Pathway to Japanese Literature

I saw the azure sky.
The azure sky permeated into me.
I choked on lapis lazuli-colored waves.
I swam through the azure sky.
And I was now nothing but a transparent wave.
I heard the sound of the shore in my spine.
The monotonous rhythm scattered dull undulations into the sky from there.

I had wasted away.
The summer sun pierced through me sharply like a savage torrent.
Each time, my body was like mist carelessly dancing down into the sand.
I was no longer conscious of the resistance I possessed.
And I felt the torrent of light that was intense heat within me, as if it were my own flesh.

There was a white lighthouse.
It wore a triangular hat.
It streamed daylight dreams into the glittering sea.
I caught the scent of old memories.
The Sado-bound ship dropped a clot of smoke into the sky.
High sand dunes continued along the coast.
To block Siberian winters, the dunes' bellies grew bush clover thickets.
At midday's peak, grasshoppers lay drunken.
From the summit toward town flowed pine groves shaking their cicada-cry-permeated heads.
I stood within the bush clover thicket.

At that time, I resembled the watchtower of the sand dunes.
From the watchtower windows spread open in all directions, the landscape—colors, scents, sounds—flowed in.
I was tired.
There was no self within me.
I did not think of things.
When the landscape flowed past the window, those landscapes were myself.
From the watchtower window, I carried myself.
Seasons grew within me.
I converted everything into landscapes.
And when I thought of myself, I too was merely another landscape that flowed past the window.
I smelled an old and distant scent.
A voice kept calling for mother.

I was tired of seeking.
I had sought things for a long time.
In this way, my fatigue too had aged.
My fatigue had damaged my body until even living became unbearable.
At times I felt my body was nowhere to be found.
And I surfaced faint confusion for this abandoned self.
My fatigue—there I stood gazing at an insect on a bush clover branch.
The insect trembled frail transparent wings.
I noticed my body had again become a transparent wave.
Nothing but light and shadow lighter than mist.
The shadow of insect wings quivered faintly upon me.
In scorching air, grass heat hung stagnant.
The insect flew away.
That gust seemed to strike sharp against my heart.
In pleasant dizziness of falling sunward I came to relish intoxication.

For a long time, I had sought various things.
I couldn't grasp a single thing.
And before I could grasp anything at all, there was nothing left to seek.
I was sad.
But even to grasp that sadness, I failed again.
Even in sadness, I again found no tangible reality.
I continued vaguely feeling only an ever-expanding emptiness.
Within boundless emptiness, a red sun rose, set, and ushered in night.
Such days continued every day.

Was there nothing I sought?

I searched.
In vain, I could only sense my own fervent body odor.
I dug through memories.
Then one day, I discovered a dust-covered visage buried in memory's deepest vault.
It was a girl.
She had lived in my hometown.
Scarcely remained any memory of exchanging words once or twice.
Since leaving my hometown—for nearly ten years—we hadn't met.
Now I knew not whether she lived or died.
Yet this unearthed dust-shrouded figure breathed with miraculous vitality.
With each passing day, I'd grown unable to distinguish between that visage's life-force and my own.
I fled on journey as if pursued.
Soot had blackened my cheeks.

I returned to my hometown.

In my hometown, my family home was gone.
I threw down four or five old magazines and a cloth-wrapped bundle of sleeping pills into the four-and-a-half tatami room of a soot-stained inn, dulled by the western sun.

Under the gloomy eaves of snow country, an excessively bright sky accentuated the apathy, endurance, and languor.
A leaden wintry sky lurked in every corner of the town.
A faint sensuality drifted through the streets.
Sensational news articles strained beneath gaudy cotton adornments...
I had already become a stranger.
To climate, to customs, to people, and even to emotions.

I walked through the town with hands tucked into my sleeves against the sweltering heat. Against my forehead clung the faint yet refreshing, ceaseless sound of opening windows. That sound suggested a path where drowsing street trees quietly unfurled. It gave me strength to walk through any loneliness. With suspicious eyes, I watched every passing woman. After they went by, I would try to convince myself—half-mocking my own emotions—that perhaps that one had been her. I laughed inside. I stubbornly feared looking back. Let all be chance. Let my sorrow and my lover (that lover who was, so to speak, a laughable question mark) pass by with chance. Through regret over whether that had been her, there will come a day when your sorrow crystallizes into a jewel.

