Pathway to Japanese Literature

That afternoon too, Koga sat with his knees neatly stacked and his back against the wall there.
Since becoming unable to read books, Koga had nothing to do all day long.
All day long, he merely sat listlessly in the darkness.
Sometimes he would stand up and walk back and forth inside his cell.
It was a cell where one would collide with the opposite wall in just three and a half steps.
Calculating that ten round trips per minute would make six hundred in an hour—covering a distance of nearly one ri—Koga walked on.
But soon his head would begin spinning dizzily.
Thereupon he sat down again, this time beginning to tear toilet paper and twist it into paper strands.
That he could twist complete paper strands from this coarse, tattered paper without them breaking midway would bring him fleeting moments of satisfaction.
Only when his fingertips began stinging did he rest his hands and become absorbed in various thoughts.
When his head grew weary, he rose again to clean by groping around or perform exercises while minding the four walls of his narrow cell.
In the mornings, Koga would repeat such actions again and again, locked in a desperate grapple against time.
But—after all his struggles—in the end he still could do nothing but lean his back against the wall and sit there in a daze.

Koga raised his face toward where he imagined the high window to be and strained his sightless eyes.
The month of October that year was already nearing its end.
Today, from morning onward, the warmth of a clear late autumn day—so characteristic of the season—seemed to seep even into his sightless eyes.
The sun quietly moved to the hour when light already fell upon the wall against which he leaned his back.
When he turned his hand back to grope around, he found indeed only a slight expanse, but there was a place where the cold stone wall conveyed a faint warmth to his hand.
Koga, remaining seated, quietly slid his body over to that spot.
When he entered the faint autumn sunlight leaking through the high window, images naturally rose up beneath Koga’s eyelids—the clear October sky, and undoubtedly in the courtyard just before his cell where he now sat, a single sumac tree proudly displaying its vibrant crimson leaves toward the sun.
The sun’s warmth seeped through his grime-stained lined kimono to his skin, and for a time, he drifted into a doze without realizing it.
He felt a strange, warm swelling in his chest that he had long forgotten, yet at the same time, when he reflected on his own state in such moments, he would suddenly envision himself resembling those insects commonly seen in autumn gardens—creatures bereft of strength to move, lying motionless in the sunlight—and be struck by a wretched loneliness that pierced his heart. Just then, the sound of shoes approaching directly down the opposite corridor reached his ears.

When afternoon came, the inside of this building fell into a hushed silence.
In the mornings, this world’s unique cacophony would manifest—the officials’ raucous shouts, the clatter of swords they seemed to rattle with deliberate force, doors slamming open and shut, the metallic creak of keys and handcuffs locking into place, the suppressed whispers of defendants being led to trial—all these sounds churned chaotically through the corridors. They penetrated thick walls and doors, transmitting their dreadful echoes even to those sitting within those confines.
The timid could not remain seated amid those noises; against their will, they stood repeatedly to peer outside through the small peephole, wandered their cells, and visited the latrine multiple times within brief intervals.
Yet by afternoon, such morning clamor inevitably faded away, and as people regained composure, a moldering, rain-like boredom began to eat at their hearts.
Amid such stillness, hearing approaching footsteps, Koga—with his sharpened hearing—immediately discerned whose footsteps they were.
And as they drew nearer, he began to feel—without quite knowing why—that they were coming specifically for him.
Indeed, that was the case.
The footsteps halted before his cell, and soon the door opened.
Urged along, Koga put on the black glasses placed on the desk, donned the woven hat, and went outside.

Urged twice with “Hey, this way! This way!”, Koga walked down the long corridor he had grown accustomed to navigating without needing his hand held, turned right at the end—and as he sensed the guard’s body pressing close beside him at the turn, the memory of that guard’s kind, thickly bearded face rising in his mind—he asked:
“Who is it?”
The guard answered “Yeah,” then came the rustling sound of paper being flipped near Koga’s ear. “Ah—attorney visit. Attorney Sato,” he said.

Upon entering the visitation room, Koga sensed someone who seemed to have been waiting across the desk. He exchanged greetings and sat down in the chair. "Ah, I'm Sato—our first meeting," the man said in a cheerful, booming voice, followed by the snap of a briefcase clasp and the rustling sound of what seemed to be documents being spread across the desk.

“I’ve been hearing all about you from Mr. Yamada… What an awful misfortune you’ve suffered.”
“And I can only imagine how difficult it must be for you in a place like this.”

“Yes, thank you kindly.”
“This time, I’ll truly be relying on your kind assistance in many ways.”

“Actually, the date for the appeal trial has been set.”

“Ah, has it finally been decided?”
“That was sooner than I expected.”

“It’s not that a specific date in terms of month and day has been definitively set yet, but it’s been roughly confirmed for around late next month.”
“Today, I went to inquire about the court’s intentions.”
“Since it’s a matter of separation anyway, and given your particularly difficult physical condition, I thought it best to have it done as soon as possible.”

“Thank you for that.”
“…I’m also glad it’s sooner than I expected.”
“I’d prepared to wait past the year’s end anyway.”
“No matter when it happens, I suppose it’ll end up the same in any case—but since it’s bound to be decided sooner or later anyway, I’d still feel more at ease if it were settled quickly.”

Koga felt slightly excited and became aware of himself growing restless.
This was the first time he had met Attorney Sato Nobuyuki.
His defense attorney during the first trial had been his senior from the same hometown, Mr. Yamada.
It had been approximately half a year since all correspondence had abruptly ceased from that Mr. Yamada, who had gone beyond mere duty in attending to his needs.
The fact that Mr. Yamada, who had come to his office from his suburban home one morning, had been taken away from that very place was something Koga only came to hear about after an additional two months had passed.
In this region, there had existed a group formed by young lawyers, and Mr. Yamada had been its central figure.
Of course he could not see his form, but Mr. Yamada was likely now spending his days and nights within this same building as Koga.
The fact that Mr. Yamada, who had stood in court for Koga just ten months earlier, was now placed in the same position as him made Koga keenly feel—even from this single reality—the increasingly perilous nature of the times seeping into his very being.
For that reason, Koga had resolved to stand alone in the upcoming appeal trial.
To Koga in such circumstances had come a letter about one month prior from Attorney Sato, who had been a friend of Mr. Yamada.
It had been decided that he would take over after Yamada.
The letter’s wording stated that he would visit soon to discuss everything.
Koga felt a surge of forceful resolve.
Beyond simply rejoicing for himself that a lawyer had appeared to assist him in various ways, there was the fact that Mr. Sato—who, about two years prior when Koga was still free-bodied, had been known only as a lukewarm liberal and had not been heard to have particularly changed since—had now, especially in an era like today’s, willingly taken on their case. In that fact alone, he felt a bright, vigorous joy.
In every field, people will continue to follow one after another, and the torch will be passed on without being extinguished.
Mr. Sato’s case was nothing more than a single small example of this.

“How is Mr. Yamada doing?”

“Yes, he’s well.”
“I can’t go into specifics yet.”

“You’ve truly suffered an unimaginable misfortune… We believe that alone should warrant your immediate release, but things aren’t so straightforward. How long has it been since your eyes were damaged?”

