Pathway to Japanese Literature

One morning, as I finished breakfast and was smoking a cigarette, A came and, without entering,

“You—let’s go for a walk right now—quickly, quickly—go get ready this instant.”
“You don’t have this kind of outfit, do you?”
“Ah, right—if not, regular Western-style clothes will do—hurry up and change!” he blurted out in frantic haste, then exited through the entranceway without waiting for my reply, pacing back and forth along the alley there while whistling restlessly.
When I looked, A was dressed in a hunting cap, a jacket with a band, riding breeches—that sort of outfit—with a large mahogany case slung over his shoulder and a reed walking stick in his hand.

"It’s been quite some time since we last met!" I said, yet A’s demeanor showed no trace of calmness.
To be fair, since A often made eccentric gestures anyway, I didn’t find it particularly suspicious at that point.
A was someone who hardly spoke unless intoxicated (this being our sole point of resemblance), yet that day he paid no attention to my reactions and kept relentlessly rambling about these vague, smoke-like matters that held no interest for me whatsoever.
There was barely room to breathe.
"And today I’m peculiarly worked up!" he added abruptly.
I refrained from asking any questions myself.

“I’m writing a novel right now.
“I started writing from this second section—the Childhood Chapter.
“After describing through various narratives the environment surrounding that childhood era, I planned a terrifyingly long story that would follow through until I—now thirty-one years old—would finally set out toward that unknown land.
“But having first written out this second section—the Childhood Chapter—before taking even a single step into the main subject, I abruptly found myself stuck. Perhaps my method of selecting scenes was flawed—though truthfully, when I take up the pen, I’ve grown accustomed to such willful disregard for narrative flow—but to hit such an insurmountable block so easily? I never dreamed it possible.
“In a fit of temper, I suddenly jumped to the end and made this the first section—but then this too abruptly hit a dead end.”

A launched into this fevered monologue without any preface.
Even when he said "this" or "that," none of it made sense to me, but since A showed no concern, I simply let him ramble on as he pleased.
I was hardly listening.
Only the unfamiliar phrase "hata to, hata to" that A kept repeating struck me as amusing.

"I no longer knew what to do.
Last night and the night before and the night before that, I read through those two unfinished manuscripts over and over without sleeping a wink—but ah! It's hopeless!"

“Huh! You’re really going all out! Somehow.”

“It can’t be hopeless—no matter what, it can’t be hopeless—I can’t stay like this... I have to go—I have to go!”

“Where to?”

“You—let me ramble freely. The truth is, if I stop talking I’ll get drowsy—if I don’t keep walking briskly like this, I might collapse from sleepiness. Starting today, I’m resetting my reversed sleep cycle—no matter how painful, I’ll endure it until evening.”

“Oh—so that’s why you were spouting all that nonsense? Just rambling unchecked?”

“Well, yes—you—why don’t we quicken our pace a bit?”

“……Hmm.”

“What splendid weather we’re having! Such rare weather! A morning this serene must be truly uncommon.”

“Lately, it’s been like this every day.”

“Hold it! Ridiculous! So night’s still no good after all…you? On a day like this, if you were sitting at a desk, there’s no way your mind could turn unsound.”

“I’ve only pulled two or three all-nighters since being born, so I don’t know about nights… but you—couldn’t you ease your pace a bit more?”

“—It was a quiet late night transitioning from winter to spring.”
I would face my desk each night like a fish at the water’s bottom, fixedly staring ahead.
I had begun with the volume of reminiscences; yet no matter how indiscriminately I spread open those pages, none could evoke in me the mood of recollection—that small shadow within my heart remained unchanged, its causes and effects still entwined with my present mind; and wearied by remembrance, I grew afraid.

“Hey! I told you to walk slower—”

“What year and month were you born?”

“Me?”—How utterly foolish to respond to some sleep-deprived nonsense.

“I was born in November of Meiji 29.”
“That makes me thirty-one this year.”

“November... you?”

“Yes, an autumn child.—Ah! What magnificent weather today! The sky’s perfectly clear.”
“The air’s like water—you there, open your mouth and run a little! Feels splendid!”

“How’s the drowsiness?”

“Much improved.”
“But I’ll be in trouble if topics run dry…… These days—do you know when the moon rises?”
“Between eleven and midnight—a proper misty night. The half-moon was positively glorious.”
“And then—”

When A ran out of material for his monologues, he would start muttering incessantly about the first section this, the second section that.
Today was an exception, but when it comes to talk of novels, I find myself unable to respond.
That’s why A too rarely ever brought it up in front of me.

