Pathway to Japanese Literature

From nowhere, a monk appeared in the village. He wore a faded brown robe and straw sandals. He tapped a small Buddhist percussion instrument, holding a black-lacquered bowl in one hand, stood at each door, chanted sutras, and walked while begging for alms. The monk appeared to be in his fifties with a gentle demeanor. In a quiet tone, he chanted sutras. Even as he chanted sutras with downcast eyes, he appeared to be deeply pondering something. His eyebrows were white and had grown long. On his head, he wore a hat that had been weathered by repeated exposure to rain and wind. Even on short autumn days, he remained composed and would not leave until he stood at each door and the household members greeted him. A dragonfly with wings as frayed as shuttlecock feathers alighted on crimson-tinted persimmon leaves, rose, then descended to settle again. The sound of the Buddhist percussion instrument resonated calmly through the windless, quiet noon. The neighbor and the monk came to a halt; he chanted sutras.

Those who saw the monk would say, “The monk has come to our village again.” From inside houses would sometimes come a voice calling, “Pass through.” At such times, the monk would quietly leave that house’s front. Other times, a child’s voice would shout, “We won’t come out!” Then too, the monk quietly left that house’s front. There were also moments when a young man’s voice would snap, “Move along!” Even then, the monk still calmly left that house’s front. When leaving one house, he would go to its neighbor and chant sutras in that same calm tone. The percussion instrument’s sound resonated languidly. His long white eyebrows above closed eyes suggested deep contemplation—as if praying something for each household. In fields where crimson-withered pumpkin vines and lingering dead leaves lay, at times the faint autumn sun would shine.

At one time, there were people in this village who had moved from distant towns, and among them were those who were sickly or mentally disturbed. As late autumn approached, a cold wind blew. The groves of the village all had their leaves shaken off by the northwest wind, leaving the village itself growing somehow desolate. The thatched houses—until now hidden by lush fields and tree branches—were suddenly exposed as both fields and forest turned bare, revealing gray roofs and allowing glimpses of people drying belongings or working before their homes.

The weak sunlight, soaked in clouds, had barely begun to faintly brighten the scenery when suddenly the wind shifted, and rain began to fall. By evening, the sky darkened, and sleet mixed with rain began to fall. The ridges of the fields were blanketed white, and the withered grass too turned pale. The wind grew increasingly fierce, and the houses hurried to close their doors. At this time, they were made to wonder where the monk would disappear to.

The next day, the outside was white. The sky hung heavy with unease, clouds churning turbulently as they realized this marked the first day of snow’s arrival. Around noon, once again, the monk appeared in the village from nowhere. He stood at the corner of a tenement, sounding his Buddhist percussion instrument while planted in sleet-streaked mud, still chanting sutras with closed eyes. From inside the house, the neighbor’s wife’s voice sounded, “Here, take this now,” she said, followed by the clinking sound of coins falling into the black alms bowl. Before long, her figure disappeared into the house. Outside, a cold fierce wind blew as black clouds surged from the northwest. The monk remained composed, standing there chanting sutras for what seemed an eternity before finally leaving the front of that house.

In this manner, the monk patrolled the village day in and day out. When it seemed he had continued for ten days straight, he vanished without trace and stopped visiting the village. None in the village could tell exactly when the monk had ceased coming. They assumed he must be making his rounds elsewhere and would no longer visit their village. Then there were times when a year would pass before he returned. Other times two or three years would go by before his reappearance.

No one could discern that the monk had aged. Whenever they saw him, he appeared to be the same age as when he had first come to the village. Not only that, but none thought his form had altered much either.

At times, from autumn into winter, the monk would enter this village. At times, he would enter at the beginning of spring. The timing of his visits was never fixed.

Then, one year, such a rumor arose in the village.

"That monk doesn't age." "When that monk comes, one person after another dies in this village." "When someone dies, that monk comes."... No one had believed this rumor. At spring's beginning, the monk entered the village from nowhere in particular. At that time, this rumor arose once more. From this rumor came villagers who gave coins to the monk each time he came. Some would close their doors and feign absence when the monk came. After about ten days, the monk had left the village for somewhere.

The villagers said to each other.

“The monk hasn’t come.” “He didn’t come yesterday either.” “He didn’t come the day before yesterday either.”

“He hasn’t come for exactly five days now.” From around this time, the villagers first began taking notice of the monk's arrivals and departures.

