Pathway to Japanese Literature

Yet the darkness itself was the original canvas. Hordes of familiar-eyed revenants gushed forth from my eyes, alive there in great numbers.

――Baudelaire

1

A doctor died. That was his cousin’s spouse. The man lay with his feet toward the crematorium’s iron door, a large bruise spreading across his left temple, placed in a long unpainted wooden box and loaded onto an iron transport cart. Amidst a row of iron doors rusted red by intense heat, that particularly large door bore a silver arabesque pattern entwined upon it—a special first-class honor, like the head server’s seasonal offerings. At the head of the transport cart stood a temporary incense burner, its smoke rising mechanically. A small elderly monk in purple robes had been chanting sutras in a shrill voice for some time. He suddenly reached toward his robe pocket, then flusteredly glanced back over his left shoulder. This time he glanced back over his right shoulder. Then he—upon noticing Shigeo—made an upward wave of his palm. He had forgotten. Shigeo took out a folded scroll from his uniform pocket, stepped forward, and handed it over. It was the Buddhist hymn.

Priest Kōten—argumentative, witty, and even prone to sudden eccentricities—now recalled how he had forgotten the Buddhist hymn earlier, just as the coffin was about to be moved. “This won’t do—no good at all!” he declared in deliberate Osaka dialect, then dashed into the examination room and scrawled something onto whatever paper lay at hand. “Given the urgency now—let’s see—ain’t there some decent phrase I can use?” he muttered. Though the verses seemed patched together from memory, the ink flowed bold and fresh—a testament to his brushwork. Having finished writing, he passed it to Shigeo. “You there—keep hold of this.” “Wouldn’t do at all if this butterfingers drops it again.”

Shigeo returned to the back row of the bereaved family, leaned his shoulder against the tile-framed window, and lowered his eyes. The sutra ended, giving way to the Buddhist hymn. The voice deepened into a tone as though addressing someone directly. Somewhere came the sound of a woman stifling her sobs. The hymn advanced toward its concluding passage. Gather! The bright moon, clear breeze, and one’s own samadhi— Blue mountains, green waters—fused into one From the very origin, Hell does not exist. And yet—is there a paradise? If we have not yet met— Behold the mountain monk departing hand in hand… Mr. Kōten’s right shoulder jerked upward. He abruptly seized a fistful of powdered incense and hurled it into the burner. The hallucination of scattered sparks stabbed Shigeo’s eyes. Without an instant’s respite,

The turtledove cries amidst the flames. ……Katsu! At that instant, within Shigeo's eyes, the sparks transformed into blazing kalpa fire. The fire blazed fiercely. Beyond that, Mr. Kōten crouched down diligently, opened the coffin’s viewing window, and pushed the now-folded paper onto the marguerite flowers. The incense offering continued. A woman's stifled sobs. When the eldest son Tōru—wearing the uniform of a middle school famed for gifted education, his wrinkled black necktie askew—returned with his nervous eyebrows twitching, then came the deceased’s second wife Umedayo, flapping the hem of her ill-fitting mourning dress as she returned with her swollen, bluish face now framed by crimson-rimmed eyes. At last, the iron door opened. The transport cart began to move, and the coffin was sucked in. The iron door closed, and the lock fell with a resonant clang.

Just when he thought it was silence, it proved otherwise. Shigeo doubted his own ears. Until just moments ago, the kalpa fire had been burning within his eyes. That had now vanished, and this time it began roaring in his ears. It was a deafening sound. It was as though the entire crematorium began to roar. The moment the coffin was sucked in and the lock clanged, there was indeed a sense that ignition had occurred beyond the iron door. But even so, the sound was too loud. The over a dozen other iron doors lining both sides were all utterly silent, and though he hadn’t touched them, they had grown mysteriously cold. Had they all been ignited at once? Probably not. But it was certainly no auditory hallucination. “The turtledove cries amidst the flames…” Mr. Kōten intoned in a sing-song voice. But that the deceased now burning inside the coffin could become a dove and make such a loud noise was utterly unthinkable. By now, he might be sitting serenely in zazen, taking the pulse of the blazing flames. That Director Kodama was likely the one most suited to such a state, Shigeo thought with his head, now throbbing with a headache brought on by the strange sound.

He exited to the courtyard from the very back.

It was the sweltering blaze of late July, yet the air hung yellowed and heavy. The crematorium’s characteristic strange odor lingered because even though there was wind, the air remained stagnant. Amidst this, he could see the deceased’s elder brother—who had hurried here from the mountain depths of Tottori Prefecture—tucking up the front of his summer hakama and urinating against a chinquapin tree.

The spacious rest area was occupied solely by the Kodama family’s party, left oddly empty. Mr. Kōten promptly took off his purple robe, exposing the chest of his white undergarment, and began chattering in a shrill voice while fanning himself restlessly. The other party was a man named Senba, a council member of K Academy rumored to be a key figure in a certain nationalist group. Indeed, it was this man who led about ten students clad in matching black haori with squared shoulders to today’s farewell ceremony, had their representative read a lengthy solemn eulogy, and upon a single command made them perform the ritual of lined-up incense offering. That the relationship between K Academy and Director Kodama was not merely that of a school physician and an institution was something Shigeo had vaguely begun to sense. However, what on earth lay at its core was beyond the grasp of Shigeo, a twenty-three-year-old engineering student. It was not so much indifference as avoidance born of unease. Mr. Senba himself was said to have wandered the continent for many years, and on his round, boyish face there was what appeared to be an old sword scar on the right side of his jaw. He always maintained a dignified bearing in his haori and hakama, yet his demeanor was rather genial itself; around his well-groomed thin mustache and small eyes lingered a perpetually amiable smile. He was not the type to raise his voice in argument; even toward Director Kodama, he took on the role of listener. And then, on very rare occasions, he would make his small eyes glint sharply and murmur something conclusive in a smooth voice.

To these two was added the deceased’s biological elder brother, who had finished urinating and returned. This man absolutely never spoke. He was tall, bearing no resemblance to his younger brother, and held his honest horse-like face erect as he listened intently to others’ conversations indefinitely. Whether he understood or not, his face remained completely expressionless. Even his laughter was expressionless. In that manner, he would stay for a week or even ten days. He was a respected figure in the region who had long served as county magistrate until the county office was abolished four or five years prior. That was why he occasionally came up to the capital for petitions and such matters. Though born an impoverished peasant from a mountain village, through livestock improvement, he had once cut quite a figure. In his heyday, he was said to have kept as many as three mistresses’ houses and become infatuated with a Shimane geisha. That was when he developed political ambitions. Rather than that, it seemed his ambition had been innate from birth. In his youth, he had tried to foist the family business onto his younger brother Kanji and plot his own escape from home, but Kanji, who utterly detested farm life, ended up having a fierce quarrel with his elder brother and instead was the one who ran away. And he went to the capital and became a doctor. Since he had run away from home, it was naturally a struggle to work his way through school. By the time those struggles finally began bearing fruit, his elder brother had squandered all his wealth through successive election defeats and ended up smoldering as a county magistrate deep in the mountains. It seems that at some point, a reconciliation had been established between these brothers. However, the younger brother had never once returned to his hometown.

The reason Shigeo had caught wind of such biographical details was that he had occasionally overheard his cousin Teruko visiting his aunt’s house and engaging in private talks. During his boyhood, Shigeo had been under this aunt’s care. “With the disarmament conference ending up like that—even Mr. Wakatsuki and Mr. Karasune have come back—but will things really settle peacefully now?” “The Privy Council seems ready to swallow it whole, but the military’s dissatisfaction must be considerable, wouldn’t you agree?” “I too think a great storm must break before long.” “After all, unemployment keeps swelling endlessly—Mr. Hamaguchi’s fixated on nothing but austerity—you might say the land’s strewn with starved corpses—in all my years, I’ve never witnessed such desperate times.” “Isn’t this just like a blind alley?……”

Monk Kōten was chattering about such things. Mr. Senba was nodding deferentially with responses of “Haa, haa.” “So then, if a storm must come pouring down, it’d mean nothing less than a second Roman offensive—what do you think? Around next year, perhaps…” “…The Communist Party’s already taken two hammer blows—year before last and last year—so they can’t even stand on their own feet now.” “Now it’s your turn.” “Director Kodama wasn’t one to sit idly by either, but really—this Roman offensive of yours…”

“Well now, it’s not quite so simple…” Mr. Senba replied, narrowing his eyes into a smile as he grandly wielded his white fan. “He insists they must not go.” “But will that settle things?” “From our Zen Buddhist standpoint, Mussolini’s methods bear some resemblance to Nanquan’s cat-beheading.” “All said and done, in that instance, Zhaozhou was the more skillful one.” “But when I look at Mussolini’s subsequent policies—though this is just parroting Director Kodama’s ideas…” After that, he launched into an extended paean to Mussolini. Mr. Senba listened with a smirk.

Quite some distance from the three of them, in the innermost seats of the rest area, Umedayo and the bereaved family sat in silence. The eldest son Tōru was a fifth-year middle school student, followed by eldest daughter Sakiko, second son Shin, second daughter Yukiko, and third daughter Shigeko. And then Susumu, Umedayo’s youngest child born of her womb, who turned four this year. Earlier during the incense offering, Susumu had been carried by a white-clad nurse to approach the coffin, but now he sat quietly on his mother’s lap. He had a bluish, swollen face resembling Umedayo’s and was an extremely sluggish child in his movements. He hardly even cried. He merely twisted his mouth. While taking a seat beside Tōru, Shigeo felt the seven bereaved family members like shadow puppets in the dim light within the corner of his lonely heart.

In a corner near the entrance sat a group clustered around Kanai, the career pharmacy clerk, gathered wordlessly about a round table. Kanai was a squat man of about forty with a black, angular face pocked with warts, his thick nearsighted glasses perched heavily on his nose. Then there was Yanagisawa the driver. This was the man who for over a decade had kept driving that decrepit Ford on the brink of collapse, faithfully serving the director throughout. Though countless opportunities had arisen to switch to a more luxurious private vehicle, this scrupulous man never once bent his so-called "principles." Then came economic hard times, and now they faced the director's death. Alongside them were two young nurses and three chauffeurs from the hired car service.

In short, everyone who currently constituted the Kodama household from both within and without was now gathered there without exception. These people, having abruptly encountered their central figure’s death, now stood poised to embark on a process of dissolution and regrouping... If anyone among them were plagued by the deepest regret, it would be Mrs. Umedayo rather than Yanagisawa. This person held the qualifications of a female doctor. What kind of history she had in her youth, I do not know, but by the time she appeared before us, any interest in life or love for people—whether she had possessed them from the start or not—she had at least long since abandoned them somewhere, becoming the very model of insensitivity. If she could have remained as she was, she would have been far better off. If she had merely repeated such motions—following behind the director or acting as his proxy, her long narrow eyes with their heavy drooping eyelids clouded in a drowsy hue as she took medical records of critically ill patients and reluctantly applied her stethoscope as if disgusted—then even if not happy, she would at least not have been an unhappy person. In other words, she was like a person who had uprooted everything animal or plant-like from what we call life, surviving solely on minerals thereafter. Exactly. A listless mechanical doll. ...Yet at thirty-eight, she had been crushed beneath Director Kodama’s overwhelming vitality and forcibly dragged into the arena of “life.” She had been forced into becoming a second wife against her will, and to make matters worse, had even been made to bear that child seemingly born with muteness. It was an utterly tragic accident. Not only that, but she had been made to shoulder that oppressive five-story hospital—utterly unreasonable for a private institution—along with a massive debt likely twice the building’s weight, only for him to then pass away there. Of course, as a practical matter, that debt would not actually be hers. That was the same as the fact that the hospital was not hers in the end. If she were so inclined, she could leave the house at any time as a stranger again. Her qualifications as a female doctor would probably not let that Susumu starve. But even so, whether she could truly return to being that mechanical doll again was highly doubtful. Whether through accident or violence, the scars of life once imprinted upon her—this awakening to something human, this experience of womanhood through childbirth, this belated self-awareness that must have been both unwelcome and astonishing in confirming she too was female—in short, this forced inoculation of desire as poison—would not so easily restore her former cold freedom. She was a pitiable woman.

