Pathway to Japanese Literature

In Kenwood Forest at London's northern edge, Chinese trees with ink-black trunks towering dozens of meters high and mighty silver elms burst forth with complex branches and leaves from their robust trunks toward the open sky, spreading out to suspend vivid emerald hues in the crystal-clear midair. Through the thickets of shrubs clogging the bases of those towering trees, squirrels and white pheasants emerged here and there with puzzled expressions. At times, a peacock—surprisingly nimble for its large frame—would wander onto the lone narrow path that wound through the area, bringing pedestrians to an abrupt halt.

At the heart of Kenwood Forest, within a bright open lawn measuring approximately 120 yards square, stood an elegant white mansion adorned with a rose garden.
The late Sir Edward Cecil, former master of Kenwood, bequeathed to the general public his secondary residence at Kenwood—along with dozens of world-renowned paintings and precious ancient artifacts collected within it—together with seventy-four acres of land encompassing the surrounding gardens and vast forest.
And he added fifty thousand pounds for maintenance costs.

Kenwood Forest stood as a historic site in London's northern suburbs, rich in ancient landmarks alongside Golders Green natural park and Hampstead Hill adjoined to its southeast—various memorials scattered across these areas including poet Keats' house, French playwright Molière's former residence, the castle hotel atop the hill, homes of poet Lord Byron and renowned statesman Pitt, and Parliament Hill that Guy Fawkes had designated as his vantage point when plotting to bomb the early English Parliament.
But beyond these famous antiquities that anyone might readily recognize, near the forest's southern edge bordering Hampstead Hill, there lay a tract preserving the remnants of an old dueling ground—used for hundreds of years since ancient times and still remaining exactly as it was.

Surrounded by sparsely growing birch groves lay a rectangular lawn approximately eight yards wide and twenty yards long, lying about one foot lower than the surrounding turf.
While the Dueling Ground—imbued with its surroundings' historical atmosphere—imparted to those with even fragmentary knowledge of its past both peculiar fantasies and uncanny tension, even casual passersby found themselves irresistibly drawn to gaze upon it: whether due to the desolate aura of birch trees standing precisely spaced roughly six feet apart, or the sunken rectangular plot—unremarkable yet mysterious—whose original purpose remained momentarily unclear, all heightened by an eerie fascination that unconsciously compelled them to stare.

A trio approached this dueling ground.

A woman with two men—their trio's clashing youthful energies formed an awkward combination, like a broken wheel that refused to turn properly.
Sandwiched between them, the woman found every aspect of herself warped out of true.
Her head and face and body—even her heart—were warped.
In this distorted state, she clung to both men at her sides and staggered forward unsteadily.

The two men were students at the University of London.
John appeared good-natured yet gave an impression of being a somewhat stolid man.
He had his left arm linked with the woman at the center.
Blond hair softly enveloped his square head.
His blue-green eyes radiated a calm light, gazing nowhere in particular.
Yet at times they would sharpen to piercing points and glitter fiercely.
Peach fuzz gilded with golden down filled his face tinged with pale rose.

He wrapped his medium-built, slightly plump frame in a brown tweed suit that complemented his blond hair. Occasionally responding to the woman's playful tone with a grin that bared his white teeth, John walked on with his body held straight.

Walton was a tall, slender young man. He wore knickerbockers, every bit the crisp student. He pulled the woman close with his right arm as if claiming her for himself alone, yet she—while not entirely resisting his grasp—appeared to counterbalance his pull by clinging to John's left arm.

Walton thrust his head—with its chestnut hair slicked greasily flat—so near the woman's face they nearly collided, his brown eyes meeting hers with calculated shrewdness as faint wrinkles repeatedly creased his somewhat elongated features. He remained wholly absorbed in addressing her. Consequently, his knickerbockered legs moved with autonomous instability like a stage magician's—wobbling for equilibrium while occasionally catching on pathside pebbles or weed roots, bending at odd angles.

The woman Iris, who had been walking sandwiched between two dissimilar men on either side, suddenly yanked them to a halt with a spiteful air and stood still.
With Walton’s face thrust before her eyes—blocking about half her forward view—she lowered her head slightly as though evading an obstruction and peered past him at the lawn to her left.