Within ten days of the monk's departure, an incident occurred in the village. It involved the simultaneous deaths of a young madman and his mother who had lived at the village outskirts. The pair had subsisted on meager stipends from local authorities. The villagers too showed compassion by giving provisions to the mother. They had once been samurai receiving feudal stipends from their lord, but later survived on public bonds until the father died and their son went mad at fifteen, remaining so ever after. Eventually these bonds were entirely depleted. Though said to have relatives in town, none ever visited the mother. The madman would periodically break free from his cage. His hair hung matted over features blackened with filth beyond recognition of skin tone, clad in shoulder-torn garments with a rope belt, barefoot and muttering as he roamed aimlessly, frightening children at play outdoors.

It was a day at the end of autumn, when snow had yet to fall.

A group of children was playing under a large walnut tree near the temple cemetery. With fifteen- or sixteen-year-olds leading and eight- or nine-year-olds following behind, they were playing a game of demon tag when— “Hey! Do you know English? I’ll teach you!” came a shout from someone trudging closer through the distance. Peering at the approaching figure—long hair hanging over shoulders, rattling a thin stick, sharp eyes darting about—they recognized the village madman known to all. The children, who had seen and heard how he’d repeatedly brandished blades and tried to slash his own mother—forcing her to flee outside—screamed and scrambled to escape first. Some lagged behind, wailing as they cried out.

When this incident spread through the village, four or five villagers set out to search for the madman out of pity for his mother. That night in the temple grove they captured him again, repaired his cage once more and confined him within. When western sunsets dyed crimson the branches of walnut trees standing by temple gravesides, children who witnessed this sight would inevitably recall and discuss the madman. When villagers discovered these tragic deaths of mother and deranged son - finding she had pierced her child's throat with a dagger before lying atop his corpse to end herself - a blizzard howled outside. Gloomy light seeped through door cracks to illuminate this fireless house in sorrowful tones. Not one proper utensil remained. They saw how rush wicks she'd crafted until death lay scattered about a blackened scarred board.

The blood was blue in color. The whiteness of those rush wicks, like leached pigment, left those who saw them numb with bewilderment. One of them spoke up. They had seen the madman's mother hurrying back from town through that great blizzard two days prior, umbrella-less. Her wooden clogs with slackened straps sank into snowdrifts, fingers raw with frostbite, white hair—stripped of life's hue—pitifully whipped by the wind.

The villagers wondered why the mother had killed her child and committed suicide. Did she think to avoid burdening others further? Had hunger and cold become unbearable? Among them came this voice: "She was a daughter raised in a samurai household." "She must have had at least this much resolve," someone said. These words made those present recall an era of blossoming youth. Once, in her twenties—eighteen or nineteen—this old woman had... and various fantasies took shape. But this lasted only a moment. Now before their eyes lay deaths too gruesome to behold. The garments were thin unlined robes, their torn shoulders mended countless times over.

Another person offered a slightly different interpretation. It was that she didn’t know when she herself would grow old and die. After she herself died, who would there be to care for this madman? Rather than that, they said she had done it out of the belief that by killing him with her own hands and immediately following after him in death, they would remain parent and child even after dying.

For some reason, this remark made everyone present tearful. The villagers carefully buried the two corpses.

One summer, from somewhere unknown, the monk entered this village. By now, there was no one who didn’t suspect that whenever this monk came, someone in the village would die. There came to be no one who did not heed the rumors someone had once spread. “That monk has come again,” the people murmured, gazing at him with uneasy eyes. The children formed a group and followed after the monk. They kept a distance of a few meters apart and whispered among themselves. “When that monk comes, someone dies.” A girl of about seven said,

“Why don’t we throw stones at that monk?” said the childminder carrying a nursing infant on her back. In this manner, the villagers, trying to keep the monk away, had some go around to each house in the village spreading the word: “He comes into this village because they give him alms. If you give him nothing, he won’t enter this village.” They proclaimed that one must never give alms. Among them were households that superstitiously revered the monk, but considering how foolish it would be to give alms only to earn the villagers’ resentment, they pretended not to notice when he came. The monk stood before the house as usual and chanted sutras in a calm tone. The sound of the Buddhist percussion instrument resonated slowly. Peering through door cracks revealed his closed eyes as if reciting mantras—the thick white eyebrows imparting an unearthly quality unlike any ordinary monk.

Even if they pretended not to notice, the monk never left the front of this house. The superstitious woman, her chest leaping, said in an extremely small voice, "Please move along." Her face flushed crimson, and her heart pounded. Somehow, the woman felt a vague sense of guilt.

This extremely small utterance too seemed to have entered clearly into the monk’s ears. The monk quietly left the front of this house.

