lived a veteran geisha named Ocho. Though I likely hadn’t written her any letters either, I assumed she’d attend Father’s memorial service tomorrow—with this thought, I’d visited Osono’s establishment during my earlier walk to inquire about her whereabouts. No conversation held any interest for me.

Moreover, none of the family members were sitting restlessly. Only Mother—(Oh, when did she start wearing glasses?)—was keeping accounts by the hearth in the tearoom.

I decided to retreat into the box-like back room and sit down at the desk.—That I felt not the slightest desire to drink alcohol struck even me as strange. Here, sitting at the desk in this manner—I hadn’t even considered such a thing until just a moment ago. I took out a pen and paper from the bag and spread them out on the desk. I tried thinking of writing—only stale, terribly stifling thoughts pressed against my eyes, blocking all peripheral vision. Despite that, I remained leaning on the desk. During the day, I had drunk a little at Osono’s place, but even that now felt as insipid as water and had completely slipped my mind. I wished I hadn’t gotten drunk at that house like I sometimes did at home—thinking such things, even there, even in this very house—the various drunken antics I’d often performed came back to me vividly, and I shuddered.

“Where has [Son’s Name]-chan gone?” “Did he go out?” I heard Mother ask Wife.

A lively dinner had begun. “I’ve turned so red just from drinking a little.” When my wife came looking in and asked me about dinner, I answered that I’d already finished eating alone, wearing the same curt expression as when I’m usually at my desk. She withdrew with a peculiar look on her face. Undoubtedly, my eyes must have been gleaming with suspicion. I—like a criminal with a cowed attitude untouched by dreams—surveyed my surroundings and attended to the tranquil disarray in the distance.

The box of dolls Mother said she had put away the previous day sat in the tokonoma alcove. Since I had no sisters, these were just Grandmother's and Mother's old dolls—it’s a wonder they’d survived at all. I tried forcing my resistant heart into submission through sheer will. "If you don't display the Hina dolls," Grandmother used to tell my childhood self, "they'll slide open their box lids themselves on festival mornings and march in procession to drink from the well." I attempted to lose myself in these pleasant doll memories. Yet even now, Grandmother's tale left me vaguely unsettled.

Last night when I suddenly asked Mother about that story, she responded with a bitter smile—"I decorated them with anticipation," she said as if seeking lonely consolation, "and stayed up until nearly midnight that evening." Now that this was a household with just Mother and Jiro, what must the Hina Festival eve be like here... When Flora returned to America, we once sent Hina dolls. Mother had made a dissatisfied face, but I—mixing a pair of her old Hina dolls—had jokingly added that story I’d heard from Grandmother. Did she remember it?

I propped my cheek and tried to focus on carefree memories, but no matter what, my heart refused to be cleansed. I remained terribly transfixed by Mother's writing box in the tokonoma's corner. This was the camphorwood box I'd grown accustomed to seeing since childhood. When had my heart first begun fixating on that? Even my travel fantasies might have been mere pretexts to flee the self-condemnation festering in my cursed mind.

I, trembling with violent palpitations, unsteadily stretched my hand toward it.

"I, adrift in my writing! Incompetent! Stuck! Desperate thrashing!" Just recently—I who had published a novel titled An Unfilial Son in literary circles and incurred widespread scorn—once again stretched out my hand like a thief in the same manner.

"Ah…" I let out a despairing sigh. —My hand turned into a stick and wouldn’t move. I stared at my bony hand exposed under the bright electric light. I curled my fingertips into a detestable rake-like shape and fixed them rigidly, staring only at their tips. My head was nothing more than a dull, obtuse lump. Before long, my arm—like the idiotic withered limb of a witch severed by Watanabe no Tsuna’s rope—became like mere firewood and tumbled down heavily.

While thinking how accursed it was to even contemplate, I had been fixating solely on that for some time now. It seemed I had been indirectly deceiving myself all along. But my heart remained thoroughly gripped at the root by that thing, indulging in a bizarre void. "When it truly came down to it—" In the depths of my chest—I who should be an artist—a hope so meager glared with animal-like eyes. So even while in Tokyo, sighing like that, I had concealed an eerie calm somewhere.

But now that it had truly come down to it, I found myself involuntarily stiffening my arm into rigidity. My right arm had transformed into that grotesque form and lay lifelessly sprawled. —I picked up that firewood-like arm and, with hollow thudding sounds, rhythmically knocked it against my wooden fish-shaped head, my face vacant with dementia. “Ah… I must go on a journey to be saved.”

