Pathway to Japanese Literature

Preface

This work is an old piece.
I wrote this to answer those who claim Buddhism is nothing but an entirely moralistic doctrine divorced from literary arts.
But I repeat—this work belongs among my earlier compositions.
Therefore, should you find its prose somewhat antiquated in expression, I humbly beg your indulgence.
If only you might grasp this truth—that those who would creatively adapt Buddhism's eternal verities through changing eras must possess an artist's intuitive power; or rather (though my own work be crude), that Buddhism and literary arts exist in essential unity—this realization would bring me profoundest joy.

Furthermore, The Hundred Parables Sutra comprises several thousand parables extracted from those sections of Buddhist scriptures' parable sutras that exclusively feature fools (in Buddhist terminology, those of so-called fixed nature). However, the original sutra texts contain only this work's subtitles and a mere two or three lines of commentary beneath them—nothing more. The main text is entirely the author's creation, drawing hints from those sources.

The Fool Who Ate Salt Parable

A fool who was treated to a delicious meal seasoned with salt elsewhere returned home and licked nothing but salt, only to find it tasted awful.

He was a man entirely devoid of flavor.
He was the sort of man who would immediately doff his hat and bow upon meeting someone.
What’s more, he even blew his nose quietly.

“Why don’t you try adding a bit of salt?”

The plaster shop landlady instructed Shidako.
In lieu of deducting Shidako’s assistant fee, the landlady cleaned up the plaster storage shed a little.

“Well… Let’s try adding a bit of salt then.”

Shidako replied.

After leaving his handbag with the valiant Greek statue at the shed’s center for their rendezvous—Shidako suddenly slapped the man’s cheek with a sharp crack.
And she remained silent, keeping a straight face.

“You’re terrible.
“Without any reason at all…”

Impatiently stammering, the man’s voice fermented.

“Because you’re just too meek.”
“He made a pass at me.”
“Aokuma here at our place.”

“So Aokuma is the master here.”
“Very well.”

To Shidako, it appeared that the man’s internal organs—simple as a schematic diagram—were writhing for the first time since birth for a purpose other than conveying food.
The man pressed his quivering lips behind his front teeth.

“I’ll break all the plaster here.
“Then I’ll surely go to other houses to find out your profession.”

The next time she met the landlady, Shidako said:
"Thank you."
"The salt really worked."
"That man started showing some passion."

The landlady had forgotten what she herself had said before.
And then, having heard the entire story from Shidako, she ended up utterly astonished.

“I told you to sprinkle salt carelessly, but you actually went and seasoned him proper, didn’t you? Oh, so that’s how you season a man with salt.”

That evening, the landlady said to her husband.

“Something strange happened. You.”
“Shidako’s lover made a pass at someone like me.”
“He was serious, I tell you.”

The plaster shop owner, who had been nursing cheap whiskey, bristled with scales of curiosity across his entire body.

“Well ain’t that something.”
“What a pervert.”
“Make sure you sweet-talk him into buying at least one hunk of plaster.”
“I ain’t havin’ it if you don’t make him buy nothin’.”

The following morning, reluctantly dragged by her husband to the storage shed to pick out plaster pieces for sale, the landlady discovered one of the valiant Greek warrior statues damaged—the very tip of its shoulder chipped away in a most cowardly manner.

The Fool Who Hoarded Milk Parable

The fool intended not to milk the cow day by day until guests arrived, keeping the milk stored within her body.
When the guests finally arrived, the fool milked the cow, but only a day’s worth came out.

Her husband’s love grew fresher day by day.
There was a scent of clover thickening with vitality.
It had the luster of tightly woven flannel.
The sweetness restrained itself where it fell short.

Thus Hoshiko found it acceptable to perceive her husband’s love as milk.

Ten months into their marriage.

There had been three consecutive days off—a rare occurrence.

The sisters from her Tokyo family home sent word that they would come to visit for an overnight stay.
Until the day of that promised visit arrived, six yellow autumn days still lay sandwiched between.

Hoshiko wanted her sisters to witness the love her husband held for her.
Making them aware of this happiness absorbed through drinking from within would also serve as a supplementary lecture on marital hygiene for her sisters yet to marry.

But would her younger sisters—girls who still didn’t judge men’s love by the quality of its texture—truly comprehend something like her husband’s affection?
Would they even recognize the taste of milk?
If they were still the sort of girls who traced and retraced letters with a goose quill pen to get autographs from Hollywood stars, this would be difficult.
In that case, there was nothing for it but to demonstrate through quantity rather than texture.