A and I had been friends since childhood.
Though both A and I graduated from the same school’s humanities department, our specialisations being entirely different meant we hardly ever discussed work matters; yet as neither of us had other close friends, we continued associating just as we had in the old days.
A wrote novels and plays, but I had never read his works.
There was no ill intent—neither opportunity nor any—and knowing full well I lacked the mind to appreciate such things, he never once asked.

That's right!
I do recall having read what was supposedly his debut work—it must have been when we were twenty-one or twenty-two.
The reason I remember is that he gave me the novel written in that notebook.
When I saw the first page grandly inscribed with "I dedicate this first work of mine to Brother B, my friend since infancy," I was overcome by an odd sensation—my face burning crimson.
It was titled "The Child Who Cried Under a Mask."

The child protagonist would gather friends daily to stage theatrical games. He primarily gathered girls from the audience. While there were various descriptions of his family environment in the manuscript, these elements formed its core focus. He appeared secretly enamored with a girl named Haru-chan, going to great lengths to capture her attention. "Since all our actors played formidable generals, our plays consisted solely of Battle of Sekigahara reenactments spanning two or three acts—yet none ever fell in battle. I performed the most violent swordplay I could muster to thrill Haru-chan, then cornered Sanpei backstage and implored, 'Won't you let me kill you?'—"

From the very beginning, he had never liked Genkichi, the only son of the neighboring house, and refused to let him join the group.
Genkichi wailed while dragging his mother about, pleading through her mouth to be admitted.
They paid him no heed.
They thought it insolent that someone younger than them would want to join their circle.
As Genkichi clung to his mother's hair and wailed, they coldly glared back as if daring him to keep watching.
The battle gradually intensified, and he deliberately flourished a great sword ostentatiously before Haru-chan's eyes.
The audience, though chilled to the marrow, spared no applause for the brave actors.

"At that moment, a splitting burst of laughter erupted from the audience seats."

“Oh my, how amusing!” cried Haru-chan, leaping to her feet in excitement.
I too cast a sidelong glance from beneath my Susanoo-no-Mikoto mask to see a young boy—clutching the comical mask everyone had rejected during this splendid battle—stumbling bewildered into our midst.
It was Genkichi.
The actors were inwardly surprised, yet continued fighting even more fiercely without so much as a glance.
I bellowed at the top of my lungs and swung the large spear with full force.
I slashed and slashed, cutting wildly.
However, since the young boy had become the sole focus of the spectators' gazes, the samurai actors grew thoroughly embarrassed.

“He absolutely refused unless it was the general’s mask—unfortunately only that one remained—so we finally tricked him.”

“My, my! But really now, what a sprightly child Genbō is! And how clever!”

The mothers too emerged and showered Genkichi with praise.
We stewed in resentment but had no choice but to keep fighting.
Genkichi grew emboldened and danced.
The spectators clutched their bellies laughing and rolling about, then poured their fullest applause upon the charming fool.

Soon, his carelessness—the butt of his spear struck Genkichi’s head with a solid thud.
Genkichi let out a scream.
Genkichi, without even the strength to remove his mask, bawled inconsolably right where he was.
The spectators felt great sympathy for Genkichi, yet some still couldn't help but stifle their laughter.
Genkichi's comical and pitiful figure became the center of attention.

"On stage, the Sanbyōdō battle still raged on, but I feigned kindness to comfort Genkichi, thinking that paying him attention might at least somewhat divert the audience’s focus."
Genkichi clutched the mask tightly with both hands and wailed.
I resentfully thought this brat was putting on an act with his crocodile tears, but gently comforted him anyway.

With rough hands I tore off Genkichi's mask. His face was drenched in tears. Realizing he'd been genuinely crying after all, I felt a flicker of goodwill toward him. The spectators who saw the popular actor's bare face gaped curiously and buzzed with excitement. Then Genkichi wrenched out a final tearful "A-ee!" and grinned as if repaying their sympathy.

"When Genkichi’s mother—who had returned home reassured—came to retrieve him and he left,"

“Shin-chan, let’s play again.” Haru-chan dashed out first.
Right after,

“Despite Sanpei’s repeated proclamations of ‘Now begins the great battle of earnest combat!’, most spectators scattered in all directions, paying no heed.”

