Pathway to Japanese Literature

As we walked six ri along the mountain path—passing a long narrow lake whose shores stretched endlessly between groves of red-barked old pines that alternately revealed and concealed its waters—while listening to high-pitched songs from the treetops, Father and I arrived at Y Town as dusk fell. That night we stayed at a cheap inn on the outskirts; the next day Father took me to Y Middle School’s entrance ceremony and, after entrusting me to the dormitory, immediately returned to the village. At our parting Father said that since he had paid three months’ dormitory fees, I should return about half of the pocket money he’d earlier given me—there wasn’t enough left to settle the inn’s bill. With my chest burning hotly inside me, I pulled out from my kimono’s breast fold the frog-mouthed purse tied to my obi with string and placed several silver coins upon Father’s open palm. Though Father’s eyes held no tears, his voice grew thick with emotion until he couldn’t speak—so gathering my courage I said: “Father, do take care of yourself. Goodbye.” Nodding with his eyes alone, Father walked to where the hallway turned corner before turning back once more to fix me with an unwavering stare.

“Hey you, you’re taking too many soup ingredients.”

Then during dinner in the cafeteria, I was scolded by the Dormitory Head. Clutching my bowl and ladle, I bowed my head, my face flushing red to the very tips of my ears. For the time being, the 150 new students were required to arrive at school each morning as early as humanly possible and gather in the west-side waiting room. At first glance, it went without saying that each took pride in having passed the entrance exams—in their new uniforms and caps and leather shoes—but even so, among those like me who had come from deep in the mountains and been abruptly thrust into dormitory life, there were many students whose hearts beat strangely in this sudden transformation, who still didn’t know to put their hands in trouser pockets, their kneecaps clattering with tremors. One stemmed from my nature, the other from circumstance—a past heavy with suffering that had persisted in my life since even my earliest youth.

It was the day of the entrance ceremony. When a soul-piercing bell rang, three teachers guided the crowd of parents into the waiting room, opened the register in their hands, called out each name one by one, and divided the hundred fifty students into three groups. I was third from last in Group Three; thus my name being called required an excruciating amount of time. Perhaps my acceptance had been a mistake—with this desperate thought, I cast an imploring look toward the parents' seats. There stood Father in his crested cotton kimono and hakama, straining on tiptoe over shoulders, staring fixedly at the teacher reading names while his heart pounded with each successive child called—that same frenzied spasm from when he'd once cried out watching me race at an elementary school sports meet now pulling taut every muscle of his face. The anxious tremor from that moment lingered, tormenting my nerves for days on end, but by the time I'd nearly forgotten it, I—through aping someone's mannerisms—had grown sufficiently accustomed to thrust both hands in trouser pockets, gaze downward in corners, and experimentally kick wall panels with my shoe tips in a steady tok-tok rhythm. Until two years prior, this middle school building had been barracks; thus the waiting room's brick floor lay thoroughly ravaged by soldiers' boot studs and rifle butt plates. From the walls I detected the stench of sweat-soaked uniforms and grease-thick boots.

As days passed, during the ten-minute breaks between classes, I would sit on the clover in the garden beside the waiting room with my legs stretched out. Beyond the fenced road by the stream's edge, at a thatched-roof building encircled by bamboo groves, the waterwheel turned ceaselessly while a steel mechanical saw split long timbers—screech, clang, shriek—terrifying yet utterly monotonous sounds to which the roar of pines lining the schoolyard embankment responded, their clamorous wave-like roar entangled deep within my ears. When the waterwheel was still, the pines alone played their lonely tune. That sound would often return me to the day I had left the countryside with Father, walking through the pine forest path. In those days after the exams, whenever I followed Mother to the bathhouse each evening as Father bathed—whenever I heard him sigh, “If my exam results don’t come through, I’ll have no face to show the neighbors and relatives,” then repeat his admonitions a million times about studying and conduct should I pass—why then, when we walked alone through that pine forest, had Father contrary to my expectations not offered a single word of advice? In that moment, my silent father’s presence had instead been such an immense encouragement to me.

Somehow, such emotions were always coursing through my heart. One time, in a burst of excitement, I blurted out to my dormmates, “When I think of my parents, I can’t help but study!” Soon this reached the ears of the commuting students, and every morning when we crossed paths on our way to school, instead of greeting me with “Good morning,” they’d all jeer, “Hey, ‘when I think of my parents,’ huh?” Yet I didn’t feel particularly ashamed. With the 10 PM lights-out bugle, the electric lights went out, and waiting for everyone to fall deeply asleep, I opened my textbook under the dim electric light at the lavatory entrance. This too soon became widely known, and without being aware of the rumors branding me a freakish fellow, I remained convinced that everyone was praising me in whispers—attributing even this base, vanity-driven studying and the nosebleeds from sleep deprivation to my studious nature, all while secretly swelling with pride. When cold-water rubbing was encouraged, I took pride in being the first every morning to strip completely naked and pour bucket-drawn water over my head from above—a hollow display of courage.

In our room called Nishiryō Room Twelve, there were three new students—the son of a prefectural assemblyman, the son of a third-class postmaster, and myself—along with a second-year dormitory head. However, since the assemblyman and postmaster would arrive in splendid Western suits via chauffeur-driven cars to present gifts like boxes of sweets to the dormitory head, he favored those two while coldly disregarding me. The Dormitory Head had a slight deformity—not conspicuous enough to be called a cripple—and with his pale face’s eyebrows perpetually furrowed in anger, he kept his head down and remained silent day and night. Despite being a repulsive man who regurgitated swallowed food from his mouth—whether due to some reflex psychology—he would berate me to my face about my messy eating habits, large mouth, poor manners, and thoroughly inferior character and looks. In my sadness, I mimicked the other two—their somewhat refined manners, elegant speech, and gestures—only to invite ridicule. My grandfather came to see me, his grandson, nearly every Sunday. He arrived dressed like a rustic farmer in white loincloth and straw sandals, carrying oak-leaf rice cakes made at home. I distributed the oak-leaf rice cakes to everyone in the room, but they only ate half and threw the rest out the window. I wrote home asking them not to let Grandfather come, and this time Father started showing up. Because Father’s appearance differed little from Grandfather’s, on days when he was to visit, I would stand rooted since morning beneath the eaves of the inn along the highway where we’d stayed the night before the entrance ceremony—there I would intercept him. Having detected my scheme to prevent him from visiting the dormitory like Grandfather, Father twisted his lips and roared, “Am I so shameful then? Aren’t you my own child? Ashamed of your parents, are you? You damn fool!”

At any rate, more than anything, I found it excruciating to be mocked by the Dormitory Head. No matter what it took—even if it meant performing feats beyond human capacity—I longed to curry favor and win his affection. To this end, using pocket money extorted from my parents, I constantly attended to him with sweets and—exactly as he demanded—took reckless risks: sneaking out during evening study hours to treat him to multiple cups of hot milk at the downtown milk hall, then scaling wooden fences to return. At night in bed, I would oblige his requests: first spinning Grandfather’s yōkai tales from childhood winters by the hearth—like Issun-bōshi’s cooper whose mallet-struck tub hoop flew skyward to become the Thunder God’s drum, earning twenty-five mon per *boom-boom* strike (five times five!), *boom-boom* strike (five times five!)—all in a jester’s comic cadence; then reciting half-remembered jōruri ballads with theatrical flair to please him. I shouldered blame for the sickly Dormitory Head’s bedwetting and even hung his futon on hidden fences to dry. Thus at last hacking through brambles to outpace rivals, I became sworn comrades with that surly Dormitory Head. Amid this bond, at third term’s start, he returned to a distant northern shore for kidney treatment and soon perished. That I alone in the dormitory received his family’s death notice testified to how obsessively I’d sent get-well letters. His pitiful wisp of a shadow clung stubbornly before my eyes for weeks. But when shock jolted me awake—my negligence having earned warnings in six subjects—I plunged into panicked study beneath that lavatory entrance’s gloom, books splayed open as ever. Yet even this proved mere brazen pretense—a groveling reflex before unseen powers, a desperate flattery even of myself.

