Pathway to Japanese Literature

I

Perhaps because alcohol did not agree with his constitution, every morning when he gargled, he would expel a large amount of foul-smelling, alcohol-tainted water from his gut.
In the past, it had been an occasional occurrence, but nowadays, this had become an established routine.
And this too had been rare before, but now when this expelled water ran out, his chest and stomach would churn even more violently—hollow, agonizing, gurgling—before he finally vomited up bitter yellow gastric juice.

Generally speaking, he had been born with a robust constitution and thus lacked any medical knowledge. Therefore, at first he had been quite startled by this and would invariably feel mentally oppressed for a while after washing his face, but now he grew completely accustomed to it—so much so that when it seemed likely to subside halfway through, he would sometimes deliberately make his throat rumble and expel it with practiced technique.

In this manner, he came to perform his daily ablutions each morning—a hollow, agonizing, clamorous ritual.

His four-year-old eldest son watched his father's bizarre contortions by his side every morning.
The boy would gag repeatedly in his throat, then flutter both hands like a turtle hatchling suspended by strings - mimicking every detail of that agony.
No matter what torment he faced - utterly devoid of endurance - he would each morning lean over the sink at the veranda's edge (the one always stowed immediately after use) and unfailingly strike that same pose until it had solidified into ritual.

“If it’s so painful you should quit—it’s not like you even enjoy drinking that much—”

At times when pitied in such a manner from those nearby, he would always counter with the same venomous retort—but lately found himself involuntarily making a savage face,

“Yeah… maybe… Ah?” he let slip with a deeply sighed lament while complaining of trifling boredom.
(I’ve no endurance—not just physically… but mentally.) “I’m thinking of taking up some tremendously intense exercise—something that’ll leave me collapsed dead asleep the moment night falls.
“I’m sick of sleeping drunk.”

“What do you mean by ‘exercise’?”

“…………”

When he expelled water, it wasn’t as agonizing as it appeared to bystanders—merely accompanied by exaggerated motions like raising and dropping his shoulders or fluttering his wrists in rhythm with the heaves. But when the water ran dry and gastric juice came spurting out, the spectacle became nothing less than “the violent thrashing of agony.”
He,

“GEETS!”
“GEETS!” he screamed, flattening his torso like a plank and wringing his guts to force a guttural roar from his throat.

“Ugh... Ugh... U... Ahh, how excruciating this is!”

Unintentionally, he let out such a cry and, like a frog, splayed his five fingers wide before slapping the veranda with his palm in loud smacks.
And,

“UOOOOTS! UOOOOTS!” he groaned as if on the brink of collapse, teeth clamped on both edges of the wobbling sink while thrusting his upper body forward like a coward peering into a bottomless chasm.
And,

“GEETS! GEETS! GEETS!” he would cry out in such a manner and slowly stroke his chest downward.—And once somewhat calmed, he would plop down cross-legged there, quietly gazing up at the sky as he waited for his frantic breathing to subside.

He did not yet think that drinking had become a habit.
But he possessed such a pernicious habit—distorting his own experiences through a warped lens, belittling every last one with a dismissive laugh.

"I absolutely refuse to start that so-called evening drinking ritual—the moment you begin that, you're officially in the old man category," he would sometimes declare, affecting an oddly youthful air as he lapsed into crude sentimentality.

"You're already at the perfect age to start—how long you gonna keep up that grating sarcasm, you stinking geezer...?"

When his friends conversely showered him with sarcasm, he would flush crimson.
In reality, he had become a thoroughly disheveled drinker who performed those unsightly disgraceful acts daily—it was simply that in every respect he utterly lacked what might be called a true alcoholic's constitution.

“Still?”

Whenever he spent too long gazing at the sky and resting, someone from inside invariably urged him on.

“Still,” he would answer.
It went without saying that he wasn’t gazing at the sky in meditation or sentimental reflection—it was because lowering his eyes to the ground risked stirring up nausea in his newly calmed chest once more.

Yet precisely because this was not something one could call an illness, its form remained stubbornly, excessively grandiose—and since he found himself compelled to strike such an exaggerated pose regardless, he would unwittingly thrash about violently before finally sitting still like a Daruma doll, eyes fixed and arms crossed. But within this suffering lay a large, dull, complacent hole midway through—something that could be easily pierced.

“Well, if it weren’t for that, how could I endure…?”