“Yes, it’s already been over a year—time flies.”
“That was August 5th of last year—a day I’ll never forget—and about six months before the first trial began.”
“It’s rather embarrassing to recount, but at the time—for a while—I became half-mad, muttering incomprehensible things and pacing in circles around my cell. People say I exhibited many strange behaviors, but these days I’ve calmed down considerably…”

Koga began to chatter away with the force of a dam bursting forth.
His words became a story that seemed to cohere yet not cohere, flowing onward.
Just when it seemed he would go on and on about the anguish of that time, his talk would suddenly reverse back to the events surrounding the incident’s occurrence.
He spoke in a voice that seemed both pleading and tearful, his tone hurried.
Perhaps the long life he had led there and the harshness of the fate he had been cast into had caused his mind to become somewhat disordered.
His cheeks were sunken, his jaw oddly pointed, and his head—a chestnut burr—so that his entire face appeared shriveled and small, like that of a battered child.
The eyes concealed behind black glasses were likely clouded and hollow in their vacant gaze.
As Attorney Sato gazed at that face—fixed in his direction, chattering away, saliva foaming white at the corners of its mouth—he who had once seen this man mount podiums with such vigor felt something even tragic stir within him. For a time, the words failed to register; he could not find what to say and merely stammered helplessly.
However, from Koga’s perspective, it could be said that he was now at the peak of joy.
In the past, he had been rather taciturn—a man of such disposition that he could quietly store most things within himself and remain silent. But once his eyes had become as they were, he could no longer read books or write letters; yet there was no one to speak with either. No matter where he turned, the outlet for the pent-up things in his heart had been sealed shut.
And what torment that must have been!
Before he became that way, he had saved all expenses and allocated them to the cost of writing letters every other day.
To various old and new friends, he wrote diligently.
It was only after Koga could no longer write letters that he came to understand the significant role they had played—beyond serving as a substitute for taking notes on the considerable number of pages he read daily, and beyond maintaining contact with comrades outside.
The act of writing letters was, for them now forced into this unnatural life, nearly the sole means of maintaining their mental well-being.
When that sole thing was taken from him and the pressure of pent-up emotions became unbearable, Koga would always pace in circles around his cell and dash his head against its walls.
And when he happened to meet someone and have a chance to talk, he would start chattering almost indiscriminately.
This alone was a desire he could scarcely restrain.
Moreover, today—with Attorney Sato appearing before him as someone who would listen to whatever he had to say—this must have further stimulated his desire. Yet even as Koga chattered on, he suddenly noticed the presence of the guard supervisor, who scraped his boots impatiently against the floor and rattled his sword, and at the same time recalled Attorney Sato’s undoubtedly vexed expression; inwardly, he flushed with embarrassment.
He suddenly stopped talking and, while stammering, apologized for his verbosity.

Mr. Sato said, “No,” and—

“So given what I’ve just explained—and with the trial being about a month away—there are several things I need to ask you beforehand. That’s why I came today,” he began, flipping through documents. “Of course, the individual factual points are as recorded, and I don’t think there’s anything to add there. But your current state of mind—your mental disposition, so to speak—which will ultimately determine your attitude in court… That’s what I need to hear.”

Koga was suddenly pulled back from his previously uplifted mood into a solemn state of mind.
The feeling that it had finally come over him.
And he suddenly began to feel a turmoil and unease in his heart.
Given that he knew the trial would be held sooner or later, his attitude toward appearing in court had been more or less decided.
However, the nature of that attitude was precisely what would prove decisive for Koga’s fate.
Therefore, he could not deny that he had unconsciously recoiled before the gravity of the matter and left something unresolved in its depths until the decisive moment arrived.
That ambiguity had now brought turmoil and unease to his heart.
Koga placed his hand on the desk to calm his mind, pressed it to his forehead, bowed his head, and remained motionless for some time.
His feelings gradually settled.
However, he had not yet reached the point where he could state his decisive attitude before Mr. Sato here and now.
He raised his face and said there were still some things he wanted to consider further, asking if they could wait about ten days.
Mr. Sato nodded lightly as he put the documents into his briefcase, stood up with a “Well then,” and said “I’ll come again soon.”
“Don’t push yourself too hard,” he added in a warm voice.
The meaning of those words could be taken both as a warning against physical overexertion and as a caution against adopting attitudes contrary to his true feelings.

“Ah, I’d forgotten.”
“I’d completely forgotten,” he said, returning.
“Today—before coming here—I met Ms. Nagai Misako.”
“Since she said she had business and couldn’t come, I deposited the five yen she entrusted me with earlier.”
“I believe she’s meeting someone else tonight—do you have any message for her?”

A shadow fleetingly passed over Koga’s face, and a complex expression seemed to flicker across it.
But it vanished immediately.
Returning to his usual expression, he thanked [him] and replied that there was nothing else.

Nagai Misako was Koga's ex-wife.

When he returned to his cell, the day—still early for dusk in this season—had already turned to evening.
Clang, clang—the distant clatter of metal dishes being tossed echoed through the air.
Janitors scurried down the hallway.—By the time supper ended and the sparrows that had been noisily chirping near the window fell silent, night appeared to have settled completely.
In a stillness like a mountain lake yet heavy with something ominous in its depths, Koga began attempting to order his thoughts during those two or three hours before sleep.

Before thoughts that welled up like clouds, he would stagger and halt time and again in confusion, then tremble and freeze before the dark shadow blocking his path ahead.
When he felt suffocated, he would stand up and begin pacing, then sit back down.
The thing that could neither be pursued nor dispelled, however, was always memories of the past in such moments.
All who came here must have been like that—for people were isolated from living social life and compelled to exist solely in a world of vibrant recollections of the past.
In Koga’s case, however, there was even greater reason for this than in others.—He would meticulously dredge up every recollection entangled with his own brief yet complex past life, stroke each one, lick it, chew it over until nothing remained unexplored, then store it all back into the depths of his consciousness.
His manner in such moments could be said to resemble that of a child who occasionally takes toys from a box to play with them.
But eventually, he came to despise himself—this self that seemed to live only in the world of the past.
However, when a living human is cast down to a state of death and yet must still go on living, what else in the world could there be to support him?
Even bitter memories had now turned sweet—and each time, the world of the past would revive again, still accompanied by fresh emotions.
——