I barely managed to advance to the next grade, but with my rank being 138th and ten students having failed, I was practically at the very bottom.

“You’re a halfwit! No brains at all! No matter how much you study squatting in that latrine…” On the morning of the new school year’s ceremony, when I arrived at school, one among the group clustered in the waiting room—criticizing each other’s grades—spotted me and instantly mimicked my mannerisms, prompting everyone to burst into unified laughter. Upon entering second year, those with poor marks or hulking types prone to bullying newcomers had to relocate to East Dormitory alongside third-years. Yet I remained in West Dormitory by luck; though no Dormitory Head myself, I still ranked among the veterans who brandished fierce authority over first-years. The Dormitory Head was Saeki—whose father, a prefectural assemblyman, had been my first-year roommate. The postmaster’s son, another former roommate from first year, wore an indignant look after being assigned to East Dormitory. One day en route to the cafeteria, he seized my sleeve and declared they’d all debated who might dominate West Dormitory—then wrenched my ear while sneering, “You seem meek enough, but bet you’re the type to swagger over greenhorns.” In truth, with my squat frame squared at the shoulders and elbows jutting out, I strode down corridors with exaggerated steps, graciously accepting new students’ bows as we passed. I’d then comb through their flaws with raptor-like intensity before reporting everything to Dormitory Head Saeki. Every Saturday night, dormitory heads alone would gather to summon each new student individually for arbitrary punishments. Though I—like other non-head second-years—should’ve stayed desolately in my room, I instead joined the ranks meting out fist-punishments and futon-suffocations as Saeki’s indispensable lackey—he who commanded West Dormitory’s reverence through lineage and unmatched judo prowess. Above all else, I meticulously attuned myself to Saeki’s whims, laboring painstakingly to stay in his favor.

One day during our regular sack-beating disciplinary session, Saeki struck the cheek of an impudent new student nicknamed Baldy, who then fled into the hallway sobbing convulsively. Stationed outside the door on watch duty for the dormitory head and supervisors, I saw him reveal the saucer-shaped bald spot on his crown as he marched resolutely toward the supervisors' office—instinctively knowing he'd gone to inform on us. Later I quietly cornered Baldy, coaxing and wheedling while pressing him to confess since I wouldn't tell anyone—but he stubbornly shook his head. The next day and the day after that, I coaxed him with that crafty promise of secrecy until finally extracting his confession. With smug triumph plastered across my face, I rushed to report this to Saeki. When Saeki—crimson with rage—berated him, Baldy began wailing at full volume this time, slipping through my grasping hands to bolt toward the supervisors' office like a startled bird. Three days later on a Saturday afternoon, they convened a meeting in the supervisors' office where Supervisor-in-Chief Mr. Kawashima—acting as principal during the headmaster's travels—trilled a piercing assembly whistle to gather all West Dormitory second-years before lecturing earnestly about the barbarity of iron-fist punishments. In that breathless moment when even rustling clothes fell silent under Mr. Kawashima's glare, Saeki's violent sobbing suddenly erupted. Then—as I stood dazed, observing everything like it concerned strangers—my name was called out like thunder cracking overhead.

“Step forward!” The gymnastics instructor and dorm supervisor, a retired lieutenant, abruptly dragged me out to the front of the line.

“Y-Y-Your conduct is cowardly.” “You are utterly lacking in integrity.” “Y-Y-You said you wouldn’t tell anyone... That is nothing short of utterly outrageous.” “I hereby sentence you to five days of disciplinary suspension.” “I had considered disciplining Saeki as well, but—feeling pangs of conscience—and, and since he’s weeping here now, I’ll grant him special clemency!” As Mr. Kawashima—his rat-like face framed by glasses so thick they threatened to slip off his nose, his stuttering Tohoku dialect growing more severe with anger—finished speaking, I buried my face into the arm I had sprained during judo two mornings prior, now suspended from my neck in a white bandage by the doctor’s care, and let out a stifled cry—but it was all too late. I sat curled up on the thin-edged mat of the four-and-a-half tatami room near the toilet, choking on tears day and night. I blamed myself. Everything had been unexpected. It was terrifying. I burned with shame when students coming and going to the restroom—especially new students—pressed their faces against the glass with eyes full of curiosity and scorn as they passed by. No one—not even Saeki—showed any restraint out of consideration for the supervisors’ eyes, and the fact that not a single word of comfort came my way filled me with bitter resentment. Even though Father had galloped over on horseback upon receiving the telegram about my judo injury the day before my punishment began—even though his face from our parting remained vividly before my eyes—what in the world had led to this outcome? I pleaded with Mr. Kawashima during his rounds, kneeling to beg him to conceal matters from Father—yet each time I imagined the notification being sent and Father arriving at any moment, my surroundings would plunge into pitch-black darkness, and I would bury my face into my bandaged arm, sobbing as tears streamed like waterfalls from my clouded eyes.

On the day my suspension was lifted, I had no face left to show at school. I clung to the captured artillery barrel planted in the schoolyard, hugged my shoulder-slung satchel close, and hunched myself small to escape the piercing stares leveled at me from every direction.

“Hey, you! Long time no see.” “Did you stir up some kiddie scandal or what?” Then, a commuter student unaware of the circumstances called out to me with a smirk, so I replied, “No, that’s not it,” overjoyed to finally speak with a peer. I had long regarded that commuter student as a blessing. By now, I had come to believe that nothing but diligence in my studies could save me. No harm comes to those who don’t interfere—to keep my mind pure and avoid harm, I concluded that solitude was my only option. No matter how many times someone jabbed the back of my neck with a pencil or kicked my heels with their shoe tips in the classroom, I did not so much as twitch an eyebrow or blink once. After school, when I returned to the dormitory—unlike before when I would idle around visiting room after room—I begrudged every second spent removing my kogura uniform and clamped onto my desk. Growing all the more withdrawn yet paying no mind to being shunned by my peers, this was by no means the same vanity-driven striving as before, but solitary self-reliance and silence that left no room for regard of others. I simply took pleasure in how my diligent preparation and review yielded strikingly visible academic achievements in the classroom. Even if my intellect wasn’t sharp enough to avoid roundabout answers, the very essence of my responses always struck true.

However, due to some twist of fate, misfortune continued to plague me. As the local saying goes—when it rains, it pours.

In the evening of early summer when the crimson sun dipped behind the high mountain ridge, I exited the bathhouse and crossed the dormitory’s backyard with a towel still dangling from my hand. First-years batting balls on the tennis court surrounded by fresh greenery called me over, and for once in my life I felt a rare surge of excitement as I took up a racket for the first time. Naturally I soon left my companions and returned to my room—but that night it rained, leaving the net and racket abandoned on the court thoroughly soaked and ruined. This prompted fierce complaints from the tennis club. When they combed through every detail to determine who had last handled the racket yesterday, my carelessness was deemed responsible. With my cheek muscles frozen stiff and no defense to offer, the tennis club executives hauled me to the supervisors’ office where I was promptly forced to write a formal report for Mr. Kawashima before enduring a stern lecture.