He muttered such things to himself as if venting meaningless complaints.
“What a strange suffering this is—how utterly senseless and dim-witted this agony!”
Every day, every day, every day!

II

The ugly cries he emitted each morning during his gargling resounded noisily throughout the neighborhood.

Summer had come.
Might he not soon fall ill with some disease?
His daily cries had grown so violent that one might doubt their authenticity.

By the time he, a late riser, began his gargling, fresh light already poured down in radiant streams from the celadon sky of early July. How could such raucous barbaric noise emerge from that scrawny frame? Those nearby would often stare with half-mocking doubtful eyes.

"It's like quarrel dialogue from an Expressionist play."

N, the modern middle school student he knew, proudly made such a comparison and caused him to frown. But he, teasingly adopting the mannerism of such moments as if mimicking some voice, spoke in an exaggeratedly grave tone,

“Like the soliloquy of the water sprite Nikkelman—Blekekeke, Keksks!”

“I don’t know anything about that stuff.”

“Well then—” he said.
“CHEETS! CHEETS!”

“...”

“No—it’s not that I’m throwing a tantrum, you know…”

“Even if I did throw one, there’s nothing scary about it.”
“Blekekeke, or something like that!”

“Tsk!” he clicked his tongue.

“If it comes out, it’s a jazz band for the eyes.”

“Tsk! Tsk! You idiot!”

He made a playfully bitter face as if to say he disliked being teased with strange descriptions, rubbing his chest all the while.

“Ah, this feels refreshing now,” he said.
And tilted his head in an affectedly thoughtful manner,

“Tsk! Tsk! That ‘tsk’ sound—in English they write it as ‘tut, tut, tut,’ if I recall correctly... Hmph... Things can be said any way depending on how you hear them—compared to anything at all, I suppose...” he muttered.

“What the hell! So you were thinking about such ridiculous things? How boring. I’m, again…”

“So then N—if you were to get slightly annoyed here—tsk! Why don’t you try clicking your tongue? Let’s see if it resonates as ‘Tut!’ Or maybe ‘Tsk!’? Perhaps I might discover an interjection even more fitting than ‘Tut!’—after all, I want to conduct some thorough research into this—”

“You’re mocking me!”

N laughed with cheeky crispness, true to his brash middle schooler nature. “If you’re so refreshed now, go finish your damn meal already.”

He slowly expanded his chest and took a deep breath.

N had been sitting beside him since earlier, waiting for his washing to finish.

“How many minutes do you have to keep doing that before you calm down?” N asked, voicing concern over his deep breathing that seemed undeniably exaggerated.

“Well… I suppose I have to keep it up for about twenty minutes no matter what.”

Despite having rarely ever done deep breathing, he said such a thing.

“Ah, what a pain!”

N whistled while kicking at the ground with his toes.
He,

"This deep breathing thing—it seems pretty effective! Maybe I'll do this every morning from now on!"
While thinking this, he looked up at the sky and breathed deeply with exaggerated force—huffing and puffing.

"Today's finally the day we go swimming! I'm absolutely doing it... Ugh, it's getting brutally hot!"

"When it comes down to it, I just can't stomach it."

“If you don’t exercise, it’s poison!”

“You sure talk big.”

He said that and grabbed N by the neck.
N blushed slightly and stuck out his tongue.
He squeezed N’s throat tightly to relieve his own restlessness.
N, pushing back against his arm with his chin,

“You’re stronger than I expected,” he said.

“Of course I am—you go on about boxing techniques, but I won’t lose to someone like you.”

“Tsk…” N laughed, not engaging.
And then, N suddenly burst out with a new laugh in a different tone,

“Agh!
Tsk, tsk, tsk!”
“Tsk, tsk, tsk!” N finished saying.
“Darn it.”

“Agh! I was careless too!” he shouted.
And then, the two of them burst into uproarious laughter in perfect unison.

“Still at it?”

From inside, his wife called out.
“It’s almost eleven o’clock, you know.”

“Well then, I’ll eat here with you too.”
“It’s already lunchtime for me.”
“—And today’s really the day! Let’s go swimming right away!”

“As for me swimming in such a stagnant puddle like that—I’ll have to pass.”

“There goes the sore loser act again.”