Hoshiko requested of her husband.

"For the next five days,"
"Do your best to conserve your love."
"But when my sisters come, pour every last drop of what you've saved up right onto me."
"Put it to use and show me."

Her husband with thinning hair murmured, "There, there."

On the sixth morning—with skirts smelling of camphor and naphthalene, and flower-patterned sleeves jumbled together in a bustling heap at the entrance—the sisters arrived.

“I’m first!”

“I’m first!”

The second sister and third sister were arguing about such things while gasping for breath. They had raced here from the station.

They hadn’t changed a bit, these girls. It was just as well she had made those preparations, Hoshiko thought.

“Hurry up and come in.”
“Quickly use some hot water—dinner’s ready right away.”

In the meantime, Hoshiko braced herself, waiting for the love her husband had stored up over five days to come pouring down upon her shoulders and chest all at once now.

“This persimmon is incredibly delicious.”
“Want me to give you half?”

The quantity of her husband’s love had yielded only a single day’s portion after all.
It hadn’t grown as thick or abundant as Hoshiko had hoped.
Rather than that, the sisters were preoccupied with inspecting their sister’s tearoom and front garden—places they were seeing for the first time.
Once they grew bored of that, they promptly made their sister’s husband a companion in bat-shaped trinket crafting.

Milk cannot be stored in a cow’s belly—Hoshiko thought—you see.

The Eiffel Tower Parable

A foolish rich man summoned a carpenter to build a three-story tower but declared he required neither of its lower two floors—only desired the uppermost layer.

“Just try to imagine wanting to create only that slender tower’s summit at that height—without building that foundation, without constructing that middle section.”

The old man—who had grown weary of playing with his plump dogs Rick and Rack on an island in the Seine River, his pension for sustenance paid from German reparations—pointed at the Eiffel Tower and declared this.

“Then, from the agony of trying to make the impossible possible, human emotions seep out like sweat. Courage, disappointment, cunning, despondency, stubbornness, consolation—amidst these you can even see the jealous streak in the palm of a woman who’s been struck. You’ll even see the lone dimple of a child you’re sure you must’ve had somewhere. I even recall the sum from that manuscript fee I’d carelessly overpaid which ended up being quietly taken away. But in the end, even all that gets burned away, and occasionally something like fireworks lights up. Hold a mirror up to the sun and focus its rays into your eyeballs. It’s not some flimsy thing like that. The glare forces its way right into your mouth till you can’t breathe. You’d surely gasp in that moment. You might just find yourself pressing your head from behind with your hand without thinking. Just think the regulation of all that overstrained intellect in your head finally snapped. But that’s not how it is, no. It's neither here nor there. Bring your ear closer here for a second. I’ll tell you in a whisper. That’s what that ‘space’ the Jewish Einstein makes his bread and butter—proof being when your head gets carried off by those sparks, the Eiffel Tower’s summit manifests without any foundation or middle section, floating softly at that height like it’s no impossibility at all. Ha ha ha ha ha ha. If you ask me, that Saint Augustine fellow was a hasty one. Just from seeing those sparks, he jumped to the conclusion that he’d even glimpsed God’s very body. That’s not God. That’s just God’s halo.”

“God’s body or whatever—it’s like a raw Italian octopus that molds itself to match wherever it finds itself, so there’s no way you can see it.”

“Is that so? You’ll cross the bridge and walk along the riverbank to head back, eh? Fine weather today means they’ve strung laundry lines all from Hikifune to the quay loop—makes walking a damn nuisance.” He laughed coarsely. “Ha ha ha. Look at that fishing-obsessed fool over there. Stuffed his catch right into his pocket and buttoned it up careful-like.”

The Parable of Losing the Bowl at Sea

A foolish man dropped a bowl into the sea.
The man immediately recorded the current flow conditions at the spot where he had dropped it.
After two months, he came to a sea in another country that resembled the flow patterns he had previously documented.
The man tried to retrieve the bowl and searched there but could not find it.

When they departed Naniwa’s canals and passed offshore of Sumoto in Awaji, the sea lay calm.
The sail sagged dejectedly.
The boarding passengers took out sake flasks.
There was also an old man who had a woman hum a shamisen tune while he dozed off stroking the rounded curve of her knee.