After a certain incident in the spring three years ago, Koga—temporarily thrown into confusion [six characters missing]—faced [twenty-two characters missing].
As for the full circumstances of his arrest, there now [twenty-one characters missing].
Koga had been confident that, at least where he himself was concerned, he would not make any blunders, but given the nature of organizational work, there were many instances where collapses originating from others could not be prevented.
Even when he had to go out to places prepared by other comrades while thinking [seven characters missing], in such times, he could not afford to think only of his own safety.
Improvisational expediency—in Koga’s case, this had ultimately caused [outcome] [two characters missing], but even that was probably unavoidable, given that it was a young organization with little experience.
What good would it do to reflect on such things now? [...]
Koga found reassurance in that conviction, and since coming here, he had devoted himself solely to maintaining an attitude that would not bring shame to [...]。
His mental preparedness had been settled, and the depths of his gut were unexpectedly composed.
Koga had long believed that what people called guts or fortitude was nothing more than one’s capacity to adapt—rooted in a principle—to an ever-shifting external world. Yet over the past several years, as senior comrades were taken away one after another, each arrest bringing fresh turmoil that gradually subsided, his mental preparedness for such circumstances had naturally taken shape to a degree. It was not a strained, rigid resolve but rather a cool composure—a defiant audacity, one might say—that came to form the bedrock of his heart.
And so he consciously nurtured and cultivated such a heart.
In fact—and for that purpose—it was unthinkable that one could find anything else (seven characters missing).
The more he was shown [...] day after day, using it as fertilizer, [...] his heart grew [...] stronger each day.
Mocking all things sweet, rejecting all things warm, with a mask-like expression of one who had utterly forgotten emotions of joy, anger, sorrow, and pleasure—he sat there.
But those silent [...] people hidden behind that expressionless mask could be easily discerned.
How laughable it was—this arrogance born from the meager experience of enduring minor hardships, this presumption that he might even be forged into someone unacquainted with fear. Yet before long, Koga was cast down into the abyss of darkness and forced to grasp, to the point of revulsion, the immeasurable cruelty of reality.

―And so Koga’s life there passed peacefully each day in such a manner.
When a book he particularly liked came into his hands, he would become so engrossed in reading that he forgot he was in such a place; only when the clatter of a patrol officer’s sword interrupted his reading would he return to himself and confront his current circumstances—a not uncommon occurrence.

In this manner, Koga came to face six months of imprisonment.
He had previously been involved in a certain labor dispute, and there had been a criminal case ongoing at the time.
It was during this new preliminary hearing that it had been finalized.
That was in the spring of last year.
As it was during the preliminary hearing, he ended up remaining here in the detention center for unconvicted prisoners and receiving his sentence.
The work was envelope pasting.

It was August 3rd, when his remaining prison term had grown short.
That day was a bath day, and Koga was in the bath.
Once every five days—and even then only allowed fifteen minutes from undressing to exiting—how dearly he cherished those baths.
That summer was reportedly the hottest in forty years.
The heat was especially severe here; in the cells, at least one person a day would develop cholera or collapse.
There were also those who suddenly [...].
“You’ve had syphilis before, haven’t you? Well, this is when it climbs to your head and makes you stupid—watch out.”
Whether he was being serious or just mocking, Koga heard the guard say this while laughing uproariously more than once.
In this sweltering heat, they languished, and even the flesh of healthy humans began to rot like that of the sick.
Because Koga’s cell happened to face west, he was thoroughly roasted by the long summer day’s heat for half the day.
When the heat became unbearable, Koga would press his back against the window, stretch his spine, push his face against the small iron-barred window, and gasp with his mouth rounded like a fish, trying to breathe even a little fresh air.
When he sat working, there were times when his vision would grow hazy, as if from a mild cerebral anemia.
At such times, he would slam his forehead against the worktable where envelopes were pasted before him, using that jolt to snap back to himself.
But more than anything, what he suffered from were the terrible sweat and the blood-sucking insects.
Koga’s body was far from the frail, sickly constitution suggested by the pale veins visible beneath his skin.
Having spent less than a year in confinement, his youthful, healthy skin had still appeared taut and full, but no sooner had midsummer arrived than it began to sag a deep red.
Sweat that had been wrung out as if squeezed clung stickily to his body with its coarse texture.
By night, flat blood-sucking insects crawled in swarms over his sweat-festered skin.
He involuntarily sat up and flipped back the futon to find ravenous nocturnal insects—creatures long accustomed to dwelling here between the bedding and straw mats, their bellies likely filled with [seven characters missing] blood—now scrambling in disarray to flee.
The heavy breaths of men similarly unable to sleep leaked out from here and there as if in unison at that moment.

It is not hard to imagine how Koga, in such a state, had eagerly awaited his once-every-five-days bath.

It was a small, single-person bathtub about half the size of a tatami mat.
Perhaps because Koga was a convicted prisoner, he was always made to wait until last—and that day was no exception.
How many men had already soiled the water of this tub before he entered it?
On the surface of the halved water volume [twenty-nine characters missing].
When he put his foot in, the bottom felt [four characters missing].
Then something—[eight characters missing]—seemed submerged too, brushing his toes.
Looking at the washing area, there on the concrete floor clung [thirteen characters missing].
[twelve characters missing] flowed a stench like river decay.
——Yet everyone had grown accustomed to such filth.
After all, one couldn’t afford to call it unclean.
Koga was no different.
Koga submerged himself fully into the tepid water.
The bathwater seeped deep into his chafed skin.
Forcing himself under up to the shoulders with closed eyes, he’d feel his heart shaken by melancholy—something like an infant’s sorrow returning to its mother’s bosom.——But such moments lasted only briefly.

“Time’s up. Get out,” called the duty guard as he peered through the peephole and walked on.
After being told this, Koga hurriedly began to wash his body.
He tried turning the faucet of the iron pipe that supplied fresh water, but not a single drop came out.
The water—the storage tank likely emptied by days of scorching weather—had completely dried up, even what was drawn from that tank.
There in the bathtub, Koga scrubbed his body and then his face with a hand towel soaked in bathwater.
Because the sweat had spread across his face like pustules.
Before he had even finished, there was a bang as the bathhouse door opened.
It was the signal to “Get out.”
Without even time to dry himself, he threw his work clothes over his shoulder and returned to his cell—only to find a greasy-looking white substance clinging to his chest and arms, whether it was someone else’s grime or his own.

That had occurred a little before noon that day.

And that night under the dim electric light when he began night work，Koga felt heat and itchiness spreading through both eyelids.
But he paid it little heed.
For suffering conjunctivitis from spring through summer was hardly rare in this work environment—where prisoners strained dust-irritated eyes daily—and Koga himself had long been afflicted，receiving eyedrops yet remaining uncured due likely to malnutrition.
Night work taxed such weakened vision severely.
Mornings sometimes brought struggles merely opening crusted-shut lids.
Given this state，even sensing faint grittiness within eyeballs that evening seemed unremarkable.
Koga still remembers how，half-dreaming after bedding down，he repeatedly scrubbed feverish sockets with hand-backs through that night.

The next morning when he awoke, his entire body felt sluggish—and it wasn’t just due to the heat; he could distinctly sense that he was running a fever.
His eyelids were swollen persistently, and the pain was severe.
When he touched them, the lymph nodes below his ears were also swollen and bulging.
A yellow substance—something softer than ordinary eye discharge—kept flowing endlessly even when wiped.
Could this be pus?
When he suspected this, Koga’s vague anxiety swelled rapidly.
He pressed the call button and requested a doctor.

The young doctor, who had arrived after considerable delay, said “What’s wrong?” and casually pinched up Koga’s eyelids with his fingers before flipping them inside out with a forceful motion.
A creamy, muddy substance gushed forth and soiled the doctor’s white coat.
This was pus that had accumulated in the conjunctival sac.
The conjunctiva’s surface reportedly resembled a strawberry fully ripened to vivid redness.
He involuntarily muttered, “This is bad.”