“That’s right.” His wife chimed in with N, though from an entirely different stance, her voice dripping with spite. “‘Stagnant water,’ you say? Such lofty airs.” “There are shallow parts—perfect for someone like you. …You can’t swim a stroke in the Odawara Sea despite growing up there.”

At some point, she had seen him bathing in that sea—given how he constantly boasted like some expert, she expected real skill. But his cowardly posture defied description: utterly unable to swim beyond the waves, just darting back and forth where they broke against the shore as if playing tag with the surf. No wonder he balks at swimming invitations—who’d want to go anywhere with that?

She had tried to continue saying such things, but once before when she had made similar remarks intending them as mere jokes—though there had been no reason whatsoever to feel contempt for him—he for some reason had adopted an expression as though his entire being had been scorned, and now too she felt slightly that same hesitation, so that she nearly swallowed back the words she was about to say. Moreover, she had often experienced how he—whenever she, whether out of malice or goodwill, conveyed even a fragment of his nature or lifestyle to others—would abruptly transform his face, which had been laughing until that very moment, into the visage of Enma. Not only would he lose his temper, but at the slightest provocation—regardless of whether bystanders were present—he would suddenly throw a punch, leaving her dumbfounded. However, according to her experience, his attitude seemed to have several classifications depending on the type of bystanders. Somehow, she could not help perceiving his tantrums as an artificial construct—while superficially passionate, upon reflection, his actions seemed underpinned by an utterly dispassionate duality, and recognizing this only intensified her own gnawing revulsion. Thus, believing she had fully discerned his simple joys and angers, she often restrained herself—yet at times he, even when she endured,

“Somehow I can’t stand that carefree face,” he would say,

“So you’re making a fool of me?” he’d mutter, spinning petty spiteful speculations while stubbornly nursing old grudges.

“Say something.”

Even when speaking would only fuel her anger further, he still pressed her like this.
In such moments, she endured by imagining scenarios like this:
——Take a man with an undeniably peculiar head shape (not limited to heads)—so conspicuously strange that anyone would immediately notice this comically misshapen crown. One must avoid mentioning it in his presence at all costs. Though he agonized over this absolute, unalterable fact of his extraordinary appearance—suppose such a man were to grow acutely self-conscious and turn dreadfully sullen whenever his wife mentioned his cranial proportions under any circumstances. This was precisely the sort of pitifully absurd scenario she envisioned to endure.

There must exist some similarly grotesque defect protruding from his very nature—she couldn’t bear these moments without conjuring such imaginings.

“Don’t spout such nonsense, you meddler!”

As she’d anticipated, he snapped back angrily.
N, looking somewhat flustered,

“Aren’t you going back to Odawara this summer?” he asked her.

“What am I supposed to do?”

She felt a hysterical resistance toward him as he acted with an irritatingly standoffish manner. ...(Just when everyone had finally settled into calmness for once, he’d immediately start finding fault over nothing... That’s what I hate—truly hate.) Yet no sooner had this thought arisen than she herself became unreasonably furious beyond endurance.
And she began hunting through all his deceptions toward her.

He sat with a sullen face, clutching his knees tightly as he gazed up at the sky. When she saw this, she clicked her tongue with a "Tsk!"—nearly spitting out her contempt. But as she began coldly observing his figure out of habit, her resentment melted away as if dissolving, and she nearly burst into laughter instead. She had such an audacious habit. Whenever encountering people who slandered her, found fault with her devoted work, mocked her innocent words with sarcasm, hurled vulgar insults, or showered her with contemptuous criticism—(these things she had experienced most from him and his mother)—she would feel tear-inducing frustration. Yet by firmly suppressing it and calmly visualizing those people's forms without goodwill, her mind would dart to unexpected places until she inevitably discovered some abnormal trait: how one's entire purple gums became exposed when speaking; how another who fancied herself a beauty always had crusted eye discharge in her canthi—wasn't that trachoma? Then there were those constantly hiding buckteeth by mumbling lips alone or pointlessly pressing hands to mouths; or that woman's husband who supposedly sneered at her—his head flat as if hammer-struck, occiput jutting like a mallet—how could valid criticism come from such a skull? Though one wondered about his hat-buying trials! Or that person with dreadful body odor—when she first spoke to them, the stench made her instinctively turn away and discreetly cover her nose under a sleeve. They must have noticed this shameful act, for they grew distant afterward—ah, so this explained their secret slander! As her mind wandered through these outlandish character assassinations, the hostility she'd wanted to repay tenfold somehow strangely vanished into thin air.