“Capture Haru!”
“I’ll make anyone who goes back regret it!”
Having said that, Sanpei dashed off in pursuit, and the actors followed with a collective shout.

“That Shin-kō bastard didn’t show up ’cause he’s sweet on Haru?!”

Sanpei’s voice rang out in the distance, laced with hostility.
I started.
“Can you sense bad things right away?—That’s how it felt.”

"I hesitated to survey my surroundings. Fortunately, no one was there."
"Even so, I felt I couldn't cry in such an exposed place."
"Though still a child—had I fallen for a woman?"
"The moment this thought struck me, terror seized me. Left utterly alone on the straw mat, I could no longer resist the burning heat at the corners of my eyes."

Suddenly, I picked up the mask that had fallen at my feet.
I hurriedly pressed it against my face.
I pressed it until it hurt.—And then, when I thought it would be fine to cry, I suddenly felt foolish and threw the mask away.

I dropped down cross-legged on the straw mat and simply sat blankly.—When I felt a sting, I looked at the back of my hand to find a mosquito had landed there.
"I bit my lower lip and slowly began to spread one palm to strike it down when—suddenly wanting to quietly watch its abdomen gradually swelling—I instead froze in place and stared fixedly at the mosquito's workings."——

It was still long—it covered all the way up to when he became a young man.
A once mentioned that soon after, he had revised this and published it in some magazine, but I never saw it.
I found it neither boring nor interesting—in fact, I had no such memory—but when I asked A whether Genkichi might be some shadow of myself, he answered that he was an imaginary character, so I let out a sigh of relief.
When I answered “Yeah…,” I had intended to cut off relations.

Passing through small stations like Ogikubo and Nishi-Ogikubo, we reached a place called Inokashira with its large marsh at a half-trot.
I suggested we rest a bit on a bench, but A refused and continued chattering nonstop while shaking his head and exercising his arms, not allowing his body a moment’s rest.
I walked while gazing at the geese on the water.
A said that it was dangerous not to keep doing this and mainly kept his eyes fixed on the sky.

“Enduring sleepiness—when it reaches this extreme—becomes its own damn pleasure.”
“…If there’s no destination to reach in the end, I can’t damn well conclude it no matter what—even in my fantasies, I hate suicide, and turning it into some tearful laughter feels old-fashioned… Plus it doesn’t sit right with me… But then again, ending up in despair or stupor or numbness—it’s a damn shame even to myself… Ah, guess I’ll go after all.”

A was exerting every effort to combat drowsiness while showering his sleepiness with shouts of rebuke—so long as he kept talking with all his strength without pause, any phrases would do; thus when even such rambling monologues ceased, A would emit futile animal-like moans of “Ooh-ooh” or clench his fist and strike his own head with full force. Having pulled such an awful all-nighter and remained awake afterward, he must have been driven to these extreme motions—or so I deeply sympathized, though it was something beyond my own experience.

"There's no foothold—none at all!"
"I’ve been cursed by my own indulgence—after all, I never anticipate the results in any situation."
"Idiot!" A barked like a drill sergeant.
There was no use lending an ear, nor did his ravings hold any meaning—so I reasoned that for A himself, such shouting bore no true anguish but was merely a means to overcome drowsiness—and thus we remained as carefree as students taking a stroll between study sessions.
A seemed like someone reciting memorized passages.

“It would be fine if it were merely the result of living, but my thoughts and life are so meager—”

“Oh, I wonder what that small brown bird is?”
“Look—it dove again!”
“Ah!”
“There it surfaces over there again!”

“There’s no need to deliberately seek changes in life—if only the five senses were complete…”

“Oh! It’s not just one—another head popped up over there! They must have incredible lung capacity!”

“Is this urge to needlessly demean myself some form of neurasthenia?”
“But for me, it’s not without purpose…”

“Two!”
“Three!”
“There’s a whole flock of them!”
“Oh! They’ve all vanished again!”

“I’ve stopped—completely—for now!
“Let’s decide to go—this is no time to indulge in insensitive delusions.”

“What a strange bird that is!”

I watched with interest the small water birds I was seeing for the first time, disappearing and reappearing.

After circling the pond, we headed into town to begin our return journey.
When we reached town, A could no longer make his unreasonable outbursts and, having run out of things to talk about, appeared considerably weakened.

"How about it?"

"My head is just pounding."

"What do we do now?"

"Having me tag along all day... Even you must..." I asked evasively whereupon A pointed to a shared automobile at the street corner.

