Pathway to Japanese Literature

Part I

Akiko was known by the nickname "Pointe" at school.
Pointe was a point, and also a stinging pain.
That it simultaneously represented "pointe"—a sharp tip—was tacitly understood among her schoolmates.
In her case especially, it was the Blue Pointe.

Akiko found herself carved into this name Pointe.
She could not help feeling something akin to awe toward the upperclassman who had discovered this epithet.
At the same time, she came to regard her as a rival.

“That girl is a single, unyielding Pointe.”

That upperclassman turned pale once and said to her classmates.
And regarding the color, she added:

"And what's more—the *Blue* Pointe."

The classmates didn't know why this girl had turned pale. However, this strange nickname spread rapidly among the girls with their keen sense of smell. That they came to understand the meaning behind this code word—pointe, a sharp point—was nothing but a product of their uniquely acute perceptiveness.

At that sunlit suburban Academy, multitudes of girls bloomed while growing gaunt through their own nerves—delicate yet withered. Their tentacles quivered like blue radio waves in every sunlit corner of the Academy. How could those girls not have sniffed out Nettle Akiko? Before some could detect her scent, they had their skin torn by this nettle and shed blood that was painfully anemic.

Akiko had had a physical experience with a middle-aged man at an abnormally early age.
For Akiko herself, this accidental event—carried out without any sexual impulse—seemed to stimulate not her body, but only her mind.
The pale, chlorotic symptoms commonly seen in mixed-race girls began to afflict her.
Her honed nerves mercilessly laid bare within her the elements and circumstances that differed from those of the other girls.
Her nerves had cruelly dammed up her menstruation.
Even as the girls grew gaunt yet their nerves acquired a layer of plumpness, reaching the age when they bloomed like morning roses, Akiko alone remained—a nettle stripped of color.
To this could be added another reason: her weak heart.

This girl undergoing mysterious regression appeared to possess a single rare talent.
It lay in the particular quality of line that appeared in her sketches.
A certain upperclassman assigned to assist during sketching hours had come to cherish this talent of Akiko’s.
She introduced Akiko to the painter Iso.
For Iso, that upperclassman was both his art disciple and one of his mistresses.

The result was unexpected.
In the incident centering around Iso, that upperclassman had been brutally wounded like a yellow gemstone carried along a distant road in a bag with harder jewels—all for Akiko’s sake.
In the end, Akiko abandoned this upperclassman.

It was not long after that the nickname "Blue Pointe"—first escaping this girl’s lips—spread among a group of students.
The name of that upperclassman was Ryuko.

Iso had truly known a great many women.
The women, like sunflowers in his garden, had filled his skin with yellow pollen.
He was never satiated.
Iso possessed a savage breast.

Truly, many women had gathered around him. He was not originally a man of base inclinations, so he must have felt some genuine surprise at himself; yet he went on achieving one mechanical success after another. It was an act that evoked a certain hellish carnivorous plant from southern regions—a plant that spelled doom for insects.

Among Iso’s numerous mistresses—these women who willingly cast their yellow flesh into his arms—Ryuko alone could be said to have been loved by him through error. In other words, Iso loved Ryuko not as a girl but rather as a boy. It was merely the young woman’s lack of sexual knowledge that prevented her from recognizing the peculiarity of Iso’s way of loving. Be that as it may, the result was the same. Ryuko, like the hyacinth that bled from its brow and transformed into a flower through Apollo’s game of hurling iron quoits, ultimately ended up spurting blood from her neck by Iso’s doing—forced to prove herself as a boy—though this story belongs somewhat later.

Initially, Iso was introduced to Ryuko by a certain friend with a note describing her as a young lady of somewhat delinquent tendencies.
This must have been an absurd description to a man like Iso.
He could not help but imagine beneath this note's surface a solitary girl made unbearably restless by premarital idleness through her own intelligence.

He met Ryuko.
Surprisingly, he felt an astonishment—so strong it seemed unseemly for him—at the elegance of Ryuko’s features, honed by her intellect.
That elegance unwittingly drew his imagination toward Madame Récamier.

Iso was, for a painter, an eccentric man obsessed with history and natural sciences—one who had amassed a truly eclectic body of knowledge through his own lucid methodology within the cerebral convolutions.
That his paintings were intellectually constructed from this knowledge remained indisputable.
Through such means, he came to know one particular secret of the Louis dynasty:
the fact that Madame Récamier—betraying her peerlessly elegant countenance—possessed a certain sexual deformity.
This knowledge would prove calamitous for him.