At this time, no one in the village gave anything to the monk. Yet the monk walked through this village every day. He stood before each house without exception, chanting sutras as always and sounding his Buddhist percussion instrument. Though none gave alms, the monk continued walking through the village daily performing his alms-begging duty as ordained. When ten days of this had passed, he suddenly vanished without trace.

There was no one among the villagers who did not think the monk had stopped coming and feel uneasy about what would follow for some time.

“The monk had finally stopped coming,” someone said with a feeling as if a heavy stone had been lifted from their heart.

“We’ll be uneasy for a while,” said one of them, sensing the rumors held an undeniable power. “In this civilized age, such things don’t happen,” they insisted, trying to obscure their own mind with the word ‘civilization’—this civilization that supposedly renders nothing frightening.

The conversation among these three people,

Their discussion concluded with the settled conclusion, "We'll know once some time passes." They inquired into who had first started such rumors. However, they never discovered the source. The monk left, and within five days, misfortune struck this village. The people exchanged glances as if realizing it only now.

The dead person was a fifty-five-year-old man. He had long served as a railroad crossing guard.

Telegraph poles running from the northern coast stretched unevenly southward. When he looked around the lonely country path running alongside rails reflecting dull light, his swollen body clad in a faded navy Western-style suit swayed listlessly with each plodding step, his powerless arms moving unconsciously. When the monster roared and came thundering through the quiet, vast field, the sleeping grass, trees, and houses awoke. There must have been those who noticed this man standing before the railroad crossing guard's hut with a white flag raised—the same man who had leaned out from a yellow window—while others simply passed by in silence. Some spat and passed by. Among them was a pitiable old man. Some must have passed by while wondering what kind of life he led.

The man was by nature not very talkative. He had long suffered from paralysis, and his left hand and ear did not function well. When at home, he would take out a potted plant with red berries—what kind of tree it was he didn’t know—into the sunlight and water it. There were those who saw this man watering the tree with red berries even on the day before his death.

On a gloomy, overcast morning, the man went out to fish in the nearby river. The bluish water had risen up to his feet. As he stared at it, his eyes began to swim dizzily. He thought this was the river, but suddenly feeling as relaxed as if lying on a tatami mat, he collapsed just like that, swallowed water, struggled, and died. When the villagers went to retrieve the man, in the shade of thick grass, they saw him curled up with his limbs drawn in, having drowned. His face was ashen, with a short beard growing on his chin. Compared to when he was alive, there was no particular difference in its poor complexion.

From then on, every time this monk came, it became certain that someone in the village would die. Time passed like flowing water. That too became a tale of the past.

This village too had undergone several transformations. After the fields were devastated by a great flood in a certain year, many left the village to relocate elsewhere. Some went to towns, others to different villages.

Now only three houses remained in this village. This village was a small one, cut off on one side by a river and far removed from the main road—a dark, lonely, gloomy place. Old, large cedar trees grew thickly around the village. In the slightly brighter field, mulberry trees spread black, large palm-like leaves shining in the sun.

Of the three houses, two stood side by side in this mulberry field. One house stood in the dark forest. In the two houses lived poor people. While others had gone out to towns or moved elsewhere, we, lacking the means to do so, still remained in this village.

The house in the forest had been the prosperous family of this village for generations. The house stood old and large, with centuries-old trees densely covering its grounds. No matter what occurred, the family never considered leaving their estate. The interior of the grand house—its windows few and far between—seeped with dampness. Branches wove together overhead, barring sunlight from piercing through the canopy. White trunks intersected crimson ones in stark vertical lines. Those who visited would sometimes recount seeing an enormous snake coiled around branches, targeting sparrows. Others spoke of encountering strange insects while walking beneath the trees before reaching the forest's depths. When conversing with the residents inside, visitors claimed their faces appeared deathly pale and unsettling. It was said there had never been a generation in this house without an invalid.

In this house lived a daughter who remained unmarried at thirty-two. The daughter had been kept from leaving this dark house since childhood. She only heard wind striking against forests and saw rain falling soundlessly. Occasionally when clouds parted she could faintly glimpse blue sky through trees. At dusk birds would gather from nowhere in this forest and sing. She only ever heard their cries. The daughter had never seen objects bearing beautiful colors—vivid greens,lively crimsons,crystalline blues—that might delight eyes,save brass kettles used at home,mirrors blue-tarnished with age,and other heirlooms passed down through generations.