After voicing this, the doctor’s face—though Koga could not see it, of course—appeared to grow increasingly tense as he stared fixedly at the affected area.
He seemed to pause and think for a moment, but then, returning his hand, wiped [the area] with alcohol-soaked cotton while...

“Have you ever had Tripper?”

The doctor, having likely perceived Koga as an intellectual, posed the question in such terms.
When Koga gave a negative answer, he tilted his head slightly and stared fixedly, but then, as if suddenly noticing something, asked again:

“When was your last bath?”

he asked.
When Koga answered that it had been a little before noon yesterday, he glanced briefly at his face, then fell silent again with a deeply contemplative expression.

After being moved to the infirmary, the pain in his eyes grew increasingly severe.
His fever ran high, induced nausea, and he vomited yellowish water two or three times.
To prevent his eyelids from sticking together, his eyelashes had been cut short.
The silver nitrate solution, drop by drop, stung and gouged as it raged violently within his eyes.
The nursing orderly washed the inside of his eyes approximately every two hours with a lukewarm liquid believed to be mercuric chloride solution diluted thousands of times.
After that was done, they gently covered his eyes with gauze soaked in cold medicinal liquid—and Koga, adrift in a high fever, drifted in and out of consciousness.
“What’s wrong with me? It’s not serious, is it?”
When he asked, the nursing orderly said, “We ain’t got a clue.”
To them, those words were likely nothing more than a perfectly ordinary thing to say, but at that moment, they struck Koga as terrifyingly cold.

In the evening, as he was leaving, the doctor called the nursing orderly and was seen whispering something together.
He was also saying things like, “Take shifts and stay up all night to watch over him.”
Those words could not help but make Koga foresee something terrifyingly ominous.
Have you ever had Tripper?
That anxiety—which had first flickered when he was asked, which he had forcibly shoved into a corner of his mind out of sheer terror while feigning nonchalance—now surged up with renewed force.
He tried to call out for the doctor, but the words caught in his throat and refused to come out.
“The terror of knowing the truth refused it.”
By the time the electric lights on the high ceiling came on, he even felt like bursting into tears, and the heart of his childhood—when he had walked through rice fields trembling late at night—came back to life.
With the aid of strong sleeping pills, as he drifted drowsily into sleep, Koga faintly heard in his dream the voice of the bath attendant who had often cautioned him during baths: “Don’t wash your face in the bath… Don’t wash your face in the bath…”…

At what seemed to be morning, Koga woke up.

Before his eyes lay a dim and hazy darkness.

Koga involuntarily clawed off and tore away the gauze over his eyes.
However, the darkness remained the same.

“Doctor!”

“Doctor!” Koga shouted.
However, there was no reply.

“Nursing orderly!”

And he shouted again.
But no one answered.

In the corridor near his pillow, sounds of what seemed to be morning activities were already bustlingly audible.
Koga shuddered with terror, jolted upright on his bed with a start, and began to shout something at the top of his voice.

“Don’t get excited, don’t get excited,” came rushing through the voice of a nursing orderly who seemed nearby—one whose voice Koga dimly recognized—as he firmly pinned Koga down.

Everything had ended at that moment.
The dreadful bacteria had destroyed both of Koga’s corneas overnight as though melting them away.

When Koga realized all the facts for what they were, his brain—every nerve throughout his body—came to a halt in an instant.
When he finally regained his senses, he let out a strangled cry and began to weep.
He cried out loud, and only when that voice struck his own ears sharply did he feel as though he could barely escape the pitch-black world of terror and despair.
He continued crying even after night fell.
His choked sobs leaked through the infirmary door and echoed high and low along the deathly silent walls of his ward’s long corridor, resounding as if stifled…

After spending a little over a month in the infirmary and becoming emaciated beyond recognition, Koga Ryokichi returned to his cell around the time the autumn wind had already begun to bitterly chill the skin.
Wearing black glasses and led by the nursing orderly, he walked steadily down the long corridor; upon entering his cell, he placed both hands on the mat there and collapsed as if his knees had given way.
The harsh clang of the door slamming shut rang out, and as the footsteps of the official and nursing orderly faded into the distance, a loneliness that gnawed at his heart welled up—a feeling as though it had only just now begun.
He made an unsteady attempt to cry, barely stifling a sob.
For a time—without resisting—he immersed himself entirely in that sentiment; Koga remained utterly still.
Because his six-month sentence had already ended during his time in the infirmary, Koga had once again become a remand prisoner.
He still could not clearly recall what kind of life the month he had spent in the infirmary after losing his eyesight had been.
Even now, looking back, that period alone felt as though it had been cleanly severed from the continuity of his past life, leaving him unable to distinguish between dream and reality.
He would take whatever was within reach and hurl it at random, and he had a memory of being partially deprived of his hands' freedom for about a week.
He remembered that all long string-like objects had been taken away down to the ends of his loincloth.
He remembered refusing to eat for several days and causing people trouble.
He merely remembered these various things in disjointed fragments, without any order.
In short, at that time, he was likely half-mad.
Therefore, Koga’s new wretched life could be said to have begun when he returned to his original cell after that month.
With a hollow mind, he now began to wander the world of darkness by groping.—

Outside his cell, things proceeded with no change from a month prior—or rather, with such ordinariness and unerring regularity in their precision that one might think they had been this way since long before Koga was even born. Convicted defendants were transferred away, new criminals exchanged into their place through the cold metallic clatter of keys and handcuffs that echoed ceaselessly—night fell, morning came again, and the same cycle repeated endlessly day after day.

Whatever misfortune might befall Koga alone, such things were of no consequence whatsoever.
Scattering individual fortunes and misfortunes like dust, a single giant gear turned with a ponderous groan.
Koga felt himself—miserable like a bug, discarded and forgotten.
When Koga realized with his entire being that this ruthless progression of things—which permitted not even a hair's breadth for illusions or entreaties, much less acts of dependency—constituted reality's true visage, terror seized him.
And beyond the window in that red-brick building, the work to adjudicate him advanced methodically.

The first thing that assailed Koga was the terror of going mad.
Until now, the forms of various objects that had never captured his interest—indeed, that he had even come to regard as ugly—now revived in his mind’s eye with a jewel-like perfection.
He would pull close the earthenware teapot and teacups in his cell, and rejoicing in their cold touch, stroke the plump, rounded surfaces of such utensils, never knowing satiety.
As he did so, that faint attachment gradually grew powerful, until he felt an affection so intense he could devour them, and simultaneously, upon realizing—*Ah, will I never again see the shapes of such things with these eyes?*—that thought alone nearly drove him mad.
Even from a purely physiological perspective, the loss of one of the five senses—the most vital among them—had thrown the center governing sensory integration into disarray; his thoughts splintered beyond coherence, and his mental state had lost all equilibrium.
On top of such a foundation, he would recall the two or three madmen he had known in the past—and at precisely such times, his mind would grow unnervingly agitated. He would compare their circumstances with his own down to the minutest details, until finally he trembled before the anticipatory dread that he, too, would go mad.
Koga’s mental state thus grew increasingly bleak with each passing day.
Spending the day in a daze, when night fell, he would try to convince himself that he had somehow made it through safely once again.—For Koga at that time, the greatest temptation was suicide.
For a person so wounded they must choose death as their sole refuge, how sweet an illusion suicide could be—this was something Koga had read about in books and such. But now he had come to savor it as his own visceral reality.
When the suffering became unbearable, if he once realized the thought that he could die at any time, his heart would feel a calmness as if enveloped by something vast and settle.
He sometimes wondered if death was considered so sweet because what is called the world without beginning or end—from which humans had emerged—lay behind death, and because through dying, humans would return once more to that homeland, guided by death itself.
However, the very reassurance that he could die at any time was also, in another sense, what kept him from immediately carrying out suicide.
Finding comfort in death amidst suffering—delighting in contemplating it as a source of solace even within anguish—could this feeling of being drawn to it yet reluctant to reach out be called playing with death? Human beings living one step away from suicide exist everywhere today.
However, in cases where [five characters missing] had not fallen so far, the matter contains something grave, striking people’s hearts without fail.