His beastliness had begun to move half by inertia.
While harboring a terror common to all barbarians toward Ryuko’s elegance, he nevertheless treated her like all the girls who climbed his ×× while remaining asleep.
He mechanically lured her into ××××.
Yet Ryuko ascended ××× fully conscious.
Contrarily, it was Iso who fell into slumber.
Ryuko’s elegance had reached such heights.

Iso experienced Ryuko.
But he could not violate her.
He had discovered in Ryuko the exact same sexual defect as Madame Récamier.

What is this!
That their resemblance in appearance should be rooted in the same physical defect of the flesh.
Even Iso had not known such a theory.
Clearly, this was a coincidence.
This coincidence threw Iso into disarray.
He was abruptly roused from the slumbering state of consciousness that had been lulled into complacency by habit.
Everything whirled rapidly, and he was momentarily stripped of all his own convictions.
This bordered on divine punishment.

But soon, a miracle had begun to unfold. Because of that defect, Iso began to feel himself drawn to Ryuko. In Ryuko’s case, that sexual defect appeared as a form of perfection.

Truly, Ryuko was an astonishing perfection. She was none other than an extraordinary girl who typically embodied all feminine virtues—flexibility, wisdom, health—while remaining utterly exempt from their decline. The fragility of beauty was lacking in her. Because of that defect, Ryuko’s beauty—like an ivory statue—remained eternally imperishable. This was an eternal defect—or rather, perfection. All women exploit the weakness of men’s emotions through the fragility of their beauty. But in Ryuko’s case, it should be said that she exploited Iso’s strength through the hardness of her beauty. He marveled at Ryuko. He looked at her with the radiance of an infant who had awakened to a new consciousness. A completely different desire was now holding him captive. His forensic knowledge regarding Madame Récamier’s secret mysteriously sanctified his affection for Ryuko.

They had arranged to meet primarily in the mornings within the clear air of the Outer Garden.
Ryuko crossed the small overpass near her house.
Iso came striding from the shadow of the red brick barracks on the opposite side, tinged purple.
And usually arriving first, he would discover her by the blue bench there in the gravel before it, tracing shapes with her parasol’s tip while maintaining vigilant watch over her surroundings.

In the grassy planting, he would spot Ryuko’s figure from afar.
Even when the footsteps had reached a distance where they could unmistakably be heard, she showed no intention of breaking her elegant posture.
Only when resolute footsteps came to a halt directly before her did Ryuko finally raise her face and look squarely at Iso with a resolute demeanor.
Her eyes—clarified by intellect—seemed almost to interrogate their love affair.

Iso loved placing her in the morning light of the Outer Garden.
Despite its gradually intensifying brilliance, the morning light harbored a faint dark gray somewhere.
It seemed to impart a certain luster to the lucidity of her skin.
They sat down side by side on the bench.
Iso smelled a strong fragrance.
But he felt no temperature whatsoever.
This was a mysterious phenomenon he had never experienced through other women.
He had known through direct touch that blood warmer than average was circulating through Ryuko’s white flesh.
But her body temperature seemed not to dissipate externally beyond her skin at all.
It seemed as though it didn’t even transfer to her own clothes.
Her clothes always remained impeccably neat in the crisp morning breeze.
In her, Iso saw a woman who would ultimately never lose anything.

One day, during that same hour, Ryuko said to Iso.

“In the fifth year of the women’s department, there’s a girl who draws peculiar lines.”
“Calling them peculiar—there’s a morbid brightness in that girl’s very personality.”

The conversation was cut short as Iso was thinking of something else.
When they parted, Ryuko opened her parasol and stood up, then suddenly spoke rapidly as if remembering something.

“The girl I mentioned earlier—her name is Miss Akiko.”
“Since she herself seems to want you to look at her sketches, would it be all right if she comes to visit sometime?”
“Because she’s a frail-looking girl with glasses, you might not take to her.”

Iso felt no particular interest.
Rather, he even found it strange why Ryuko had brought up that girl twice.

Eventually, one Saturday morning, Akiko visited Iso’s atelier alone. Squinting against the glittering morning light that fell from the back window onto her forehead, she stood on tiptoe at the threshold and removed her black coat. Then from beneath the innocent navy-blue jumper’s chest, a poplin blouse protruded, appearing like a disheveled flower that exuded its fragrance. The girl stretched her bare shins with a slight shiver and advanced without hesitation toward Iso, who stood motionless in a deep corner still clad in his morning attire.

“Forgive me, Brother.”
“I’ve finally ended up coming.”
“Since Sister Ryuko said it was all right for me to come.”