Though they had money, the house remained gloomy. The ancient shamisen had often heard her mother play until the daughter's childhood, but one year during the rainy season—after its drumhead slackened into bumpy folds and lost its voice—it was hidden away somewhere. Of course, there had been no place nearby to restring it. From then on, the house stayed perpetually silent, not even a whisper of laughter escaping. Most of all when that shamisen was played—her mother's singing voice still lingers in the daughter's ears. She had no reason to remember that song, having scarcely understood it back then. The melody was plaintive, resentful, gloomy beyond words—yet its tone left an indelible impression. Mother—still young with jet-black hair gleaming—would turn her pale face slightly aside, cradling the shamisen as she gazed toward the garden and sang. Bluish leaves floated hazily in the twilight air.

When the daughter was around eighteen or nineteen, she often sank into deep thought. At that time, she felt nostalgic for the color red. At times she would recall the melodies of the shamisen she had heard in childhood and ponder that clinging, resentful singing voice in her mind. "Where could that shamisen have gone?" she wondered as she searched. But ultimately she could not find it. In those days, there were moments when hearing birds sing in the forest at dusk, seeing the blue sky, or gazing at moonlight would make her wish to see the sea. At times she felt as if someone were waiting for her.

Now only white and black colors remained on her person—no red, no blue, no purple. She no longer peered out from the black house’s window to gaze at the forest swaying in the wind like fine stripes woven into the void and lose herself in daydreams as she once did. To such an extent that her heart seemed to have turned to cold stone, she had ceased to care for her appearance. Her pallid face framed loosened hair that hung disheveled around her shoulders. On her person she wore no feminine reds or purples. Although the woman would occasionally lean out the window to gaze at the evening sky, there was never anything she yearned for or admired that might bring a flush to her cheeks. She simply laughed coldly. Her laughter was cold and hollow—the kind that seemed to mock the world and ridicule people.

The daughter's mother had now become a white-haired old woman. The old mother said to those who came and went.

“The daughter is ill，so please don’t speak so loudly or laugh.” When she said this，they might have thought this woman was indeed ill.

The forest that towered blackly into the sky hid this house. It looked as if it were protecting this house. Rarely were there those who came and went to this house. Apart from the small birds in the forest, there was no knowing how those people inside existed.

Of the two houses standing side by side, one normally kept its door closed, and the wife did not go out to the fields. Her husband was a traveling merchant; journeying along the coast as far as neighboring countries, he was seldom home. Those who traveled through mountainous countries had no choice but to follow the sea. Where the land meets the sea, there are villages; there are towns. They would enter those towns and villages where sea winds blew, smell the stench of fish and the scent of the shore, and conduct trade. In the towns, there were also white flags fluttering against the backdrop of the blue sea. Bargaining with bare-skinned men and women sunburned a coppery red, they walked from village to village, town to town, until before long they had crossed the border into the neighboring country. Thus, while her husband was away, the wife went out to the fields and tended to the vegetables. Those who passed in front of this small house with sagging eaves always saw its door closed. There were no particular visitors either.

In midsummer, the bright yellow sunflowers stood tall as spines; just when one thought they had opened eastward as the morning sun faintly tinged the eastern sky, by the time the sun gradually rose and turned southward, these large yellow flower heads began following the sunlight while revealing their thick stamens. When the sun neared noon, the flowers made their green leaves glisten under its rays, reflecting silvery light like perspiration as their heads drooped limply sunward. The blazing orb swayed through the vast sagging sky. Through the long midday hours, the flower-blooming house kept its door shut. At last when the sun dipped beyond mulberry fields—staining the horizon blood-crimson and casting red beams upon the black-towered forest—some sunflowers fell shadowed yet still stood rooted earthward, stubbornly straining to glimpse that solar disk now plunged into abyssal depths.

The summer sky of the northern country turned a deep indigo, crystal-clear, soon after dusk fell. The stars' light—unchanged from when it had shone a thousand, two thousand years ago—tonight for the first time streamed fresh, vivid, and damp over blades of grass and thatched roofs as if illuminating this world anew.

In the one remaining house—where insects chirped and rough walls stood exposed—lived an old couple. The old man was senile, and the old woman’s head was pure white. An only son was apprenticed at a clock shop in town and sent a small amount of money every month. They relied on this to let out thin wisps of smoke. The old couple planted a small number of vegetables around the house. They did not harvest enough to sell; they simply gathered what they needed to survive. When the early autumn wind blew and the chili peppers turned red, even during daylight hours, insects chirped in the shade of fallen dead branches. The sky was clear and blue as water, and wild geese flying north could be seen.

In the morning, when they woke up and went to check beside the leftover red chili peppers, it seemed frost had fallen the previous night; the few green leaves that had sprouted were frozen white.

When the faint sunlight struck the pale red rough walls, one recalled the village's rise and fall.