“Oh? This place—what is it? It’s not a golf course?”

Iris’s small, nervous face—marked by blue veins at her temples and upper eyelids—clouded with bewilderment.
Her face maintained its dignity whether bright or clouded—a well-proportioned and precise countenance.
She had the slim, firm physique typical of most women in London, but from her short, narrow waist to the rounded swell of her hips, she maintained a smart femininity.
She stiffened her slender frame and stared at the rectangular lawn sunken a step below its surroundings.

“Hmm, this is such a strange place—probably some sort of sheep pen, don’t you think?”

Walton blurted out with his characteristic hasty assumption.
Yet even before he finished speaking, somewhere in his mind something had already halted this line of thought.
Walton fell silent with a suspicious air and gazed like Iris at the birch trunks—bathed in the late spring afternoon sunlight, their trunks glowing forlornly with a smoky silver sheen—and at the green lawn appearing modestly striking under coarse diagonal stripes of shadow cast by the sparse birches.

John, who had been wearing a faint smile at Walton’s words, shot Walton a convulsive glance before speaking in a low voice to Iris.
“This place... was a dueling ground long ago.”

“Oh—so this was a dueling ground.”

Iris let out a scream shrill enough to cut off John's explanation and yanked his left arm downward.
John pointed to both ends of the lawn with his right index finger and said to her in an instructive manner,
"They'd stand here and there, see? Swords in hand, advancing toward the center—thrusting and slashing away. Must have been something."

At the same moment she listened at a pace suggesting she wasn't truly hearing, Iris abruptly twisted free from the men's arms on either side and leapt onto the Dueling Ground's lawn.

The two men were dragged along unresistingly and slipped smoothly into pursuit as they ran in.
As soon as the men rushed up beside Iris where she stood halted, she whirled around and thrust her right index finger in rapid succession toward Walton's and John's hearts.
Her grotesquely contorted grin and those slender fingers—ghost-pale and flashing—delivered feral jabs with cruel precision that sent the men reeling back two or three steps.
The men held their breath.
But Walton stepped forward past John—who stood halted with irritating discontent—extended his right arm to thrust his index finger like a sword forward, bent his left arm upward at a right angle, and advanced toward Iris in a dueling stance.

“Behold Don Quixote! En garde!”

According to Walton’s past experiences, Iris had always struck him as a woman of rather complex character.
At times he found himself at a loss for how to handle her.
Even now she appeared to him an oddly obstinate and spiteful creature.
For her part, she now found Walton unbearably presumptuous and affectedly dandified.

“How rude! Addressing me as ‘Princess’!”

Iris turned her back to the slanting sunlight and assumed a defensive posture.

Backlit by the sun, her pale yellow hair—appearing like white strands—softened into a blur, making her face look elongated and hollow.
When Walton’s index finger lunged at Iris’s throat like a striking snake, she could no longer endure the sudden pressure.

“No! That’s disgusting!”
“Do it with John.”

With that, Iris spun around and ran to the far side of the former dueling ground’s lawn.
Even as the two men approached, she stood vacantly gazing at the grass beneath her feet.
But soon she abruptly looked back and forth between their faces with equal measure.
Then she said in a probing tone.

“Why don’t you two duel?”

She had ridden trains and buses all the way from London’s distant outskirts, brought here by these men. The nearly hour-long journey with its transfers and such—and the vague stimulation of being constantly flanked by members of the opposite sex—had left her thoroughly exhausted. Rather than from blatant Walton, it was from John—who seemed composed and magnanimous—that she felt this oppressive weight bearing down. At any rate, she was tired. She wanted temporary freedom from the men. Yet were they to leave her entirely, she’d likely find the loneliness unbearable. She wanted them kept at a slight remove from her side—enough that their attention wouldn’t fixate on her excessively, yet not so little that they grew wholly indifferent. In any case, Iris wanted to catch her breath. She wanted to sit on the grass and take five or six deep, easy breaths. Then close her eyes and surrender herself to thoughts that might settle her mind while inhaling the grass’s soft fragrance. Iris’s utilitarian cunning schemed to have them stage a mock duel first—thereby freeing herself from them.

“Come on, have your duel.”