When the girl stood facing Iso, she said this and showed a melancholic smile, her lips parting slightly.
Iso worried whether her crooked teeth might show from there.
She appeared to be standing slightly on tiptoe.
Her face was pallid, lusterless.
Only the lenses of her rimless nearsighted glasses cast a smooth light across her face, producing an oddly mature expression.
Iso was struck by a discordant impression.

Incongruities were observed throughout.
First and foremost, the very form of address—"Brother"—had somewhat disconcerted Iso.

Does this girl have a habit of habitually addressing men she isn’t even close to in this manner?
Or had she filtered it through rationality—that is, decided to call me that by contrasting it with how she addresses Sister Ryuko?

Iso had unwittingly fallen into an attitude akin to inspecting Akiko while being perplexed by such thoughts.
If it were the latter case, the curious thing was that her speech showed no trace of affectation that might suggest she had speculated about his relationship with Ryuko.
It must indeed be the former.
……However, at that moment, the girl looked up at him, her eyes taking on a questioning hue at Iso’s silence.
He found himself compelled to say something.

“Miss Akiko, you must have come to show me your paintings.”

Iso, carried by the momentum of having tried to adopt as gentle a tone as possible, noticed that it had come across like an adult addressing a child and was startled. But the girl swiftly took advantage of that and began to speak in a childish tone.

“Sister Ryuko did say that.”
“But in truth, that didn’t really matter.”
“If only I could meet you properly, Brother.”
“…But since I feel somewhat guilty about it, I’ll have you look at them after all.”
“My sketches—these.”
“I just grabbed whatever I could find.”

While flashing a fleeting cunning smile, Akiko pulled out three sketches from the drawing board on her lap and arranged them on the table.
Iso saw that the fingers arranging them were likewise pale and lusterless.
She hurriedly withdrew them.
Iso reluctantly glanced at the table.
All three were nude studies of a girl.

“Why didn’t you bring any landscapes?”

“Because I dislike landscapes.”

“Then why not still lifes—flowers, for instance? Isn’t starting with human figures too ambitious from the outset?”

“I’m no good at flowers.”

While having this conversation, Iso gradually began scrutinizing the sketches with careful attention.

This had employed a model.

“Huh? Which one?”

Akiko craned her neck as if peering in.
Her body appeared to sway unnaturally.

“That one?”
“Well, it’s half and half.”
“To tell the truth, that is my body.”

Iso was staring at the girl’s face.
Akiko’s face appeared even paler at this moment, and her eyes glared back at him almost defiantly.
Clear defiance was evident there.

“I thought as much. But why did you draw yourself?”

“By looking in the mirror.”
“Ah!”
“Why did you ask that?”
“After all, isn’t one’s own body the most readily available model?”
“And I hated my own body.”

Iso felt as if he had collided with a pure white wall.

If Iso had known about Akiko’s past, he might perhaps have been saved from misfortune.
But he did not know.
He had no choice but to be dragged down and plunge into it.

The next time Akiko visited Iso, she was visibly cheerful.
This was at least not feigned cheerfulness.
To put it bluntly, it was an unnatural cheerfulness.
As though the wings of her cheerfulness—hitherto dammed up for some reason—had abruptly awakened... Iso intuited this as he gazed sharply at the girl with keen eyes.

This time, Akiko had brought two or three still life sketches.
But she had depicted the vase as if it were a human body.
She said.

"My paintings are just imitations of yours, Brother. Why didn't you mention that matter last time? I went home feeling so perplexed about it."

"But there was no point in saying such things."

Iso answered sullenly. In truth, he had long since perceived that the lines of Akiko's sketches were merely girlish imitations of his own. Yet what preoccupied Iso more was the extraordinary sensitivity manifested there. He had directed nearly all his attention toward unraveling this secret.

Suddenly, Akiko burst out laughing.
The melancholy that had clung to her until now had vanished, and for the first time, Iso thought he heard the rounded, womanly rawness of her voice in that laughter.

"Why have you suddenly become so amusing?"

“Oh, you mustn’t get cross.”
“But it’s not really an imitation.”
“When it comes to paintings, I only know Brother’s, you know.”
“Even at exhibitions, I only look at Brother’s paintings.”
“It’s not like I decided it that way on purpose, but it just naturally ended up happening, you know.”

“Is that why it’s strange?”

The two involuntarily looked at each other.

Akiko continued to frequent Iso’s atelier after that.
It was clear she wasn’t coming to have her sketches reviewed.

Each time, through Iso’s eyes, all of Akiko’s disharmonies intensified further.
Simultaneously, through some discordant yet mysterious process, they seemed to gradually organize themselves, drawn toward two opposing poles.
Iso envisioned chromosomes within a germ cell moments before division—pulled toward two poles and aligning into neat rows.
He even imagined Akiko might abruptly split into black and white elements before his very eyes.
A peculiar dread gripped him.