Not long after that, one evening after dinner—it was when all the dormitory students had gone out to work in the vegetable garden in front of the East Dormitory. The rake I had swung down with all my strength lodged into the long handle of the opposing person’s rake—and in that instant, a startled cry rang out: “Agh!” The dormitory students, stunned and frozen in shock, surrounded me. “Hey—do be more careful!” shouted Mr. Kawashima as he rushed over pale-faced, his voice wrenched from the depths of his being, deep vertical wrinkles carved between his brows and teeth clattering as he scolded me. But upon seeing the tears streaming down my cheeks, he added, “Hmm… Well… At least it wasn’t Mr. ××’s head—the rake’s handle was fortunate…”

Truly, if I had mistakenly struck the crown of that person’s head with the gleaming iron claws of the rake, what should I have done? In an instant, steaming fresh sweat poured over my entire body. For several days afterward, whenever I recalled it, I would cover my face with both hands and let out a pained sigh. In the very instant I moved my hands and feet, I would be seized with terror that yet another calamity of unfair fate was about to descend upon me, and lose all power to endure.

On the fifth day after returning to my mountain house for summer vacation, the grade report I had been waiting for arrived. Despite scoring over ninety in all but three or four subjects, my newly implemented semester ranking came in at ninety-first place. I was crushed. I truly, just as someone had said, came to believe I was indeed an imbecile; abandoning even the pleasures of stream fishing and mountain hikes, I lived through that entire summer in utter gloom. In September, I returned to the dormitory as pale as a critically ill patient. Since something didn’t sit right with me, I timidly asked Mr. Kawashima to recheck my grades, and it turned out I was ninth. “It seems you’ve repented and studied hard—your grades are excellent,” he said, showing for the first time a smile that brimmed with warmth. I was ecstatic. Through such opportunities, Mr. Kawashima’s trust in me was suddenly transformed. My accumulated resentments dissolved effortlessly into clarity, leaving me so lighthearted I felt as though wings had sprouted—ready to flutter about everywhere in buoyant flight. A week later, when a faculty disciplinary meeting was convened over the offense of Mr. Kawashima’s unruly son—a student one grade above me—having torn down documents from the school bulletin board, Mr. Kawashima, who had been confined alone in the supervisors’ office, called me in from the hallway as I passed by and implored in a tearful voice choked with sorrow: “I reckon my child’ll surely get suspended too… But if even that becomes a chance for ’im to change his ways like you’ve done, well… I’d be glad of it.” I felt an indescribable wave of pity for Mr. Kawashima surging within me.

Before long, I grew conceited from scattered cheers of approval. And before I knew it, had I forgotten my vow to remain solitary? It wasn’t that I couldn’t endure solitary hell’s torments—rather, some chance occurrence bound me to Ito. Ito ranked second academically while radiating vitality and agility—hoisting himself on horizontal bars like an automaton, leaping twice others’ distances in the broad jump, performing handstands atop vaulting horses, doted upon by every teacher, harmonizing indiscriminately with classmates, and commanding such respect even upperclassmen revered him. Though now fallen into ruin himself, he hailed from an ancient lineage of distinction, commuting daily in polished shoes from his aunt’s house across the river. Each morning when I left the dormitory for school, he would detach from the chattering throng of peers and hail me with a briskly masculine “Hey there—good morning!”—his voice crisp as new banknotes, eyes blazing with passionate brilliance. I observed him through eyes clouded with brooding melancholy. We moved through classrooms and athletic fields like blood brothers, arms nearly entwined as we walked. Stretched across verdant lawns, we contemplated late summer’s boundless skies. He clarified my academic uncertainties. We practiced judo together. “You lack strength but cling like burrs—that makes you tougher than most,” he remarked—what I took as praise—before suddenly executing his signature tomoe nage with icy precision, hurling me to the dojo’s center. The moment I rebounded, I lunged at him with near-feral intensity. He stood poised like a heron, deliberately arching his chest while gripping my straining collar and sleeve—occasionally sweeping a foot in exploratory gestures—all performed with unshakable composure. His polished excellence—in studies, athletics, every endeavor—increasingly filled me with awe. This entire alliance with Ito—so far beyond my station—was witnessed by classmates through eyes equally divided between wonder and envy. Any attempt to dampen this bond proved futile—its purity shone too conspicuously to outside observers, requiring neither forced sincerity nor sacrifice while remaining utterly unshaken. During moments of overflowing bliss—those serene dream-states or the teacher’s unguarded hours when pride leaked through his gentleness—I’d uncharacteristically provoke Ito and commit all manner of eccentric acts.

A major—a graduate of Y Middle School who had recently graduated first in his class from the Army War College and received an Imperial Gift Sword—visited his former Chinese classics teacher at his alma mater for a day while returning home. When we saw off the departing figure of the major—gold-braided staff-officer epaulets coiled around his shoulders and a Tenpō coin dangling from his chest—as he left the school gate in a rickshaw, even the most hopeless failures among the entire student body felt their blood stir.

“Hmm, I knew from the start Haga would rise to this day.” “Haga’s intellect shone brightest of all,” declared the old Chinese classics teacher—a thirty-year veteran since the school’s founding—his wire-rimmed glasses slipping restlessly from his ears as he boasted of his prized pupil’s success with a cracked smile, “but as Sanyo taught us about such men: not a prodigy born gifted, but one who honed himself through true grit.”

“Hmm, which of you here will become the second Haga?” “Well now, who might that be?”

When I left the classroom, I rushed over to Ito’s side, “Ito! The teacher saw your face—he definitely saw it! They’re comparing you to the second Haga!” I said breathlessly. “Now now—don’t spout nonsense,” Ito rebuked me with commanding authority. “You’ll make people laugh—stop this.”

If I graduated from middle school, I had no prospect but to return to a remote rural village and become a farmer. "It doesn’t matter what becomes of someone like me anymore," I repeated to myself. Years later, the vision of Ito—the military-aspiring Ito with gold-braided staff officer epaulets on his shoulders and a Tenpō-era coin on his chest—burned in my heart like fire, his glorious ascendancy alone taking root there. At times, that distant vision would abruptly materialize in the present, and I, now middle-aged, would sit at my classroom desk conjuring the illusion that I was in my mountain home—listening to the valley stream’s babble, gazing up at a star-flecked sky—utterly enraptured by my former best friend’s rise to prominence. When I suddenly came to my senses and Ito had his English mistranslation pointed out, my heart would momentarily stop beating, and an even deeper, more unbearable kind of desperate agitation would churn endlessly within me.

“You’re dark-skinned—the nape of your neck looks like spilled ink or something.” With that, Ito placed his hands on my bony nape and pulled me back two or three steps. A faint fear and sorrow swept through my heart like a swift wind. “Am I dark too? Hahaha!” Ito pressed on and asked earnestly. I thought he was quite dark-skinned, but no—he’s fair, I lied.

Though there was no real ill intent behind it, Ito would occasionally make offhand remarks about my dark complexion. That rekindled memories of all my past misfortunes. It likely dated back to when I was eight or nine years old. My family had gone to plant rice in paddies half a ri beyond the mountain pass. The fields lay under dark low clouds, frogs silent in the stillness. Mother hitched up her kimono hem and urinated in that field. My baby sister fussed at her side. Perhaps finding something grotesque in Mother’s posture there, Father scowled and exchanged scornful whispers about her dark skin with the red-sashed maid tending the kettle fire. While nursing my sister and jabbing chopsticks at her cracked lunchbox’s bottom, Mother abruptly turned to my own complexion. When the maid interceded kindly on my behalf, Mother’s face darkened with quivering rage: “No—this child’s been black since birth.” “Look here—around his neck? Pure spilled ink.” “Not sunburn nor dirt—black right down to his bones,” she declared mercilessly. The shadow that fell across my soul then—I could never scrub it away. I hid from my family to scour my face with rice bran wrapped in a handcloth. I stole the maid’s skin whitener and smeared it on. Each morning after washing up, Father’s orders were to pray at my alcove shrine—a Seto-ware Tenjin figurine—for academic success. Instead I clapped hands begging, “Let no one mention my color today; make me white.” Day by day my prayers grew more desperate. Even when I excelled in elementary school, being chanted at—“Blackie! Blackie! Blackie!”—crushed whatever dignity I had. I couldn’t meet my fair-skinned friends’ eyes. To those who refrained from calling me Blackie, I pleaded promises of rewards—bribing them with picture books and slate pencils.