Her tears did not seem to be mere tears of sorrow. Rather than tears of regret, they must have been tears of resentment. And that expression was one of astonishment and loathing toward the physiological process itself—tears as bitter as bile being wrung from her own tear sac, which she had until now believed to be completely parched.…

While Shigeo kneaded his capricious thoughts in his youthful mind, the wind direction seemed to shift, and that familiar strange odor of burning human flesh began settling heavily within the rest area. Umedayo suddenly began coughing violently, hurriedly pressed a handkerchief to her mouth, then rose from her seat and disappeared behind the glass door at the rear. Perhaps she’s feeling nauseous, Shigeo vaguely thought. That strange odor was of course not new to him that day. I probably wasn’t taken to my grandmother’s cremation, but I remember my father’s all too well. My father, who had died on the soiled tatami mats of a Beppu hospital, was burned on a cloudy autumn morning in the shadow of deserted sand dunes. It was no proper crematorium—just a small makeshift hut surrounded by straw mats. That evening, we went to collect the bones, jolted along the long rice field path under the slanting sunlight. In the hut behind the sand dunes, there were only my mother, myself, a middle-aged undertaker, and no one else. No—there was one more thing: my father’s skull, miraculously intact. The undertaker used the tip of long fire tongs to topple that skull. At that moment, the wind rose, carrying a faint strange odor from within the straw-mat enclosure of the hut—the lingering scent of my father.

For a ten-year-old boy, discerning what that smell was posed no great challenge. But to have his father’s secret—or perhaps an adult’s secret—thrust upon him in such a manner was an unbearable feeling. Moreover, the boy had another worry. He did not want his mother to notice the smell. If that proved impossible, he at least didn’t want her to realize he himself had detected it. ……Fortunately for this secret-loving boy, his mother was at that moment completely preoccupied with something else. She had clearly remembered the number of gold teeth Father possessed and insisted one was missing. It was not greed. It was her inherent Edo-born stubbornness. And finally, the undertaker—using cedar chopsticks—dug out that last gold tooth, blackened by fire’s heat, from the ash mound gathered before him, then held it aloft with evident pride before dropping it into the bone urn. The boy felt ashamed of the undertaker. To hide that shame, he deliberately climbed the sand dune and pretended to gaze at the sea. Over the overcast waters, the tide’s roar resounded.

The memory of that autumn evening was now thirteen years in the past. From then until today, he had encountered the smell of cremation on several occasions. He had been a boy with relatively frequent ties to the dead. Every time he inhaled cremation smoke, somewhere deep within, the boy had developed a habit of faintly hearing that roar of the tide and sensing the smell of the sea. To call it a sacred memory would be a lie. It was rather the opposite. For the ten-year-old boy, his father had been a distant figure. The boy had known his father far too little. The lingering scent of cremation smoke first made that boy aware of his father’s living flesh. Though a sense of guilt for having glimpsed adult secrets clung to that moment, through its association with the scent of the tide, it remained undeniably a form of longing. A longing mingled with the bitterness of regret.

For ancient Japanese people, what was envisioned beyond the sea is said to have been the land of deceased mothers. In Shigeo's case, it was different. Father had drifted and lived closer still—within the roar of the tide, within the scent of the sea. The reason he felt neither significant disgust nor fear toward the crematorium’s odor, and was scarcely ever led to contemplate impermanence, lay in such circumstances.

However, today, the situation was quite different.

From Kodama Hospital in Nihonbashi Hamachō where the farewell ceremony had been held, Shigeo—alongside small girls and Kanai in Yanagisawa’s beat-up Ford—had served as the rear guard of the funeral procession. But from the moment they passed Minowa Garage and soon turned into a cluttered side street, he found himself persistently assailed by an eerie sensation that felt almost threatening. It was a dark alley. The townscape seemed to sink ever deeper into darkness precisely as the two o'clock sunlight grew more intense. From one side assailed the stench of rotten vegetables; from the other, the dusky black stench emanating from the tannery attacked fiercely. Amidst this, a line of cows being dragged to the slaughterhouse trailed in disarray. The automobile came to a standstill. Taking advantage of the funeral procession being scattered and separated, with a sudden rush, a swarm of beggars surrounded the car. A half-naked boy lay sprawled in front of the car, sticking out his tongue. An old woman’s wrinkled hand reached into the window. A red-haired woman in a single waistcloth clung to the steering wheel and refused to let go.

“This is completely a paupers’ revolt!” exclaimed Kanai, the ever-grinning perpetual pharmacy apprentice, in a shrill voice. “They’re taking advantage of people’s weaknesses!” “No, Mr. Yanagisawa, you mustn’t do anything.” “They’re just getting more audacious.” “Instead of that, make up your mind and plow right through them!”

Yanagisawa, who had started to put one hand in his pocket, blushed and fidgeted. "This isn't what you'd call a paupers' revolt. It's an organized riot of the outcasts," Shigeo thought. He also felt he had seen such a scene long ago when he was a child, on the outskirts of some town in Taipei.

After several such disturbances, the car finally passed through the crematorium gate. Just before reaching it, when they suffered the final group’s assault, the strange odor of cremation settled thick and heavy, and Shigeo was overcome by nausea. It was his first experience.… Before he knew it, the rest area had fallen silent. When he looked over, Umedayo had joined Mr. Kōten’s group and they were whispering among themselves. Mr. Kōten kept shaking his head as he continued murmuring something. Umedayo responded with expressionless upward glances—sometimes giving faint nods, other times shaking her head decisively. The strange odor had grown fainter than before. The roar of the kalpa fire now sounded distant. But it’s still Hell, Shigeo thought. Where? Beyond that iron door engulfing Director Kodama’s flesh in raging flames? In that dark alley where people cackle while extorting coins? At the seat where four whisperers conspire? Among those bereaved children forming their silent circle like shadow puppets? Or where Yanagisawa and Kanai—who’ve been part of the Kodama household these dozen years—now stand? No—could it reside within me myself, thinking these very thoughts? “Or perhaps…” Shigeo murmured almost aloud, his vacant eyes sweeping across them all. “Perhaps those former members of Kodama’s household—the two or four or six who died one after another these past ten years—perhaps their very lives were Hell from the start?”

With utterly unexpected vividness, Shigeo saw the dead rising up in the darkness within his eyes. Simultaneously, unexpected cross-sections of his boyhood began to surface one after another, as though illuminated by will-o’-the-wisps. He sank into the world of recollection. Like a mariner on the verge of drifting toward unknown islands ahead.…

2

A small red-brick hospital kept in neat order. The gateposts—also built of red bricks and pressed nearly flush against the entrance—bore a weathered wooden signboard boldly inscribed with "Kodama Hospital." A signboard jutting from the low brick wall revealed the director to be one Kodama Kanji, a "physician" specializing in internal medicine and pediatrics. Sandwiched between two-story townhouses on either side, its bricks showed an odd darkening, their arrangement suggesting a structure straining under the pressure of its confinement. This was the impression that greeted ten-year-old Shigeo when he returned from Taiwan to Tokyo and first passed through Kodama’s gate.

Where the Kanda Aqueduct passed Ochanomizu and approached Yanagihara Riverbank, there was a canal that branched off to the right and flowed straight south. He did not know what this canal was called—it was the one that eventually poured into the base of Nakasu. Spanning it was a small wooden bridge named Hisamatsu Bridge, and directly across from it stood the Meiji Theater. The hospital was positioned exactly facing the flank of this Meiji Theater, which must have made it appear all the more cramped.

When one stepped up into the entranceway cluttered with haphazardly discarded footwear, there in the waiting room—where a worn-out carpet covered the floor all the way to the far wall—three or four silhouettes always huddled in the backlight. The light came from the pharmacy—where electric lights burned even during daylight hours—shining through its frosted glass partition. At the far end lay a meager excuse for a courtyard, blocked by neighboring houses' high wooden fences that rarely admitted any light. There stood a narrow veranda resembling a covered walkway, where four wooden crates with latticework were stacked in one corner, emitting a terrible stench. Guinea pigs were kept there. Slipping past those cages, patients and visitors made their way to the restroom. In the dim gloom permeated with disinfectant's smell, the boy lost all urge to relieve himself. When he looked up, a large glass tube—its purpose unclear—hung eerily from the wall......At first, the boy's impressions had been confined solely to that world. Because these impressions were so strangely intense, he couldn't escape beyond them.

A boy of pale, willow-like constitution who would develop a fever at the slightest provocation was made to frequent this hospital via the Tsukiji-Ryogoku-bound streetcar from his aunt’s house in Yotsuya Mitsuke—where he lived with his mother. The one-way trip was a major journey lasting a full hour, and particularly as dusk approached, the sense of desolation proved unbearable. Such fears too must have colored his impression of Kodama Hospital. Gradually, the boy’s eyes grew accustomed to the darkness. For him, Kodama—less a cousin by obligation than a terrifying physician—should have been forty already at that time, yet always kept his pockmarked ruddy face meticulously groomed as he sat erect in his white examination gown upon a swivel chair. When the boy timidly perched on the small chair, [Kodama] ceased writing Western script in rough characters and pivoted around. Without a trace of smile, he stated, “Your pallor persists.” Then he would invariably take up a round spoon and command, “Open wide.” After having his throat vigorously swabbed and being forced to gargle—when he fled breathlessly from the examination room—the same glass tubes that hung in the restroom always dangled from its white walls like forgotten relics.

The boy who fled first found refuge in the pharmacy. After all, he had to receive his medicine before going home—that necessity too compelled him. Waiting in the waiting room among sullenly silent people was utterly unbearable. Everything there—newspapers or entertainment magazines, cushions or chairs spilling stuffing—no, even the very air itself seemed to seethe with germs. Yet going upstairs to disturb his cousin Teruko also felt inconsiderate. Teruko was petite and looked young, but she was seventeen years older than the boy. She was always chasing after housework and childcare (with a four-year-old as the eldest, she had three children). (He had overheard his aunt saying another would likely be born soon)—it was only natural that someone of her fundamentally unsociable disposition couldn’t bring herself to act kindly even toward a relative’s child. At times she would call him upstairs for tea and ask about school, but though not malicious, her distractedness was something the boy keenly perceived. With an infant on her lap, she would begin flicking an abacus. The boy felt awkward and soon retreated downstairs. In that case, there remained nowhere to be but the pharmacy.