As for her—
……Who on earth was she?
When I pressed my thoughts to their limit, her image would always obscure its precise contours and vanish from my sight.
Chasing after the vanishing form, I would hurriedly shut my eyes.
Now, only darkness remained there.
I tried to conjure a single image there.
On the black curtain, I placed a white circle.
I tried to add eyes, a nose, a mouth to it.
I endeavored to quietly watch over that circle until my Muse provided the creative suggestion.
The white circle spitefully expanded and contracted.
And each time I tried to add a point, it would insidiously try to erase another.
To prevent that, I would add speed to my dotting.
In response to my tantrum, the circle too shook violently like a flag.
Giving up, I would open my eyes.
What met my eyes with refreshing clarity were houses, trees, roads—all of reality’s summer devoured by the sun.
I found myself marveling at them as if they were miracles, gazing blankly for some time.
I found myself wiping away the sweat crawling down my cheek.

She existed within me, so to speak, as a presence of such tenuous substance.
I knew her as the girl from my memories.
This was undeniably true.
Yet she had taken root and grown within me unbeknownst to myself.
And this version of her that had grown within me might already have become someone distinct from the her developing in reality.
The her within me might have been what you could call a concept—a symbol.
Yet I who had pursued that concept, swimming through sunlight to reach this northern port town, was neither concept nor symbol.
That was the real me.
At that very moment I walked along the listless road, dust coating my skin.
Though weary, I still carried life and youth within me.
Therefore she too remained alive.
She was strength itself.
Beyond catching a glimpse and pursuing her, I held no other designs.

When I gazed upon myself in such a state, I realized I had become a distant landscape—dreamlike and boundless.
While scattering my footprints across my hometown, I kept feeling this present moment existed at a distance akin to a remembered dream.
I cherished that dream without cease, that landscape.
As landscape myself, I might have preferred arranging her—landscape too—within my heart.
And I as landscape flowed through the town like air.
A swallow crossed through the town and through me.

The town's dust and noise seeped deep into me.
Even when I hid alone in silent groves, the town's din that had permeated my skin enveloped my body.
At the sand dunes beneath night's high vault, I heard the squirming clamor of footsteps against my skin.
It scattered into the night sky.
And in exchange for the dissipating noise, night's silence—or sometimes the shore's sound—seeped into me with crystalline clarity.
Something within me strained toward perfect transparency.
The night sky, the whole universe, granted me sweet absolution.

One night again, I went to a Catholic church in this town to discard the grime of crowds.
In the monastery's darkness, I heard my childhood waltz.
Shadows within shadows, waves of doubt cast half-somnolent dreams.
The pungent scent of poplars stung my eyes.
A clamorous chorus of frogs erupted.
The priest had been German.
I remembered his black vestments and bearded face.
For this reason, people called the desolate pond reflecting a Roman cross 'Foreigner's Pond'.
The pond lay encircled by sand dunes and poplar groves.
At ten years old, I would play there.
Through poplar groves where autumn had settled from their very crowns, a sudden shower clattered through fallen leaves and rushed away.
The red evening sun peered through cloud breaks.
I wore a cloak.
The temple bell tolled.
Abandoning my fishing rod, I raced home.
At Christmastide, I received sweets.
Beyond poplar groves glowed tenement lights.
A window stood open.
Naked man and woman dined.
Sturdy muscles etched shadows.

Long ago, my friend had lived there.
He was four or five years older than me.
He had been the most reckless troublemaker at the town's middle school.
He was strong at judo.
I was a first-year student.
Every day I slipped out through the classroom window and walked through the coastal pine grove.
He had a kind heart.
To keep me—who closely resembled him—away from his fallen dissipation, he fiercely scolded me.
People misunderstood me as the boy he once was.
I was expelled from the town's middle school.
He went out hunting and died after being struck by a friend’s stray bullet.

The monastery windows were dim, and no sound of prayer could be heard.
I was desperately stifling the heart that wanted to cry out loudly about something.
The clamorous sounds of dining carried through.

I learned my sister had fallen ill and come to the hospital in this town. She was suffering from black sarcoma. She herself knew she would die within the year. Every day she received radium treatment. My father too had died of sarcoma. I did not particularly fear that inheritance.

Sister had been an intelligent woman. For her children, she was a good mother. Because of this, she grew old without losing the wisdom of her youth. Sister believed in me. Therefore, I did not want to meet her. All intimacy was ill-suited to me who had become a landscape. This left me with a bitter sting. I was tattered cloth. The resilience needed to receive human closeness no longer existed within me. Though hearing of my sister’s illness in the same town, I postponed visiting her each day. During my aimless wanderings, the smell of chemicals would sometimes cling to my nostrils. I closed my eyes and pretended not to know. I ate ice cream. I sucked on the spoon for a long time.

The town's newspaper was discussing sunspots.