At Iris's decisive proposal, Walton was momentarily troubled and made a grimace, but immediately managed a smile, turned to John, and asked.

“John—up for a duel?”

“Don’t be absurd.”
“Let’s folk dance instead.”
Ta, ta, ta, ta, tarattara!

While keeping rhythm vocally, John—driven by a desire to vent some pent-up emotions—placed both hands on his hips, slightly bent his knees, and with spring-loaded poise began advancing toward Walton, retreating, then leaping and sidestepping left and right.
He began to sing with reckless abandon as he danced around.

Taratta, rata, rattaraa,

On market day,

I saw Peggy for the first time.

She sat down on the hay,

She was driving a low-covered wagon.

Taratta, rata, rattaraa,

I sing,

That hay was fresh grass,

Even adorned with spring flowers,

They cannot rival her in her prime.

If she were riding in the wagon,

The harsh old man at the barrier gate,

Without collecting a single toll,

Lightly rubbing his white-haired head,

Saw off the low-covered wagon.

Taratta, rata, rattaraa,

…………………………

Walton too began dancing opposite him, and the two of them danced in perfect rhythm.
The more spirited their dancing grew, the less Iris could endure it.
Having her own improvisation turned against her, she couldn’t remain still.
She shouted in a shrill voice.

“Stop! Why won’t you duel as I told you to?”

John, who had stopped dancing, protested vehemently.

"There's no reason to duel."

"Reason? You need a reason? Let's see—what reasons did people even have for dueling in the old days?"

Iris, as though her way forward had been suddenly blocked, found her will abruptly suppressed and slumped dejectedly.
Iris fell silent and inquired about the reason for the duel.
At that moment, Walton interjected.
He swallowed hard, waiting for his chance to start speaking.

“Against those who tarnish one’s honor before the public… and then… disputes over women like Nelson’s…”

Suddenly, within each of them, it felt as though some heavy mass had dropped with a dull thud. The sound itself seemed to reverberate through their ears. Toward that sudden, mysterious sensation, the trio’s entire beings were drawn. There, they fell into a chilly silence—an enervated silence that had pierced through the depths of their souls and sunk into an abyss of nothingness. A boundless silence it was. Though Iris had been first to claw her way out from that void, now her mind lay so exhausted it could scarcely bear even the slightest emotional burden.

Caught between two men of late and having utterly lost control of her emotions under daily anxiety that continued each day, she could no longer sustain even her feigned vigor for long.
With her face—as pale and elegant as white porcelain—she forced its surface to tighten even more rigidly as she commanded the two men.

“Duel for my sake!”

“Hmph.”

John gave a wry smile.
The sensation of being manhandled since earlier had lodged in him, nausea rising.
He felt dizzy.
But Iris brusquely shoved both men aside.

“Now begin.”

“We’ll use pistols.”

It was Walton who said this.
He mimicked a pistol with hand gestures; it occurred to him that if they performed even a mock duel, this situation could be easily resolved without having to stir up his emotions or exert himself physically.

The men faced each other.
They gripped their right hands, extending only the index fingers to form pistol shapes, then bent their left arms horizontally and rested them atop.
The men waited unenthusiastically for the signal.

“Ready… Begin!”

Bang.

The two men snapped their mouths open in unison and roared.
Walton pressed both hands to his left chest and deliberately collapsed onto the lawn.

“I’m shot...”

Walton, having fallen, immediately opened his narrow eyes in a slightly comical manner to gauge Iris’s mood.

“Ha, ha, ha, ha.”

Iris laughed with a feeble voice.
She laughed with a strangely wretched expression.
By now, she felt she didn’t care what the men did.
In truth, none of it mattered anymore.
But even so, she found their mock duel far too anticlimactic to satisfy her, and wished they would keep their distance a while longer.

She stood there tilting her head slightly with an air of boredom.
John remained planted in his original spot wearing an expressionless mask, his pistol-shaped right hand hanging limp at his side.
Yet that rigid sensation still clung to his chest.
Walton—born cheerful—found himself unable to breathe in this chilled, stagnant atmosphere for another instant.
I want to smash something.
Then it struck him—something delightfully satisfying might bloom from the wreckage.
With forced levity, he launched himself at John.

“Hey, let’s wrestle.”