Akiko was certainly treating her own body with reckless disregard.
On both the backs of her hands and the skin of her face, not a trace of girlish care to soften that pallid dullness could be discerned.
She nonchalantly crossed her bare shins before Iso's eyes.
They were legs that defied any standard of beauty.
The shape of her pale limbs was more accurately described as emaciated than slender.
That these legs—resembling a thirteen-year-old girl's—had begun to show faint signs of maturation was undeniable.
Yet Akiko revealed no shame in baring them.
There was an indifference as if she had cast off her own skin.
Or perhaps to Iso, it seemed she remained perpetually absorbed in some entirely separate matter.

In stark contrast to her attitude toward skin, Akiko kept her heart wrapped and hidden with apparent care.
To Iso, this proved unbearably frustrating.

Once when Iso stared at the whiteness of Akiko's throat skin,
the area kept moving constantly as she spoke earnestly about something.
Through Iso's eyes part of her chest skin remained visible too - she'd again fastened her brooch too low in that careless way.
Even in her rather bony chest area, signs of maturation couldn't be overlooked.
The mystery seemed to manifest itself relatively clearly there, Iso thought.
He persisted in staring obstinately.
That Akiko noticed his gaze's direction was beyond doubt.
Iso awaited its effect.
Yet she kept chattering on about something in that childish tone.
Iso grasped none of its content.
While vaguely sensing his ears had gone hollow, he kept waiting for something.
But ultimately Akiko's skillfully wrapped heart never surfaced through her skin.

Before he knew it, Akiko had stopped talking.
Iso shifted his gaze blankly to her face.
A careless servility had mingled in his eyes.

At that moment, Akiko was watching him from the center of his blurred field of vision.
She even wore a faint, quiet smile.
Iso sensed a warmth drifting somewhere within that expression.
It seemed both like a mysterious warmth and a maternal one.

Iso noticed he had encountered this smile somewhere before.
It had even appeared repeatedly in his own dreams.
In dreams where he lay exhausted from his debauchery, this smile had gently reprimanded him.
That smile.
He realized it was Mona Lisa’s smile.

He discovered Akiko.

A few days later, Akiko was on Iso’s chaise longue.
Iso asked Akiko.

“Why on earth did you draw your own body?”

“Because I detested my own body.”

The emaciated Mona Lisa rather cheerfully gave the same answer.

Around that very time, Ryuko—through feminine consideration—detected Akiko’s scent on Iso’s body and began to withdraw.
Turning pale, she realized that Akiko, as Blue Pointe, had placed a punctuation point in her own history.

Part II

The yellow-tinged autumn wind passed through her robe and flowed unsparingly over her skin.
That autumn, Akiko felt her skin had grown remarkably thin.

Her abdominal skin, taut as if filled with a vermilion as vivid as nail polish yet more emotionally charged, struck her own eyes with harsh clarity. As more days passed, her skin began to grow translucent like a thin membrane. It evoked the translucence of cocoons she had seen in the school laboratory. Akiko imagined the clammy limbs of an infant appearing translucent there.

Along with this, the secretion squeezed from her inner being imparted a luster to her skin. Her skin had a strange smoothness for the first time since birth. It was as if the virgin had blossomed upon the maternal body. Akiko was amazed at the beauty of her own menstruation. It was something far removed from any feeling of guilt.

That oily vermilion had now sunk into slumber deep within her skin.
Everything resembled the whitish light of a cloudy day.
Her inner oils appeared to have dried up completely.
Akiko was left an eternally unfinished mother.
The abdominal skin still remained thin.
It was a sad thinness.
Through that thinness flowed the yellow-tinged autumn wind.

The infant that had tautened Akiko’s skin with such virginal abundance became a white shadow and slipped into the doctor’s secret pocket to save the mother’s heart from death.
At the very least, the doctor believed it had slipped down.
But he had grasped at empty air.
The infant had always hovered in mid-air.
It was a scene as strange as myth.
A faded infant was always floating in the oblique space of Akiko’s eyelids.

Akiko fought against her own distorted maternity.
It was as if virginity had blossomed simultaneously with motherhood.
If warped traces of maternity lingered within her, why should maidenhood's flower meekly wither?
Akiko clung to this sacred privilege with deathly desperation.
Upon her forehead bloomed a pallid holiness like lilies.
Love still needed to rekindle its fresh breath.
But the amber-tinted autumn wind coursed ruthlessly across her skin, scattering every last flower bud.
Her skin no longer held maidenly circulation.
Across its ravaged surface spread a daily thickening opacity of sensation.
She grew conscious of herself turning blind.
One day Akiko discovered even a sour odor upon her own skin.