The owner of the pharmacy was Kanai, the pharmacy apprentice. Shiro—the nephew whom the director had taken in from the country and was sending to medical school—also occasionally assisted with preparing medications. He resembled his father Kodama Ichitarō with his long face, pale complexion, and sheep-like eyes behind thick myopic glasses. The protrusion of his jaw was exactly like that of Amako from Kitazawa Rakuten’s popular cartoons of that time. He would blurt out absurd remarks and had a talent for making everyone laugh. However, since he was usually not there during the day, when patients crowded in, Kanai would be extremely busy. When the boy would enter and spend time reading boys’ magazines in the corner or timidly peering at the rows of medicine bottles behind glass cabinets labeled “Poison” with black placards and locked doors, or those marked “Dangerous Drugs” with intimidating signs, Kanai would sometimes ask him to help with tasks like grinding ingredients in a mortar or dividing measured powders equally into medicinal paper packets. This task delighted the boy. Being trusted by adults—how wonderful it was. Perhaps Kanai was the first—and possibly the last—person in this world to ever truly trust Shigeo. Kanai would praise him as quite a good boy and make delicious drinks using saccharin and citric acid as rewards. And he himself would drink it with narrowed eyes, as if savoring the taste. “Tsk-tsk,” he would say while doing so. The boy felt an affinity for this good-natured man nicknamed Warty Toad.

In contrast, the young nurse Nakagawa was someone the boy had disliked from the start. She had plump, swollen cheeks that appeared almost translucent, tinged with cherry-pink. Her eyes drooped at the corners with saccharine sweetness. Yet she was terribly arrogant and miserly. At night, she would wander about still wearing her terrycloth nightgown. When the director was away, she would crank up the gas stove in the examination room, sit with her legs crossed high, and flip through Entertainment Graphic's pages by licking her fingers. Her hair always hung disheveled, but when passing by, one caught whiffs of strong Western perfume. ……Once, while helping Kanai in the pharmacy, the boy realized he had forgotten his cloth-wrapped bundle on the small chair in the examination room corner. He went out into the hallway, opened the glass sliding door to the examination room, and stuck his head inside. Then Nakagawa—flustered—popped her face out from behind the curtain and darted forward to block his path.

“You can’t be here right now!” she said. Her face clearly bore a look of vile contempt.

“Get that bundle,” the boy pointed. Nakagawa snatched up the cloth-wrapped package, shoved it against his chest to push him back, and slammed the sliding door shut. Through the glass, he saw her distorting her crimson lips and glaring upward at a slant with a jerking motion. She seemed to click her tongue. The boy burned with humiliation. Yet through a crack in his fury, he caught a fleeting glimpse of the half-drawn white curtain inside the room, the familiar mysterious glass bottle hanging from a cord stretched across the ceiling, its black rubber tube dangling behind the drape. Behind that curtain, something forbidden was happening. Of course, the boy possessed no clues to imagine what. But reconsidering it now, Nakagawa’s expression seemed to have declared, “A child who mustn’t be trusted!” This redoubled his bitter frustration.

(This was a story I first heard years later from my aunt: though Kodama had officially advertised internal medicine and pediatrics as his specialties, Hamamachi's location apparently meant many of his patrons came from the pleasure quarters.) Since that was their specialty—with Naniwa Hospital run by old Dr. Kawai right on the back street—Kodama had initially held back out of deference. But ultimately unable to refuse, he ended up watching helplessly as his antagonism with Dr. Kawai deepened. (...When Shigeo heard this story, he finally understood why there had been so many female clients in the waiting room—women with upturned eyes and sallow faces illuminated by backlight.)

In time, the boy became a sixth grader in elementary school. At the Kodama household, his "sphere of movement" was gradually being set free around this time. In other words, he was now permitted partial entry into the adult world. This was also due to circumstances where Kodama Hospital had grown increasingly prosperous; during times when the housewife found herself overwhelmed by managing lavish social obligations for Bon festivals and year-end gatherings, the boy had come to be relied upon as a convenient and unassuming assistant who could stay overnight to help. The boy’s mother seemed to regard this as an ideal opportunity for life education for one so prone to timidity and social withdrawal; far from opposing it, she rather adopted an attitude of encouragement.

Teruko’s disposition had gradually become comprehensible to the boy. Her initial apparent brusqueness stemmed partly from her straightforward and unadorned nature, and partly from how the dizzying busyness of her days often left her tending toward a dazed stupor. Perhaps reflecting this unpretentious disposition, her facial features were by no means beautiful yet possessed an agreeable harmony. Of course, this assessment accounted for even the guileless air arising from characteristics like her broad jaws—what might be called a goby-like squareness—and slightly oversized nostrils. To put it plainly, though already a mother of four, she remained someone whose schoolgirl temperament hadn’t fully faded from either mind or body.

Regarding how Teruko came to marry Kodama, there was an amusing anecdote. After graduating from Yokohama Girls' School, she had worked temporarily as a substitute teacher at an elementary school in the Tsurumi district.

On a particularly windy day, when Teruko had gathered her female students in the schoolyard to conduct calisthenics, a gentleman emerged from the school building’s entrance and began observing them from beneath a cherry tree. Assuming he was just another visitor or parent, she vigorously bared both arms with her tasuki sash crossed over her chest—demonstrating forms to students and dashing about to correct them—when strangely, whenever she moved positions, the gentleman would shift his location too. He would swiftly stride from one cherry tree trunk to another, then stand perfectly still to stare intently. In the end, she could only think that he was observing her from every possible angle. “A strange man came to observe today. He might be a pervert,” Teruko told Mother when she returned home. After some time, a marriage proposal came, and when they finally met for the arranged meeting, they discovered it was Kodama. “Face-only meetings are such dreary affairs—you’ve really got to see a person in motion,” Kodama was said to have remarked, uttering something Rodin-esque. And indeed, he being a doctor whose eye was not mistaken, Teruko was made to bear children year after year. “How on earth did you ever decide to go live with that barbarian-like man?” The aunts from all the relatives would often tease Teruko. Kodama was not only pockmarked but also covered in hair from his face down to the backs of his hands. “But it turned out well, didn’t it? Such a hard worker is rare these days.” In that tone resonated equally the envy and contempt of aunts from samurai lineages toward this upstart.

In truth, this doctor was a monster of fighting spirit and sheer force of action. He had struggled through a second-rate medical college, but when asked about the hardships of establishing—small yet solid—a foothold in that prominent Nihonbashi location, he would only laugh without answering. Driven by insatiable research zeal and rationalistic to a fault, there lingered in him something of a dreamer ceaselessly striving toward tomorrow. "Clinical work? Utterly tedious." "Just prolonging five or ten lives by a hair's breadth." "The true essence of medicine lies in theoretical practice... What? Does it hurt?" "Well, if you want healing, you'll endure some pain." He delivered such cutting remarks even during house calls without hesitation. From the era when patients dreaded injections and doctors rarely used them to avoid discomfort, he had administered shots liberally. For patients then unaccustomed to syringes, this proved surprisingly effective. Such methods bred colleagues who whispered "quack doctor" behind his back—yet in pediatrics, the precision of his diagnoses and treatments had truthfully struck those same critics dumb. For time and again he'd revived infants whom local physicians had declared beyond saving.

There was no occasion when Kodama looked more serious than when examining children or reading German medical journals. He clenched his clean-shaven, rugged jaw; unconsciously thrust forward his upper lip bearing a small mustache; tightly lowered the eyes behind gold-rimmed glasses—eyes that until moments before had glinted with an ironic smile—and remained utterly motionless like that for five minutes, even ten. The children too grew quiet, as though intimidated into silence. While taking their pulse or applying his stethoscope, he seemed not to be listening to the sounds themselves, but rather gazing fixedly at something beyond them.

"A distinguished physician truly operates differently, doesn’t he?" remarked the middle-aged cousin who was witnessing such a scene for the first time, addressing Kodama as he examined his own son. Being a second-generation aristocrat, this cousin distinctly felt the class distinction between himself and Kodama, lending his tone a faintly mocking quality. “With you, Mr. Kodama, we adults get handled like daikon radishes or potatoes.” “Roughly grabbed and suddenly jabbed with a needle.”

“Well, perhaps so,” Kodama replied with a grin as he instructed the nurse standing behind him to prepare an injection. “Adult illnesses are utterly boring. They’re already fully formed, you see. Whether they recover or not amounts to the same foregone conclusion. But children are different. Children remain eternally daunting to us. There’s nothing so incomprehensible.”

And after washing his hands, he would request Japanese sweets, pick up two or three with apparent relish, and depart briskly by automobile. It was a used Ford, and Yanagisawa the driver had been hired along with it to live on the premises. But Yanagisawa wasn’t the only addition. By then, even from what the boy could observe, Kodama Hospital’s population had grown significantly. The nursing staff now numbered two. Shirō had left school and taken to loitering around the pharmacy and examination rooms. The household maids had also increased by one—a middle-aged woman of slight stoutness—who mainly tended to the children. Then there was another—a regular visitor—a tall man in a serge suit who would stride unceremoniously into the examination room and even frequent Teruko’s second-floor sitting quarters. He was addressed as Nagase-san, but the boy couldn’t discern his role. He perpetually clutched a document case. On occasion, he would settle into Yanagisawa’s automobile and ride off with leisurely purpose.

How the increasingly cramped building of Kodama Hospital accommodated its growing population remained beyond the boy's understanding. To be sure, while presenting as a red-brick two-story structure from the front, its interior maintained an ordinary Japanese-style layout—further divided into separate front and rear second floors. Moreover, just when one noticed what appeared to be a mezzanine-like space in some odd corner, there would be a staircase beside it that seemed to lead to a third floor. In essence, as Kodama Hospital expanded, it likely continued stacking one ill-conceived addition upon another. It was such an archetypally Japanese progression. For the boy, there should have been no forbidden zones remaining by then; yet since the rear second floor appeared to be the nurses' and maids' territory, he found neither reason nor opportunity to venture there. Even on the front side, his freely accessible area remained limited to two second-floor rooms—the housewife's parlor doubling as the couple's bedroom, and the children's communal space further within. The mezzanine and what seemed to be third-floor chambers above still preserved their labyrinthine mystique, remaining for the boy a realm of impenetrable darkness.

As the population increased, gradual changes began to appear in people’s lifestyles. The head of the pharmacy gradually became Shirō’s role, and a newly arrived teenage trainee nurse served as his assistant. The cages for guinea pigs and domestic rabbits multiplied until finally, a roof was erected over the courtyard where they came to occupy most of the space—Kanai appeared to have been promoted to caretaker. “It reeks something awful! Here, young master—take a whiff of this!” Kanai dashed into the servants’ dining area at the back—though it was little more than a small Japanese-style room with four-and-a-half tatami mats covered in thin straw flooring—and thrust his hands toward the boy’s nose. More than the stench itself, his palms were smeared with bluish filth that made the boy instinctively turn away. Still clad in his white coat, Kanai rushed from the kitchen into the bathroom where water began gushing noisily. Yet he remained earnest. “What do they even plan to do with so many rabbits? I’ll never understand the director’s thinking,” he muttered with an amiable frown while diligently scribbling notes into his blank-paged ledger. There were times he prepared slides on small glass fragments. There were times he examined them under the microscope in the examination room. Once finished, he would revert to his carefree demeanor, curl up in a pharmacy corner, and concoct sweet drinks for the boy using citric acid and saccharin as always.