“I had intended to ride that. Now that we’re here, I can go alone!” he said.
The shared automobile had a sign that read “Observatory.”
A said that since he had received a letter of introduction from someone, he was now going to visit the Observatory.
And he began describing the Observatory’s appearance in vivid detail, as though he’d stumbled upon the perfect subject.
In the middle of a wild field stood a massive hemisphere like an overturned bowl; flip its switch and the sphere slowly split down the center, whereupon a great telescope aimed skyward emerged like a smokestack. To peer through this eyepiece required lying face-up on a platform beneath it—the lens opening aligned precisely with one’s face when positioned so—a magnificent cannon-like telescope impossible to use otherwise. Beginning with this spectacle, he rattled off meticulous descriptions of the Observatory’s features.
So when I too became interested and offered to accompany him, he flusteredly refused, saying it couldn’t be done due to the letter of introduction.

“Next time—”

“Well then, I’ll count on you at that time.”

“Well then, goodbye!” said A, shaking my hand.
He had such a habit, and I—who normally found these farewells with A so disagreeable that I would unconsciously prolong them—was made to blush this day by his absurdly exaggerated handshake. Had A perhaps gotten carried away narrating that place he’d never seen with such feverish enthusiasm?
That might be why he became flustered upon hearing my request to accompany him—after all, A had this foolish habit of exaggeration.
That’s right—perhaps when he suddenly spotted that automobile in his usual desperate attempt to stave off sleepiness, he’d latched onto it as conversation material and spouted those outlandish claims; I’d never once heard him express interest in such things before… Alright then, next time he showed up, I’d play dumb to the very end and zealously press him about accompanying me—so I resolved.
(He must have gotten off the automobile midway and secretly turned back—still, once alone, how in the world had he battled that drowsiness? I’d never seen anyone so desperately sleepy before.
When he himself had claimed there was a reclining platform beneath the telescope—that bastard!
He must have staggered unsteadily!)——(Poor thing—had I kept him company around the pond a bit longer, perhaps he wouldn’t have been driven to take that automobile if he’d been muttering his monologues there!)

I had been eagerly awaiting A’s arrival ever since—over two months had passed—yet he still had not shown himself.

A's wife visited B because her husband—who had left three days earlier saying he was going to B's place—still hadn't returned.

The area around A's desk was buried in scattered manuscripts.

From among them, she extracted one or two relatively coherent realistic pieces.
(The other fragments consisted entirely of things like sweet fairy-tale dreams or impressionistic ramblings whose substance was suspect—inexplicable extensions of the ravings he had muttered around the pond.)

Part One (From midway.)

“That might be acceptable—Father apparently still has acquaintances over there.” Mother agreed without much surprise when she herself had broached the subject.—“They do exist, don’t they? You’ve been corresponding with them.”

“Well—” I nodded, but since this travel plan was partly due to things I couldn’t discuss frankly with Mother, I found myself pitying her.
My wife and I—delighted like children at being able to go together—were discussing it openly without concern: “She’s older than me by one year? Two?”
“Two?”

“If we count in the Western style, how would that be?”

“It’s not the same, you fool.”

“Ah, is that so…?”

Truly, I was in a dreamlike state.
Though there existed the clear objective of going to meet a sister—separated from our mother—whom I had never seen, for someone of my disposition who rarely considers matters with urgency, my ordinarily haze-filled head merely continued to doze half-awake within the limited scope of dreams.
If anything, having such an objective made me feel constrained, and I began to increasingly resent the very journey I had so carefully planned for its sake.
——Based solely on the photograph’s impression, there’s no way I could be mistaken—but if those eyeballs were blue, how utterly creepy that would be!
Such thoughts were all I could muster.

"So how old would Father have been then?" the wife said, wearing a smile that seemed to savor sweetly malicious pleasure as she deliberately waited for my reply.
At such times, my wife did indeed seem to harbor some triumphant sentiment toward my mother.
I would often deliberately match her calm tone while studying these base emotions of hers, provocatively steering her words along until inevitably she would venomously blurt out one of the following mockeries.

"Father didn't like your Mother all that much, did he?"

"He told me once when he was drunk—'I left because I couldn't stand it anymore!'"

"When you were born, your father must've been secretly disappointed, hohohoho."
"Father was twenty-two or twenty-three."

“Unless circumstances were truly dire, he couldn’t possibly abandon a newborn child!”