So saying, he shook John’s shoulders.
Walton roughly bent and pulled at John’s body, which had gone limp with all its joints unresisting.
John nearly toppled over but instead tensed up.
The tension heightened his opponent’s attacks, which in turn made him tense up even more.
John could no longer remain purely on the defensive.
John's muscles first contracted reflexively.
Before long, the two men’s flesh, strained by furious bones, collided violently.
The moist, soft lawn soil was pressed down by the four straining shoes of the men and rebounded.
The transparent blades of grass twisted and tore free, flying up like winged insects taking flight.

The youths' raw competitive urge could not be halted by half-hearted measures.
The violent struggle grew increasingly intense.
From between the entangled flesh, a sudden cry arose.
Another cry answered in kind.

“You bastard!”

“Ah, resorting to fisticuffs now.”

The two men wrenched apart the hands they’d been grappling with as if repelled.
They looked at each other’s faces anew.
Recognizing unforgivable rage in each other’s features, they turned murderous.
At last, a fierce bare-knuckle brawl had begun.
The men finally plunged headlong toward the inevitable confrontation.
Lunging and flailing through mounting resentment and hatred, they strained their arms and hurled themselves at each other recklessly—“Take this! Know my curse and hatred!”—each fist howled as it struck.
It transcended mere physical blows and pain.
Through the pain permeating their bodies, they deciphered each other's hidden malice.
Propelled by the mounting momentum of their flesh-and-blood struggle, they shattered their usual restraint toward one another.
With Iris caught between them, the long-suppressed hatred between the two men blazed forth, breaking through to the surface.

John's father was a gardener.
Lately, his father’s clientele had multiplied exclusively in London’s western suburbs.
As in any European city, London’s east end was a slum.
Wealthy individuals with magnificent mansions relocated west and southwest.
The rented house in London’s East End where John and his family lived had grown too distant from the customers’ gardens.
So at the beginning of last month, they had to relocate to a certain alley in the western end.
That relocation had been far more convenient for John’s father.
Due to the relocation, John had to live apart from Iris in the neighborhood.
That gave John a somewhat lonesome air, yet also conjured an oddly cheerful image of separation from Iris.
On his way back from the university in the downtown area, he visited Iris.
Each time they met, they confronted one another with such transformed aspects that they seemed unrecognizable.
They wanted to discuss many things.
They wanted to hear even the most trivial details.
They recalled the trivial acts of self-indulgence that had passed between them since their first days attending the church elementary school.
They even gave some thought to what they must do from now on.
More than anything, right now, the two of them wanted to go out somewhere.
They wanted to do something.
They wondered if there wasn’t something truly enjoyable to be had.
Otherwise, they wanted to have a life-and-death fight.
The two met with hope.

With unexplained dissatisfaction, the two parted ways.
After discussing and promising when they would meet again, the two separated.
Their mutual yearning grew stronger.
That only amplified the dissatisfaction.
Their reciprocal callousness became all the more conspicuous.
They seemed like pure incarnations of heartlessness.
Before long, lamentation and anger came to churn ceaselessly day and night within their guts.
They could do nothing.
What rendered John even more wretched was his friend Walton’s association with Iris.

Walton, whom Iris had once disliked, had recently become a frequent topic in her conversations.
At times Iris even invited Walton to insert himself between them.
Each time John saw Walton bickering and fawning over Iris before his eyes, his blood seethed.
John maintained a facade of magnanimity.
He simply couldn't bring himself to make gestures or whisper words that might arouse desire in women—especially in Iris, his childhood companion.
He burned with frustration at his own helpless clumsiness.
With Walton relentlessly seizing the initiative, John found himself driven into defensive postures.
Whether strolling as three or attending events together, everything made John feel like he was being led about by Walton.
In those situations, Iris might as well have been absent.
The former Iris had vanished completely; now there remained only an Iris compounded with Walton.
John wanted to see the authentic Iris.
He wanted to strip away the contaminants.
He wanted to ensure those impurities would never adhere to her again.
He wanted to make it absolute.
He wanted to tear them apart with his arms, crush them with all his teeth, spit them out as dregs, grind them beneath his heels, then burn them to ash in a crematory furnace.
Yet still he felt certain ashes and smoke would slip free to cling to Iris.
Rage, curses, and anxiety left John gaunt and feverish.