What enabled Koga to emerge from this pitch-dark state of mind and gradually regain his composure was the cultivation of his auditory sense.
Having realized that merely making scattered, aimless efforts would prove futile for unifying his fragmented mind—and whether this stemmed from a disabled man’s self-defense after losing his sight—Koga, who had around that time become aware of his gradually intensifying auditory acuity, began striving to achieve mental unity by devoting himself entirely to honing his hearing.
And that attempt could be said to have succeeded.
By deeply immersing himself in the world of sound within this building—a world naturally generated here, monotonous yet imbued with every complex nuance—he gradually regained a somber composure. From then on, for Koga, the external world became nothing more than another name for the world of sound.
One reason was likely that his current environment conversely proved favorable for such attempts; by the time this story began—roughly one year after that point—the acuity of Koga’s hearing and intuition had reached a level unimaginable for someone who had only just lost their sight.
Even he himself found it strange—so much so that he would sometimes fleetingly wonder if the world of birds and beasts was truly like this.
For instance, he could accurately distinguish each of the numerous guards’ footsteps, and as soon as a footstep entered his ears, the face and voice of the guard associated with it would immediately surface in his memory.—This was by no means unique to Koga—for those who had grown accustomed to living here over time, it might not even be particularly remarkable. Yet Koga could go beyond that: he could correctly sense the footsteps of someone coming to attend to him while they were still quite far away.
As for the weather—though of course this sort of sensitivity did exist even among patients—he had grown incomparably more perceptive than before; when he awoke thinking, *Ah, today will be rainy*, more often than not, that day would indeed be rainy.
It wasn’t necessarily based on physical comfort or discomfort—it was just a feeling that made him think so—but it proved correct.
However, Koga knew yet another method of predicting the weather beyond that.
That was due to the sparrows’ voices.
Under the eaves of this building nested many sparrows; they would gather in the shade of the paulownia and sumac trees before his cell and chirp all day long. By discerning nuances in their voices—though reaching that point had required considerable time and practice—Koga had eventually become able to roughly predict the day’s weather.
Though it was a subtle difference in sensation difficult to put into words, depending on whether the day was clear, cloudy, or rainy, the sparrows’ chirps were heard with slightly distinct resonances.
In human terms, it might be akin to the difference between somber voices and animated ones, or between dry voices and mellifluous ones.
It seems that small creatures like these are still subject to nature’s dominion all the more, one might think.
Sitting idly in the dimness every day, listening to the voices of small birds had become a lonely pleasure irreplaceable by anything else for the present Koga.
At times, he would even seriously consider what would happen if his sentence were decided, he were sent to another prison, and there were no visits from these beloved small birds near its windows.
Lately, Koga has taken to buying each season’s cut flowers and placing them inside his cell.
The officials would laugh at him for buying flowers despite being blind, but of course Koga’s was not about seeing—it was about loving the fragrance.
So when scentless flowers were brought in, he would be disappointed; yet when those flowers eventually withered, the sound of their petals crumbling away could be heard quite clearly even from the distant desk where they were placed.

Late at night by his pillow, Koga—unable to sleep with eyes wide open—would often hear that overly loud sound and even feel a certain unease.

Again, such an incident had occurred once.
It was when he had been led by a guard to the courtyard for some purpose he couldn’t recall.
As he felt he had drawn quite near to the entrance of the corridor across the courtyard, Koga instinctively leapt about six feet to the side.
In the very next instant, something large crashed down with a violent sound onto the very spot where Koga had just been walking, followed by the scattering noise of debris.
Upon inquiry, it turned out that prisoners had gone up onto the roof to repair damaged roof tiles, but through some mishap, they had accidentally dropped a bundle of tiles.
The guard who had been walking a little behind was also astonished by Koga at that moment and marveled, “That’s incredible. Does everyone end up like that?”—These phenomena were likely not so much due to acute hearing as they were the result of a delicate unification of all the nerves throughout his body.

When the searing immediate anguish of potentially going mad had thus slightly subsided, now, however, a different torment—one he’d lacked the mental space to confront until now—emerged with newfound clarity.
The question was this: How should he live henceforth? Upon what thoughts should he ground his heart and continue existing?
Crushed and trampled into misery as he now was, Koga could not help but realize that his past self—who once held his head high with pride—had shattered into fragments, and that the very ground he had until now stood upon with ease was crumbling away with a rumble beneath him.
"Putting on airs with your grand talk won’t do any good—it’s all just before everything gets smashed to pieces," sneered a voice spitefully near Koga’s ear.
There was nothing left but to bow his head and prostrate himself before the fate that had been imposed upon him.
Until now, no matter the circumstances, he had never lost a single focus.
All things passing through him from inside and out were organized and unified at that focal point.
Now, that had vanished.
But even so, to desperately construct some conceptual philosophy of life within his mind and try to forcibly settle there—such a thing was not possible.
Koga felt himself like an abandoned skiff without refuge.
When sad, he would immerse himself completely in childlike sentimentality and weep; when his heart was even slightly at ease, he would rejoice—spending several days with a day-to-day mindset.
He had yet to repel the blow and regain the strength to see even a single glimmer of light in the darkness.
All along, he had not regained the mental space to first return to the position he had once stood upon and then think things through logically from there.
It would still require a long period of groping in the dark before he could rise again.
——And after a considerable span of time had passed, the first place where Koga’s heart settled was a world of resignation.
It was not necessarily resignation imbued with religious meaning—rather, it was an attitude of surrendering everything to nature’s flow, like an abandoned skiff adrift, neither forcibly resisting the force that dragged him onward nor doing anything but yielding to it as it was.
It could be said to be a bold mindset of abandoning everything—a resolve of “Things will turn out as they will,” he told himself.
The Eastern-flavored reclusive life philosophies he had utterly despised until now—the state of enlightenment spoken of in Zen Buddhism and such—came pressing in with irresistible allure.
As a method to settle into such feelings, Koga would eagerly excavate his meager knowledge of natural science, direct his distant thoughts toward the cosmos and its celestial bodies, contemplate the life of Earth—said to perish eventually—and then reflect on the speck-like forms of humans dwelling within it.
Then all the endeavors of people in the world came to seem utterly foolish.