I could not bring myself to acknowledge my father’s circumstances through such a simplistic lens and self-serving logic.
I found myself thinking precisely the opposite in equally simplistic terms—but regardless, once I had let her say such things, I was suddenly stripped of composure and struck by a gloom-laden mood.
……(I must be a child born of unnatural love, ????
Is this why I’m such an idiot?!
And so I am—strangely weak-willed by nature, cunning in a way, lacking that manly single-mindedness, impatient to a fault, yet possessed of a knack for underhanded tricks.
And I grow tired of everything so quickly!)

Moreover, I—I should have become far more misanthropic by now! Even when I mocked my own absent-minded heart in such terms, I never encountered any real troubles.

(But...? I wonder—in reality, which side’s coldness drove father to leave alone?)

I would sometimes indulge in such thoughts as if pondering some profound question.
And I would sometimes find myself gazing fixedly at the face of the woman before me—a face I myself didn’t particularly care for either.
And I felt a ridiculous chill within me.

(I'm terrified to travel alone for even a month... Our eldest son has already turned five.—Lately, this desire to journey alone has grown unbearably strong.)

In truth, I had never experienced anything resembling love—even when recalling that woman before my wife, I felt only an unpleasant dread—had that continued, how happy I might have been! There were no such memories at all.

"Anyway, he was in his twenties..."

Still, she continued her malicious probing.

"Is that so…"

……That’s why I now feared my own delusions in advance and endeavored not to let her utter those final words.

"There were two children, apparently."
"But N—apparently only one survived."
“Father once said it was a mercy only one survived.”

“…………”

What words would she finally use today?
Thinking this, I felt tempted by her vulgar smile—but resisted.
Enduring this could only be achieved by showing displeasure—I had grown weary of escalating into savage arguments with her over such matters. Even as I thought how strange this had become, I displayed an oddly sullen expression and cut off her words.
——But I was still driven to delusions I didn’t want to entertain.
I linked my weak nature to that preposterous, vile thought.

I shook my head and, while whistling nonchalantly, interjected in the tone of a worldly-wise optimist.
——“…Of course I don’t think he’s single anymore.
“Though he hasn’t exactly informed us.”

"Isn't it awkward that you haven't been able to send adequate money since Henry died?"

"So—"
"I think N—— must be married by now."
"...He might have unexpectedly fallen into terribly wretched circumstances."

I, who once faced Father—ever since first laying eyes on him in my teens—found something inexplicable, and oh! Father! The wife, who had observed the peculiar father and son who never addressed each other as such, would still occasionally mimic Father’s Westernized name—a name that had ironically become easier for me to utter in her presence—and whenever she did so in such situations, I was overcome with unbearable disgust. But ever since formulating that plan, even when she adopted that cheap, frivolous tone of hers, I no longer made those strangely fastidious scowls as before—instead, I found myself readily concurring with her more often than not. She suddenly started wearing Western-style clothes and attending English conversation practice. I too had the same need as she did, but being someone who—whenever things turned formal—had grown accustomed to being utterly incapable of proper conversation even in daily interactions, I thought such practice unnecessary. To be sure, I also felt that practicing might actually make me speak more insensitively, but when meeting such a sister and that peculiar stepmother, I thought it would be more convenient for me if my speech remained less fluent. Moreover, since there was F—— who likely hadn’t yet forgotten Japanese, it posed no issue—with her, I had grown accustomed to years of interaction in our language, which I had to carry on carelessly, even deliberately childishly, more so than when conversing with any woman from my own country.

“Our household is really putting on a show... And with such a commonplace incident, it wouldn’t make for an interesting story even if written.”

With deliberate affectation, I said such things while forcing a bored-looking smile.

“But somehow, I feel happy though.”

As days passed，I found myself increasingly unable to bear the profound tedium of being accompanied by my wife.
The purpose didn't matter—I wanted to continue this voyage stretching endlessly onward alone；otherwise there'd be no point in going—this yearning had grown unbearably strong.
It was supposed to last about a year.

If I were to leave her behind，my wife would have to live with Mother.
The fact that such feelings existed within my heart—even I found it difficult to confess this directly.

“Mother—does she truly not know about N——?”
“It’s not that she doesn’t know…”

“Shūko seems delighted about going together!”