Indeed, back when she lived with his mother and suffered her malice, growing intensely resentful—times when this led to covert arguments with him—she would ultimately,

“What’s with the body odor!” she had retorted coldly about his mother, then burst out laughing on her own.
Yet she possessed an affable vulnerability—whenever others showed her even the slightest goodwill, she would harbor an almost insincere level of reciprocal affection in her heart, idealizing everything.

Her habits of solitary musings and compulsive soliloquy—whether because he paid no attention to her concerns since they began living together, or from fear of occasionally being subjected to his bizarre acts of spite—had only grown more severe within her.
He would often find himself shuddering for no reason when, sitting at night in the room separated from her by a sliding door, he heard her muttering complaints under her breath as she worked on her sewing.

“Shut up!”

At such times, he would shout at the top of his voice.
And then she too started as if startled,

“Oh! Did you hear that?” she would blurt out in surprise.
And then, after a while had passed, as if she had forgotten, she began muttering again.

“Could it be that having such an unreliable husband has made me foolishly succumb to this lonely affliction…”

At times, even when she was muttering disrespectful soliloquies about him, he remained oblivious and would voice such saint-like musings.

...

He stayed silent and glared in the opposite direction as she, having regained her composure, attempted to speak to him.

What a weirdo!

Gazing at his demeanor, she felt such comical absurdity that she found herself oddly refreshed.
Then she cheerfully began talking to N.

"Are you going somewhere, N?"

"Next month I'm supposed to go to Bōshū with friends."

"Oh how enviable!
I hear you're quite the skilled swimmer."

"Ah."

"I want you to teach me."

“Since I’ll be there during August, why don’t you come then?” N invited.

“I really want to go!”

She muttered softly.

Far beyond her imaginings, he—with an earnestness entirely disproportionate in a thirty-year-old man—had long been tormented by his inability to swim. Perhaps because he was raised by the sea, from early childhood he harbored a wretched shame about this inadequacy—a shame so fervent that even he found it absurd. It resembled the agony of a sailor who could not master swimming’s art. There had even been a novel he once wrote that was filled entirely with nothing but such longing.

While his poor technique was certainly a factor, he was foolishly timid of the sea.
It was a rough sea, dangerous for inexperienced swimmers.
He had been strictly forbidden by his family from going to the sea.
But when he first entered the local middle school, he occasionally went to the sea while hiding from his family.
In his first year, being smaller than average both physically and in spirit, he found sufficient joy in boldly playing in the sand along the shore or merely miming swimming motions with hands and feet touching the bottom—feeling no shame whatsoever. Yet by the following year, he no longer felt like going even when invited.
His friends would cheerfully discuss their rapid improvement—"I can easily swim out to where the steamships dock now"—which secretly filled him with gloom.
When invited, he would fabricate baseless excuses—headaches today or pressing matters—and decline.
Every summer when it came around, it was customary for the school to organize a swimming training group and hold camps at distant, safe seaside locations.
He would go along every year, but he always grew tired of camp life midway through or developed resentment toward the overly enthusiastic trainees, returning home without enduring even a week.
When he returned, his home remained stubbornly by the seaside.
And his friends were all competitive swimmers by the shore; with not a single playmate to be found, he would spend his summers in monotonous routine.
He would roll about the tatami room in frustration, practice swimming using an instruction manual, and float tadpoles in the small garden pond to satisfy his longing.
He had indeed ridden tadpole boats until the summer of his fourth year.
How delightful it would be if I could swim freely through that vast blue sea!
Next year I will absolutely improve and must join their ranks!
I thought earnestly of such things.
For this purpose, he had even once pretended illness to his family during a certain winter and stayed at an Izu hot spring with a bathhouse pool large enough for swimming.
Of course, it goes without saying that all came to naught.

Every year when summer came, he would repeat the same longing and taste the same sorrow, his fervor undiminished—until at last he had reached his thirtieth summer.

“Back when we were in A——” She attempted to steer the conversation toward memories of summer seas from when they had lived together in that crude fishing village—not his hometown—in some remote area. But realizing this would inevitably involve mentioning him again, she grew momentarily flustered and diverted with a single remark:

“The sea there was calm and pleasant,” she said, steering away from the subject. He recalled how even back when they lived there, he had boasted about various swimming-related matters yet had never once swum where others could see.