The land was close.
The pine grove rose in a solid band of blue.
Through the trunks, small thatched huts could be seen moving in a row.
On the warm sandy beach, a crowd of people were dragging nets to catch sand lance.
Dogs barked and ran about.

Makizo leaned against the ship’s gunwale with his cheek propped on his hand and dozed briefly—his numbness-like fatigue had completely healed. Only a sense of futility lingered.

Ah yes—the hairpin existed. Let me recall the vestiges.

He scooped up a twisting wave crest in his palm, took it into his mouth, wiped his face with a new three-shaku hand towel, and in the spring seascape before his eyes recalled Kiyamachi’s cold light of morning-after partings.
The corridor at dawn was cold.
The sandals were like lead plates.
The woman didn’t even draw bathwater.
She merely stood by and yawned.
When he tried to get a good look at her profile in farewell, she ended up turning away.

"Did that heartless wretch even begrudge me her profile?"
As she turned away, this hairpin fell onto my sleeve, but the woman hadn’t noticed.
I let it slide into my sleeve.
A tawdry silver hairpin.
Huh—a chrysanthemum was carved there.
Impudently, a fence was carved too.
Filthy grease had built up.
And yet, why did seeing this make me long for her?
"Might as well give it a sniff."

As he twisted it, he ended up dropping the hairpin into the sea.
Makizo didn't find it particularly regrettable at the time.
He somehow became acutely aware of nothing but the surrounding scenery.

"So this was where I dropped that woman’s hairpin."
"Right—I’ll commit this place to memory."

The ship, having made repeated port calls, dropped anchor at Bishū Gamagōri.
Makizo’s hometown of Toyohashi was now near.

However, his longing for the woman from Kiyamachi only grew stronger.
More than that, the silver hairpin he had dropped into the Awaji Sea had become unbearably precious.
He had been reduced to just the clothes he was wearing and his return travel expenses, and the price paid for his journey to Kamigata—for which he had staked all else—had become nothing more than that single silver hairpin.
It had been the sole memento of the woman who had affected him thus.
By keeping it, he would have to voice resentment and bitterness his entire life.
His chest seethed only to end up utterly vacant.

He heard voices dragging nets on the beach.
The barks of dogs mingled among them.
Green pines and white sand.
Makizo—

"This isn’t Awaji.
This is Gamagōri."

No matter how many times he told himself this, it still looked like Awaji there.
The Sumoto in his memory had vanished completely as the Sumoto Sea before his eyes assailed his senses with glaring light and visceral rawness.

"I’ll have that hairpin returned."

Staring at the seawater that gathered tiny creases like tatami seams, its clammy translucent surface putting on a coquettish display, Makizo tightened his obi.
And then he plunged headlong into the sea.
Instead of obtaining the hairpin, Makizo lost his life to the sea.

The Parable of Five Men Sharing a Housemaid

Five men fairly pooled their money and hired one housemaid.
When one man grew angry and gave the housemaid ten lashes, the other four men also asserted their rights and each gave her ten lashes.

Five men hired one woman.

In an old rented house where hawthorns bloom.

The five men were splitting their living expenses.
Accordingly, they split the housemaid’s wages per capita and paid them.
Irrespective of this, the hawthorn flowers bloomed plum-shaped.

The ordinary housemaid could find no way to address them and called each of the five employers “Master.”
But her way of addressing them wasn’t entirely without some uniqueness.

For one: that Master.

For another: a touch Master.

For one: If I may beg your pardon, Master.

For one: Are you present, Master?

For one: simply Master.

She called.

One of the employers handed over laundry to the woman.
Then the other four employers also produced laundry.
Equal opportunity.
Equal division of privileges.
They possessed the delicate economic sensibilities befitting single salarymen.

The five items of laundry could not be washed uniformly clean.
There were times when shirts hung out to dry would be folded with the reddish-yellow stain of hawthorn berries still smeared on sleeves.
The employer who owned it pursed lips and scolded the woman.

Then the other four also pursed their lips to avoid loss and scolded the woman.
The scolded woman had cause to resent her employers—
"But resenting all five—"

the woman thought.

“Women like us can’t possibly resent five people all at once.”
My heart isn’t structured that way.
“After all, I must focus my resentment on just one person… So which master should I resent?”

The hesitant woman stood at the back door, her red hands still protruding from the eight-paneled lattice.

As she pressed her fingers there, organizing her thoughts, the hawthorn conveniently bore small thorns.