She made her black socks undulate like a snake beside the chair and stood by the window.
The pleatless robe boldly traced the lines of Akiko’s thighs.
She appeared to be standing through her body alone.
She was exhausted.

Akiko waved her palm through the oblique space before her eyelids repeatedly, trying to dispel the phantom infant.
However, her hand merely sliced through the cold autumn wind in vain.
At times, she would feel a faint warmth in her palm around where her hand passed through the infant.

The reason she perceived a child in space rather than an infant's form was because she remained an incomplete mother.
The child had skin as though it had spent several months on earth.
As Akiko's body recovered, this phantom child gradually took on a more fully formed appearance.
This was no manifestation of melancholia.
Rather, it seemed to influence her as maternity's lush unfolding.

Murase had begun sending letters again around the time Akiko started to recover.
Akiko’s mother still maintained vigilant surveillance around her daughter yet passed along Murase’s letters unopened.
At times she would linger in a corner under some pretext, discreetly observing Akiko’s face as she read them.
The mother seemed to derive a relatively bright impression from her daughter’s expression.
Her vigilance barred anything Iso-related—even brief exhibition notices in newspapers—from reaching Akiko’s eyes.
Conversely, she even affected tolerance toward Murase.

Akiko found her mother’s attitude grating on her nerves.
She despised her mother’s transparent trickery.

As if belatedly, Akiko engaged in bitter rumination.—
When Iso, bewitched by the Mona Lisa's smile, grew obsessed with marriage, Akiko coolly exploited it instead.
She herself knew full well that Mona Lisa's smile would swiftly vanish.
Having discerned that smile's fragility herself, she merely watched coldly as events unfolded.
She felt this marriage's success was merely a path to satisfy one desire of hers.
She had possessed both Iso's body and emotions. Beyond that lay another—and final—desire to monopolize him.
This was a potent desire.
Yet the battle to achieve it might as well have begun after marriage.
Though they had rushed into that union for different reasons, if pressed to say whose childlike simplicity had led to foolish self-deception, one would name Iso.

Just as she had anticipated, the marriage proved to be nothing more than the Mona Lisa’s all-too-swift disappearance.
She had prepared herself for this.
She clung to the second weapon she believed she had readied.
But soon, it became clear that her overconfidence had been misplaced.
Akiko was defeated.
The hands she had believed firmly grasped her weapon as a woman were empty.
Iso surged torrentially past her like a foolish flood.

Ryuko, who had undoubtedly been lying in wait for this opportunity with cold intellect, began reclaiming Iso.
Akiko, who had merely driven a pointe into Ryuko's history six months prior, now came to realize her fate: to be flung once more as a rigid pointe into the very center of the blue sky.
Akiko clenched her teeth and writhed within this transformation.
Yet the more she struggled against herself, the more clearly she felt she was nothing but an emaciated, pale girl.
Under Ryuko's curse, she truly felt she had stiffened into a single rigid pointe.

Murase began appearing around Akiko precisely around the time of this struggle.
She discovered this young man trying to approach her at the edge of a certain hall's pool.
When Akiko gazed at the young man's figure reflected in the water's indigo layers, she imagined a whimpering puppy drawing near in devotion.
In truth, the young man was as guileless as a puppy.
But Akiko did not give this young man the body he desired.
She had quickly given him what lay just one step short of that as if tossing it away, but...
The young man obediently followed behind her. Akiko herself, though losing expectation, was gradually beginning to open her eyes.

Meanwhile, the crisis advanced with measured strides in tandem with the acceleration of Akiko’s heart. This stemmed chiefly from a new desire that had awakened within Iso. Day by day, Iso and Ryuko sank deeper toward the white death.

The white struggle repeated endlessly until Akiko thought she perceived its final omen.
Unfortunately, at that precise moment, she nearly collapsed from a violent cardiac seizure.
Suddenly an arm supported her.
It was Murase's arm.
Akiko vanished with Murase as one shadow.
This imbecilic final performance hastened a decisive outcome.
The night following their disappearance witnessed Iso and Ryuko's lovers' suicide.
Iso's hand delivered a scalpel's keen strike to Ryuko's neck.
Her exquisite features faded soundlessly into unconsciousness within his embrace.
Then Iso slit his own throat.

Murase and Akiko, who had disappeared, were discovered by pursuers from home at Sannomiya Station.
They were gems stripped of color.
The two were taken back to Tokyo on separate trains.
In the sleeper car during the journey, Akiko felt a strange disturbance of another being within her own body.
It was no different from fetal movement.
Along with this, her heart too began to voice its pain, as though remembering.
Akiko wept bitterly at this moment.
People pitied her misfortune.