“Well, Bōshū’s better.”

When N said this to her, he suddenly turned an oddly earnest gaze,
“Is it really good? A gently sloping beach?” he asked.
“Yeah.”
“How far out?”
“Well, I don’t know about that.”

“Even if you go quite far out, can you still stand?”

“You can stand there,” N replied with a quizzical nod.

“Is it lively there?”

“Of course it is!”

“I really want to go!”

She muttered wildly to herself.

“Do come for real! There aren’t any men who can’t swim coming there, but plenty of women, you know.”

N’s overly casual remark sent a chill through her, yet she also felt an ache that tickled at her heart.—“I can swim a hundred meters or so myself, you know.”

“Well, in that case… Let’s go.”

“But—” She began, then turned away and indicated him to N with her eyes—he sat feigning sullen indifference, as if contemplating something entirely different.

“Do you dislike it?” whispered N.
N’s breezy tone, utterly oblivious to his inner turmoil, only deepened her bitter smile.
How should she respond?
She didn’t know.

After some time had passed, he,

"I like mountains. Maybe I'll go alone to some mountain," he muttered clearly. His attitude brimmed with such confidence that it betrayed her groundless anxieties into unease.

III

Because the area beneath the washbasin had turned into a muddy patch, he borrowed a hoe from the landlord and was digging a drainage channel for wastewater.

“What the… This is the place?”

When he felt behind him a sigh-like sound—the kind made when one exclaims in relief—and straightened up to turn around, there stood Ryosuke, Fujii’s younger brother, laughing.
Fujii was an old friend from his hometown.
He looked at Ryosuke happily and displayed the friendly demeanor exchanged when friends who haven’t met in some time encounter each other by chance.
In such moments, they would speak in a relatively ordinary manner—in a way that suggested they knew no other means than that.
It had been two years since he had met Ryosuke.

“Day off?”

“Nowadays, there’s no such thing as a Bon holiday.”

Ryosuke laughed awkwardly.
Ryosuke was employed at a certain shop in Yokohama.

“I met my brother the other day.”

“I see—”
“Have you been going back to Odawara lately?”
“Not at all.—”

Then about a week later, his younger brother Jiro—a third-year middle school student—came dragging his climbing staff with a rucksack on his back, saying he was returning from an ascent of the Japanese Alps.
He said he had parted with friends in Kokubunji and stopped by here.

“If you wait around for Brother’s promises—well—that’s exactly how you end up missing out.”

“Oh yes, yes, we did make such a promise, didn’t we,” she said.

“For five or six years now…”

Jiro took out picture postcards from his bag and recounted his modest experiences.

Rather than those stories, he found himself preoccupied with questions—how does one properly enter an inn when staying there? If you suddenly stride in without a word and plant yourself in the entranceway, would that alone mark you as a lodger? Even doing it that way—wouldn't they give you dubious looks over there? Is there a distinction between first-class and second-class accommodations? If staying second-class with two or three fellow students—wouldn't that feel awkward? How does one pay the lodging fee? Among friends traveling together—wouldn't it feel strange for each to settle their own bill every time? Did someone pay collectively and have others repay them later? Wouldn't that also feel uncomfortable for everyone? Or do you all not mind such things? Do they go straight to sleep after eating at the inn? What kind of conversations do they mainly have? Even when giving orders to maids—the procedure must differ quite from our household's way, no?

"Do even someone like you do things like tipping?" he asked.

Jiro dismissed everything with a laugh, but he—having never traveled independently to secure lodgings—wanted thorough answers to several points.

He recalled how recently—though never having ventured alone to Tokyo's pleasure quarters either—he'd developed a strong urge to try going solo. He'd earnestly posed similar questions to a friend only to be called “a deliberately obnoxious bastard!”—leaving him mortified.

He also asked Jiro how much travel money he had received from Mother.
“If there’s any left over, why don’t you leave even a little bit?”
He earnestly proposed such things, causing both Jiro and her to blush, and suddenly found himself blushing as well.

“When Jiro goes out, Mother ends up all alone at our house lately, huh!”

“It’s already settled!”

“Lately it’s—even when you go off staying out with friends somewhere—no—[she’s] letting you go out so freely! Is Mother really okay with that? …Back in my day, no matter how much I wanted to go out, they’d never let me join up with friends like that!” he said, clumsily mimicking the rustic dialect from farming villages near his hometown—a speech style now fallen into disuse even there.