Year after year, medicine peddlers from other provinces used to enter this village. Back when this small village had not yet been ravaged by floods, when many houses still stood in these mulberry fields, before its people had begun moving to towns and elsewhere—when there were still quite a few households—those medicine peddlers would come every summer. They never passed through even the smallest village in all of Japan without paying a visit. When they left a yellow medicine bag at a house one year, the next year they would unfailingly return to that house and replace the old one with a new. Upon departing, they would turn toward the household members and,

“We’ll come again next year,” they said. When the medicine peddlers came to that house the following year, there were times when the old woman who had answered the door the previous year had died that autumn and was no longer there.

However, for some reason, those medicine peddlers had not visited this village for over two or three years by then. Other groups that had once entered the village year after year with regularity—cocoon buyers and various peddlers—had also ceased coming. At the same time as those people ceased coming, the monk who had been visiting every year also stopped coming. The old couple who had long lived in this village still remembered that monk. They had not forgotten his figure—wearing faded robes, his hat pulled low over his eyes as he stood before each house, chanting sutras and striking his Buddhist percussion instrument while making alms rounds. Moreover,

Moreover, they had not forgotten the rumor that had once circulated: “When that monk enters the village, someone is sure to die.”

The wind blew, rain fell turning to snow; years ended—over a decade passed until this village became what it was now. Since the apoplectic railroad crossing guard had drowned, many changes came over this village; after that incident, that monk only rarely entered to make alms rounds, but once people dwindled and decline set in, he stopped coming altogether. With his absence stretching through years untold, it finally became a tale of old. Some thought he might have met violent death somewhere. Thus did anyone considering his return seem unthinkable.

Yet suddenly in the tenth year, this monk came begging alms. Among them, the old couple's eyes widened in shock. They grieved, wondering if the time had come when they must die. The two spent that night talking together. "Nowadays those living in this village are only us in our house in the dark forest and our neighbor's wife's household. It makes no sense for the monk to come begging when there are only three houses left." "I wonder if today's monk is the same one from before," said the old woman.

The already senile old man was clear-headed only at this moment. And then he asserted.

"It's the monk who came ten years ago," "the same monk." The night hung darkly, pressing against the hut's eaves as if cocking an ear to eavesdrop on the house within.

"If he's the monk from those days, he should have aged much more," said the old woman. The old man showed no change whatsoever. From his build to his bearing, he declared it was exactly as it had been back then.

The old woman, saddened, narrated the following in a low voice.

“Surely it won’t be us who die this time—I think it’ll be that daughter in the house deep in the forest.” “When I saw her briefly the other day, she had a deathly pale face.” I thought she had the countenance of a dead person. Her lacquer-black hair hung over her face, her eyes sunken, her limbs emaciated—I had been horrified at the sight. I thought I would not last much longer. I think that when the monk appeared, he must have come to take his daughter away.

It was a quiet, dark night.

Facing the white-haired old woman sat the toothless, bald-headed old man. The dim lamp cast an uneasy light through the house.

A pattering sound struck against the window. Yet the old woman continued speaking without noticing. "Since that great flood, I found the time when that terrible disease spread more frightening. "Why does no one ever stay long in this village?" "Once our son comes of age and can run a shop properly, we want to move to town."

“Oh，it’s started raining，” said the old man，tilting his ear. “The western sky was terribly dark this evening. Since it’s a quiet evening，it might start raining.”

“...” said the old woman. For a time, the old man and old woman sat facing each other in silence while outside came the soft patter of falling rain. “Why does the Monk only come to this village?” said the old woman with unconcealed suspicion. “He’ll keep coming till every last soul here’s dead,” replied the old man without opening his eyes as he lowered his gaze. The Monk made his alms rounds through the village for two or three days before vanishing unnoticed into nowhere. Each time they looked toward the shadowed forest now, they told one another how soon they’d see coffins emerge from those woods.

The wife staying home alone turned her thoughts to the distant north where the sound of the sea could be heard and worried about her husband’s well-being. The earth had dried to a pale hue, and most of the leaves had fallen. The mulberry leaves remaining in the field had withered black.

The heavens and earth lay as silent as death throughout the day, utterly soundless.

“Snow is coming soon.” The old man went out to the doorway and said while tidying things up.

The sky was filled with nothing but white, motionless clouds. The forest, the houses, the fields—all remained silent as if draped in funeral shrouds from head to toe, creating a gloomy atmosphere.

On this day when all sound seemed dead, a day of utter silence, news came to the old couple.

Their son, apprenticed at a clock shop in town, had died suddenly of illness—came the news.