Then everyone surrounded me, thrusting their hands out from all directions while demanding, “Give me some too!” and “Hand it over to me too!” I stole whatever I could lay my hands on from home and brought it out to give them, but eventually there were no more suitable items left to fulfill my promises, and I was saddled with the nickname “Liarboy.” I thought human happiness was nothing more than having fair skin. I was caught by Father smearing water-based white powder like a precocious little girl, and Father scolded me, calling me a vulgar brat. It must have been during the well-cleaning—Father, bustling past the garden entrance, tripped over the hoe I’d brought out. “Agh! Damn you, Blackie!” he roared, raising his fist. I flushed crimson. Father knew that I was being called Blackie by my playmates. With my mind in utter turmoil, I instinctively raised the hoe with my mud-caked hands, closed in behind Father, and assumed a stance of bone-deep resentment. That day, two or three regular helpers had come to assist, and the well wheel at the back creaked and groaned all day long; even as a child, I had felt buoyant amid the commotion, yet I had become utterly dispirited and skipped dinner entirely.

When summer vacation arrived and I saw how beautiful my sister’s face looked upon returning from the town’s girls’ school, I was astonished. Finding the pumice stone in her nickel-plated bathing basket, I concluded she must use this to polish her skin. Entering the bathhouse, I scrubbed my entire face vigorously—only to peel off my skin and draw oozing blood. “But you—this was meant for scrubbin’ your heels! Oh my, what’re we gonna do with you?” To my face—now a gruesome, uneven scab—my sister applied ointment while forcing a strange, pained smile. I gazed in the mirror day after day, lamenting and grieving.

Strangely, for the past year or two, the torment of my dark complexion—which had faded from my heart—suddenly found its old wound throbbing anew through Ito’s words. I began catching glimpses of my face in the frosted glass along the corridor whenever entering or exiting classrooms. Just as acne had broken out across my entire face, even when seated at my desk in the study hall I did nothing but pop them with my fingers—my focus stolen away, I couldn’t apply myself to studying at all. Around that time, reading daily newspaper advertisements for a skin-whitening medicine invented by a woman named Takayanagi Kouko—(a formula promising fairness in three days)—I deemed it divine gospel and immediately sent money to Tokyo. Yet within days, the delivered package was unfortunately confiscated by the dorm supervisor’s office, and I found myself summoned before Mr. Kawashima.

“What’s this about? “A skin-whitening medicine…” Mr. Kawashima stared at my face—blood oozing from burst pimples—with a severe gaze. “Th-that is my mother’s.” “If it’s your mother’s, why did you order it through the dorm?”

“Because she wanted to hide it from Father… Mother said to take it home on Sunday…”

Mr. Kawashima curled the corner of his mouth skeptically and deliberated awhile, but ultimately handed it over. After waiting several days, I opened the package, dissolved the powdered medicine in water precisely following the instruction leaflet, and applied it morning and night without others’ knowledge. Though it failed to lighten my complexion, the medicine worked remarkably well on the acne. Each time I faced Mr. Kawashima’s perpetually nervous scrutiny fixed upon my face, remorse over having duped him so completely seized me—a terror like balancing on a sword’s edge that set every hair bristling.

As the entire dormitory rushed to prepare entertainment for the Emperor’s Birthday celebration, the son of our village’s resident policeman—my elementary school classmate—transferred into our dormitory from a middle school in a garrison town where his father now served as police chief. With his sunken mouth missing front teeth—the gaping cavity visible deep within—a peninsula-like protruding chin, small eyes, and a forehead creased with thick wrinkles, he bore the exact appearance of an old woman. Thus upon entering the dormitory, he was immediately dubbed “Baa-sama.” This nickname perfectly embodied his meddlesome nature—he was truly a vulgar man who loved nitpicking and took pleasure in unearthing my past misdeeds to expose them publicly. [They] had mocked me as “Blackie! Blackie!”, and then—in retaliation for being provoked into that nickname—I had tormented a child afflicted with a strange disease that left six small nostrils clustered like bells on either side of his nose, cruelly dubbing him “Six-Nostrils! Six-Nostrils!” until he wept, then exploited his vulnerability to sell him overpriced peepshow pictures and embezzle school supplies. He even enumerated my history as a habitual thief who stole arareto sweets from the stacked boxes at penny candy stores, going about proclaiming me a “thief!” Through such malicious gossip and transparent flattery, this transfer student—chafing under his outsider status—skillfully ingratiated himself with the dormitory’s brutal faction and obsessively worked to establish his position. Baa-sama would stride past my room chanting “Steal! Stole! Stolen!” at the top of his voice. Though I bit my lip in bitter frustration, I could do nothing about Baa-sama’s swaggering presence except cower helplessly. I panicked blindly. Around this time, reports proliferated of watches and bird’s-eye fabric items going missing within the dormitory. I wished I could vanish from existence. With every theft rumor, I trembled in terror—what if someone else’s wallet had slipped into my book box or trunk? What if one tumbled out when I spread my futon at night? The more righteous acts I performed and honest words I spoke, the more it all felt like mere pretexts to avoid suspicion. On the evening winter break began, when dorm students received their travel allowances, seven or eight frog-mouthed purses were stolen by someone’s hand. Finally town police arrived and—convinced the thief was among us—three detectives spent the next day’s ongoing exams searching every room down to lifted tatami mats with janitors’ help, then intercepted each returning student at the cafeteria entrance to strip-search uniforms and shoes. When my turn came, Baa-sama gathered two or three cronies to pace before me showering meaningful smirks and venomous stares. The harder I tried to empty my mind, the more grotesquely contorted my features became. Yet every crime was uncovered—with an unearthly wail of “Waaah!”, we threw down chopsticks to rush over and find a third-year from East Dormitory prostrate before detectives, tearfully confessing. I felt stabbed through the chest as consciousness blurred into distance.

As if to spite everyone, somehow from that time on, Ito began associating closely with Baa-sama. Just when Baa-sama had been diligently picking apart aspects of my nature that Ito had never noticed before and working to slander me—during a shrine festival where all students paid homage to our feudal lord’s ancestors—I snickered at a student who stumbled over a stone while bowing before the hall amid the crowd. Later, Ito severely rebuked me for this. Around this time, while walking together along the riverside town’s single-row houses, an unfamiliar young child shot me with a cork bullet tied to a toy gun’s string. When I angrily shouted “Idiot!” at them, Ito—disgusted by my vulgar words toward an innocent child—flushed bright red, puffed out his cheeks, and looked down as he spat, “Che! You’ve got all sorts of unpleasant traits.” Then he—who until then had been walking beside me—abruptly stepped away under the willow tree, furrowed his brows while staring into the distance, and began whistling.

Day by day, Ito grew more distant from me, and seizing such opportunities, Baa-sama gradually wrested him from my grasp until I stood completely isolated. The moment this realization struck, Ito turned his back on me in the blink of an eye. I stood dumbfounded. At this singular moment, fury seized me—I hated Ito’s betrayal from the very marrow of my bones. I erected an impassable fence around my heart, barring him entry forevermore. Though we avoided each other, chance encounters still occurred where we’d meet alone—both exchanging furtive glances with unnaturally bright eyes, each thinking “Ah, that bastard wants to speak to me,” yet neither daring to voice even a whisper of reconciliation. Reckless in my defiance, I squared my shoulders and marched stubbornly down my own path.