With John having moved away, Walton lost a friend. To him, John had been an anchor—at times an unbearable nuisance, yet at others a steadying weight. John's excessive attempts at reconciliation now struck him as presumptuous and irritating, yet nostalgia lingered. John, who once lived near Iris's house and would bring her along to invite Walton out, had left Iris alone. This solitary Iris suddenly appeared grown-up. She looked peculiar. He felt compelled not to leave her as she was. She seemed precarious in a way that made her future uncertain without intervention. To Walton, Iris's recent life now appeared both lonely and endearing. He often met her at the front of his father's grocery store. After finishing her bank accounting duties with clockwork precision and heading straight home, Walton would typically be waiting for her by half past four. In Iris's gaze, he began discerning interrogation, entreaty, and benevolence. They exchanged greetings. They held brief standing conversations. This began some time after John's relocation. Afterwards, the two would occasionally discuss and inquire about John while strolling about the area. They walked through nearby towns. They roamed far afield. No matter how far they wandered, their conversation never reached conclusion.

Talking about John held no interest now.
It never came up anymore.
Walton wanted to delight Iris, make her laugh, set her glowing with vitality—to spin wildly within that blaze of living.
He wanted to melt himself into her very being.
Around this time began days when John would call on Iris only to find her unavailable.

Walton did not forget the April 22nd that had passed.

That day was a bank holiday.
It was a day that captivated London’s lovers.
Though somewhat vulgar, deafening noise and potent whiskey sent those remaining in the city into reckless frenzy.
They drove people mad and left them exhausted beyond reckoning.
John, who had promised, came to invite Iris.
She had been waiting there with Walton.
The three wandered through town streets and park bustle with stiff unease.
But evening fell, and John had to return home.
Near Iris’s town, John had to leave her alone with Walton and walk away.
He departed with feigned cheerfulness, entrusting his anxieties to fate.
Walton was truly happy.
Just as he’d hoped, Iris seemed delighted.
She leaned on him even more than he’d leaned on her.
Midnight approached.
The two—clowning and stumbling—slipped between shrubs at a corner park to rest their fleeting weariness.
The kiss seeped gently into their marrow.
Next morning Walton sprang from bed heart racing at thoughts of thrilling freedoms awaiting him—but when he intercepted Iris before work, every expectation shattered.
Iris brooded bitterly over last night’s reckless venture of transient excitement.
That Walton had exploited her sexual curiosity so effortlessly left her seething with restless humiliation.
In emotional recoil, she and Walton barely spoke.

Her withdrawn expressionlessness and silence left Walton flustered, infuriating him nearly to the point of wanting to exert physical force upon her.
Yet afterward, in the pleasantly clear air and refreshing shade of green trees, she at times appeared to open up and regard Walton with something akin to nostalgia.
Walton was momentarily captivated as she moved with the ethereal detachment of a sleepwalker.
But he began to feel that none of those virtues of hers had anything to do with him.
Truly, her reactions to him amounted to mere fragments.
Walton felt unbearably lonely and foolish.
But since he was an optimist, he continued clinging to slender threads of expectation.
Over half a month later, upon learning that Iris treated John on the same level as himself, Walton became fired up.
He regained his vigor.
He grew hyperconscious of himself and believed fiercely in his own power.
He spent his days resolved to bring her under his protection.
He wanted to humiliate John immediately.
Walton believed he could certainly accomplish it.
He dismissed John as beneath consideration.

And yet, this very John now struck Walton with such violence.
He hammered away until he felt faint.
Walton, to his shock, recognized John as a formidable enemy and swelled with rage.
A desperate struggle seized them.

John and Walton—now, above all else—wanted to strike their opponent at least one more time.
They wanted to thrust.
They gradually became the struggle itself.
In their consciousness now, even Iris vanished.
There was no dueling ground, nor late spring, nor afternoon sunlight—nothing at all remained.
Collisions were repeated like raging waves against rocks.
They were breathless.
Though they couldn’t even utter a sound, a violent clamor filled the air.