With no intention of visiting, I had come before the hospital.
I paced back and forth.
The nurse watched me.
I entered the hospital.
My sister came running out to greet me.
She looked nearly indistinguishable from any healthy person.
Only there remained a truly lonely pallor born of her resolve to die.
The children who had visited from the countryside had just departed.
Scattered remnants of half-eaten food littered every surface of the room.
A train bearing those cheerful children crossed an iron bridge boldly before my eyes.
My sister was precisely the sort who would fashion any mask needed to let her children live joyfully.
My sister spoke of her children.
A marriage proposal had arisen for her eldest daughter.
This concern made her prone to forgetting her illness.
I smoked cigarette after cigarette.
My sister struck a match for me.
My sister laid my cigarette butt in her palm and toyed with it endlessly.
My sister said she saw plants in her dreams.

“I want to throw a wonderful dinner party for you…”

My sister would sometimes repeat those words.
I told my sister about the menu of a banquet Louis XIV had once hosted.
My sister said she had once eaten in a beech forest.
Putting on a brave front, we kept spinning hollow fairy tales without end.
We promised to visit the hospital every day.
On days when the children weren’t around, I promised to stay overnight at the hospital.

The snow country’s midsummer brought a singularly brutal heat.
Windlessness persisted through daylight hours.
The sun sank unchanged, and even at night the heat did not abate.
Sister kept taking ice into her body.
Beyond the window hung the leaden leaves of a mukkabana tree.
Moonlight pooled upon them.
Sister sprinkled water over their burdened forms.

In those few days, I did encounter one acquaintance.
We exchanged a few passing words, parted without laughter.
I met another person.
He was an aged rickshaw driver.
He pressed me insistently to ride his cart.
With me aboard, the vehicle wheeled along stony paths beneath the midday sun.
In a singsong tone he declared happiness waxes fuller with years.
I laughed with feigned mirth.
The canopy shivered.
At the beer hall, a lone barmaid wiped the entryway.
At the driver's house, we ate watermelon.

Another family lived in her house.
The gate where the young girl had once leaned back gazing at power lines now stood with its door firmly shut beneath pine boughs' shade.
A triangular shaft of sunlight cut through the shadow.

I strained my ears.
I slipped by quietly.
I looked up at the window.
After a long while, I just laughed.
I went to the sea.
From the deserted silver beach, I plunged into the sea.
I ventured out exhilaratingly to the open sea.
Palms shone white and scattered.
The depth of the sea lay still.
Suddenly I recalled death.
I was afraid.
My body began to panic even faster than my heart.
The water stopped hitting my hands.
My limbs lost all sensation.
The spray I exhaled made a sharp sound.
I became painfully aware—with a sorrowfulness so comical it was absurd—of being gripped by the desire to burst out laughing.
I crawled up onto land.
I lay down on the beach.
I fell into a deep sleep.

That night, I stayed at the hospital.
I wanted even less to see my sister.
Because I had to engage in conversations devoid of real feeling.
And upon reflection, I seemed not to possess even a single fragment of truth worth telling.
Everything that rose to my mind appeared fabrications born of emphasis and coercion.
I had accidentally remembered.
That there would likely be no chance to meet her again.
It would assail me with helpless sadness - senseless in origin, so abrupt in its coming, and to such degree that I could never make myself believe in it.
I was utterly bored with such games.
After a while, I was already gazing absentmindedly at the clouds.

My sister too was tormented by her own lies.
Troubled by visitors' falsehoods, she instead noisily scattered lies of her own as if to preempt them.
That white mosquito net.
With lights extinguished, we lamented our misfortunes in offhand exchanges until past midnight.
When one reached toward truth, the other would frantically shift topics.
We performed sympathy.
We wept over counterfeit emotions.
Exhausted, we slept.

In the morning, before my sister woke, I slipped from bed and went to the sea.

A 6,000-ton freighter entered the port.
Spurred by the intriguing news, the townspeople gossiped about the port's prosperity.
In the back alleys, I caught the greasy kitchen scent.
In the back alleys again, from thrown-open lattice windows, I choked on the smell of cosmetics.
I steeped in the scent of bath scum.
And then I looked up at the sun.
The shadow of homesickness wavered incessantly.

Tokyo's sky came into view.
The shadow I had left behind was being jostled, trampled, crushed, and gasping for breath in Tokyo's hustle and bustle.
At those endless wounds, the silent shadow's face contorted.
I resolved to return there.
I resolved to give words to the silent shadow and blood to the countless wounds.
Time to shed false tears was no longer granted to me.
Everything bore down with urgent immediacy.
I would sorrow vividly.
I must return to the burial mound.
And.

We gathered around the farewell dining table on the hotel's upper floor.
The town's lights gradually multiplied.
I was growing intensely irritated.
Sister fell silent, overwhelmed by my intensity.
We went to the station.
We were bored.
The train began moving.
I became excited.
I frantically waved my hat.

The parting alone was bitter.