The prolonged bankruptcy of relatives finally took its toll, diminishing my father’s assets. When I became a third-year student, I moved out of the expensive dormitory and rented a room on the second floor of a geta shop on Honmachi-dori. I had rice and charcoal sent from home, chewing on meals cooked in the inner compartment of an Irihira pot over the hibachi’s charcoal fire. After overhearing the landlord downstairs—who despised my cooking—hurl sarcastic barbs, I mostly resorted to toasting dried rice crackers to eat. Every morning, the lanky army officer renting the detached room downstairs would clang his saber and call out in brisk Tokyo dialect from the garden stepping stones, “I’m off now,” to which the landlord would respond as if echoing the metallic clang with a “Why, good morning and welcome back.” Clutching my cloth-wrapped bundle of textbooks, I descended the steep stairs and mimicked the officer’s cadence with an “I’m off now.” The landlord answered only with a sardonic chuckle and a chin-jerked “Why.” I felt certain I could hear the landlord’s wife and daughters snickering behind my back. Rising at dawn to wash rice stealthily by the well—enduring complaints about disturbed sleep—I grew too self-conscious to use the toilet openly, instead storing urine in soy sauce bottles and secretly disposing of it while fearing closet inspections. On days when I found evidence of someone peeking into my rice bowls or pots, my nerves frayed completely. Here and there lingered pitiful glimpses of a small fool. Still, I never neglected to drive myself onward with single-minded devotion to my studies.

Abruptly, an oppressive weariness—one my strained heart had never even conceived of—crashed over me all at once. As if a spring had come loose and ceased its motion, I cast everything aside and took an unauthorized absence. I excluded all judgment. I spent several days in a daze.

I quietly returned to my village home and announced I would leave school—that there was no particular need to graduate middle school to take over the family farming business, and that I wanted to work alongside my family. Father and Mother sat on the engawa, pressing their ears and mouths together as they whispered in consultation. “You’ll really do this?” “That took nerve.” “Family fortune matters more than learning or reputation—you’ve finally seen sense,” Father said. To prevent rumors that financial hardship caused my withdrawal, Father ordered we tell everyone it had been entirely my own decision.

In half my life, Mother had never been as tenderly attentive to me as during those brief days following my withdrawal from school. After all, Mother might have long been trying to pull me out of school, urging Father both overtly and covertly any number of times. In the mornings I would go out to the fields to practice farming; in the afternoons I read lecture notes. I suddenly felt as though I had unloaded a heavy burden from my shoulders that had weighed on me for years. Here there was no one with whom to compete over grades—neither Ito nor Baa-sama nor Mr. Kawashima the dorm supervisor nor the geta shop landlord. All that existed was liberation. Small though I was, I had pushed worldly cares far into the distance, settled into a compact lofty perch, and greedily indulged in fleeting moments of unclouded happiness and peace.

Yet this unending tranquility—this life so divorced from the world that I sensed no lack within it—proved but a fleeting, ill-omened dream. I, who had inherited every falsehood in Father’s character—the hypocritical acts toward neighbors that formed the sum of his life’s pride, that wretched hunger for renown—and who chafed perpetually at these traits, effortlessly struck at their core and jolted Father. Father and I would clash in an instant, reconcile in an instant, loathing each other more profoundly than any, pardoning each other more deeply than any. Neighbors who’d flung open their storm shutters at our midnight howls of abuse stood gaping come dawn as they watched us father and son stride shoulder-to-shoulder behind our ox toward the paddies. Timid yet brazen, wounding and distrusting—day upon day, night upon night, our collisions of conflict and affection grew ever more tangled until we settled into a prolonged deadlock of irreparable mutual glares.

In the whirlpool of domestic storms, I held onto Yukiko’s image and wrapped myself in my own wings. Yukiko was still a first-year higher elementary student; her house stood in a chestnut grove beneath the high stone steps of Juoudo Temple, no more than ten cho from my home. When I was eight years old—on a day when spring winds rattled the paper-paneled doors as dusk approached—I slid open the entrance screen to find Yukiko standing there, kappa-like in her red-thonged geta. Why she had come to play was nothing more than a leaf blown in by the wind and finding its way here. I took Yukiko’s hand and delivered her to Mother’s side. The phantom of her, whom I had chanced to glimpse, never left my sight, and on the day I spotted her entering elementary school at the start of a new April term, I was kept awake all night by joy. Each time we met, though still a boy and a girl, we would exchange faint smiles and knowing glances, and move our lips. I would shamelessly peek into her classroom, touch her long hair, or pry open her desk lid to examine the neatness of her penmanship. No matter what anyone said, Yukiko was mine alone. When Obon came and the thudding rhythm began echoing from Juoudo Temple’s grounds, I would slip out of the house and walk along the mountain-skirted grassy path toward the drumbeats. There, hiding from prying eyes, I watched Yukiko—her white cheeks tied with red cords and a woven sedge hat pulled low over her eyes—billowing her long sleeves like waves as she danced among the village girls to the young men’s drumming. On such evenings, night mist would deeply envelop the riverside and groves of trees in the forest; even after returning home and lying in bed, the drums’ pulse haunted me till dawn. As these annual memories grew ever more cherished, increasingly peculiar and desperate melodies of all kinds set my heart racing. This was love, I realized. I walked in front of her thatched-roof house surrounded by a hibiscus hedge, using an errand as my pretext. Longing to see her, I would go every night to study Chinese classics at the temple downstream, stay there, and arrange to meet her on the road as she went to school in the morning. Despite her plump, gentle face, whenever I stared at her, Yukiko would tense her cheeks and cause faint lines to quiver at her temples. The demands of this love first made me take notice of my own appearance, then made me fret over my unattractive face. The nickel-framed glasses I had until then only worn in secret while gazing at myself in the mirror were now boldly displayed on my face even in public. At that time, my sister who had married into a neighboring village had slightly poor eyesight which became fodder for her mother-in-law’s complaints. Fearing our family might be deemed afflicted with an ocular disease as if it were hereditary, Mother detested my fake glasses and hurled every possible sarcastic remark—yet I remained utterly unfazed. I constantly worried that someone might beat me to it, and thus tormented myself over how to confess my feelings to Yukiko, still so young, as soon as possible. Fortunately, Yukiko’s mother had secretly sensed my feelings and discreetly invited me to the autumn festival, where she had Yukiko serve me a feast. Yukiko, who had a habit of always biting her lower lip—the moist lips now beautifully etched with the pale pink hue of blood—sat with a tray on her lap, looking downward.

After the tray was taken away, just as I stood up, the Seto brazier I was holding slipped from my hand and shattered into dust. Yukiko brought a broom and dustpan for me, and I did something like scooping the hot ashes into the dustpan, but black scorch marks remained here and there on the tatami mats. I turned bright red and apologized to Yukiko's father. Finally, in a frenzied daze, I asked Old Woman Otsune—who frequented our house—to have my parents approach them and arrange for us to be formally engaged. Meanwhile, I abruptly began paying attention and started cherishing Father and Mother.

On a night when the rain fell incessantly, Old Woman Otsune came formally to the house, bearing a bow-shaped paper lantern with undue solemnity.

“Have you no shame!” After sending Old Woman Otsune away, Mother came clattering over, jabbed my shoulder—her terrifying blue veins bulging and eyes bloodshot—as she cursed with venomous loathing. “Lately I’ve been thinking there’s something off about you. “You, acting like you got some fancy festival invitation. “Using Old Woman Otsune for this? Damn fool!” “Mother! “I—I wanted a pure bond like Takeo and Nami in *Hototogisu*! “Not like those vulgar youths. “There’s nothing wrong with it!” I rebelled in bitter indignation, though cornered against the room’s edge.