Among them all, the one who seemed to be suffering the most inconvenience was Yanagisawa the new driver—or so it had seemed to the boy. Though secondhand, Kodama had purchased an automobile ill-suited to a small private hospital to improve efficiency amid his increasingly busy workload. Yet from an outside perspective, that efficiency showed no signs of improvement whatsoever. Since mornings were for house calls, Yanagisawa should have had free time—yet he rose early each day to sweep the front grounds and such. This was simply his nature.

Around one o’clock in the afternoon, he would depart with the Director for house calls. After that, he would not return until one or two o’clock in the dead of night. Moreover, this was not because the number of patient households had particularly increased, but rather because Kodama’s argumentative tendencies—now that he had acquired an automobile—had grown all the more pronounced.

The fact that the boy was staying at his aunt’s house with his mother had been mentioned before. In that house was a cousin attending the humanities department of a private university—that is, Teruko’s younger brother. In addition, they were looking after two children from relatives. The dark house with only four rooms had taken on something of the appearance of a daycare center. Above all, the two children were precious charges entrusted by certain relatives, so his aunt’s anguish was no trivial matter. Even if there was a slight fever, she would call Kodama. Since it was his wife’s mother’s request, Kodama too reluctantly arrived by automobile. When he examined them, it was usually nothing serious.

“Well now, Mother, you might as well go to some shrine and get a charm to ward off worms. If left alone, it’ll heal in another two or three years—no need for a doctor’s involvement,” he would say point-blank. Kodama was well aware of the circumstances and environment in which that boy had been born.

Instead, when the examination ended, he would seize his cousin and launch into lengthy debates. The boy remembered the name Oiken being frequently mentioned, but beyond that, he couldn’t make heads or tails of what was being discussed. The cousin was a man who seemed like some hybrid of naturalism and the erotic school, every bit the private university student he appeared to be, deliberately leading a soot-stained life—and toward this cousin, Kodama seemed to be vigorously extolling the merits of philosophy. “I tell you, I’d have been better off becoming a philosopher than a doctor. Even if you take someone’s pulse, you can’t grasp what life is. Your own pulse—your own pulse. That’s where philosophy comes in. What? Literature? I’ve read my share of naturalist novels. That’s less about taking pulses and more like stroking your own navel...”

There the Oiken debates would begin anew. Even when notified through the relay phone about an emergency patient, he kept arguing while nibbling on Japanese sweets until the other party conceded with a grunt. Finally on the third call—"Damn! My apologies"—he frantically grabbed his briefcase and left. This appeared more or less identical at every house call location. Only the topics changed.

“At this rate, all the patients will end up losing patience with you. Be careful,” the relatives' aunts warned Teruko. “I’m perfectly fine with that, really. On the contrary, I’m only gaining more regulars—it’s almost a nuisance,” Teruko replied in a breezy tone.

When he returned home past one o'clock, supper would follow. Since he didn’t drink alcohol, matters were easily handled, but after supper he would read a while longer. Kanai would come upstairs and deliver earnest reports about the guinea pigs and rabbits. He would give Kanai instructions for the next day. Teruko, during that time, would open the ledger on the nearby desk and calculate on the abacus. Of course, the boy had not often witnessed such daily routines of the director with his own eyes. Yet the life of that clinic—vibrant yet sleep-deprived, infused with a downtown energy unfamiliar to him—proved more than sufficient to stir his curiosity. The boy’s eyes gradually opened. Layer by layer, the labyrinth’s darkness was peeled away.

3

The eldest son Tōru was being made to learn the violin despite not yet having entered elementary school. From age four or five, he had shown acute sensitivity to rhythm—whenever a maid washed rice in the kitchen, he would toddle over, plant both hands on his hips, and begin counting time to her motions: "one-two and three and four..." This daily morning ritual eventually earned him the label of genius. The initial commotion came from Kanai at the pharmacy and Nurse Nakagawa, but when their half-jesting theory of genius reached Director Kodama’s ears, he turned deadly serious. Despite his packed schedule, Kodama stationed himself in the kitchen for nearly a month to observe his firstborn’s movements. The outcome saw a diminutive junior officer—around twenty years old, son of a fellow townsman serving in Toyama School’s military band—begin making weekly Sunday visits clad in flamboyant dress uniform.

Tōru was a nervous yet affectionate child who had grown especially attached to Shigeo. It even felt like he was yearning to cling to him. From Shigeo's perspective, he sensed something resembling revulsion toward this precocious "genius child." Of course, it wasn't jealousy. Rather, a physiological loathing kept recoiling within him. The sensation of being clung to proved unbearably repulsive. Shigeo was a boy convinced that precociousness was something he alone possessed in full measure... He was the sort of boy who might earnestly warn, "If you touch me, your skin will get dirty." For him, physical disgust carried many layers more weight than mental aversion.

Among the people in Kodama’s household, the first to strongly capture Shigeo’s interest was Tōru’s mother—that is, his cousin Teruko.

During the spring break when he became a sixth grader, as Shigeo went to play in Hamachō, Teruko sat in the second-floor living room reading a magazine with an unusually leisurely expression. The children were nowhere to be seen. As Shigeo sat silently in the corner, Teruko suddenly seemed to notice and said, “Oh, I’ve gotten a craving for Western food… What do you like? Just tell me anything you’d want.” “Just tell me anything,” she added. The boy turned red. As a poor boy, he couldn’t possibly know the names of Western dishes—moreover, being treated itself stirred a precocious sense of humiliation. “There’s no need to hold back,” Teruko said breezily and rang the bell on the square telephone atop the office desk. The boy pricked up his ears to hear the names of the ordered dishes. They were all unfamiliar names he couldn’t comprehend.

When the dishes stacked like a tower and separated by wooden dividers emerged from the lacquered food carrier that had been brought in, the boy likely felt unguarded joy and curiosity for the first time in his life. An impeccable aroma and promise of deliciousness filled the space. The dream was realized. The boy ate as if studying some lesson, stealing furtive upward glances to observe his cousin’s manipulation of fork and knife. His gaze would occasionally climb to her profile. With her usual vacant expression, she slowly brought the fork to her mouth. Each time her pale temple moved, he discovered a single vein becoming visible beneath the skin. He thought his cousin beautiful. Yet what made him happiest above all was having finally shared a secret that belonged solely to them both.

Teruko would occasionally drop by the Kōjimachi residence on rare instances. In Hamachō it went unnoticed, but here at the Kōjimachi house, even her casual movements carried traces of medicinal odor. That smell—the one rendering physicians alien to us. It was the same stench Kodama perpetually exuded. The boy felt envious. He felt Teruko's sacred purity had been tainted.

She would come to Kōjimachi invariably in the afternoon to make up for her sleep deprivation. She would ascend with a pallid, utterly exhausted face. “Your eyelids have gone double again,” Aunt would say. Teruko would sometimes murmur in a low voice, as if casting the words away, “Oh, I’m so sick of this life.” She arranged cushions in the back room and hurriedly lay down. Quiet breathing began.

The boy was in the room next door separated by sliding doors, clinging to a small desk while holding his breath. He felt himself as if he were a knight guarding a princess's sleep.

Among the boy’s relatives, they would gather twice a year in spring and autumn for what they called a family meeting. Usually around noon, they would either utilize a spacious residence among the relatives or head out to a suburban amusement park. It was a family gathering that had been started by the relatives to console the old viscount—the eldest among all kin—in his later years after he retired and passed the family estate to his son. There were indeed so many relatives. When things were going well, nearly fifty people would gather. He was a boy who hated being among people and generally looked down on or resented most of his relatives, yet he had unwittingly come to attend these gatherings willingly. Because there were many relatives, there were also numerous cousins—some distant, others close. For the boy, there were also many girls who were like older sisters. There were times when a girl who had a deeply tanned face when seen in spring would transform into an unrecognizably prim young lady by autumn, her ornate kimono sleeves hanging heavily. However, what truly livened up and made this gathering stand out was a group of about seven female cousins. Among them were some he found disagreeable, but at least five captivated the boy’s heart in their own ways—whether through unadorned elegance, an oval-shaped comely face, the indescribable cadence of their speech, or their smooth way of walking. The boy may have dimly discovered something there that could be called a hierarchy of beauty. If calling it a class seemed inappropriate, one might as well rephrase it as categories of beauty. Those female cousins cast aside their usual pretenses that day and let loose in a raucous uproar. They fully indulged in the freedom of commoners at the oden standing buffet. But when he mingled with those cousins, Teruko—petite, schoolgirl-like, and utterly plain-looking—somehow seemed to the boy like the most important person of all. The feeling of that preciousness was almost sensual…

As for Kodama, he was an indispensable crowd favorite at these family gatherings. Yet he never remained in that seat for even an hour. Clad in his professional uniform of black suit and striped trousers, he would materialize like a black gale in Yanagisawa’s rattletrap Ford, only to vanish again as that same dark wind. Whenever Kodama manifested himself, the cadre of middle-aged men would abruptly stir with excitement and converge upon him. Within their encircling throng, he voraciously exercised his appetite, cackled with simian shrieks, scattered barbed remarks like “Well! Still breathing, are we?”, repeatedly extracted his gold pocket watch to consult its face, then—his features now flushed monkey-red—made haste to depart.

The boy became a middle school student. From the end of that year into the New Year, he stayed at Kodama Hospital for about ten days. As usual, it was under the pretense of assisting Teruko with household management, but now that he was a middle school student, his credibility increased and he was effectively promoted to a semi-secretarial role. The boy blundered at times, yet felt a certain pride. As the pressure mounted, the disorder in Teruko’s living room rose sharply. In the shallow alcove, mountains of year-end gifts in various sizes were piled up. Beside the desk, bundles of bills would be piled up only to rapidly disintegrate before one’s eyes. Where they came from and where they went, the boy could not imagine. “This year really is something else!” Teruko muttered in an angry tone, impatiently sweeping the abacus beads. The blue vein bulging at her temple even appeared to throb heavily. Young men from Meiji-za, working in pairs, carried in mandarin orange crates bound with rough straw ropes. Upon encountering them, the Director greeted them with an “Ah” and headed out in the Ford.

The already cramped waiting room became so crowded depending on the time that one couldn’t even move. The pharmacy counters, which normally used only one of their two windows, now had both open. One was used for handing out medicine, with Shirō—wearing thick glasses that made his eyes look like a goldfish’s—in charge, and Nurse Nakagawa temporarily assisting him. Nakagawa, unlike her usual laziness, moved with an oddly bustling demeanor, her disconcertingly rosy thick fingers working deftly. The boy shuttled frequently between the pharmacy and the second floor. The other window had become the cashier’s counter, where Kanai handled a paper tray in and out while showering those around him with compliments. Beside it, bills and silver coins would pile up, which the boy would come down from the second floor to transfer. One evening (though since the pharmacy kept electric lights on even during daytime, the exact hour remained unclear—) there was a time when the boy, while Kanai was struggling with counting bills, found himself absently watching the movements of Nakagawa’s fingers. At a terrifying speed, the stubby rose-colored fingertips moved, and in moments the medicine packets were folded and stacked like a horn. Of course, ever since that bitter experience some time ago, the boy continued to harbor a kind of physiological aversion toward this nurse. However, within the glow of the daylight-colored electric light, there was something cloyingly alluring about those fingers moving with such brisk vitality.