He wasn’t drunk; yet when mention of his mother slipped out, an oddly heavy, lonely knot formed in his heart, leaving him barely able to sustain natural conversation. Otherwise, he could only wear a gloomy face and sink into unpleasant silence.

To keep others from sensing this inner entanglement, he habitually overcompensated with excessive jesting—repeatedly causing discomfort through ironic missteps. This too became part of his act. Even among certain close friends where no particular reason existed, peculiar exchanges—initially playful private jokes—had unwittingly hardened into habit through years of use. At times it manifested as meaningless games he forced upon his brother.—They were brothers separated by fourteen or fifteen years.

The fact that he still lacked any inclination to travel was partly due to the influence of the extremely conservative education he had received from his grandparents and mother during his childhood; however, he could not bring himself to think that it was because his mother, having entered old age, had suddenly begun indulging Jiro—.
Every year, Jiro and mother would routinely take rather long trips together—though he himself had never experienced such things—and while he had once contrasted this with father’s circumstances to sympathize with mother’s loneliness, he now found it bitterly sad that no such feelings could arise in him these days since father’s death.
……When he thought Jiro was away, he felt toward his mother a kind of jealousy he had never experienced before—an entirely new and astonishing kind for him.
The following few remarks are omitted.

He had never once traveled alone since childhood and remained so to this day.
The rare family excursions of his childhood held no fondness in memory, stirring no longing whatsoever; by the time he graduated middle school, not traveling had become so ingrained that he began to find the act itself a nuisance. Soon after, he started courting a neighborhood girl, leaving little room for such matters—and even afterward, he lived on in monotonous routine, too preoccupied to spare a thought for travel. Yet lately, he found himself intermittently gripped by a vague desire to try journeying alone, if only once.

“She really lets you go out freely, I must say?”

“But it’s already settled, isn’t it? I plan to head out somewhere again before summer ends,” Jiro declared with pride.

“Ah see now!”

He nodded to Jiro in his continued playful manner, though his heart lingered with his mother; through those same words, he had affirmed her stance in this way.
Ah see now!
This phrase indeed matched the affirmative expression used by farmers in his region when hearing something unexpected—astonished yet deeply impressed—uttered without accentual stress while drawing out the lingering “noo” resonance as it flowed from throat to chest.
He nodded, precisely replicating both the pronunciation and gestures.
Jiro and the others laughed as if compelled into cold sweat by his unrelenting use of a jesting tone.

“Jiro, when are you coming back? Tomorrow?”

“I’m thinking of staying to enjoy myself for four or five days.”

“Hurry back, I say—hurry back! It’s not proper to go making detours on your way home from a trip.”

That he would speak even this much about self-cultivation was so unusual that Jiro wondered whether he was still joking.
Jiro wore an expression suggesting this doubt, but as the man repeated the same admonition again and again, he ultimately produced an oddly hollow smile.

IV

One evening he addressed Ryosuke,

“Are you also on summer break?” he asked.

Over a month had already passed since Ryosuke arrived.

“I’ve been made to stop, you see.”

Ryosuke scratched his head and laughed.
After that, they never broached the subject again.
Before anyone knew it, even Ryosuke had caught his morning "Gē-gē".
Every morning they took turns performing their noisy ablutions.

"Ahh... bitter... bitter..."

“Since the house across the way is vacant, why don’t we move over there? It’s good that you can’t be seen from outside there, and having woods in front of the veranda is also good.”

“I’ll build you a proper built-in sink—lay some pipes and make a drainage system,” said Ryosuke.

After moving there, they drank much less alcohol.
Ryosuke stopped the work, saying six months had passed since he started preparing the sink.

Ryosuke built many shelves in the room and, under the guise of exercise, fiercely cleaned both inside and outside morning and evening.
It was the first time his house had ever been so clean, organized, and well-kept.

From N in Bōshū came occasional postcards of invitation.
From Jiro came another letter, this time saying he intended to go to Myōgi Mountain and asking if he wouldn’t come along.
From around that time, he once again began late-night drinking, and his morning retching grew more violent.

"When the retching stops, will you go to Bōshū?"

Recalling that he had said such things, she asked.
They had grown accustomed to calling his condition “Gē.”