People knew nothing.
That Akiko had been seized by her first maternal sentiment and wept; that the heart pain had merely served to amplify her sobs; that her tears were rather warm tears of happiness—people knew none of this.…

During her convalescence, Akiko often ruminated on this bitter recollection.
She even appeared to take a cruel pleasure in it.
However, following her recovery, these unfolding scenes gradually faded into a hazy mist.
On the surface of that mist, an infant’s pallid limbs appeared and stretched out.

Akiko had ceased walking barefoot even within the house.
She swathed her legs in thick woolen socks.
Her skin - drained of its oils - could not endure the autumn wind without pain.
Before long, the scent of makeup began lingering stubbornly at her fingertips.
The voluptuous fragrance of cosmetics clung ever more thickly about her person as autumn deepened.
She acquired the habit of enveloping her own skin.

By that time, one day Akiko wrote a letter to Murase and lured him out.
They conspired together and met in a corner of a certain movie theater.
It was their first meeting since being separated at Sannomiya Station.

The seats they took were positioned at a steep diagonal to the screen.
The movie began.
Around their seats crowded black human figures swaying mutely in every direction.
They too joined those shadows in silence.
Some faded circus troupe's tragedy played out across the screen.
The clown's white costume crossed its center like something clumsily twisted and hung.
At times that bleached light swelled to fill the entire screen, dully illuminating theatergoers' faces.
Each time Akiko stole a glance at Murase beside her.
The faint glow vanished instantly, leaving her no chance to read his expression.
Before she knew it Akiko found herself gripping Murase's hand within her own gloved in tight black leather.
Murase seemed to let his gaze drift vacantly with the film's progression.

She let out a hot breath into the boa's feathers.
Something glistened damply before her eyes.
She thought she caught the tepid smell of tears somewhere.
Akiko closed her eyes, drew in her neck, and buried her face deep into the boa's feathers.
Feathers steamed by breath and beaded with droplets coldly moistened around her nose.
Perhaps it resembled the sensation of tears with no outlet for emotion.
On the screen, a single dancer with legs that seemed to melt into silver stood hunched over a disordered dining table, releasing a strangely complex smile.

The movie vanished.

In the flowering bright lamplight, the two properly faced each other for the first time in a long time.
The young man looked up at Akiko with a pure flush coloring his unexpectedly healthy-looking cheeks, his gaze as if dazzled.
A smile rippled across Akiko’s face.
The two nodded to each other and went outside.
They avoided the swarm of clustered automobiles and walked shoulder to shoulder along the dark tree-lined path by the moat.
An oddly unbreakable silence settled over the two of them.
Akiko was the first to break the silence and said to the young man.

“What will you do with me?”

She had wished it might simply resonate vaguely within him.
Yet her voice trembled with a strangely heated tremor.
Akiko remained acutely aware of this helplessness.

“What?”

The young man halted as though anticipating this moment, regarding her with puzzled intensity.
He had detected the quaver in her voice.
Her question differed little from the vague inquiries about future commitments that had filled his bundle of letters.
Nevertheless, he now perceived the arrival of a delicate instant where abstract explanations would yield to a single tangible act.
For a lingering moment, he studied her face with hesitant scrutiny.
Then a flash of youthful resolve lit Murase’s eyes.
An automobile glided closer in soundless approach, as though stalking prey.
Akiko felt peculiar emotion sear through her entire being.
Every pore seemed to exhale in unison.
She pivoted sharply to mount the vehicle’s running board, as if fleeing exposure.
The woman buried her humid breath deep into the boa’s plumage.

Akiko knew Murase’s body.
She writhed Leda-like.
Her face bore the softness of a mother feeding an infant.
At times, it could rather be thought the smile of something cruel that sucks blood from an infant.

Around that time, there was a rumor in the town.

The first person said.

“I saw them walking through the park.”
“They wore chrysanthemum flowers around their necks and looked proud.”

The second person said.

“I caught sight of them peering into the department store’s display window. As I approached, the man arrogantly met my gaze, but the woman rather averted hers by turning her chrysanthemum to the opposite side.”

The third person said.

"I encountered a woman alone attempting to board a Ministry Line train from the platform,"
"As I hurriedly tried to board, she withdrew the foot she had once placed on the carriage step—deliberately—and while showing that characteristic smile of looking down on people, yielded her place to me."
"Around the neck was a purple chrysanthemum flower."

The rumors reached Akiko’s ears as well.
Needless to say, they concerned none other than Iso and Ryuko.
And there was no doubt each of these people’s observations possessed significant distortions born of both partial truths and measures of antipathy.