“Enough! What nonsense—have you no shame!” Mother raised her hand to strike. Father’s disapproval went without saying—he had once fought with Yukiko’s father over the forest boundary to the point of litigation. Yet he kept silent about it now. A few days later at noon, having returned from the orchard, Father stood naked using basin water when he spotted a filthy beggar at the entrance. He fixed me with a terrifying glare and shrilled: “Lazing about like some parasite! You’ll end up just like that wretch soon enough!” Mother immediately chimed in agreement. The servant too gazed at me with eyes sycophantic toward my parents. Out of sheer spite, I resolved to overcome all obstacles and marry Yukiko someday. Having sworn this vow, I—driven by self-destructive urges and sexual awakening—initiated a sordid affair with the housemaid. Late one night, I crawled crab-like into the futon of the newly arrived maid—red-cheeked and pug-nosed—only for her to jab me with her elbow, claiming another man’s prior claim. Humiliated at having my masculine pride trampled, I begged her to at least accept gifts. The next day I bicycled to town, bought trinkets, and stealthily handed her a round box. She brusquely opened it, plucked out the hairpin, sniffed the perfume bottle’s neck briefly, then stashed it in her cupboard without thanks.

That too was quickly found out. By now, I was despised by both my family and anyone in the neighborhood. When I walked down the street, even children would point and laugh at me. I was most afraid of children who mocked me along the way, and whenever I spotted a group of them, I would take detours to avoid them, growing more servile with each passing day.

Two years had passed. Ito—who until then had occasionally sent letters of apology that seemed to regret his change of heart—now informed me he had graduated from middle school and been admitted to a high school in K City through school recommendation without taking entrance exams. I was crouched by the back pond sharpening a sickle with a whetstone when Father came bringing that postcard. "If you had kept going to middle school, you could have graduated. What a waste." "Quitting halfway... You've done nothing but bring shame," he said with evident regret, his face stiffening as he pressed his wide lips into a tight line and heaved a thick sigh.

When I failed the conscription exam, I married the daughter of an executive at the gas company in Y Town. When I had entered middle school, the multicolored pencils—red, blue, purple—neatly arranged in the leather pencil holder on a student’s worn-out uniform chest pocket, along with those pencils’ dazzling nickel caps, had bedazzled my eyes. Though I had watched in awe, thinking this student must be an extraordinary scholar given his exceptional English skills, I later discovered he was actually a failing student. When I learned my wife was that failing student’s older sister, I felt an oddly ticklish yet unpleasant sensation. And what a clumsy, foolish blunder it was—during the three-times-three exchange ceremony on our wedding night, I trembled so violently while placing the set of vermilion-lacquered cups on the stand that they clinked sharply. Yet she performed it with perfect composure—which made sense when I finally learned, over a year after our child was born, that this marked her second time undergoing the ritual as a returned bride. I kicked over her dressing table and broke it, hurled her sewing box into the garden, and raged at her insolence in pretending not to recognize items she’d once taken to another household before brazenly bringing them back. And so I spent many years in unrelenting passionate quarrels that never taught me better.

When my child turned seven that spring, I ran away with another woman and embarked on a wandering journey; after enduring various hardships to reach Tokyo, I became a foreign correspondent for F Magazine, then flourishing as a product of literary fortune.

Imprisoned Wretched Bird Child of sin, mortal-born Chains drag through earth, drag through darkness,

Broad daylight’s vain curse… The drunken, agitated mad poet dictated like this and had me transcribe it.

“Sir, what does ‘mortal-born child’ mean?” Before a peeling-lacquer tea stand holding a meager sake bottle and lone cup, the mad poet lay completely naked save for his loincloth, supine with one emaciated leg—reduced to skin and bone—crossed over the other, vigorously tugging at his grown-out mustache as he composed verses. When I asked my question, he sprang up as if shot from a bow, thrusting his jaw forward and pursing his lips: “It means born from a mortal’s womb. Couldn’t tell if I’m horse bones or cow bones! I’m nothing but a lowborn wretch!”

When he answered as if in a violent paroxysm, tears glistened in the poet’s bloodshot eyes—on the verge of spilling over. In that instant, I too felt the eternal shackles binding my very being—chains from which I could never escape beneath the blue sky. A hard lump surged up and clogged my throat.

Chains had dragged through earth, dragged through darkness—and twenty years had passed. I wept at being imprisoned, wept at my own sins, wept at being a child of mortal flesh—and felt as though I had been dragging through twenty long years of darkness. How he must have yearned to escape imprisonment and reach broad daylight’s vast world! Imprisoned wretched bird—you shall live under daylight’s vain curse! Standing by that manure-strewn suburban roadside, I reread this dictated manuscript—neither poetry nor prose nor anything decipherable—and suddenly found myself swallowing tears before walking back toward the tramway street where the afternoon sun blazed relentlessly. And I brought it back to the magazine company in Ushigome where I was allowed to live on night-duty lodgings with a woman while working as a journalist. In midsummer 1928, around when the mad poet left this world, my health too had grown poor. When I contracted Krupp pneumonia—feverish with bloody sputum—the woman secretly notified my family back home, and Father even telegraphed his planned arrival time in Tokyo. But dreading to let the shabby countryman that was my father be seen by the magazine’s regular writers, I immediately wired back refusing his visit. Just as in middle school when I’d despised Father for visiting the dormitory in leg wrappings and straw sandals—when he’d raged, “Is there something wrong with me? Ashamed of your own father? Am I not your father too?”—so now I envisioned not a face flushed crimson with anger at our distant hometown hearthside where he’d readied to visit his sick child, but Father’s desolate expression as he silently read the telegram from a son spurning parental affection. Moaning beneath my futon, I saw it flicker before my eyes and was made to reflect thoroughly—no matter where I fled, I remained an unfilial wretch. Around this time, my wife back home left our child behind and reverted to her family registry. Until then I’d pitied the precarious fate of the woman I lived with and been considerate of her, but now I found myself hating her instead. Adopting an attitude of begrudging even her fleeting amusements as sinful, we ceaselessly snarled at each other like wild beasts. To call everything regret fell short. Neither self-restraint nor stable judgment existed—I’d simply been carried along by fatigue and weariness as they were.

One autumn day during the year-end cleaning, when the sunlight had grown noticeably weaker and the cicadas’ cries had faded, I was at the entranceway tucking up my kimono hem with a hand towel over my face, beating the tatami mats with a bamboo stick. Then, a university student wearing a new uniform with gold buttons—looking every bit like one might still call him a ruddy-faced youth—approached hurriedly and,

“Are you Mr. Ooe?” he asked.

“……” Without adjusting the hand towel over my face, I slightly raised my head and stared vacantly up at the university student’s face. “Who might you be?” “I’m Kagawa.” “I’ve been at W University since April.” “I’d long intended to call on you, though I only knew your address was in Ushigome Yarai…” “Kagawa... Ah, Mr. Sakaemori’s kin, was it?” “You’ve really kept me in your memory all this time, haven’t you?” I was utterly dumbfounded. Kagawa was the nephew of Yukiko—the girl who had been my first love. I hastily straightened my room, washed my hands and feet, then ushered Kagawa inside. From a nearby Western restaurant I ordered individual dishes and uncorked beer to entertain him. In his moist, cool eyes and rounded face with its tightly drawn mouth corners, I discerned Yukiko’s features. Feeling both tenderness toward Kagawa and a dreamlike transience, I sank into endless recollections of the distant past.