Iris was tormented deep in her gut by the chaotic clamor of feet stamping the ground.
She heard the sound of the two men alternately snuffling back nosebleeds.
She even felt the savage breathing of wild beasts, and every hair stood on end.
Amidst these noises, the sound of bone striking bone resonated in Iris's heart with a particularly eerie desolation.

She had no idea what to do anymore.

It never occurred to her to stop them.
This desperate life-risking struggle was terrifying as though cruelly tearing her apart.
Her body darted frantically around the men.
She felt as though she herself had joined their bloody struggle.
She knew of course that she herself was the cause of this duel.
But she endeavored not to feel responsible.
She wanted to remain deliberately indifferent.
The men—faces grotesquely swollen and smeared with nosebleed and greasy sweat like mud, twisted and mangled by pain fury and breathlessness—were no longer her friends.
Of course they could never become lovers.
Disheveled hair eyes bloodshot and festering twisted clothing convulsing limbs—such men had become strangers to her.
It was a beggars' brawl.
It was a beastly mauling.
Death hovered perilously close.

She wanted to escape this place as quickly as possible.
But her body still clung to that spot.
She burned with impatience.
Yet gradually, she backed away from the dueling ground.
Timidly, like a little girl sneaking out in secret.
She slipped through shrubs clustered like giant mushrooms into the dense thicket of mixed trees.
The place she emerged was a slight protrusion of Kenwood Forest.
Songbirds seemed to fill the treetops with nests, each singing willfully to assert its selfhood.
The entire area brimmed with the blue-reeking stifle of grass and leaves, pressing down upon all who entered.
Iris had penetrated deep into the forest.
She reached a place entirely encircled by low shrubs, where she alone became barely concealed beneath layered foliage.
She angled her knees on the turf and sat like clockwork.
Her hands clasped themselves upon her knees without thought.
There she released three or four thick, lingering sighs.
Despair and disgust had drained her spirit.
Vaguely, she merged with surrounding trees and grass as time flowed.
She became nature incarnate.
Quietly she surrendered herself to eternity's current.
As if she alone survived in mountains and rivers after a nation's fall.
She had forgotten both herself and the present world.

Suddenly, she was startled by hurried footsteps - what sounded like two women passing close by.
She felt terrified of something.
Never before had she experienced such utter powerlessness.
She stifled her breath and stayed alert.
Her honed hearing now picked out approaching footsteps - another pair, likely men.

“Hey, did you find someone?”

――……………………………

As Saturday evening approached, a man who had abruptly begun scrambling to find companions seemed to have lightly extended an invitation to some women in an inoffensive manner.
“Oh, so that’s who they were—” she sighed in relief.
The addressed women said nothing.
And both the men and women moved away.
She felt a flicker of curiosity about how the women would handle the invitation the men had cast like a net.
But the women departed without even responding.
The disappointment of trivial human affairs strangely demanded an answer from within her.
“Did you find someone?” echoed loudly in her ears, yet she was both utterly surprised and flustered.
She peered into her own mind.
She peered into her chest and stomach, and—though it was mortifying—even briefly into her private regions.
Nowhere was there a trace of the man she desired.
No matter how hard she searched, she couldn’t find it.
From the moment of her birth until now, among all the men she had encountered in her existence, not a single face had asserted its right to appear clearly before her.

“Still I haven’t found the one. When will I find him? How can I make him mine? Looks—if they’re good, all the better—but even if he isn’t some conventionally handsome man, a remarkable person whose masculine essence shines; someone whose thoughts, words, and deeds—whose very life—pulses in unison with the universe’s vitality; a man of spiritual wisdom and physical presence who, when holding me, could breathe vibrant life into my weary, crumbling soul—that’s who I want. Where could he be? He might be unexpectedly close to me. I must find him as soon as possible. Even though I’m already twenty-two… it’s not the time to be jostling with men like John and Walton—I should abandon them. And now I will advance anew toward my aspiration.”

Iris, excited by girlish hopes, swung both fists through the surrounding air.
And then, channeling the resilient determination of her quest into both hips and legs, she stood up.

She did not stop by the dueling ground.
Though she couldn't help but wonder about the outcome of the men's struggle over there, she gradually retreated further and further from that place.
She had to get away from the dueling ground—where those now-pointless men still fought—as quickly as possible.