When Akiko heard this rumor, she felt as though she had glimpsed something strangely beautiful. This must have been because the fatigue from events that had mercilessly trampled her had unknowingly intensified the radiant heat of her emotions. Those emotions had imperceptibly bestowed rounded contours upon her chest. With each breath, those curves swelled as sumptuously as a swan’s breast. Fatty deposits had settled within her body, weighing her down with an uncanny heaviness that induced languor. At some point these same secretions had begun coursing through her skin again—though under daylight they took on a rather unsightly hue. There was no telling how many times daily she secretly wiped them away with astringent lotion. In such a condition, Akiko found herself envisioning with crystalline clarity those blood-purple chrysanthemums said to bloom upon their two necks.

Akiko felt as though these two flowers had bloomed through her own sanction.
They were chrysanthemums that could never have flowered without her consent.
She found herself perplexed about where to situate these blossoms that had achieved such exquisite radiance.

There was neither a feeling of defeat nor hatred.
Akiko had broken free from Ryuko’s circle of curses; she was no longer that rigid Blue Pointe.
That constricting ring vanished along with bitter tears—she had become a beautiful circle expanding voluptuously through space.
Rather, it was she who needed to pity those two.
How long would they continue their childishly dangerous game while bearing chrysanthemums?
Those chrysanthemums were what I must claim.
...With a mother’s resolve to retrieve dangerous toys from children’s hands—so Akiko turned these thoughts over.

Autumn was traversing the heavens in majesty.
Beneath this opulent light, they too had begun weaving their beautiful life—it was no different.
As for Akiko, she turned her gaze upon her own beautiful existence.
Murase's chestnut-hued flesh glimmered faintly in her vision.
Only one matter plagued her—the chrysanthemums' rightful place.

The faintly glimpsed flesh of Murase now transformed through mysterious means.
Akiko cast her dreaming eyes into the void.

At last, the transformation was completed.
There lay her heavenly infant with its pallid flesh stretched out.
She realized.

Yes, those two chrysanthemum flowers were precisely what suited that child's hands.

At this moment, something dissolved her thoughts without a sound.
She drew herself up fully and cast the eyes of a satisfied mother toward the heavenly infant.
A moment of happiness visited that place.
Exhausted from thinking, she finally closed her eyes.

Murase began manifesting sudden changes.
Akiko saw the crimson drain from his childish face with ebbing-tide swiftness.
Contrarily, he started frequently showing her childish rebellions.
Like one possessed, he would suddenly writhe—eyes stretched wide—struggling to wrench free from her grasp, and this too repeated itself again and again.

Akiko thought there was no doubt that Murase had indeed seen something.
But what in the world could be having such an effect on this youth?

One day, Akiko resolved to confront Murase about this.

“I saw your portrait.”

Murase answered with lips paling in childish rebellion.

“Was that something Iso drew?”
“If that were the case, how would you feel?”
He shouted, turning pale with excitement.

“Hmm. I might feel a touch of loneliness.”
“But why must that become such a frantically serious problem?”
“He has his own world.”
“No matter what he draws in that world, there’s no reason for me to make a fuss about it.”

Akiko answered in a calm tone.
Her voice carried a mother's tenderness toward an infant.
Yet contradicting her voice, a peculiar expression now surfaced on Akiko's face.
Her pallid lips contorted as she laughed with the forgotten Mona Lisa's smile for the first time in ages.
Murase gazed at her face but uttered nothing more.

Clearly, Murase was hiding something.
He guarded the secret with a child’s persistence.
To Akiko, who had withdrawn from the world, it was unimaginable—it was no different from some trivial thing.
Akiko felt no compulsion to press him for answers.
One thing had become clear to Akiko’s eyes.
It was that Murase, running behind, was being lashed by some force to charge into the scene of the three of them.
The storm had already passed over the three of them.
The three people—one wearing blood-purple chrysanthemum flowers on their flesh, another wrapped in mourning clothes of emotion—each enjoyed the tranquil autumn day.
And now, Murase—agitated as one seized by a paroxysm of fervor—was attempting to leap into that legend, into the very legend that had already spun away.
Akiko clearly saw it.

While watching this crisis that had befallen Murase, Akiko felt strangely calm.
The bitter fatigue she had endured still lingered in a corner of her flesh, keeping her prudently removed from agitation.
Within Akiko’s unyielding calm, the flame of emotion continued to burn slowly.
She attempted once again to ignite Murase’s flesh like a pink lamp.
She wished to lull this youth into sleep within quiet pink flames.
She bestowed upon Murase caresses hotter than ever before.