“Well then, I’ll leave this to you,” Kanai said, turning around. His glasses glinted dully as they caught—or so it seemed—the rosy fingers that held the boy’s transfixed gaze. The boy hastily looked away. Yet in that same instant, he realized Shirō’s drooping eyes had also been fixed on Nakagawa’s fingers—since when? A strange collision of gazes. Feeling blood flood his cheeks, the boy slipped beneath Kanai’s lingering grin and bolted upstairs.

Teruko, her white forehead creased in a frown as she glared at the ledger, showed the boy a postcard when she saw his face and said, “Could you write the reply for me?” “Just keep it simple.” The boy somehow managed to decipher the feminine scrawl and began to ponder. The lingering vexation from moments ago kept disrupting his thoughts. The boy wanted to explain himself to Kanai. He also felt that this was impossible. At the same time, the fact that he was contemplating something cowardly like making excuses was what he found most unbearable. The pen trembled violently. Persisting in feigned composure, he began to write in pseudo-classical style. The phrases, one after another, betrayed his confidence.

That evening, Kodama returned early from his house calls, slid open the living room shoji with a clatter, and announced: “Ah, I’m starving. Make me some rice with tea,” he said to Teruko, then deftly plucked the postcard from the desk and began reading it silently, one hand thrust into his coat pocket. Then, flipping it over abruptly to look, he muttered, “This is dreadful. Who wrote this?” and tossed it aside. Teruko answered “Hmm?” expressionlessly and stood up from her seat.…

That night, even after burrowing into the futon in the back children's room, the boy found himself unable to fall asleep. Though Meiji-za had long since closed its doors, through the windowpane he could still feel the dull swirl of feverish commotion lingering in the streets - a sense like some dark crimson river flowing through the night. As that turbulence gradually subsided, the frost of winter's depth began permeating the air. The charumera's mournful wail drew near with aching slowness, then faded away with equal deliberation. Mingling with this came the sudden crisp clatter of geta hurriedly coming and going - sounds that clung to his ears, making sleep ever more elusive. Half-rising from bed, he parted the window curtain just enough to peer out. Beneath the arc light at the bridge's foot, geishas wrapped in white shawls appeared and vanished like butterflies with frozen wings, their chins buried deep in woolen folds. What could they possibly be? he wondered. Though he burrowed completely under the futon's heavy layers, the geta's echoes seemed to persist for nearly another hour.

Such was the end of the year, its chilly impressions persisting—but when the calendar turned to New Year’s, the atmosphere at Kodama Hospital brightened and transformed completely. Even when he returned to his aunt’s house, the boy’s mother was no longer there. The mother had entrusted the boy to his aunt and remarried. The boy did not insist on returning. Perhaps having sensed this, Teruko said: “Let’s have a grand karuta tournament this time. I’ll make sure to tell your mother, so do stay longer.” “This time I’ll definitely beat Yoshi for you!” "Yoshi" was her younger brother Yoshio. The boy too, under the influence of this cousin, had developed quite a fervor for karuta.

The official karuta tournament was set for the fifth, but the intense practice sessions began on the afternoon of the second. Teruko, ever competitive, wore an expression that had cast off all weariness from the year’s end as if it were nothing, returning to her usual schoolgirl demeanor.

The pharmacy staff were also recruited as practice partners. Young people from nearby patient households came swarming in. Among them were the daughters of Shimojō, who ran a large Western goods store in Ningyōchō. The elder sister had a withered, plain face; though she had long since graduated from girls' school, she was still idling about at home due to what they called a weak constitution. The younger sister had a round face with wide-open eyes—likely meaning "a pigeon hit by a bean bullet"—and had been given the nickname Hatomame by the pharmacy staff. The boy had been paired with these sisters at last year's karuta tournament too. Being naturally removed from downtown sensibilities, he had only gained the vague impression that there existed various types of downtown girls.

However, upon reuniting after a year this time, the boy was astonished by the younger sister’s remarkable transformation. It felt as though a peony—or some large flower—had suddenly burst into bloom. Her noticeably fleshed-out, broad shoulders were draped in a rainbow-like haori. The rims of her eyes were crimson as if lined with rouge, and perhaps because of this, when she raised her gaze, her eyes momentarily flashed an emerald light. Because it was dazzling, the boy had never properly looked at her face. The impression was that of a stolen glance.

The day of the karuta tournament was an annual all-night affair. The second-floor living room could not accommodate everyone and thus became Class A's main battlefield. Class B would be held in the back children's room. The boy and Shimojō's younger sister were in this group. The Genpei tournament that had gradually begun around four o'clock maintained its festive liveliness until nightfall; beyond that point it abruptly took on an air of deadly seriousness. This was because the half-hearted guests had left, leaving behind only those derided as 'professionals' and their ilk. The battlefield merged into the living room area while the children's room became a waiting space where players occasionally came to rest or eliminated participants sprawled out for naps. The children seemed to have been put to bed in the maids' room on the rear second floor or somewhere on the third floor, for they hadn't shown themselves since evening. Director Kodama too was in that group—he appeared two or three times to snatch sushi pieces, each time enduring poisonous remarks disguised as pleasantries before vanishing somewhere. He had absolutely no interest in competitive matters.

The pillar clock struck two. The boy, having been made to serve as the reader nonstop since earlier and wearied by everyone’s bloodshot eyes and the yellow-tinged, stifling air of the venue, retreated to the children’s room and looked at a book while warming himself by the brazier. The book was a large-format Arabian Nights with two-color printed text and lavishly included color illustrations. The boy treasured this book; whenever he went to stay somewhere, he would always wrap it in a furoshiki and carry it out. It was, in a way, something like a talisman. He had nearly memorized every story by heart, yet found immense pleasure in absentmindedly gazing at the illustrations. Courtiers and merchants wearing turbans shaped like mortars, women clad in trousers billowing like balls, their tiny shoes curving back in arcs like bows, noblewomen concealing their faces behind muslin veils... Each and every one of them dragged mysterious tales in their wake. The boy, as he flipped through the pages, suddenly came upon the story of Zobeida. The porter, loaded down with the noblewoman’s purchases, accompanied her to her residence. The one who opened the door was a young woman—tall, full-bosomed, with eyes like an antelope’s, eyebrows like a new moon, cheeks like anemone flowers, and lips resembling Suleiman’s seal. This "Suleiman’s seal" business was something the boy didn’t understand at all, which only made it feel all the more mysterious. Her twin breasts were like a pair of pomegranates...... Yet later, when the woman tore at her garments with maddened frenzy, her chest would be covered in raw scars that looked as though she’d been whipped...... Though identified only as “the second noblewoman” here—this unnamed woman—the boy had arbitrarily dubbed her Zobeida, borrowing the name of a queen who appeared much later in another tale. The boy loved the resonant sound of this name.

The sliding door in the corridor opened, and someone came in. She slipped past the boy and plumped down directly across from the brazier. A sweet scent drifted. It was a smell like purple marshmallows. The boy lost the chance to raise his face. Shimojō’s younger sister took out a compact mirror and began fixing her makeup. The marshmallow-like scent grew even stronger, and the boy felt nearly suffocated. But it wasn’t just that. A guilt-like sensation throbbed. The boy realized that while reading Zobeida’s story moments earlier, he had unknowingly associated it with this younger sister. He realized that the name Zobeida had been giving off a marshmallow-like fragrance. The boy furtively raised his eyes and stole a glance at the large arrow-feather pattern adorning her chest. Was she breathing heavily? Her chest was heaving in great waves. “Could there be whip marks seeping beneath this?” The boy suddenly thought and shuddered.

“I wondered where you’d vanished since earlier—so you were reading something here, were you?” “No, I just…”

Snapping her compact shut, Shimojō’s younger sister stared fixedly into the boy’s eyes. An emerald light flashed as though shot through. The boy cowered, yet was glad she had noticed his absence. Even if it was mere courtesy, it felt as precious as a small gem.

“What a beautiful book. What’s that?” As he handed her the book, their fingers touched. Her fingers were icy cold and smooth. She began flipping through the pages carelessly. When encountering stuck pages, she moistened them with saliva to turn them. The thought of Nurse Nakagawa crossed the boy’s mind. Holding his breath, he grappled with this strange emotion—a mingling of disgust and fascination.

“Seems interesting.” “May I borrow it?” Then she said in a tone that bordered on insistence. “I’ll return it soon.”

Bewildered by her flippant manner of speaking, the boy agreed as if under a spell. He recalled that when he was little, he had dropped the talisman pouch with a bell. At length, in the room where pale morning light began piercing through air made yellow and murky by sleeplessness and agitation, the boy watched his precious Arabian Nights—now exchanged for her neatly folded coat and shawl—being wrapped in a dappled-pattern furoshiki. ‘By the time it comes back, it’ll be soaked through with that marshmallow smell…’ Bitterly gnawed by regret, the boy suddenly found himself thinking.

(However, this expectation proved wrong. The book finally returned to his hands when spring break arrived at last, and what’s more, it was only after the boy himself had timidly pressed for its return. Shimojō's younger sister widened her eyes until they were round as saucers. “Ah, right, right. I still haven’t returned that, have I?” she said.)

The next day, the book delivered by a messenger to the pharmacy window was wrapped in the shop’s elegant packaging paper, but its contents presented a wretched state to behold. Not only were the gold letters on the cover peeling off in places, but there were also two marks from the base of a tea bowl, exposing the bare cloth beneath. Moreover, both the front and back covers bore stains from what might have been spilled water or drool, while some white substance and something pink had clung all over them. This appeared to be face powder. When touched, it clung stickily, giving off a clammy, unpleasant sensation. The boy recalled having considered keeping the book as a memento of divine retribution, but before he knew it, he had lost it. (As for both Shimojō's older sister and younger sister, I have no recollection of meeting them since then.)

From around this point, Shigeo’s recollections grew hazy, and within that dimness, only the figure of Okumura-san emerged. Okumura-san was a middle-aged woman who seemed lonely—someone he could only picture as always wearing a dark haori. Judging by this fragmentary image, the boy must have seen her between autumn and winter of that year. In any case, it wasn’t for very long.

When Okumura-san first appeared before the boy, her composed demeanor made it seem as though she had already been part of the Kodama household for a very long time. At first, they passed by each other two or three times in dimly lit corridors like those near the pharmacy and examination rooms. Each time, she would press herself against the wall and quietly yield the path. She had a delicate-featured, refined face, wore small glasses, and always walked with her gaze slightly downward. The boy wondered what kind of person she was. He could not bring himself to ask his cousin about her, nor did his cousin go out of her way to introduce them.

On a day of indeterminate season, the boy was reading Fujimura’s poetry collection alone in the second-floor living room. It was the sole literary work in the small bookcase at the Kodama residence—apparently quite old, its large wisteria-patterned cover lightly soiled with hand grime, both edges of the spine beginning to tear. Perhaps it was a book my cousin had cherished in her youth. For Kodama and Fujimura’s poetry collection made too jarring a pair. Be that as it may, the boy’s first encounter with Fujimura’s poetry came through that dilapidated volume. Phrases like “When a man’s tender breath lingers in O-Natsu’s hair / When his quickened sighs race like hail” or “Know you not my love appears not on painted screens / Nor in sky-mirrored sands nor wind through rustling leaves”—though their meaning eluded him—stirred some uneasy anticipation in his breast. The boy had reached that age. "There is something, there is something—" he strained to peer through the veil over his eyelids with all his might. To understand held a terrifying void.