Mother had been keeping a diary since long ago. Inside that writing box should have been Mother’s diary from this year. I had planned to steal a glance at it. Steal a glance and plot to use it as material for a novel. Why was I compelled by Mother’s diary toward such ugly curiosity and a temptation that, while not novelistic in any conventional sense for me, was in some way novelistic? Why do I experience such grotesque excitement? I shall omit the description here, but those who had read A Man Called an Unfilial Son might perhaps imagine it. Lately, even from friends I had been closely corresponding with, I had been told: "What you’ve been writing recently isn’t good—it’s dull!" I had been told.

Mother has been keeping a diary devotedly since long ago.

At the end of the year, Mother, who would take my hand and go to the bookstore,

“A daily diary published by Hakubunkan—” she would inquire as was her custom. On New Year’s Eve, when she finished the final page of that year—I remember—Mother would close it with a motion imbued with considerable solemnity, producing a slightly different sound than usual as it snapped shut, then unlock the black writing box that opened like a chest of drawers and solemnly store it away. When she returned to her seat once more, she opened the lid of this writing box and stored away the replacement new diary. I would sit at the desk with Mother every evening and listen to her explanations of elementary readers like the National Reader and Swinton’s Reader, as well as the Analects of Confucius—but during that time, right before me, Mother would diligently keep her diary. (This is a trivial aside, but Mother pronounced “reader” as *riido*.) With an accentless pronunciation she had purportedly learned from the old Roman Catholic Japanese missionary who first introduced English to this town, she would recite phrases like *Shīda Bōi Endo Dagāru* (“See the boy and the girl”), *Supurāshudo Daōtā* (“Splashed the water”), and *Supin Ātotsupu*, *Supin Ātotsupu* (“Spin a top”) in the same monotonous cadence as one would chant the *iroha* syllabary. I had learned to call a top *ātottsupu*.

“Since a diary isn’t something anyone else sees, you may keep yours freely—record without hiding what you think and encounter, regardless of whether it’s good or bad.” “I do the same,” I had been taught by Mother, but I never kept it up for more than a month. I was defacing my diary with drawings, but Mother never laid a hand on mine. As proof of that—did I sometimes keep one? When asked, I lied, but there had never been an instance where it was exposed. And each year, I too was given one volume. Although we never spoke it aloud, we had naturally grown accustomed to the notion that a diary was neither something to be shown nor something to be looked at.

For us, there was no anxiety that a diary might be seen by others even if left forgotten. The writing box remained as it was—behind the doll storage box, having grown no older than that state—containing a lustrous sheen that fit comfortably in the hand. My eye, like one clinging to straws, was persistently beguiled by that.

Again, I stretched out my arm. But my fingertips that touched the lid trembled violently and refused to obey. They trembled so chaotically it was almost comical.

March 8th The small number of invited guests welcomed in the afternoon mostly departed before sunset.

—In the end, I had pulled an all-nighter and remained awake as I was, yet I didn’t feel sleepy.

I hadn’t drunk any alcohol either. “Mother, are you still keeping a diary?” I asked in a casual tone, like that of an affectionate reminiscer.

“Yes,” Mother nodded.

“Have you kept it up all this time?” “Well…” Mother smiled. “Never missed a day?” “...Though I can’t maintain it like before.” “It’s just... now—” “I see... You’ve kept all the old ones?” “They must be there.” “Must be quite a collection... Where do you store them?” “The older ones are surely in the long chest—” “Do you ever... look through them?”

“Not often, but occasionally—” “Is it interesting?” “Don’t be absurd—” “Do you plan to keep them forever?” “Shall I perhaps gather them all up and burn them someday?” “I’ve been thinking.”

“Why—” “They’d be in the way.” Even as their conversation reached that point, Mother showed no sign of considering that others might read it. “What about you?”

“…………” “Aren’t you keeping one?”

“Sometimes—” I muttered in a low voice. The novels I was writing these days were like a diary, I secretly justified.

I withdrew alone into the box-like room as on the previous day and lay prostrated over the desk. I had wanted to hide that away in an unseen place, but such a thing was impossible. —I was still being tempted. No other thoughts arose.

“Is ×× not here?”

The elderly uncle was asking Mother about me.

“He said he was studying all last night, so he’s likely resting in the back room.” “What’s this about studying at a time like this— But I suppose that’s better than having him show up drunk, Hah…” “Lately, it seems he hasn’t been drinking much alcohol.” “Whether he drinks or not—what does it matter at that age? Just reckless nonsense.” Since they seemed to be talking without realizing I could hear them, I even considered going out.

"But he’s already thirty-one, you know."