Despite Akiko’s gentle ministrations, Murase’s ferocity only intensified.
Like a wholly unmanageable child, he rebelled against even the slightest of Akiko’s actions.
For him, sleepless nights seemed to have continued of late.
In the exhausted sleep that followed, he seemed to see various dreams.
He began to frequently speak to Akiko about his dreams.
But they were all dreams severed at the limbs, and whenever reaching crucial points, he regained the cunning of a child hurriedly hiding sweets.

“Yes, that was all.”

Akiko, with calm wording, always supplied endings to his unfinished dream tales.
Murase remained silent, baring a malicious sneer across his teeth.
His symptoms worsened day by day.

One day, Akiko finally resolved to take Murase on a journey.
He unusually complied with Akiko's proposal.
Along with her, the heavenly infant followed.

One morning as their journey neared its end, Murase suddenly coughed up blood on the hotel bed.

Akiko, who had been doing her morning makeup behind the folding screen, rushed out in shock at his scream.
On the white sheet, blood had traced a sharp vermilion arrow.
At first she believed Murase had attempted suicide with some sharp blade.

“Glass.”
“The glass.”

He coughed convulsively and shouted.
When Akiko pressed the bedside glass to his mouth, he expelled a second torrent of blood as if unable to wait.
Blood overflowed the glass and stained the back of Akiko’s hand.
Repelled by skin’s oily layer, it remained in mottled patches.
She wondered if this would finally bring calm.
To Akiko—first and foremost—the handling of this blood-filled glass became a matter of critical importance; she clutched it tightly.

However, the third attack occurred.
Murase pitched forward and clung to the pillow.
Akiko instinctively caught the gushing blood in her bare hands.
She pressed her blood-smeared hands against his mouth, bringing her face so close it nearly touched his as she whispered.
Tears scattered across cold, pallid cheeks.

“What’s wrong with you?”

This time the amount was comparatively small, but even so, it nearly filled the hollows of both hands.
With that, the patient finally seemed to calm down.
She stood up to wash her hands at the washbasin.
When he heard the sound of water, Murase abruptly raised his upper body.
She had no time to cleanse her hands.

“What is it?”
“What are you trying to do?”
“Don’t move.”

“That—I need to get that.”

Murase said through clenched teeth.
His one hand reached the wall shelf.

“In that case, I’ll do it for you.”
“You must stay still.”

When Akiko tried to intercept, Murase’s hand dropped with unexpected fragility and went limp.
At that exact moment, a mouse-gray book fell from the shelf onto the bed, pages fluttering as it landed face-down.
Murase quickly grabbed that book.

“This is it.”

He tried to laugh, his face contorting ominously.

"What is that?"

"It's written in here. That had been tormenting me for a long time. However, I finally understood. It was me after all."

Akiko let her eyes dart over the face-down book’s cover. There, Iso’s name was printed. If that were the case, then it was no different from a certain new British author’s novel recently published in Iso’s translation. Akiko had also noticed how often Murase held this thick, mouse-gray book. But that it was Iso’s book—this she now knew for the first time. He continued speaking like delirious ramblings.

“Open the folded part and look.”
“It must mention the dark orb there.”
“The dark orb is poison.”
“It had been decided whether I would swallow it or you would.”
“But it was me after all.”
“Now I’ve finally understood.”

He collapsed onto the bed on his back as if his strength had given out.
And then he closed his eyes.
Drawn in by this, Akiko sank into the chair.
Of course, she had no inclination to even touch that book.
What Murase had been hiding from her with a childlike gesture was this.
He had been desperately trying to climb into the legend of three, using a few lines of type from this book as his ladder.

But why—
For what purpose—
Akiko still could not help detecting some eerie command there.
That was perhaps also like Iso’s eyes.
And for an instant, she saw Iso come alone to sit beside her for the first time in ages.
Ominously, soundlessly.

There lay the young man wounded by a long conflict whose contours she had only faintly imagined.
She looked at the young man’s figure again with pity.
His chest was bared, and through the gaps in his nightclothes, his pallid skin appeared to float up.
The next instant, she was thinking of something entirely different.
It was as if a single influence long suppressed had bloomed at this moment.
The air was filled with the fragrance of flowers.
A pale celestial infant gently descended and merged with Murase’s skin—this she saw.
The infant had grown and lay its body before Akiko in the form of an earthly being—or so it seemed.
She clearly understood that she had loved Murase for the sake of loving the infant’s pallid skin.
On the young man’s chest before her eyes, even the two chrysanthemum flowers had darkened their blood-purple hue……

Eventually, Akiko stood up.
She continued to press the wall button for a long time to call the doctor.