The Parable of the Farmer Who Yearned for the Princess

Dahotta the farmer confessed his love for the princess to someone.
Despite being told “I conveyed thy feelings to the princess yet she declared her dislike for thee,” he still strove to make her acknowledge him.

“Is there anything in this world more beautiful than this princess?”

Dahotta gazed at the princess in the palanquin from his field.
He was cutting black millet.

A gold-silver jeweled necklace, seven-treasure breastplate, palanquin light as a poppy blossom.
The small white elephant bearing it shone like a rainbow-edged pompon.
With each elephant step, the palanquin swayed as if drowsing.

Dahotta found himself unconsciously hiding in the shade of the millet as he tracked the princess's movements.

The main ridge path led toward the banyan tree grove. It was still a couple of blocks away. Fortunately, the millet fields continued. Far off, the snow-capped mountain carved into the lapis lazuli sky, using the royal castle’s twin turrets as incisors to blaze resplendently in the evening glow. The dreamlike procession drifted onward, keeping company with these distant vistas.

It’s a shame to let that princess leave without making her acknowledge me.
The princess will likely never come to such a rural area again.
The act of imprinting a field clod’s existence onto such a rainbow—I can’t quite explain why—strikes me as something that could give my life meaning.

Dahotta, who had crawled through the shade of the black millet to follow along, stretched himself upright there and tried to raise his voice in a shout.
But his waist faltered and refused to straighten.
The vanguard of the procession had already lined up two by two and was proceeding into the violet shadows of the banyan grove.

There was a manure bucket.
The weasel's corpse putrefied with a phosphorescent glow, crowned in bubbles.
The bucket ladle was stuck in a festering floating island of rags.
Dahotta picked up its handle.
He scattered it with all his strength in every direction.

The wind carried that stench to the princess’s senses as she nearly entered the banyan grove; she covered her face with her sleeve.

Dahotta felt relieved and satisfied that he had made a single strong impression on the princess. However, when he thought of having caused discomfort to that beautiful being, he became heartrendingly pitiable. Dahotta cried amidst the millet.

The Parable of the Merchants Who Killed Their Guide to Appease Heaven

When a caravan encountered a violent storm in the wilderness, they killed their guide as a human sacrifice to appease a wild deity.
What became of the caravan that had lost its guide?

The guide they had hired in ××× was a strange man.

“A true guide only begins guiding after being killed.”

He said such things.
No one paid it much mind.
For one, this guide’s appearance was utterly ordinary—no different from any common mixed-blood Arab found anywhere—and what’s more, he was quite cunning, so they simply dismissed his words as ramblings.

When his words went unheeded, the guide revealed a faint anger across his ordinary face.

The caravan departed.
The desert was infinite.
Days when it seemed the sand was being trampled vainly beneath camels' feet continued for many more.
Only the sun burned one by one each day in the sky, reduced to cinders.

Through this vast desert, the guide led the way at the front, staff waving as he proceeded along the path.
He was an excellent guide, his authoritative demeanor directing their route with a confident stride.

He unerringly located the hidden water supply covered by a stone in a sand dune's shadow.
When the sun paused at its zenith—timing it for when all had grown weary from heat and swirling sand—he began to sing.

Someday, just once—

Turn into a fish,

A castle of water with wine of water

With that child, the two of us beneath a watery canopy

Whisper

Cool.

Cool.

Then they too raised their voices in unison, joining in with "Cool, cool."
And everyone sent him a thankful round of applause for drawing out the enjoyment of singing.
At this, he momentarily put on a pleased expression but then vacantly muttered again as if talking to himself:

“A true guide only begins guiding after being killed.”

They gradually began noticing something mysterious in these words of his.

It was the afternoon of the tenth or so day since departing from ×××.
The hem of the azure sky ahead seemed pinched at one spot—as if marked by grimy fingers—then instantly spread until hundreds of leagues widened into yellow-black darkness, within which countless tornadoes whirled silver whiskers.
Hot sand stung cheeks.
The camels crouched down without spirit.

Now they had to kill someone.
Everyone in the caravan thought this simultaneously.
And they exchanged ominous looks.
When encountering a great wind in the desert—interpreted as having provoked the wrath of heavenly gods—they needed to offer a sacrificial member of their caravan through prayer to avoid calamity.
This was common knowledge.

The caravan members were all of the same clan.
They were so close that each knew the others' wives and children by sight.
As a matter of human feeling, they couldn't lay a hand on a single one of their own.
There was no one left to sacrifice but the foreign guide.
They killed the guide.