That such thoughts represented an elevated position and could provisionally be considered an ultimate conclusion was undeniably true.
In this world isolated from “society,” there existed grounds for such thoughts becoming dominant not merely in exceptional cases like Koga’s but for all people.
Yet even as Koga settled there temporarily, he constantly harbored in his heart’s depths the awareness that this was after all nothing but a transient perch.
For he clearly recognized his theoretical weakness in leaving problems unresolved.
Put plainly, it was merely where his emotions—crushed by violent blows—had dragged themselves through clinging desperation.
The ideological position he once held remained entirely untouched.
And in his heart’s core, Koga still clung to belief in that position.
A faint hope lingered that he might someday return there—yet soon arrived the time when even this provisional foothold would crumble unexpectedly fast.
The day approached when Koga would stand before his first trial’s courtroom while steeped in such thoughts.

A new problem, sharp as a blade to the flesh, now pressed urgently for resolution.
The problem was what attitude he should adopt in the courtroom and how he must confront the beliefs he had upheld until now.
Koga agonized, tormented by suffocating anguish.
His appetite had diminished, and he had wasted away beyond recognition—so much so that Attorney Yamada, whom he met for the first time in ages, cried out in shock.
Logically speaking, however, this problem had already been resolved in Koga’s mind long ago without requiring much thought.
The anguish lay in his inability to act upon what he clearly understood.
Over and over again, Koga asked himself and tried to answer.—Is that not so?
After all, I had certainly arrived at taking that position based on definite reasons.
However, after that, I met with unexpected misfortune.
But what exactly is such personal misfortune?
What misfortunes a person must be exposed to—who could know such things?
No matter what wretched fate I may meet, as long as the cause that led me to take such a position remains unaddressed, I should be unable to abandon that position.
To say I had abandoned it would be to deceive myself.
Of course, now that I have lost my sight, from the perspective of our movement, I am merely a single invalid soldier.
However, that does not become a reason for me to abandon the ideology I have held until now, much less does it become a reason to declare that my previous beliefs were mistaken.
……

At times, he would exert all his strength to defend the other, squirming, ugly self within him—searching out every advantageous excuse, lining them up, attempting to prove that it was not ugly at all, that this was in fact his true self.
But in the next instant, he would hurriedly shake his head in anguish, fix himself squarely in his gaze, and coldly declare: “To start fretting over this and that now—how shamelessly you speak! Didn’t you know all along that every dark fate awaited you?”
“It’s not just you who has met with misfortune—even since coming here, you should have already seen many such misfortunes with your own eyes.
Just yesterday, a comrade in the cell across from you went mad.
That scream must still linger in your ears—the misfortune you suffered may be an accidental, exceptional thing, and you might be wallowing in exaggeratedly overthinking it, but how much more commonplace and far [...] are being carried out in the world?
And wasn’t it your work that began to [...] the roots of such misfortune?
And now, at the final hour, you start with this ‘what now’ and ‘can’t do this’—…”

Koga felt ashamed.
In the unpeopled darkness, he alone burned red within his heart.

Finally, Koga had reached a certain degree of resolution.
However, without even informing Attorney Yamada of this decisive stance, he appeared in court.
He had no confidence.
Even having resolved himself, there remained constant anxiety that in the final reckoning, there was no telling what might happen.
And whenever his thoughts turned to his elderly mother’s circumstances, Koga could not help but feel that anxiety growing ever larger.

Koga had not met his mother for a long time.
That year, his mother—having learned of his arrest—left her hometown and took shelter with distant relatives in this town.
The authorities had apparently notified her of Koga’s loss of eyesight.
Though his mother came repeatedly to visit him after his blindness, Koga stubbornly refused to meet her.
He could not endure imagining how his elderly mother’s heart would surely shatter at the moment they met.

The last time Koga parted from his mother was four years ago in autumn.

Having been imprisoned for some time in connection with a dispute and later released on bail, Koga returned to his hometown that year for the first time in ages.
During his brief imprisonment, the situation had changed, and upon emerging, he found himself compelled to make a certain resolution.
To solidify that resolution, he needed to give himself time while still considering various matters, and in order to secretly say his long farewell to his mother, it became necessary for him to return home once.
His mother was staying at the household of her uncle from the main family—a landowner who simultaneously held a monopoly on trading daily necessities in the village.

He deliberately entered through the back door and was greeting his uncle and aunt in the parlor; during this time, his mother seemed to be busying herself with some task in the kitchen. Her back was visible even from here. However, to Koga, her manner appeared as though she had long since finished her work yet was deliberately dragging it out. Eventually summoned by her aunt, she came wiping her wet hands, but her face bore a sullenly angry expression.

“Have you returned?” she said in a low, trembling voice, uttering just those words.
Koga perceived behind her expression something that was barely containing intense emotion—something that would surely burst into tears if but one layer were peeled away.

Between him and his uncle and aunt there was nothing particular to talk about; within thirty minutes of sitting there together their words already tended to falter.
Precisely because they were good-natured people they refrained from harsh words; yet their soft speech contained sharp needles of censure that pricked Koga.
His uncle spoke at length about news of Koga’s elementary school classmates.
Many sons of landowners who had been studying in Tokyo had graduated that spring.
His uncle told how so-and-so had found employment somewhere or taken a wife.
It was clear these accounts carried more significance than mere simple news.
After his father’s death—Koga who had sold what little farmland remained to fund his Tokyo education.
During that time Mother had lodged at her brother-in-law’s house awaiting his graduation day.
When less than one year remained until that day she was suddenly summoned by police to receive ominous tidings.

Entering the three-mat room set aside as his mother’s parlor, Koga found himself alone with her there for the first time.
Gazing intently at his mother’s face before him, Koga learned for the first time how rapidly people age once past fifty.

“Oh, you’ve come back safe and sound,” she said, and instantly large teardrops welled up and streamed down her sunburned cheeks.

Starting the next day, Koga began working on the translation job he had taken on in Tokyo during his idle moments.
It brought in some money.
At night, Mother would sit beside her son as he worked at his desk, doing needlework late into the night.
Occasionally, she would say “Thread this for me,” rubbing her eyes as she placed a needle and thread before Koga.
Koga’s young, steady eyes could pass the thread through the needle’s eye without hesitation.
There were times when he was made to help wind thread onto spools.
When she saw her son like this, Mother’s eyes grew moist with tenderness.
Mother did not try to ask about Koga’s life in Tokyo, and Koga did not speak of it either.
Mother had believed in her son.
The son who had been called a villain—now that he had returned home, his words and demeanor were far gentler and more mature than before, and she even sensed something reliable in him.

Three months had passed.
Letters from Tokyo arrived frequently, and the day he had to return was drawing near.
One such evening, Koga took Mother to T City—five ri from the village—to see the new school play being performed at its theater.
Mother was dissatisfied that it wasn’t kabuki, yet she was delighted like a child.
Among the several programs, there was one play centered on a mother and child.
The ending was a conventional happy one, though clearly somewhat modeled after Gorky’s Mother.

As she watched, Mother sighed repeatedly and said,
“How well done—it’s just like us, mother and child.”