“That one’s probably fine with it—given how she is——” Mother snickered with spiteful amusement.
I had always made it my habit to utter compromising words of flattery to Mother at such times.
In such instances alone did I feel a faint, unhealthy sense of filial duty.
Compared to Mother, how utterly my wife lacked even the unforgivable minimum of feminine refinement expected at her age!
What a coarse woman she was!
We would habitually discuss such matters in that unpleasantly tepid tone of ours; I would secretly feel struck by the vulgarity of our own baseness; indeed I often took the lead before Mother in giving voice to such things—but now I found those exchanges utterly foolish, no longer out of any fastidiousness.

…………

Therefore, I lacked both the vitality to voice opposition to Mother and the confidence to splendidly incur her displeasure.
I could only grin vaguely, just as I had whistled in front of my wife.
And in such instances, I would ultimately find myself driven by delusions that fatefully trampled upon my own insignificance, growing immeasurably yet vaguely impatient.
I would lament male insincerity one moment, then find distasteful the perverse strength of female self-respect the next.
For example, Father’s figure—having left Mother alone in solitude while crudely and boisterously promoting only his own position—appeared rather dejected and unreliable.
The figure of my unfortunate mother, who had endured stoically and lived through insipid days, instead bore down on me with a powerful yet eerie radiance—and imparted an uncanny reassurance.

When I considered how even I now coldly spoke to Mother about my wife with feigned composure and boasted such things to myself—the beginnings of it all—it became clear that I alone was never merely passive in some hollow way.
And yet within me there had existed from the very beginning a certain insincerity—the very insincerity I most detested!
Male insincerity—.
We had disappointed our respective parents and entered this ill-considered marriage!

When I grew disgusted with such thoughts and turned insincere, I attributed my cowardly indolence to the aberrant household of my childhood.
In form alone they were stern—from my maternal grandmother, who became a young widow and was likely prone to hysteria, and from my mother—I had been warped in some way.
In that interim, I had been granted sweet idleness by my paternal grandparents—ignorant yet carefree.
And I could not forget that my father—whom I had never seen—was in a distant land——.
In the end, I had my father's cheerful indulgence stolen away by something, and my mother's stubborn self-respect and scrupulous conservatism pilfered by something—I had grown so thin.
No one from any respectable family ever looked like me.
My facial features bore no resemblance to anyone from either family... As this fragile thought stretched endlessly onward, I lost the strength to hold my ground—sucked into smoke, my very form on the verge of being erased.

“…………”

While I maintained an attitude of superficial agreement with Mother, anticipating criticism about my wife, she abruptly adopted a restrained expression and said: “That would be better—otherwise Shūko might meet the same fate as I.”

“Fate?”
......”

“If she herself insists on coming along, wouldn’t that be just fine?”

“Wh—?!”

“Eikichi can stay with me—a year’s no trouble at all…” Mother spoke of her first grandchild.

Perhaps it was better for Mother too that we weren’t yet by her side—thinking this, I felt a greater sense of relief toward her. But suddenly I found myself seized by strangely malicious claws that made me bite my lip and bored hands ignorant of everything clutching my collar, dragged mercilessly back from the new dream to my original world—that ill-fitting place I’d grown accustomed to.

Part Two

“When there’s a moonlit night—” Grandmother explained.
“Surely the next moon brings the fifteenth night? But must we still pass seven more nights before then?”
Grandmother flipped through the calendar while

"If only it were a moonlit night!" she muttered further, haughtily pursing her lips.

On a certain moonless early autumn evening, Grandmother and I engaged in an exchange of questions and answers regarding persimmon astringency.
When first encountered during a moonlit night, the astringency of green persimmons disappeared once, but when the next moonless night arrived, it returned completely to its original state.
And when the second moonlit night came around, this time the astringency truly disappeared, and for the first time, the persimmons could be eaten properly——.

That’s how Grandmother explained it in her usual manner, but I tilted my head in apparent disbelief.

“So if it just becomes a moonlit night, does the astringency suddenly disappear starting that very evening?” I blurted out. “No way!”
I retorted in that tone.

“Yes.”

Grandmother answered firmly, “Ah, from that very night,” and nodded deeply.
That’s absurd!
I thought.

Around Grandmother’s house stood counted over a dozen persimmon trees deeply familiar to me. On every tree hung clusters of hard, green fruits—ones one couldn’t imagine would ever ripen red. I imagined a night scene where moonlight as bright as water rustled down upon the tree branches. Countless green fruits bathed in the pale light, polished by its radiance, rose up vividly. The smooth skin of the green fruits exuded a cold sweat. It was not night dew—that bitter astringency had exuded as sweat. The moonlight possessed such mysterious power. And then, when one encountered that moment—as when a magic lantern’s lens abruptly sharpens into extreme brightness—where the beautiful moonlight spread its great hands and blazed forth in full glory, those countless persimmons, overcome with emotion, aligned themselves in unison and scattered away their final tears in a fluttering cascade…….