The gale subsided.
The guide's corpse lay half-buried in the ground like rotten wood, its nostrils and mouth packed full of sand.

Having saved their lives, the caravan members now belatedly realized their fatal mistake of having killed the guide in the desert.

“What do we do?”

They uttered aloud.

Perplexed.
Lost and bewildered, it was as if one could see them all perishing from thirst.

The emotion called distress burned fiercely from their chests outward, ruthlessly searing every part of their bodies, and in its wake came despair—a void so dense that neither time nor space could permeate it—filling that emptiness.
However, they could not endure that superhuman cold for long.

They involuntarily sprang up from there.
Everyone said.

“From now on, all of us will be guides.”
“Let’s go as far as we can go.”

The instant they thought this, the words that had surfaced in everyone's chests were those that had emerged from that guide's mouth.

――A true guide only begins guiding after being killed――

However, whether these words―now proven true through his actual death―were unique to this particular guide, or whether they had been passed down among guides since ancient times as a fate reserved for some guide encountering certain circumstances, they could not determine. As they prepared to depart from there, they all turned back to look at the sand-covered, ordinary face of the guide.

Rice Parable

The story of a man who stole rice from his wife’s family home and put it in his mouth.

Would anyone understand this feeling if spoken of? Or would they not?
Or perhaps was this feeling something only he possessed in some aberrant way—one of those futile things that would ultimately end without ever being understood by others?
Sakutaro let tears stream down before the doctor.
The doctor carefully injected anesthetic into Sakutaro’s swollen cheek.
Before the bride encircled by surgery, the entire family stood with worried faces aligned.

On the seventh day after their wedding, Sakutaro visited his wife’s family home with his new bride.
Although it was an arranged marriage, he loved both his wife and her family home.

Moderate wealth and moderate renown—along the roofed corridor connecting three storehouses lingered the faint gloom characteristic of old families. In the sunlight streaming through the latticed window, two or three amber-colored beetles glistened.

“It’s not that the atmosphere is unpleasant,”
“I simply couldn’t bring myself to like this dreary house.”

The bride Makiko said with an affected look.

The maiden he had received—fresh, healthy, carrying the scent of calcium—generations had prepared a placenta of thrift, common sense, patience to birth her.
When he thought this, gratitude welled up in Sakutaro toward each element of this ancestral home.

“It’s a good house—a house like a sturdy mother.”

When they stopped, they quietly discerned the scent of miso soup mixed with butterbur and the smell of livestock bedding straw.
Sakutaro walked along the corridor, caressing pillars and walls with tender affection.

Where the corridor ended at the storehouse door, spilled vegetables exposed stone pavement.
From there Makiko had meant to show Sakutaro an ostrich-like chicken in the backyard, but only one geta remained.
Makiko slipped it on and went to fetch its pair.

The midday countryside sunlight streaming through the doorways on both sides of the corridor was dazzling.
A winnowing basket filled with washed rice leaned against a pillar, left to drain.
The grains had already swollen under the sun and were emitting faint rainbow-hued steam.

An animal's instinct toward grain.
And so Sakutaro reached out impulsively—though consciously framing it as taking something from Makiko's family home without permission—and driven by this feeling, thrust all five fingertips into the rice before stuffing a handful into his mouth.
This unauthorized act—how completely it gratified his fondness for Makiko's family home—made him turn his swollen-cheeked smiling face toward the main house.
The instant he did, Makiko returned.
No sooner had she set down the garden geta she carried than she saw Sakutaro's face and gasped in surprise.

“You... What happened? Your cheek—”

She inadvertently used the “you” she had been withholding until now.

Sakutaro flushed crimson before turning ashen. The raw rice packed in his mouth had dried sufficiently that his meager saliva couldn’t moisten it enough to swallow. He absolutely couldn’t spit it out before his new wife above all. Because it might make him appear wretched.

When Makiko saw her husband’s abnormal state and cried out, the entire household erupted into commotion. Sakutaro grew increasingly mortified, and as the family’s anxiety intensified until an anguished expression surfaced on his face, they ultimately summoned a surgeon.

The anesthetic’s effect began to manifest on Sakutaro’s cheek, gradually numbing it.
Soon, a blade would be thrust there.
And if comical rice grains came spilling out from that incision in his skin, it would be the most humiliating thing in the world.