In the violently swaying train on their way back, Mother spoke repeatedly of her impressions from that night. And she said that while she was alive, she wanted to see a proper kabuki play just once. She seemed to have been looking at famous actors’ gestures in color-printed magazine frontispieces or such things, indulging in various imaginings and enjoying herself. To protect her from the violent shaking of the dilapidated train—reaching his hands around from behind her back while embracing his mother’s small frame—Koga,

“Ah, Mother—next time I’ll take you to see kabuki in Tokyo,” he said, uttering a blatant lie.……

Two days later at noon, while Mother was out in the fields, Koga left home and never returned.
Inside a simple farewell letter, he had placed the fee from his translation work.

It was already the season when rice harvesting would begin.
The sky and water were perfectly clear, and the autumn of his hometown breathed within a deep navy blue.

——The place where parent and child met again after those passing years was within this very building where Koga now resided.

Every time he saw the small figure of his mother coming to visit, Koga would think:
Mother was a peasant woman who had never once stepped outside her native village until this age.
Yet now, for the first time, she had been swept away by an invisible, immense force and emerged into this metropolis.
And so, while constantly startled by the din of cars and trains, she came to visit this building that even worldly people could not help but find intimidating.
There she would cower before imposing iron doors and rough-spoken guards, repeatedly asking those nearby about the visitation slip number written in Western numerals she couldn’t read—(people likely frowned at her in those moments)—clutching the slip tightly in her sweat-dampened hand as she perched primly on a stool, waiting anxiously for her name to be called… To Koga, even his mother’s starkly whitened hair and weary, dimmed eyes appeared vividly in his mind.
Occasionally Mother would write letters on straw paper resembling toilet paper, painstakingly carving each kana character with a pencil, and send them over.
Koga would stand near the entrance to his cell and have the official speaking in an expressionless voice outside read the letter to him.

By the time of the trial, Koga had one more problem he wished to handle.
It was his relationship with his wife, Nagai Misako.

Misako was his wife and at the same time a comrade.
Upon arriving here, Koga immediately told her she should henceforth act as freely as she wished, that it was fine to forget him entirely, but under no circumstances must she abandon their work.
This attitude of his toward her sprang from his long-held convictions.
Koga believed it unconscionable—for one who might spend unknown years here, who might exit only through death—to demand his wife wait eternally in such limbo.

Koga had long felt a bitter resentment toward certain comrades within this building.
Their attitude toward their wives outside was nothing more than that of feudal-era patriarchs.
They sought to completely subordinate the lives of their wives—who were also comrades—to their own lives there.
They sought to relentlessly assert their husbands’ rights over them outside.—To put it another way, though these two aspects were inextricably unified within a single person, they ended up forgetting her as a comrade and emphasizing only her half as a wife.
What would be the result?
Many of them gradually (eight characters missing) and eventually became women who returned to the so-called home.
The husbands, for their part, were rather pleased by that.
[Eight characters missing] They had been supposed to have united solely to elevate each other, yet now he felt nothing more than the ordinary love a man in society has for a woman toward her.
Before long, the weaker ones among them would fall into depravity.
Some also fell into depravity due to economic hardship.
Even those who did not end up that way—many began uttering words during each visit or writing in letters that imparted [two characters missing] psychological influence on their weakened husbands inside [prison].
The husbands, too, gradually weakened.
Such results (ten characters missing) could not help but reverberate through his attitude as well.
――In this state (eight characters missing).

Having been shown far too many such comrades around him, Koga had even come to feel opposed to the so-called [four characters missing] marriage itself.
It must have been an excessive mechanical rejection.
The attitude he had taken toward Misako also stemmed from such feelings.
In telling her to act freely, he had intended those words to carry the meaning of parting.
He had believed that was the only way to prevent them both from making errors.
Thus, even when Koga later heard rumors that Misako seemed to be romantically involved with Comrade Uemura—a member of a certain legal organization—he managed to remain unexpectedly composed, though not without first weathering the initial emotions any man would inevitably feel in such circumstances.
What reasoning had prompted this remained unclear; on one occasion, a certain comrade wrote in a letter and obliquely conveyed the aforementioned fact to Koga.
When Misako came to visit afterward, her demeanor showed no particular change from usual.
――However, since his eyes had become as they were now, Koga’s feelings had abruptly changed.
The desire not to part had surged upon him intensely.
Though he felt ashamed of this shift within himself, for him at that time—weakened in both body and mind, desperate to clutch at even a straw—it would have been only natural.
Simultaneously, Koga could not help but put himself in Misako’s position and consider her perspective.
If the matter with Uemura was indeed true, then Misako too must have intended to part with him.
She must have been waiting for the opportune moment to voice it.
Now that Koga had met with such misfortune, she could not bring herself to press forward and broach the subject—he imagined she must be profoundly conflicted.

After hesitating several times, on a certain day as the trial approached, Koga wrote a letter addressed to her.
"I will not use my unfortunate state as an excuse to bind you; my thoughts have not changed in the slightest from what they have always been"—that was what he wrote within it.
Even as he penned these words while imagining within her something resembling a chaste woman of feudal times and nurturing a heart that desired such virtue, Koga felt ashamed of his own contradiction.
But that was nothing more than a self-serving notion.
Some time later, the letter that arrived from Misako clearly announced their parting.

Shortly after that letter arrived, Misako came for a visit once.
She had stated that she wished to continue visiting as before and also wanted to send care packages, so she asked for his understanding.—When Koga returned from the visit and entered his cell, he felt for the first time a loneliness that seeped into his very bones.
He now clearly realized that her existence had been one of the major pillars supporting his life here.
It was an empty loneliness, as if a corner of his heart had caved in with a hollow thud.
He became acutely aware that he was now utterly alone.

However, Koga simultaneously felt a calm, liberated feeling—freed from all things—deepen within him. He felt within himself a reed-like power—thin and weak yet not easily broken—a passive strength, what might be called the strength inherent in weakness.

The trial was at the end of February of the following year.
It was a day when sleet fell damply, and the cold pierced all the way to one’s gut.
Koga was the sole defendant in a separate trial.
He layered on the padded garment his mother had prepared, put on his usual black glasses, and was led by the hand in heavy handcuffs up the steep third-floor stairs leading to the courthouse’s First Courtroom.
When they put the handcuffs on him, he listened with profound emotion to the words that the elderly guard—who always treated him kindly—uttered softly, as if muttering, “It’s just the rules, you see.”

Koga stood before the witness stand.

“You are Koga Ryokichi, correct?”

Upon hearing the judge’s voice, Koga answered softly, “Yes.”
In that instant—his heart, which until moments before had been trembling faintly with restlessness—began to clear like water, and in that moment his demeanor for testimony was decided.
When the preliminary fact-finding concluded, the seemingly kindhearted judge (of course, Koga had only thought this based on the voice) said, “It is regrettable that the defendant’s eyesight deteriorated during his detention.”
This might have been an overanalytical assumption, but considering how the judge immediately followed by asking “What is the defendant’s current state of mind?”—one could infer that by proactively mentioning the blindness themselves, they had perhaps intended to give Koga an opportunity to speak of his misfortune and thereby coax him into so-called ideological recantation. This might even have been the judge’s goodwill toward the unfortunate Koga.
Yet Koga, having answered “Yes,” ultimately said not a single word about the misfortune he had suffered.
“What is your current state of mind?”
When asked this, he stated that in the past [twelve characters missing] he had thought, and today he answered that [thirty-four characters missing].
“Doesn’t it contradict your group’s theoretical framework for someone incapable of action to still cling to their ideology?”
Pressed with this question, [Fifty-two characters missing] Koga answered these rebuttals in a composed low voice, and with that the trial concluded.