“Oh my, it was such a lovely moonlit night—could it have rained after all?”

Those who had fallen asleep would undoubtedly perk up their ears and murmur thus.
The next morning, when people awoke and looked, all the persimmons had taken on a bright red hue overnight.
People doubted their own eyes.
And they thought that rain had brought about this marvel....

“It’s just like a Kineorama show.”

Forgetting my own overthinking, I muttered mockingly. To believe Grandmother’s story, I could not help imagining such garish miracles. I recalled that spectacle called Kineorama—where ten thousand windows lit up all at once—and scoffed at Grandmother’s proposal as absurd. “No matter how moonlit it gets, there’s no way the astringency would vanish so suddenly!”

“Who would lie to you?”

“And besides—the other day I plucked one and gave it a tiny lick. It was still sweet.”

“So that time fell within the previous moonlit night. Didn’t you even notice such a thing?” Grandmother shattered my stubbornness.

I couldn’t help but think this story was merely another of Grandmother’s fairy-tale-like fancies. Otherwise, in my mind, there remained nothing but to compare the persimmons to lights flickering on and off——.

“There’s no fool who’d eat persimmons so early—what a waste!”

Sure enough, Grandmother said that.
And she expounded on the life of trees.
"How sinful a vice it is to waste unripe fruits!"
she recounted through moral causality.
Therefore, while I couldn't regard "The Tale of Moonlit Nights and Persimmon Astringency" as factual, I had nonetheless been made to internalize Grandmother's religious sermons through daily repetition.
And it was terrifying.
I had never engaged in such mischief as reaching out for unripe fruits like the neighborhood children did.

After mustering great resolve, I had confessed to Grandmother that I'd taken a small bite! To dispel doubt, I plucked a green fruit and bit into it—at that moment, it truly wasn't astringent. But with no sweetness either, I lacked the will to keep eating, so I shut my eyes and hurled it deep into the thicket. Grandmother's custom was to apologize to uneaten fruits as if they were people whenever they had to be discarded—even offering encouragements about waiting to sprout—to lay them properly to rest. Some scoffed at her extravagant words, but I'd been trained from the heart not to laugh.

“She’ll probably make a bitter face,” I thought, “but she’ll retract this actual ‘Tale of Moonlit Nights and Persimmon Astringency’ and replace it with some cold moral lecture—” Yet Grandmother remained obstinate, declaring only: “So that time was still within a moonlit night.”

Was it a moonlit night?

I tried to think back, but I couldn't recall anything about that night.
Was I truly defeated?
I couldn't tell whether I had truly lost or not, but somehow grew bored,

"I wish Mother would come fetch me soon," I muttered.
Though forcing a smile, I was sternly admonished by Grandmother—people who waste hard-grown fruits before they can even be eaten will never amount to anything, she went on about how henceforth I must... until I became utterly terrified.
From within the thicket's undergrowth, a green persimmon—discarded with teeth marks still indented in its flesh—caught my eye; swallowing its resentment, it glared fixedly this way.

Grandmother had sent her only son to live in Tokyo and for many years lived alone in this old house.
The only grandchild was I.
My mother was the only daughter of this household and had married into a nearby family.
My mother had lost her father when she was seven years old, it was said.

In my chest, an inexplicably terrifying shudder and intellectual misgivings about moonlit nights and persimmons squatted in mismatched disarray.
——I, as if to sweep away such thoughts,

“Tonight, Mom said she would bring the phonograph.”

“I detest anything that reeks of foreigners.
“I said I didn’t want to hear it, but the other day O-Sei from our house—”

“It’s in English so I can’t understand a thing at all,” and such—though fully aware of my own sycophantic intent—I couldn’t help but try to win Grandmother’s favor indirectly.

Mother blew out the lantern and,

“The phonograph will be brought later by Mr. Kuni,” she said.
The mute servant of Grandmother’s household came ceremoniously bearing a white wooden box—devised by a Japanese cabinetmaker to contain all the equipment—holding it as though it were something both light and heavy.
Inside were six records, a small megaphone, and a compact machine with its inner workings exposed—each separated by wooden partitions within.