"What should I do then?"

Sakutaro closed his eyes, bitterly wondering why people don’t just die in moments like this, and felt his present self—finding no salvation—as the sole instance of loneliness in the world.

The Half-Eaten Rice Cake Parable

A certain person, driven by hunger, ate seven rice crackers.
But when he had eaten half of the seventh cracker and became full, he declared, “It’s because of this half that my stomach has tightened up. So I needn’t have eaten the previous six at all!”

In the bright early spring sunroom, an experiment on love’s endurance.

Margaret, daughter of Professor Yeats, kneaded this experimental plan from the peach-hued folds of her cerebellum and began preparations.
—An invitation card, British-style breakfast—that morning could have used a breeze.

Her lover Mikimoto arrived at the appointed hour.
The rigid shoulders of a morning coat—slightly tailored from off-the-rack Austin Reed—entered the garden gate while offering bashful greetings to clusters of yellow golden-chain flowers.
Asian-tanned leather skin—leather-tanned hands.
Those hands hastily shed the genuine suede overcoat there.

The young gentleman—like a cat that had licked away every trace of student poverty’s splattered mud with its thorny tongue—was both a spider silk researcher and secret collaborator with the Domestic X-Ray Equipment Manufacturing Company.

While dominating the man with her dazzling white-and-chartreuse morning dress, Margaret polished her nails and coquetted with sculptural fingertips on their second day.

“Now spread strawberry jam on one slice of toast.”

The man’s dutiful hands and cuffs reflected across six pieces of silverware.

The garden’s cherry and pear blossoms peered breathlessly.
Rosy clouds thrust their heads from the horizon trying to hoist up the blue sky from below, but their weight proved too much.

“This time, spread marmalade on one slice.”

The faithfulness of the man who had consented and the reflection of his hands and cuffs in Elizabethan-style silverware showed not the slightest change from before.
Somewhere, the frenzied rhythm of a folk dance record challenging the tips of children’s shoes could be heard.
The man slightly twitched the flesh of his temples and ears as he listened.

Another slice, again with marmalade, another, another, another—Margaret had the man serve her up to six slices.
But the seventh slice—

“Half.”

“Half,” she said.

When Mikimoto inadvertently glanced at the young lady’s face then, there materialized at the root of his eyebrows a bulge of flesh pinched upward by vexation and rage.
Yet it proved so faint that it vanished instantly.

After Mikimoto left, Margaret slumped into an armchair in the spacious sunroom, breathing in the scent of narcissus carried by the belated wind. She found her own satiety somehow comical and chuckled softly to herself. Then she thought:

The extent to which Mikimoto would gladly attend to me translates to six slices of toast.
By the seventh slice, he begins to find it bothersome.
An intriguing psychological experiment.
"I've consumed that test material into my stomach."

She found it amusing once more.

“Still, I’m so full my stomach aches a bit. Couldn’t I have achieved the experimental results measuring Mikimoto’s capacity for love just by using half of that seventh slice at the end without eating the first six pieces of toast?”

While gazing at the white clouds beginning to scatter across the azure sky, the youth of her mind pondered this unreasonable demand incessantly.

The Children Catch a Giant Turtle Parable

A turtle was a rare sight in these parts. The children caught it. Carefully pressing it down with a stick fragment, they bound it with rope.

The children hated this reptile they were seeing for the first time; in the stone box, it retracted its head and limbs, refusing to comply. If flipped over, it would stay flipped on its back. It was a frustratingly tedious animal whose rhythm and pace didn’t align with the children’s.

Moreover, the children also viewed this animal as a dangerous creature. After all, its limbs had claws. Its mouth also had teeth. A powerful desire welled up within the children to kill this ugly thing hiding harm and become heroes. The children mustered their courage and threw two or three stones at the turtle to see what would happen. The turtle didn't die.

A passerby came along.

“You should put that in water.”
“It’ll die fastest that way.”

The passerby taught the children this method.

(Adults, when making children believe a blatant lie, begin to believe it themselves to some extent.
There are even times when they end up fully believing it.)

The children put the turtle into the pond.
The stone with patterns on its back sank once into the water and then floated up, moving its limbs among the water plants.

“Look at it squirm in pain!”

The cruel boys’ sexual desire felt an abnormal satisfaction.

The red buds of sexual desire that had burst open within the boys from adults’ lies would later become seeds of suffering for women like O-machi, Kyoko, and O-fuyu.