At that moment, a low voice said “Pardon me” in the corridor, and the shoji screen slid open softly. The one who bent slightly at the waist and peered into the room was Ms. Okumura, wearing a black haori. “Oh, Young master—are you alone?” When he replied that Teruko had gone out shopping with the children, Ms. Okumura showed a moment’s hesitation before murmuring “Well then, I’ll just get the documents” and heading toward the filing cabinet at the back of the room. She was holding a bundle of documents in her hand. For a while, the sound of papers rustling could be heard; then Ms. Okumura took what appeared to be different documents and left quietly. It was only then that the boy became consciously aware of where Ms. Okumura lived and worked. The ladder stairs leading to the mezzanine creaked faintly. When one turned at that right-angled bend, there was a third-floor room of about six tatami mats in size, which served as Director Kodama’s study. There, once, the boy had been summoned for some business. The room was filled with scattered printed materials that appeared to be medical bulletins, and Kodama sat upright at a desk like those used by elementary school students, writing intently. He had first noticed the existence of the mezzanine at that time but had thought it was merely a storage room.

In that room, Ms. Okumura had settled quietly without anyone noticing. Before the boy, another unknown door had opened.

Before long, the boy began to somewhat understand Okumura-san’s role. Okumura-san did not show her face in the pharmacy or examination rooms unless there was some truly pressing business. She always shut herself away in the mezzanine. The place she appeared most frequently was the second-floor living room, but whenever she did, she would invariably go to the back shelf to handle documents. The only ones with business at that shelf were the director and Kanai from the pharmacy; Teruko had never once laid a hand on it. From such observations, the boy imagined that Ms. Okumura’s work was likely related to those experiments with guinea pigs and domestic rabbits. In other words, it was something like serving as the director’s research secretary. This speculation eventually proved to have been accurate. One night (he remembered the brazier being out, so it was probably that winter), the boy ended up staying over after getting too caught up playing with the children to go home. Kodama, who had returned home quite late at night, began eating his supper while having Teruko serve him. Even during meals, the Director never rested his eyes or mind. At that time as well, a bundle of documents he had brought down from the shelf lay on the dining table, and while skimming his eyes over them, he shoveled ochazuke into his mouth. Then he would hurriedly jot down notes with his fountain pen on memo paper. Teruko remained completely unperturbed, maintaining that vacant stare as she silently attended nearby. Such scenes frustrated the boy. He felt a surge of unreasoning anger—not directed at Kodama, but toward Teruko—welling up within him. Finally, this person had completely settled into being the doctor’s wife. That medicinal smell whenever I come to Kōjimachi... that’s what it is. And she with those clattering mechanical motions... The boy started formulating harsher criticisms, then hurriedly crushed the thought.

That evening, Kodama seemed to be in ill humor. As usual, he intercepted Kanai who had come up with the guinea pig experiment report and began tediously lodging complaints. “This won’t do—not like this,” he kept repeating. Kanai sat with his white coat neatly arranged at the knees, listening deferentially with repeated “Hah, hah” responses. Before long, the winds began to shift, and criticism started being directed at Okumura-san. “Well now, I’m not saying it’s entirely your responsibility.” “Recently, Chiyoko-san’s—the Director alone referred to Okumura-san by her given name—excessive typos have also been a factor.” “This is a perfect opportunity. Since you’re done here, go call Ms. Chiyoko.”

“But it’s already late—there’s no need to go out of your way to wake her,” Teruko spoke up for the first time. “Late?” Kodama looked at the wall clock. It was half past midnight. “It’s not that late yet.” “Kanai-kun, go and tell her that.”

The sound of Kanai’s footsteps ascending to the mezzanine could be heard. There was a knock on the sliding door, followed by the sound of him speaking in a low voice. After Kanai had gone downstairs and some time had passed, Ms. Okumura entered quietly. She had changed into a neat Ōshima garment and was wearing a dark haori.

“Were you already asleep?” Kodama’s gold-rimmed glasses glinted as though sneering. “The copy of the statistical table I requested yesterday still isn’t ready—what’s going on?”

“Oh,” Ms. Okumura glanced at the Director through her small glasses with a puzzled look but immediately lowered her eyes again and said, “I am working on it, but the numbers are so minute that my eyes keep blurring...” It was a smooth, low voice.

“You have astigmatism.” “Why don’t you go see Mr. △△ first thing tomorrow?” Kodama snapped resentfully and grabbed the documents from the desk. “I’ve been reviewing this now—German spelling errors aside, incorrect numbers are inexcusable.” “Zeros becoming sixes, sevens turning into nines.” “Glaring mistakes I’d catch immediately might be tolerable, but with this sloppiness, even my earnest requests yield utterly unreliable results.” “Unlike financial miscalculations, even minor numerical discrepancies distort our research at its very foundations…”

“I am fully aware.” “It stems from my own shortcomings...” “Fundamental research, you understand—though it’s a wretched tendency of our countrymen to dismiss such things...” Kodama pivoted, adopting his signature lecturing tone. At such times, one could only listen in silent deference. For he spoke not to any particular audience, but merely vocalized his thoughts like soliloquies. Both his caustic wit and sardonic gaze receded as something of his medical student self resurfaced. That this man harbored such childish traits was something the boy had gradually come to discern.

After finishing his usual spiel, he shifted gears, picked up the German journal that had been lying beside him, and began dictating its key points to Ms. Okumura. “Please title it ‘Munich University, WH’.” “Pay attention. From March to the end of August 19XX, variable-dose vitamin B experiments were conducted on five male and seven female domestic rabbits. The findings regarding their rickets are as follows:” “1. ……” Here and there, difficult technical terms were included. Ms. Okumura responded, “Huh?” Kodama taught her the kanji with visible impatience. Before long, just as the room suddenly fell silent, Ms. Okumura sat primly while nodding off. The Director, who had been watching this scene with a mischievous child-like gaze for some time, said, “That’s enough,” and briskly began organizing the documents. Teruko also began organizing the desk with a look of relief.

The clock struck two.

It must have been not long after that when the boy was playing in the pharmacy and Okumura-san entered. She seemed to have come to ask Kanai some questions about the numbers. Kanai, shrinking back apologetically, had been saying things like “Oh, that was my mistake,” but then called out to Okumura-san as she tried to leave after their conversation concluded: “Earlier, the proprietress of Bunmatsuha came by and left something interesting.” “When she was cleaning, it apparently came out from the back of the closet.” “She says she wants someone to appraise whether it’s any good, but I suppose I’ll ask Yoshio-san or someone else later.”

Rattling the drawer open, Kanai pulled out a rather large, antiquated Japanese-bound booklet. The edges of its pages were curled upward from hand oils and dried saliva. Showing no particular distaste, Kanai moistened his own fingers with spit and flipped through the first four or five pages. It contained bound brocade prints in vivid colors. Most appeared to be theater scenes: chambermaids holding paper lanterns peered over a railing into a dark garden; a princess in full regalia brandished a naginata diagonally as she subdued masked villains. Then an unexpected image emerged. A naked woman sat bound to a pillar in a tatami room, hands fastened behind her back. Her half-raised knees supported a red cloth that cascaded in intricate folds, from beneath which peeked her toes—curled backward like splayed fingers. The woman wore an expression of bitter resentment, two or three strands of disheveled hair caught between her lips. "That's quite daring," Kanai remarked with evident pride. Ms. Okumura remained silent for some time before murmuring, "How cruel... people of olden days..." Her tone carried quiet reverence. The boy stared at the image—though truthfully, his chair being wedged between Ms. Okumura's seat and the desk left him no choice but to look—while recalling a scene from Arabian Nights: A self-proclaimed princess of Ebony Island, abducted by a demon king and imprisoned in a cellar. A young prince arriving by chance to console her. The demon king discovering them, stripping the maiden's garments, binding her to a stake, and flogging her mercilessly...

The boy was startled by his own train of thought. The boy had never imagined the scene of the Princess of Kokutan Island writhing in agony as vividly as the picture now spread out before his eyes. Cruelty was cruelty, but behind this picture, he felt there lurked some lewd scheme. Wasn’t that the meaning behind Kanai’s seemingly boastful words? Moreover, he could not deny that he himself felt a secret temptation toward these Japanese-style (he was clearly aware—) torture pictures. The boy found it increasingly frustrating that he was becoming tainted.

“How cruel… the people of old…”—these words Ms. Okumura had murmured lingered in the boy’s ears for a long time. There was something in them—a tone as though speaking to herself. Ms. Okumura might have recalled her own past. Or perhaps while saying “people of old…”, she had meant to include those of the present too. The boy tried imagining Ms. Okumura’s youthful face. Were one to strip away that dark weariness from her slender, elegant features, she would likely become an intelligent—yes, Ms. Okumura could certainly wear glasses—somewhat aloof young matron. That face bore no resemblance whatsoever to the woman in the picture with disheveled hair caught between resentful lips. In short, hers was a countenance that would never meet such a fate…… The boy forced himself to believe this.

For a while after that, Ms. Okumura’s memories ceased. And then the dark night when the boy had last met Ms. Okumura floated up like a hellish tableau. Had that truly been an actual event? Moreover, even though he had “met” her, the boy hadn’t actually seen Ms. Okumura’s face.

It was a strange night.

The season was indistinct, but it was a dark night with a bone-chilling cold. The boy woke in the middle of the night to relieve himself. At that time, there were five children, and a rosy-cheeked wet nurse from the countryside had come to live in, so both rooms on the second floor had been allocated as bedrooms. In the children’s room slept three girls along with the wet nurse, while in the living room area slept a married couple and two boys. The boy’s bed was located in the children’s room. When the boy had relieved himself and returned upstairs, just as he was about to open the sliding door at the end of the hallway, he heard a person’s moan coming from the ladder-like stairs immediately adjacent to his right. The boy let go of the door handle and strained his ears to listen. The people of this house were afflicted by sleep deprivation and overwork, so having nightmares was a frequent occurrence. Director Kodama was no exception, and neither was Teruko. Moreover, the nervous eldest son Tōru’s sleep-talking was something the boy was made to hear every time he stayed over. But the moan he heard then was something completely different in nature from those. He sensed this intuitively.

The moan grew lower. It seemed stifled yet still reached him intermittently. When it swelled again, the boy steeled himself and stepped onto the ladder-stairs dimly lit through windowpanes by streetlamp remnants. Muffling his footsteps, he stood before Ms. Okumura's mezzanine room. For so timid a boy, this bordered on recklessness. There he lingered, attuning himself to signs within. That Ms. Okumura lay behind those moans now brooked no doubt. Her agony seemed profound—through the sliding door came even sounds of sheets and pillow being clawed at. The boy tapped gently on the door. The moaning ceased. After moments, it resurged. Something cup-like clattered over. He knocked again. All noise stopped dead. She appeared to be steadying her breath.

“Who is it?” After a moment, he heard Ms. Okumura’s voice.

“It’s me, Shigeo.” “Are you unwell?” “Ah, Shigeo-san,” came the reply after a moment. “No, it’s nothing.” “It’s just that suddenly… this stabbing pain came… and in the dark, I couldn’t find my medicine.” “It’s all right, it’s all right—I’ve finally found it.” “……It’s fine now.”

The boy stood frozen. The moaning had stopped, but the gasping sounds still continued. “Shall I bring you some water?”