Mother took out the cotton-wrapped cylindrical records from a tea caddy-like cardboard box, carefully unwrapped them, and played each one in turn while giving preliminary explanations for every single one.

Even so, Grandmother was listening under the lamp with a puzzled look.

Mother, with slight resolve, read aloud the explanatory notes for the records her husband had sent along with this one.

“Number Six,” Mother announced as she lifted the cylinder labeled “No 6” in one hand, then read aloud: “Number Six—This recording contains a choral performance with piano accompaniment of lyrics and music independently composed by our classmates for graduation commemoration. Classifiable as a thanksgiving hymn; though we omit detailed explication, the melodies shall convey meaning through their own logic. I too participated as one of the singers.”
Mother had grown so accustomed to reading them at our household that she had memorized all the explanatory notes, yet she recited this one with deliberate freshness.
And I too had heard them so many times that Mother’s demeanor appeared artificially comical.
——It was a commemorative item from when my father graduated from a rural middle school in America Fayerhaven the previous year.
Father was thirty years old.
And this year he sent word that he had moved to the capital and enrolled in college.

It was a short choral song.

“Which one could be Father’s voice?”

We had often exchanged such words at home as well, striving in vain to discern Father’s voice from the flat, muddied chorus lacking in modulation; yet Mother, instead of consulting Grandmother, turned to me with an empty smile.
——Midway through the hymn, where a single thick voice strayed from pitch and momentarily disrupted the rhythm, we arbitrarily pointed out this barely perceptible flaw and playfully declared it must be Father’s doing; yet Mother here too said something similar and faintly smiled.
Since there were no other Japanese besides Father, when we thought this, that voice seemed slightly different from the others.

“This!”
“This one!”
“We were all saying things like ‘That’s it!’ as we discussed…”

Mother sought Grandmother’s agreement.

Grandmother remained silent.—When the daughter suddenly looked at the old woman’s face, tears dwelled in her eyes.

It wasn’t unusual for us to stay here, but that night we decided to stay after sending word.—We had once lived here as our primary residence.

I had dozed off earlier but, startled by a dream upon opening my eyes, saw Mother collapsed beside Grandmother like a young girl, her shoulders trembling finely. That appeared distant, like a scene from a play. She's crying! I thought. I suppressed the habitual bad-tempered fuss I make upon waking. I fell asleep thinking of how those persimmons that had been so sweet until recently couldn't possibly have turned astringent, of how frustrating it was having no way to test them regardless, that the discarded ones must already be yellowing and rotting away—those thoughts and nothing else.

Several days had passed since then.

There was still time before the next moonlit night.

Though all the persimmons elsewhere remained green, only those on the tree called Daiomaru in the garden corner had begun taking on a strange pale yellow.
This tree bore only a countable number of fruits, but their quality surpassed that of any other persimmons, and when left until the thirteenth night, they would ripen to the size of summer mandarins.
Grandmother made it her custom not to lay a hand on these until they were to be used as thirteenth night offerings.

It’s not yet the season for crows or insects to come pecking—what could have caused this? Grandmother, finding this strange, took a good, careful look at the short tree only to discover that every single fruit bore slight wounds. And the skin of every single pale yellow-tinged fruit lost their luster and elasticity. Upon looking even more closely, the wounds were unmistakably human bite marks.

One day, I secretly climbed this easiest-to-scale tree and tested the astringency of each and every persimmon while they still hung on the branches. I grew irritated testing one after another, but they all remained miserably astringent. Spitting as I went, I climbed down the tree in a daze.

I had thought from the very beginning that since they remained on the tree, leaving them like this would let the persimmons mature as they were—

I came to fully believe in that miraculous "Tale of Moonlit Nights and Persimmon Astringency."

By the time persimmons from other trees—now faintly sweetened yet still verdant—were offered during the Fifteenth Night festival, Daiomaru had already putrefied into an uncanny crimson. Against a lapis-clear sky out of season, only these persimmons hung distinct as scarlet glass windchime globes.

When drizzles soon fell windlessly upon them, they began plopping groundward to burst hideously open. Some smashed against stones with full-force impact splatter. Others struck the stone lantern's cap and scattered pyrotechnic. At pond's edge where moss met water lay matter indistinguishable from newborn excrement.

When Mr. Country of Muteness, finding it bothersome to clean them up, gave the branch a light shake, the remaining persimmons fell all at once without resistance with a hideous sound.
(15th Year · April)