“Oh, has he already reached that age, I wonder…”

After some time had passed, Mother slid open the sliding paper door and asked, “Are you asleep?” I lay slumped over the desk, skillfully feigning a doze with peaceful snores—exactly as if I’d been napping all along. Despite having been on the verge of going out to join my carefree companions, I found myself unexpectedly putting on such an act and regretted it. Mother gently draped the tanzen robe over my back.

Eventually, I truly fell asleep. I dreamed that Hina dolls formed a procession and came to drink water at the well beside the garden pond. This was not the first time I had had this dream. I had seen the same dream when I was a child, yet it remained strangely vivid in my memory.

March 9th

I had slept until around three in the afternoon.

The family members had all returned from visiting the grave. It was the third anniversary of Father’s death.

I walked with my waiting wife and went to visit the grave. At the temple, I encountered Osono and Ocho.

*

“March ××”

For reasons unknown even to himself, he had spent from the seventh to this day writing about the matters described above in terrible anguish, working through sleepless nights at his family home in the countryside. He received a letter from A in America. A had sent it to his hometown out of concern for his precarious living situation in Tokyo.

Among the scraps of paper he had long ago discarded, there existed the following passage.

"The other day I saw off my friend A, who was going to America, at Tokyo Station." Friend going to America—such matters stirred in me a foolish sentimentality born of certain family circumstances. I’ll omit the reasons, but I was made to become a peculiar sort of sentimentalist—not your ordinary well-wisher. It was A’s first journey. Ever since it was decided, he had ceaselessly day and night—with his chest pounding garishly and restlessly, as though sitting in a parlor where a broom lay carelessly tossed aside, as if someone were beating a dusting cloth against his breastbone—he would often tell me, describing it thus with an oddly unmoored sadness that refused to settle. "Somehow, I can only tell you these feelings," he would tell me whenever he got drunk. Indeed, I had shared in action—without a shred of shame, with a brightness that pained—not only in his restlessness that bordered on pathological, but in his sentimentality, in several clandestine farewell gatherings, and even in his drunken tears. Which of us was really leaving? The one seeing off? In the end, even I had forgotten such distinctions.

“Your feelings board the ship with me and arrive in that land—when I think that, it feels somehow eerie.”

One evening he said such things and gazed at my face. During that time, I might have been the peculiar invalid. Since I—who had been perpetually lounging about at home—suddenly transformed into someone constantly going out, my wife eventually wore an uneasy expression.

I had never witnessed a ship’s departure before, so I considered going all the way to Yokohama to see one, but remembering things like pulling streamers made me miss my chance. “A—you must have reached that land by now, while I still... Soon I’ll write you a peculiar letter, but your first Sunday there must be devoted to me—” A’s letter mentioned meeting Flora’s family and his half-sister H—who shared only the father he’d known through photographs. That they believed in his arrival—this too was written there.

* He abandoned the trip to △△ Hot Springs—which he himself had asked his mother to inquire about accommodations for—and suddenly,

“I’m returning to Tokyo tomorrow,” he said. The one most disheartened by this news was his wife. Rather than for herself, she could not bear—for his sake—to witness his listless life in Tokyo. He had no choice but to turn his mind toward those dozens of fragmented manuscript pages—scarcely any sheet fully filled with text—and the discarded papers he had abandoned in that lonely house in Tokyo’s unpleasant suburbs. Each was akin to feeble, dreamlike whispers. Yet among them lay nothing but fictional constructs where nowhere appeared figures from his own circle.

And yet he sensed some active purpose in himself—this self that had abandoned the △△ trip and now sought to return to Tokyo. So, what had he scribbled down? Even when trying to recall, they were nothing but insubstantial things he couldn’t seem to remember. When his mental state was at its most pitiable, he had a habit of pointlessly conceiving title-like things utterly divorced from any substantive content. However, this was not a habit he had developed upon becoming a novelist; since childhood, he had possessed a similar tendency.

Whether for paintings or novels, when he conceived the title first, he had almost no experience of the work coalescing into form. It stood to reason—these were bad, infantile sentiments utterly lacking substance, yet deceptively artful in execution—mere shallow glyphs parading as craft. Thus whenever he had formulated a title prematurely, he found himself hard-pressed to hastily expunge it. On rare occasions he might contort his prose to flatter some contrived appellation, though such efforts invariably perished stillborn.

"What on earth had I been thinking, what had I been writing all this time?" he muttered, but found himself utterly unable to recall. “Winter Wind Chime” He remembered scrawling such phrases on paper, but as had ever been his way, there wasn’t a single word of substance in any of it.