“Ah, I’ll go,” he answered.
And having done so, he added: “Gē stands for Jī Ei Wai—that is, Merry, lively, jolly, sportive.”

“…………”

“Hmm, if you put it that way... there does exist a baseball team by that name.”

“…………”

She and Ryosuke were having a different conversation. He wondered inwardly whether he should join that baseball team. He muttered something to that effect, so quietly it was almost inaudible. It was a baseball team organized among literary men.

N had long since returned home, and the sky had taken on a thoroughly autumnal hue, but his illness—which should have been cured by exercise and temperance—had not been cured.

Although the new semester had already begun, it had become Jiro’s custom to come stay overnight on Saturdays to see the moving pictures.

“So you’ve come again?” he said in a joking manner, making a bitter face that feigned playfulness.

Due to a terrible hangover, he sat cross-legged on the veranda, utterly unable to move.
Every living thing that met his eyes was loathsome—he exaggerated his feelings in such a way that he felt so wretched he even thought himself the most detestable of all.

“Why don’t you go for a walk? Everyone’s already gone out, you know.”

“Ugh, no-o!” he snapped irritably. If I carelessly went out for a walk, I felt like I might either collide with a train or come tumbling down into a river. Separately, there was another story he recalled—about how once at night, when a certain overcrowded train broke down on a viaduct before entering a certain station, someone thought they had arrived at the platform and stepped out first, followed by several others, until around the eighth person they finally realized it wasn’t a walkway but rather that all those who had disembarked had fallen several meters below onto the road and lost consciousness—and another recent account he had seen somewhere about how such incidents were apparently rare, occurring less than once in a thousand times, of an aviator who jumped from an aircraft with a parachute strapped to his back only for it to fail to open somehow, leaving him severely injured—though these stories had no particular connection to his current situation, when he suddenly remembered them, he was struck by a sensation as if doused with cold water, his whole body shuddering violently and contracting.

He suddenly began harshly and vehemently berating her.

"I can’t stand the way you talk—sputter-sputter!"
"What’s with that sitting posture!"
"Snap!"
"And now you’re over there gobbling up snacks, you gluttonous hog!"
Ahh, unbearable... unbearable... I'm going mad... Annoying... annoying... Just go away somewhere!
Ahh, I feel sick—if I don’t get to be alone, I can’t possibly stand it!
This nausea isn't just from alcohol alone!
It's the onset of a nervous breakdown!
Without regard to my feelings—that person nearby... Ahh—talking’s such a bother!
"Snap!"

Had she been frightened by his sudden fury? She puffed out her cheeks in a startle, but without uttering a word, she soon teared up, assumed an air of swallowing her frustration whole, and slowly left the scene.

He quietly looked up at the clear autumn sky and felt dizzy.
Yet if he remained utterly still and rigid, even his whole body could faintly sense a refreshing autumnal air.

"I must cure this sickness quickly, then join that team and show off my splendid skills for the first time in ages—since both sea and mountain plans came to nothing during my deliberations, and there's no other way to exercise... This time for sure!" Thinking this while sticking out his thin arms and bending them jerkily, unexpectedly his gloom dissolved and he even felt excitement.
And he ostentatiously let out a whistle.

When he suddenly looked, there she was glaring straight at him from between the trees ahead, her figure flickering in and out of view.
He started, returned to his stern expression, and continued whistling with feigned nonchalance as if deliberately showing that such a person was beneath his notice.
As if further provoked, she briskly approached, floated a cold smile, and said the following over the low fence:
“Your face looks somehow off.”
“The size of your eyes, nose, and mouth doesn’t balance with your forehead.”
“If the perimeter of your face isn’t larger, your eyes, nose, and mouth just end up standing out first—it’s too elongated!”
“Weird! Weird!”

No sooner had she finished uttering such an outlandish remark than she vanished into the distant grove of trees like a master of ceremonies taking their leave.

"When I thought she'd stopped talking back lately—that wench! So she'd been using that same method of retaliation against me too! She'd been rehearsing all sorts of personal attacks in her mind and secretly relieving her resentment."

He bit his lip like one truly avenged and muttered thus, yet even so—that woman must be hoarding far more disparaging words about me! As he dwelled on this, he felt both a craving to somehow hear every last criticism and an anticipation of her return, yet also revulsion—plunging into muddled restlessness, he simply rolled onto his back and stared up at the veranda ceiling.
(September 14)