When I went to Y Town’s main street bookstore to buy a travel guide while planning to elope with a woman, I encountered Yukiko—pale beneath her spring shawl and Western umbrella—reaching out her white arm to flip through a new women’s magazine. She had remained unmarried for a year or two after my wedding. Her family being of foot-soldier lineage made them ill-suited to farming, leaving few suitors willing to marry her. I heard through others that Yukiko’s white-bearded father—a refined old man—had lamented, “If only we’d asked Ooe to take her,” voicing his regret. Later rumors said she’d married a naval petty officer and moved near K Naval Port in H Prefecture only to struggle there before falling ill and returning home to be hospitalized at Y Town’s Red Cross Hospital. At that time I was working in Y Town while leaving my wife and child in our village when Father visited me one day and said, “That girl’s got consumption after all. Just as well we didn’t take her in.” By then I’d already resolved to abandon my wife, child, and home entirely, so I felt acutely sorry for him and sighed an unutterably bitter sigh. On his way back he bought me silver-rimmed glasses with thin wire frames from a town clockmaker’s shop. Then after about a week passed—on the very day I planned to act—I unexpectedly crossed paths with Yukiko again. Our eyes met briefly before hers dropped first. Panicking, I fled the storefront, hastily gathered my purchases, and walked along a shallow stream’s pebble-washed embankment via back alleys toward the station. Old pines spaced unevenly rustled softly in the faint breeze. Suddenly—inexplicably—the roar of pines from that long grove I’d walked through with Father when entering middle school years ago echoed anew in my mind. And now I felt keenly how I was abandoning Father, our ancestral forests and fields, my wife and children.

When I raised my head, Yukiko—holding a parasol—was approaching from the far end of a single path. This time, we exchanged faint smiles and bowed deeply to each other. With eyes that seemed to ask, "Why didn’t you take me as your wife?" she looked at me, her haggard, frail face slightly flushed. As we passed each other, I looked down again. It wasn’t that I didn’t love my wife—when she threatened to return to her parents’ home, I wept and begged her to stay—but the fact that she was a divorcee who had returned home made it impossible for me to respect her, and I lacked the mental resolve to spend my life with her. I thought that had I married Yukiko and respected her purity, such a miserable collapse would not have occurred. I immediately boarded the train at the station with the woman I had arranged to meet, yet even amidst the flurry of departure—thinking of him, thinking of this—my torso trembled under waves of sadness that alternated between hazy and piercingly clear. Several times as we raced beneath hills bearing weather observatories, I lifted my hips from the cushion in the speeding carriage and moaned "Ahhh—" through clenched teeth......

After six full years, with Yukiko’s nephew Kagawa before my eyes, what came to mind once more was this: had I married Yukiko, I would have lived a sincere and peaceful life as a simple farmer in a rural village—one who would have shunned fame and glory. Together with her, I would have gone out to the fields at sunrise and returned home side by side at sunset, carrying hoes and earthenware bottles. The dream—the longing—for a life where laughter would never cease throughout my days flared up suddenly in my heart, as if oil had been poured upon it. At the same time, overwhelmed by the sense of shame that clung to my own expression, I found myself unable to look at Kagawa.

Kagawa spoke of village affairs as he was questioned. He told how there had been three suicides over six years—all childhood friends of mine. One had killed himself with poison meant for trapping raccoon dogs after debts overwhelmed his eatery; a woman had hanged herself with an obi sash, wearied by discord between her stepmother and adopted son-in-law; and a sailor, heartbroken, had thrown himself into the Korea Strait. My parents—long mocked for their child’s misdeeds—must have taken some comfort in finding neighbors who were like terms in this equation, I thought with ironic pity. Yet believing all this stemmed from the unhealthy influence I myself had sown throughout the village, I could not force out even a hollow “Ahahaha” of laughter.

“It was during this summer vacation when I returned home,” said Kagawa, his hand trembling like a wave midair as he held a foaming beer glass, “but since the body was never found, we placed the unlined summer kimono and straw hat left in the ship’s cabin into a coffin. My mother followed behind it, wailing and weeping as we carried it to H Temple’s communal cemetery for burial. It caused a tremendous sensation throughout the village!” He laughed loudly. This sensation made me smile. Back when I was infatuated with Yukiko, whenever young Kagawa would come to visit our house, I kept calling him “Sakaemori-san” and giving him sweets—yet when had he started using such foreign language? The more I looked, the more his face appeared innocent, childlike, so very childlike.

I even tried making him drunk to get him to talk during that time.

“How is your aunt, Ms. Yukiko? Is she doing well? Is she happy?” I swallowed such questions along with my saliva as I looked down, gulping them back again and again with force, then occasionally directed at him a probing gaze he found distasteful. Kagawa likely knew nothing of the ill-fated romantic affair between his aunt and me.

The new year began, and the magazine was discontinued. I clung to the compassion of Mr. R, the magazine’s editor-in-chief, stayed on at the company where I even received living expenses, and focused on recuperating my failing health with prescribed medication. And in my spare time, I wrote my autobiography. As I wrote of my unrequited love for Yukiko, I was freshly reminded of that autumn festival when I had been invited to her home—how I had stood holding the rim of the Seto ware brazier only for ashes and embers to slip from my hands and scatter across the tatami, leaving me mortified. The memory became unbearable, and I wished my entire body could be pounded to dust inside a mortar and vanish.

“Ah, ah,” I let out a strange cry and clutched my lower abdomen. I spread all ten fingers of both hands in the air and thrashed about before the desk.

“What’s this mad act you’re putting on?” “Ugh! I can’t stand people who put on such mad acts!” The woman doing needlework at my side frowned gloomily and pressed on insistently. “If you keep up that act, you’ll surely become the real thing before long.” She had said the same thing on other occasions. Even when I turn forty or fifty, even if I were to go mad, I cannot bury that disgraceful blunder of breaking the brazier before my lover’s family—etched alive in my mind—nor the shame welling up from the depths of my instinct. Each time, I cannot help but leap up, hurl my body about, and frantically try to conceal the throes of my shame by acting like a madman. This minor incident alone had already been sufficient to mar, for my entire life, even those rare moments when one or two fleeting joys found their way into my heart.

After a full year had passed, the magazine was republished, and I once again became involved in its editing. Though still a coterie organization, this new iteration leaned heavily toward profit-seeking principles, and the overwhelming busyness of me handling nearly all business operations single-handedly defied others' imaginations. Editorial meetings, manuscript solicitations, participant recruitment for roundtables, anxiety, draft hounding, editing while incorporating executives' opinions, perpetual deadline extensions, express mail, telegrams, print shop runs, clumsy proofreading, clashes with foremen, sniping at photogravure shop owners, submitting third proofs for executive approval to finalize editions, berating bookbinders, momentary relief when sample copies arrived, nineteenth-day releases, consignment distributions, return processing, distributor collections, ledgers, phone calls—attending to this and that left a fool like me, constitutionally prone to futile labor, utterly unable to distinguish day from night. Yet even as I spun like a top, I drove myself by comparing my plight to those writhing in unemployment's hell—while simultaneously working with half-resigned abandon, keenly aware of my body's visible decline as if yielding to fate itself.

On the night when the May issue had been on the market for three or four days and we were hoping to enjoy some respite from the commotion, detectives from Kagurazaka Police Station arrived, thrust forth an official sales ban notice, and confiscated the remaining copies. I became terribly flustered and called the Metropolitan Police Department by phone to inquire about the details of the matter, but it was said that appearing at the Ministry of Home Affairs would suffice—though I couldn’t get a clear answer.

The next morning, I had the woman take out the spring inverness coat from the trunk and left home wearing it. The spring inverness coat was something I’d bought through monthly installments when I first became a magazine reporter—as a country bumpkin straight from the sticks, I thought appearances demanded I wear one like all the veteran editorial staff did—but so ill-suited to my bearing and awkward that after donning it two or three times, I’d stashed it away. Even after all these years, wearing it again gave me the same ill-fitting, awkwardly self-conscious sensation. As I walked, the memory suddenly revived of when I first wore this speckled inverness coat and was told by the editor-in-chief, “It doesn’t suit you with that dark skin of yours,” sending a chill through me. No sooner had this thought surfaced than I found myself connecting it to last month’s magazine critique that had ridiculed me as “a Negro who’d slipped among French people.” A faint astonishment came over me as I realized how this insecurity about my dark complexion—inescapable through childhood, adolescence, and youth—now lingered into the present after all these unforeseen vicissitudes. What change at all had transpired within me over these long years leading to today?