Koga’s mother had also come to attend the trial that day.
“Is that Yoshikichi?”
“Is that Yoshikichi?”
While staring at Koga—who entered the courtroom in handcuffs and a woven hat—as if looking at something strange, she asked the comrade beside her over and over again.
And even as the comrade haltingly affirmed that this was indeed Koga, she kept tilting her head slightly as though unable to believe it.
The trial concluded, adjournment was declared, and when it became clear that Koga was to return, she—who had remained still until that moment—suddenly let out a loud cry, stood up, and began running toward Koga, weaving through the rows of long benches.
(Koga had also heard that cry and felt anxious about what might be happening.) Of course, it was immediately blocked by people.
Then she went outside with two or three comrades, and the comrades treated her to udon at a nearby shop. But when she sat down there, she finally pulled a hand towel from her kimono sleeve, covered her eyes, and wept silently without making a sound.
Koga had heard in detail from one of his comrades via letter about how things had been at that time.

And from that time until today, exactly ten months had passed.

Two days after meeting with Attorney Sato, the court notified them of the opening date for the appeal trial.
The ten days he had promised Mr. Sato had slipped away unnoticed.

Shortly after November began, frost formed, and mornings and evenings grew markedly colder.
From the three stone walls surrounding him, from the floorboards where he sat spread with a single thin mat, the cold pressed in and seeped into his very bones.
Around that time, Koga began to let out strange, hacking dry coughs and gradually grew thinner.

One day, he suddenly received a visit from the prison chaplain.

“It seems the date for the appeal trial has been set.”

He opened the door a crack, leaned halfway through the gap, and spoke in a probing tone.
Koga thought that if his voice sounded like that, then his expression must look the same way.
Koga had known what purpose he had come for.
Suddenly, Koga felt something (fourteen characters missing) stir in his heart without any particular reason.
He nodded and remained silent.

“Does your mother come to visit?”

Koga still remained silent.

“Why don’t you meet once before the trial and have a proper talk? I could discuss various matters with you as well.”

Koga stated a brief word of thanks and thereafter did not speak another word.
Blind as he was, he feigned indifference to the chaplain’s awkward idleness and remained unperturbed—before long, the chaplain departed.

The next day, he was summoned and met the Prison Warden.

The Prison Warden’s attitude was far blunter than the chaplain’s.
Everything was clear.
He first inquired about Koga’s “state of mind,” then asked about his mother’s recent circumstances.
Then he turned to Koga and made a recommendation.
And though he phrased this rather obliquely, he hinted that if Koga were to accept the recommendation, release on bail would likely be easily arranged.
The Prison Warden said it in polite words and maintained a warm expression—so Koga imagined—throughout.
Koga answered tersely, said he had more to think over, and returned.
In the corridor on his way back, his face—peered at through gaps in the woven hat—appeared pale and tense, yet the corners of his mouth twisted faintly, even something akin to a cold smile lingering there.……

Koga felt the excitement of the past few days gradually subsiding.
At the same time, he noticed that the last remaining fragment of something ambiguous deep in his heart had naturally been stripped away while he was immersed in recollections of the past.
――Ten months had passed since the conclusion of the first trial, and in that time he had repeatedly weakened and regained his vigor.
Having regained his vigor, feeling the warm flow of blood within him, and sensing his withered chest begin to swell roundly, Koga would retrieve songs from his memory and hum them.
All those songs were connected to his past life of struggle.
With youthful excitement and a trembling, suppressed voice, Koga sang them in the darkness.
But before long, he would weaken bit by bit again, his heart growing numbed. Immediately after that trial had concluded, he himself had felt strangely vigorous—as if his unresolved heart had finally settled, with the trial serving as a trigger.
However, as time passed, a dark shadow gradually began to envelop him, and his heart started to be gnawed at once again by a desolate emptiness.
When the tension of having to forcibly encourage and drive himself because it was a trial had passed, this time, he had to feel a relaxation of mind and body unlike any he had experienced before.
This hollow loneliness could not be overcome by reason; it seemed to him like something rooted deep in his heart that he could not resist.
The initial period when he had met with misfortune was still better.
Because he himself had continuously made efforts to somehow pick himself up.
A certain period of such a state continued, and the subsequent state of exhaustion—similar to what he had experienced at that time—proved utterly unmanageable.
He was dragged along by an almost irresistible force into a nihilistic mood, slipping inexorably.
However, Koga gradually came to master the mental approach required in such situations.
It was precisely in such times that he relied on “time.”
He did not try to forcibly drive his mind in the opposite direction but quietly sank into that darkness and waited for time.
Then, before long, a faint bright light would begin to shine into a corner of his heart.
Koga had experienced such repetitions of light and dark countless times.
Having passed exactly one year since losing his eyesight through spring, summer, autumn, and winter, at each changing of the seasons he was now more intensely affected by nature than ever before, and when his body weakened, the weakening of his mind was equally severe.

But in the end, had Koga too finally reached his destination? These days he came to see bright light more often, and even when shadows occasionally fell across his path, he had grown able to dispel them through his own resourcefulness.

Initially, Koga had recoiled before that cruel reality—before those gears of history that turned inexorably, indifferent to any individual’s happiness or misery. But now, standing before them, he no longer trembled.
He could stand before them without shielding his eyes.
In fact, these days he saw the stark naked form of reality and even came to believe that quieting his thoughts about it was the best method to settle his mind.
The gears of history, which operated by disregarding individual fates, were in fact turned by humans—and Koga too had once been among those who turned them.
But midway, he had been mistakenly and violently thrown off, and now remained as a disabled soldier.
To coolly observe his own form in such a state was lonely—lonely indeed.
But there truly was no other task that could settle his heart.
When observing the various faces and postures of people walking along the street from a detached vantage point, does one not sometimes find them oddly comical and feel like bursting into laughter?
Koga wanted to maintain the mental composure to laugh at his own wretched form in such a way at certain intervals.
But where could he seek such a heart that did not flinch before anything?
In the end, it still lay within our own [missing twenty-seven characters].
[missing seven characters]…gave him the composure to laugh even at the darkness of his own fate.
While feeling a nihilism that gnawed to the marrow of his bones in the pitch-dark cell, Koga’s strength to rise again was also present within it.
When that [missing…] had taken deeper root within him, [missing…] could also be done.
A man who, even at death’s doorstep, still dreams, plans, and does not lose hope in living.
Koga was picturing such a man in his mind.

In the midst of a life that would likely continue for years in this same state, Koga placed a joyful expectation on steadily observing his own [missing six characters] while keeping watch over himself.

A few days before the appeal trial was scheduled to begin, Koga had a letter written through a scribe addressed to Attorney Sato.
“Regarding my attitude as I approach this trial court—[missing six characters]—I ask that you handle all matters accordingly, as there is nothing particularly different about it,” he stated in the letter.

(July 1934 · Chūōkōron Special Supplement)