“Cold water? No, I don’t need it,” Ms. Okumura refused firmly. “Rather than that, it’s already subsided… Shigeo-san, you should go to bed early. It’s alright now, really alright……” As if sensing the boy’s intention to leave, Ms. Okumura added, “For mercy’s sake, don’t tell anyone.” It was a voice that sounded as if it were being wrung out in pain.

The boy obeyed this command. What struck the boy as strange was that no one had noticed those moans or his conversation with Ms. Okumura. When he placed his hand on the sliding door's ring handle of the children's room, Director Kodama's high-pitched snores reverberated from the living room. The darkness outside the window seemed to be nearing dawn.

After that, the boy never saw Ms. Okumura’s face or heard her voice again. Before he knew it, Ms. Okumura had disappeared. It might have been because the boy’s visits had grown less frequent. In any case, it was several months later that the boy learned of Ms. Okumura’s death. The boy did not know the date and had no memory of the funeral.

However, after that, when the boy awoke late at night in the Kōjimachi house, he vividly overheard through the sliding door the following whispered conversation between his aunt and cousin. “I can’t help but feel Ms. Okumura’s death wasn’t an ordinary one.” “Something seems off,” the cousin muttered in a low voice. “Shh,” Aunt hushed him, “Well, you see—it really was like that. “Teruko kept hiding it over and over—pretending it was an angina attack—but really, that was… mercury chloride.” “Wasn’t it said she suffered terribly?” “Kanai secretly whispered to me.” “He said we absolutely mustn’t let it get out.” “Well, that’s only natural.” “If a suspicious death occurs in a doctor’s household, no matter what you do, it’ll affect the business, you see.”

“Did you handle it properly with the police?” “That’s Kodama for you… This here—it’s how the world works.” In the darkness, the boy could vividly picture his aunt’s expression as she formed a circle gesture with her thumb and index finger. After their whispers continued for some time, “But what a pitiable woman she was,” Aunt said. “She was educated and such a proper lady,” she added, her voice rising slightly. “I was worried too—‘Are you alright?’ I pressed Teruko about it time and again, but... ‘It’s fine—stop nagging me already, Mother?’ That’s how nonchalant she was. What did she used to say...? But in the end, she didn’t say anything at all.” “So...” The cousin prompted. Their conversation dissolved back into whispers.

Of course, the boy did not clearly grasp the content of this eavesdropping. All he felt was a burning surge—the sensation that something sacred had been violated.

Not long after that came the Great Kantō Earthquake. Seeing flames rising from behind and alongside the building, Kodama commanded his household with his trademark mechanical composure. He made each person prepare just one cloth-wrapped bundle containing nightclothes, undergarments, and personal effects, forbidding them from touching anything else. After bundling his research documents and lining everyone up at the gate, he tied a red cloth parcel to his cane’s tip. Holding this aloft, he led them across the swarming Hisamatsu Bridge to safety. Through these measures, the large family—abounding with children—reached their relatives’ house in Yotsuya without losing a single member.

4

Fortunately for Kodama, several years before the earthquake disaster, a rather large hospital—though little more than a barracks—had been built with inpatient facilities on land he purchased along a certain suburban railway line. This was constructed when S Academy had planned to develop an academic village on that land—Kodama, who deeply resonated with the idealism of its director and administrators, voluntarily assumed the role of school physician and built the hospital anticipating the academic village’s future development. However, even though the academy had long since opened and even the hospital had been completed, the vast planned site for the cultural village—where they had cleared away a red pine grove—remained nothing but bare subdivided lots no matter how much time passed. The hospital was left abandoned as if uninhabited, having become a place children only visited during summer breaks. The boy had gone there to play two or three times, but in the neglected backyard where foxgloves, sunflowers, and cockscombs bloomed wildly, they formed a striking contrast with the hospital building whose paint was beginning to peel. It looked like something that could have been titled “Midsummer Abandoned Hospital” in plein-air style. In summer, animal experimentation work was temporarily relocated here. At the hospital’s back entrance, Kanai was squeezing rabbit intestines, his palms and fingers stained yellowish-brown with thick muck. “Whoa—this stench is unbearable!” he said, his face contorted as if in delight. “Here’s the thing—it’s tolerable by day, but come night you’ll hear foxes yelping in those pine woods over there: yip-yip-yip, yip-yip-yip.”

The Kodama family renovated this hospital and moved in. The boy had once stayed there. The room assigned was one of the second-floor hospital rooms. The room—where likely no one had ever slept, let alone died—had only its tatami mats strangely reddened, making the boy recall the Beppu hospital from long ago. The reddened tatami mats reminded him of his father’s face and shins—emaciated as he died from Taiwan dysentery, a disease that perforates the intestines with small holes.

Kodama began his vigorous activities using this hospital as his base. That beat-up Ford had been cleverly preserved through Yanagisawa’s resourcefulness. Driving the hospital director along the bumpy suburban roads to Tokyo and back each day became the new fate imposed upon this tender-hearted man. As the shaking grew severe, Kodama had the car slow down. This was because he couldn’t read his book.

Within less than a year, a barracks-style Kodama Hospital was rebuilt on the earthquake ruins in Hamachō. This time, it stood as a full two-story structure, and nowhere remained any mysterious room like the one Ms. Okumura had once inhabited. The fire had consumed the old history.

To this new house, the boy did not set foot very often. Because reconstruction had progressed swiftly, the hospital prospered even more than before the earthquake disaster. As a result, with people coming and going in ever greater numbers, there remained no quiet corner where one could linger when visiting.

The single time he stayed there during summer vacation had etched itself into the boy’s soul’s history as an oddly galling page of humiliation. Though referred to as a boy, this was his last summer vacation as a middle school student.

As usual, nights of insufficient sleep seemed to persist at the Kodama household. Around eight still felt like daytime; only around nine did it finally begin to feel like the onset of night.

The boy, deciding to stay over for the first time in a while, was talking with the pharmacy staff in the downstairs dining room. Tōru, the eldest son who had become a second-year elementary school student, entered carrying a violin. When everyone clapped, Tōru put on a serious face and played Ave Maria for them to hear. Kanai teased him about being a "barefoot Elman" or some such. Tōru, puffed up with pride, played another piece. This child had, before anyone noticed, begun to adopt the airs of a genius.

There, Teruko entered. Without properly surveying those gathered, she stood before the kitchen’s glass-paned door and began untying her obi. Then slowly—taking what felt like an eternity—she unwound the bleached belly band wrapped around her lower abdomen. A leaden silence claimed the room. Though this perception likely stemmed from Shigeo’s overactive imagination—to this household’s members, such scenes might have been routine. The house was cramped after all. With no proper changing area, they had no choice but to undress here before bathing. And those present were family anyway. Yet even with such reasoning, an odd dissatisfaction lingered in the boy. He covertly studied their expressions. While others averted their eyes with practiced nonchalance, only his nephew Shirō—thick glasses magnifying his curiosity—stared fixedly at the housewife’s back where dull wax-toned shoulder blades faintly surfaced. Of course this boy too saw his cousin’s naked form then—for the first and final time. No sacredness dwelled there. Instead, an arrogant authority that denied others’ humanity radiated from her fully bare back. When she vanished beyond the glass door with vacant composure, the boy finally recovered his poise. And rose silently.

That night was one of truly strange and relentless twists of fate. It could well have been called a string of misfortunes. Apart from the eight-mat room on the second floor, there were no other spaces usable as bedrooms. In the front part of the house existed only the director’s study—still strewn with scattered magazines and pamphlets leaving no room to stand—and a narrow storage closet. The rear had been converted into sleeping quarters for nurses and maids. The boy was made to sleep at the deepest end of the eight-mat room. It was a sweltering night. To make matters worse, having been squeezed into the edge where seven family members lay sprawled together, the stifling heat became unbearable. Just as he began drifting off, the boy was kicked in the ribs by the eldest son lying adjacent and jolted awake. Thereafter, no matter how much time passed, sleep would not come. The sliding door opened and someone entered. For some time came sounds suggesting a change into nightclothes. Then, moments after she seemed to slip beneath bedding, Teruko’s razor-edged whisper pierced through: “Shigeo-san is here.” That sharpness perceived by the boy’s ears might have been an effect of the deathly still nightscape. Be that as it may, within the dim glow of two-candlepower electric light—even after the director’s snores soon commenced—the boy kept his eyes shut tight, never shifting position, body coiled rigidly inward.

What tormented him above all was self-reproach. The boy came to fully comprehend the meaning of “living hell.” But that was not all. Near dawn, the boy awoke with a pressing need to urinate. The same oily, viscous half-light persisted. Within it he endured for some time, but finally rose and went downstairs. No one slept in the dining room below. Passing through, he slid open the frosted glass door to the corridor. From midway down the unexpectedly bright outer hallway, a pale figure abruptly stirred and brushed past him. It was Nurse Nakagawa as usual, slovenly clad in her towel-like nightgown. As they crossed paths she curled her lips venomously and showered him with a derisive snicker. The boy deliberately hitched up his shoulders as he passed. Returning from his errand, he stood on tiptoe to peer through the glass door of the brilliantly lit waiting room. Beneath an unforgotten hundred-candlepower bulb lay Kanai and Shirō in disheveled exposure. Shirō in particular flaunted the very physiological trait over which the boy had long felt inferiority. Recalling Nakagawa’s sneering face from moments before, the boy felt self-loathing sharp enough to flay his flesh.

After that nightmare-like night, the boy never stayed at Kodama’s house again. Before long, after about half a year had passed, rumors of a suicide pact between Shirō and Nakagawa reached the boy’s ears. They had apparently used some potent drug from the pharmacy, but the attempt ended in failure. Nakagawa was pregnant. The woman was sent back to her home province of Shinano as she was, and Shirō was taken away by his father in Tottori. The boy had apparently overheard even such matters by listening through the sliding door to the whispered conversation between his aunt and cousin late at night in the Kōjimachi house. He felt an involuntary impulse to cover his ears. That nurse called Nakagawa Noriko—how far would she continue to torment me? It resembled someone’s vengeance. Disgust and hatred had now departed, leaving behind only a bleached-white resentment.

When spring came, Teruko gave birth to her sixth child. It was a girl, and she was given the name Miyoko. At some forgotten moment, his cousin’s words—whispered scornfully into his aunt’s ear, “What? That’s just a pun on Chiyoko-san’s name!”—struck the boy’s ears with violent force.

On the fifth day after giving birth, Teruko died of puerperal fever. The boy went to the Hamachō house for the first time in a long while and saw his cousin’s dull, yellowish death mask. Her face still wore its characteristic vacant expression. Aunt closed the lips that showed Teruko’s protruding canines and meticulously applied her final makeup. “Teruko, it’s enough now. “Now everything… it’s all completely over.” “Do you understand? It’s enough now...” Aunt released her hands and repeated it through tears, like a lullaby.

The waiting room had been designated as the venue for the farewell ceremony. When the time finally came to carry out the coffin, before driving in the nails, family members bid their final farewells. With a young trainee nurse bringing up the rear, once the farewells concluded, Kodama stepped briskly forward to the coffin’s side again. He pressed his palm firmly against his wife’s forehead—buried beneath white flowers. It was that earnest expression he always wore when checking a patient’s temperature. His russet mustache twitched. He might have tried to speak. On Teruko’s beautifully made-up face, no reaction appeared. Only her crimson-painted lips had split open like a pomegranate, faintly revealing pale pink gums. The boy sensed some indescribable obsession concentrated in that single detail. Everyone held their breath. At last, Kodama withdrew his hand. The nails were swiftly driven in, and the hearse raced straight away.