Misfortunes and worries remained unchanged from the past—all of one and the same hue. Progress in thought, progress in morality—there was nothing at all. Everything remained exactly as it had been when I was a child! With belated astonishment yet again, I walked toward the tram street while darting restless glances over myself. As I sat in the train car and looked down, I noticed two little finger-sized holes that insects had bored into the hem of my inverness. "Ah, what a waste I'd made of things," I muttered without thinking, reaching out my hand to touch the holes.

After alighting from the train at Ōtemachi, I inquired with the guard at the Ministry of Home Affairs' temporary barrack-like structure before the stop, trod over gravel to enter, and was changing into bamboo sandals at the entrance when—

"Hey," said a broad-shouldered young man with a solid build as he blocked my path. "Brother-in-law?" "Huh?!" Every hair on my body stood erect as I recoiled, wrenching my face away. There stood a man in an ill-fitting Western suit—sleeves too short, coarse hands protruding from shirt cuffs clutching a black leather bag, rigid in brand-new red shoes. Could this be Shuichi, third brother of my estranged wife? Seeing those thick lips clamped in a ferocious grimace, I surrendered without resistance and fixed my gaze on the ground. We stood facing each other in breathless silence.

“I’m terribly sorry,” I said, surprisingly steadying my nerves as I removed my hat and bowed with particular politeness, but even so, my voice quavered uncontrollably. “No, that’s all in the past now,” Shuichi dismissed immediately, yet beneath the black fedora still on his head, the furrow between his brows remained severe, and the swords of his eyes stayed unnervingly sharp. “I hear you reside in Ushigome, I see. I’ve been in Yokohama since last year. I come here every other day on business.”

Without so much as a blink, Shuichi produced a single business card from his breast pocket. Staring at the business card that read "Yokohama City ××-chō 2-8, Yokohama Meter Measurement Co., Ltd.," I felt cold sweat bead on my forehead, worked my mouth awkwardly, and floundered through incoherent replies, desperate to escape this place as quickly as possible.

“Let’s meet another day and talk at length.” “…I’m in a hurry today.” “Yes, please do come visit.” “I could also come visit you if it’s not too much trouble.” “I’ve been meaning to call on you to express my gratitude for all your past kindnesses.” The two exchanged nods and parted ways at the end of the entrance hall, one turning right and the other left. Guided by an attendant boy into the Censorship Department’s office, a clerk with a head sharpened like a persimmon pointedly offered me a chair and—while pressing an English newspaper against his plain iron-rimmed glasses—announced that the ban was due to charges of public morals disturbance, then delivered his admonitions in an exceedingly arrogant, businesslike tone. I simply trembled uncontrollably, nodding “yes, yes” until he finished speaking, then bowed deeply once and withdrew. Fearing that Shuichi might catch me again, I kept my head down as I half-ran down the corridor, and even after exiting, I leaned forward and hurried along the pavement without a glance at those around me.

To the villa in Sagami Chigasaki belonging to Mr. R—the leader of our magazine—where that day the coterie’s executives had crowded in for a flower competition, I resolved to report the full details as soon as possible, and immediately boarded a down train from Tokyo Station. I put my hat on the luggage rack, leaned my elbows against the window frame, and let the refreshing breeze cool my heated forehead. In my chest, an agonizing pulse still surged. Narrowing my eyes and clenching my teeth, I tried to fend off the things surging toward me.

Among my wife's many brothers who never saw eye to eye with me, only Shuichi had genuinely liked me from the start. During the Great Earthquake year when I had first come to Tokyo, Shuichi too moved to the capital relying on me. While delivering newspapers and attending cram school, he ended up taking refuge at my Hongo boarding house after being driven out by fires in Kanda. When flames forced our evacuation to Komagome Nishigahara with the boarding house family, Shuichi even shouldered my heavy wicker trunk for me. I detested Shuichi's crude manners and speech, and being poor myself, eventually coaxed him into returning home from Akabane through placations—but when I learned he'd ridden back lying flat on a train roof, the cruelty of treating him as a burden pierced my heart. Later, Shuichi told my wife about how chummy I was with the boarding house girl who mended my clothes, prompting her fiery rebuke when I soon returned home: "Don't play the bachelor making me write letters—everyone knows your game!"

The blows I had dealt my wife and her younger siblings—despite having committed such brazen wrongdoings in broad daylight, here I was, unable to sincerely hang my head in contrition. What kind of human being had I failed to become? Indeed, that defensive posture I had assumed, that feigned innocence, that brazen arrogance when colliding with Shuichi—the instant these thoughts struck me as if electrocuted, I shrank back in terror and trembled uncontrollably. As attacks of guilt surfaced and subsided one after another in fragments, the train arrived at Chigasaki.

Because I was out of breath, I took a rickshaw to the seaside villa. Though not particularly spacious, this elegant detached Western-style building—with its weighty damask curtains of resplendent patterns modulating the light—housed our flower-weary group gathered around the pure white cloth-draped table at its center. They sipped tea, nibbled refreshments, and swayed to the Brunswick Banatroph’s lavish melodies from its electromagnetic phonograph. When I entered, the music ceased. Squinting my eyes, I recounted the situation’s development, received a cup of freshly steeped fragrant tea, then immediately excused myself. I trudged along a powdery white sandy path through the pine grove toward the station. While the ground remained calm, a fierce spring wind whistled like a lash overhead. The tall pine branches clashed against it in symphonic struggle. Covering my nostrils with a handkerchief as the roaring pine wind captivated me, I suddenly found myself recalling that same “song of pines” heard at fourteen—when Father had escorted me to Y Town for middle school enrollment—now resonating anew in my ears here. There I stood crumbling before hope and despair’s alternating assault. Bitter remorse and aching emptiness coexisted. Abruptly slowing my pace, I glanced back at the distant path behind me—if my ex-wife learned from Shuichi about me wearing that spring Inverness coat, she’d surely laugh: “My my, all dolled up like that—teehee!” Her boisterous laughter flashed before me—those triangular eyes when she grinned, the tiny wrinkles on her nose-tip, her buckteeth—all flickering momentarily across my vision. Blushing at her phantom, I smiled faintly. I should have asked Shuichi with humble sincerity: “How is your sister? Where did she remarry? Is she happy now?” But instead—she must have read that novel I wrote about our history, this fledgling writer barely edging into literature’s margins. Though she called me “husband” for eight years—me, this endlessly detestable wretch—her hatred would be futile now; slander pointless. No—she must be secretly rooting for me still, praying I don’t fail.

Even if our bodies remain separate, after my wife fled declaring "There may be thickets where one abandons a child, but none where one abandons oneself," with the child—who grows up clutching a cold stone between us—the first to come to mind as my wife is neither the woman I currently live with nor Yukiko my first love, but Shizuko, from whom I remain achingly inseparable despite our long severance.

Beloved Shizuko! And I called out the legal name of my long-separated ex-wife. "For I am your eternal husband—" I cried aloud, lamenting and emphasizing my sorrow. From beyond the grove ahead, train cars rumbled past one after another through the trees, their billowing smoke drifting above the treetops—I stood watching this up close, yet remained unaware of my own footsteps heading toward that station, circling round and round the same ridge path that looped like a ring around the potato field. While listening to the desolate song of the pines.

(February 1932)