The boy did not go to the crematorium.

Together with a few relatives, he sat in silence in the second-floor study awaiting the urn’s return. Before the new mortuary tablet, he occasionally offered incense as if suddenly remembering. Each time, the boy felt an urge to apologize before his cousin. Perhaps it had been an apology toward the bitter remorse that ran straight through his boyhood. The boy abruptly picked up a green-covered book from Kodama’s desk pushed into a corner. It was a translation of Gitanjali. Tagore had visited Japan the year before. The boy knew how Kodama—driven by his innate “nationalist” fervor—had since become fanatically devoted to venerating this aged poet. Both Eucken and Bergson had vanished entirely from Kodama’s conversations. The boy opened the book. On the randomly revealed page lay a crude double underline drawn in pencil. There he read these lines.

Evening already draws near; shadows do not yet touch the earth.

Go to the river; it is time to fill my water jar.

………… In the desolate alley devoid of human figures, the wind has fallen silent, ripples alone dance upon the river’s surface. …………

Shall I ever indeed attain to return home? Shall I by chance meet someone?

Over there in the shallows, a stranger sat playing a flute.

5 Shortly after Teruko’s death, Kodama obtained his doctorate. His many years of vitamin research had been recognized. Through an acquaintance, he was invited by Manila Municipal Hospital. It was an ideal offer for a fresh start, but after some consideration, he refused it outright. He was burning with a new, different ambition. He fixed his gaze on the plan for Kinzadori Street’s opening—a project just beginning to stir, riding the wave of Tokyo’s reconstruction. Before long, the main thoroughfare running straight southeast from Akihabara to Nakasu was officially approved, and construction commenced.

Kinzadori Street was the name given by local residents to the section of that main thoroughfare belonging to Hamacho. It could not entirely be dismissed as mere exaggeration. According to the locals’ theory, this was because the vicinity had been the site of a gold mint established during the Edo period. The reconstruction of Meiji-za had been delayed, but relocating from the cramped area around Hisamatsu Bridge and expanding onto this main thoroughfare was an established fact. With both this theater and the pleasure district—which had begun reviving early, stretching from behind its planned site to the Ōkawa River—as their backdrop, the locals had boldly planned an entertainment district that would rival Ginza. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say they had dreamed it. They utterly ignored the existence of Ningyocho—practically right under their noses (though of course it had been reduced to ashes)—for this very reason.

When I later reflected on it, it was ultimately akin to trying to dig fresh gold from a long-dry abandoned mine. As the reconstruction of the downtown area progressed, the outcome inevitably manifested itself as cold, hard facts. But the locals’ fervent ambition transcended such considerations. Kodama, too, was one possessed by this grand vision. Or rather, he might have been one of the instigators—a leading standard-bearer. He may also have had a tendency to succumb to others’ flattery. Be that as it may, he decided to establish a presence across from the Meiji-za theater. And defying the apprehensions of relatives and acquaintances, a five-story reinforced concrete building in chocolate brown rose into being. The Meiji-za theater was completed approximately two years after that.

According to evaluations by his aunts’ circle, Kodama had rushed headlong into constructing such an enormous hospital out of competitive spirit toward his longtime rival—the gynecologist old Dr. Kawai’s Naniwa Clinic—but even so, the scale seemed somewhat excessive. Indeed, the Naniwa Clinic had materialized as an unassuming wooden two-story structure, hastily erected north of the planned Meiji-za site. Of course, there must have been some measure of impatience smoldering within Kodama regarding this. But that alone could not fully account for it. The five-story “Hamacho Building” was, so to speak, a castle of dreams erected upon the dream of Kinzadori. It stood as a strange offspring born from the union between Kodama’s fervent idealism and his relentless drive to act.

Kodama’s idealism could be found in every part of the building. Along the cornice of the top floor, a procession of frolicking infants was carved in white relief. It must mean his vocation lay in pediatrics. On the rooftop, a small hermitage referred to as a Zen hall was installed. On the fifth floor, a vast lecture hall was established; in addition to hosting weekly spiritual lectures, it was also meant to serve as a public hall for the people of the Kinzadori area. Another crucial point that must not be overlooked: the first-floor section facing Kinzadori Street was partitioned into five imposing rental storefronts. The hospital wards were assigned to the second and third floors, and the family was to reside on the fourth floor.……Had Kinzadori Street prospered as anticipated, the enormous debt incurred for this grand edifice would surely have been justified.

However, when the building was finally completed, flaws emerged in Kodama’s grand ideals from the very outset. First, the first-floor rental storefronts—which had likely borne the greatest expectations—failed to obtain official approval no matter how they tried. The authorities would not permit commercial establishments to coexist with a hospital containing inpatient facilities. They consequently redesigned the layout, shifting each floor’s designated purpose downward by one level. Thus examinations and treatments came to be conducted behind the large glass storefront windows meant for shops. Even so, since floor space remained available, they hung a sign reading “Kōsei Clinic” at the side-street entrance. This amounted to running a charitable hospital through private means—an effort one might interpret as another expression of Kodama’s idealism, though undeniably a stopgap measure born of desperation. The young doctor appointed as its director soon quarreled bitterly with Kodama and left. His replacement became Umedayo—the female physician who would later be widowed. Kodama married her in autumn of the year Hamacho Building was completed.

Once flaws began to surface, there was no stopping them. The aunts’ circle’s predictions had been correct. There was an incident involving illegal substitute doctoring. Hounded by fundraising demands and plagued by lack of time, Kodama in desperation resorted to using unqualified Kanai as a substitute doctor. Because of this, Kodama ended up being detained by police overnight. Even the abortion surgery he had reluctantly performed after being pleaded with was anonymously reported to authorities. The aunts single-mindedly believed it to be old Dr. Kawai’s machinations. The infamous “quack doctor” label spread widely, and patients dwindled conspicuously. In fact, even when Shigeo occasionally went for examinations, that obsessive near-manic zeal from former years was nowhere to be seen. Though his expression while intently listening to pulses remained unchanged, other thoughts clearly drifted through his mind.

When Mussolini was shot, a signed photograph of the Duce soon appeared in Kodama’s study. It had been sent by a man named Uehara from Rome who was close to Mussolini. Around that same time—after becoming school physician at K Academy—Mr.Senba began making conspicuously frequent appearances. Priest Kōten, who had authored voluminous lectures on the *Hekiganroku* yet was detested by part of his sect for his eccentricities—though originally an old acquaintance from the same prefecture—now began visiting regularly too, accompanied by his beautiful young wife.

After Teruko’s death, Shigeo naturally stopped visiting the house. He could feel no familiarity with the new grand hospital’s structure either. For Shigeo, seeing the children’s faces—terrified by their father’s sudden lifestyle changes—was painful. Apart from occasional visits for examinations or treatment, his memories of going to Hamacho Building were surprisingly few. There was a time when Tanaka, a high school student from a distant branch of the family, attempted suicide with Calmotin and died in a third-floor hospital room. It was immediately after the Second Communist Party arrests had occurred. This timid prodigy had met his end, caught between obsessive-compulsive thoughts and a heartbreak incident. Another time was when Shigeko, the third daughter, died of epidemic dysentery shortly after the building was erected. In a small fourth-floor room with a thin futon spread out lay the corpse of a five-year-old girl dressed in a muslin kimono—Shigeo remembered how eerily mature and elongated she had appeared. “Even though both parents are doctors, how could they let their own child die of dysentery?” the aunts spitefully remarked. There was also an incident where their eldest son, Tōru, nearly became addicted to morphine. While he was half-jokingly injecting it at the pharmacy, it ended up becoming the real thing. This was somehow managed.

The accumulation of such incidents undoubtedly cast a dark shadow over Kodama’s state of mind. His life rapidly descended into disorder. He who had prided himself on being a sweet tooth had suddenly become a heavy drinker. His eccentric acts multiplied. Even just what reached Shigeo’s ears included the following. There was a young man named Kawada who carried Mr. Senba’s briefcase, and his penis had become a topic of conversation among the pharmacy apprentices. Having heard this, Kodama apparently encountered Kawada in a hallway one day and forcibly dragged the reluctant man to the toilet to examine him. He seemed slightly intoxicated, Kawada told the pharmacy apprentices. When banquets were held in the neighborhood and a game of shallow river began, Kodama would time it just right, lie on his back on the tatami mats, and apparently take solitary delight in this. Such behavior could be called a party trick, but those who had known him in the past would frown whenever they heard such rumors.

On the other hand, he was terribly afraid of elevated blood pressure. He had developed a habit of constantly measuring his own blood pressure and without fail performing bloodletting on himself before bed. One late evening, as Kodama ate dinner with Tōru while sipping his whiskey in small, slow draughts, he muttered as if to himself, “I’m feeling rather strange.” Tōru saw a pale shadow of anxiety flicker across his father’s face. “No, it’s nothing. “It’s probably just your imagination,” Kodama murmured in a comforting tone. The next instant, he suddenly pressed his hand to his left temple and collapsed face-first onto the dining table with a groan. “Hey—bloodletting! Bloodletting!” he shouted. Those became Kodama’s last words. Umedayo, who had been examining patients downstairs, did not even need to rush over.

When examined later, a dark livid bruise had oozed out across his entire left temple. It appeared that a rather thick artery had ruptured, causing blood to spurt against the skin with tremendous force.

By the stir of people rising from their seats, Shigeo’s daydream was shattered. Before anyone noticed, the setting sun filled the earthen floor of the waiting area with its rays, and in that reddened light, the bereaved family members began walking toward the entrance step. Mr.Kōten and Mr.Senba were already standing at the eaves of the waiting area, waiting for everyone to arrive. The bones had finished burning. Following the guide in his high-collared uniform, the group entered the bone-collecting room. It was a stark whitish room surrounded on three sides by plaster walls. With a clattering reverberation of iron wheels, the transport cart was pushed in. The guide assisted and lowered a large square iron basin. The director’s bones were arranged with unexpected correctness and placed within the basin. They still appeared to retain their heat.

Priest Kōten clasped his hands together and chanted a brief sutra. “Now, Tōru—you first. “……That’s your father’s skull.”

Mr. Kōten pointed with the tip of his chopsticks, but no sooner had he done so than he let out a shrill cry. “Ah, look—this temple bone has changed color.” “There’s a large black stain.” “It must’ve been one hell of a hemorrhage.” “That’s such a typical end for Mr. Kodama.” “Ah, yes… yes…” The bereaved family members took turns peering at the discolored bone. Then, one after another, clinking their chopsticks together, they began placing the cremated remains into the urn piece by piece.

Over the shoulders of the bereaved family members, Shigeo gazed intently at another portion of the cremated remains. There lay the lumbar vertebrae—stout bones overlapping splendidly in their original configuration, arrayed with solid weight. They appeared as though maintaining a Zen meditative posture even through immolation. Shigeo thought he had finally grasped the true nature of the man called Kodama.

When he suddenly noticed, Mr. Senba’s gaze standing beside him was likewise fixed upon the lumbar vertebrae. That gaze held a gentle color, as though offering solace.