Pathway to Japanese Literature

Stealing the Incense Burner

When the man was about to go out, the woman soundlessly appeared at the entrance and held out the brown hat.
The man took it in hand, opened the lattice door, and left.
The woman stood vacantly for a moment before collapsing by the long brazier where she remained motionless.
This was her custom—whenever he left, she would brood until thoroughly despondent, typically passing one or two hours in a daze without touching any task.
Only when her thoughts exhausted themselves would she finally take up sewing.
She handled the seaweed-like cloth scraps as if scooping them up, threading dark strands through.
After such an hour passed, she would grow increasingly agitated while casting her eyes upward—trivial emotional grievances, a slightly chipped bowl rim, how he'd deliberately averted his gaze when leaving, words brought to his lips only to be swallowed—each thought surfacing in relentless succession.
The deeper she dwelled on these matters, the more her work lay abandoned as she stared blankly upward at the light filtering through the open shoji.

Indeed, the woman was wasting away day by day; her chin sharpening, her entire face thinning as if planed daily, her sickly sunken skin—pallid and drained of luster—stretching cold and white down to her throat, all coalescing into a spectacle of such oppressive gloom that one could scarcely bear to look.
This was partly due to her nature—how she excessively feared noises and would brood over single matters for prolonged periods.
For instance, in the man’s room during his absence, strange occurrences—coughing sounds, rustling tatami mats, what seemed like muttered complaints—would assail her as auditory hallucinations, startling her each time.
She would lift her slender, frail face and listen intently to the noises arising in the man’s room—a habit she had nearly developed on days he was absent—but in those moments, she would turn deathly pale and feel herself trembling involuntarily.

At the back of her eyes lingered the shadowy figure of the man—his hands tapping ceaselessly at his workbench throughout the day projected so vividly that sometimes he appeared as nothing but an uncanny silhouette, sometimes his face emerged sickly pale, and at others he resembled an utter stranger she had never truly seen.
The chisel blade he drove daily into the same block of wood would glint among wood shavings or deftly carve out curls of timber, these motions blending with his silent form as it materialized in her vision.
One day, the man worked in sullen silence, coughed sullenly, and sullenly shared three meals with her—never once showing cheer nor engaging in meaningful conversation.
He strained to avert his gaze as if fearing her pallid face, laboring to avoid all verbal exchange.
During these moments, while remaining in the room and occasionally straining to hear his work sounds, she would soon withdraw dark thread from its skein with lonely precision and resume sewing.

When evening came, the man went out.
The woman had come to sense both that the man had clearly taken up with another woman and that he could now smile brightly outdoors for the first time, yet she persistently remained silent, always—

“Please go ahead.”

With those words, she merely handed him the brown hat, showing neither jealous gestures nor using any such language.
Therefore, come evening, the man would grow oddly restless, fidgeting as he glanced at the clock, the garden, or the sky—until at last he resolved to stand up. In those moments, within his pained and lonely countenance, the woman could always immediately discern an expression of deathly stillness.
The woman obediently sent the man off, and the man would return home severely drunk when late.
But strangely enough, the intensity of the woman’s emaciation as perceived through the man’s eyes was excruciatingly vivid; she appeared forlornly diminished, like thread-like noodles drained of vitality.
Therefore, when the woman came out to the entrance late at night to meet him, the man’s face momentarily contorted with regret and shame, but soon he assumed an expression of steely resolve and retreated into his room without emerging again.

The woman grew more emaciated day by day and never made a sound under any circumstances.
She would slide open fusuma doors with a whisper, glide across tatami mats on cat-soft feet, flatten herself in the corner between closet and shoji screen as if sunk in deep slumber—remaining silent for hours—then abruptly cling to the washtub while scrubbing laundry.
It appeared soundless as water, like some limbless creature.
The woman opened the shoji to the man’s workspace,

When she tried to speak—her words trailing into silence—the man found himself startled for no reason upon seeing her: her pallor matched the soundlessly opened *shoji*. Her face—more than half hidden by the *shoji* screen—appeared as lusterless as a halved egg. Nervously, she gradually ended up hiding her face—which she had initially shown about half of—outside the *shoji* screen.

“Why are you afraid of me? You’re so jumpy, you know.”

As the man gouged out a rough cut with his chisel and abruptly looked up to speak, the woman replied in a low voice:

“No.
“I’m not particularly afraid.”

She said in a near-whisper, read the faint irritation coloring his expression yet immediately discerned a hint of gentleness unlike his usual sullenness.
He was trying to talk gently about something with me in a different mood from usual, the woman quickly concluded.

“If that’s how it is, fine—but if you keep brooding all day like this, you’ll end up ill.”
“You’re unwell even now, aren’t you?”
“You’ve become strikingly emaciated, haven’t you?”

The man spoke, his gaze taking in everything up to her slender arms—the lonely slanting lines flowing faintly across her shoulders like pencil strokes drawn with a thin lead.

“I don’t feel anything wrong myself… and there’s no particular place that’s unwell…”

“Your emaciation is too severe.”
“You shouldn’t dwell on things.”

When the man said this, the woman replied, “I know I’ve become emaciated…,” then rolled up her sleeve and stroked her slender hand as if to demonstrate.
From elbow to wrist, it was as slender as a minnow, stretched out in a pallid, prickling hue that seemed timid and drained of luster.
Veins like leaf veins showed through in a pale bluish hue.

“You’re always worrying about things before they happen.”
“You shouldn’t think about all these trivial things.”

When the man spoke while smoking, the woman started to say something but then closed her mouth.
Her expression immediately grew colder and paler, triggered by the trembling of her eyelids.
It was an expression she always revealed unexpectedly when falling completely silent; upon seeing this, the man immediately discerned both its persistence and the turmoil within her.
For the man—having been with the woman for so long—it was an expression that had become immediately recognizable.

“…………”
The woman silently raised her eyes and gazed at the man.
When the man saw the color of her eyes, he sensed a profound, uniquely feminine flame smoldering within them.
They were eyes filled with resentful persistence—strangely entangling and inescapable.

“I’ll do a bit more work.
Go wait over there.”

The man kept his face turned away this time, beginning detailed carvings with precise chisel taps at the workbench’s edge, never once glancing back toward the woman.
When she saw him working with bowed head, she fidgeted for two full minutes—scouring her heart for words that might please him—but found nothing.
She slid the shoji shut without a whisper of sound.
It closed with papery pallor.
Only then did the man finally lift relieved eyes before returning to his workbench.

The woman returned to her room, sat plastered like paste, placed her hands on her knees, and stared blankly while lost in thought.

As dusk approached and the man had just finished changing into fresh clothes, the woman’s hands—washing dishes in the kitchen—quivered violently, then abruptly stilled, her eyes becoming fixated on the massive water jar’s rounded body.
The amber-glazed surface of the jar bore countless wart-like kiln spots.
When she finished counting them all, what remained inside—a slick creature with eel-like skin, coiled long and tight—appeared before her eyes as a forest.
The woman continued her intense staring with such fervor that she seemed to become a single blazing fire, squinting until her eyes nearly vanished.
At that moment—whatever had entered her vision—she swiftly wiped her paused hands with her apron, then slipped off the slender work sash like a bucket hoop and draped it limply over the towel rack.
And then she immediately went out to the tea room and peeked briefly at the mirror.
The mirror, pregnant with evening light, was deeply recessed yet appeared desolate as a blank sheet somewhere.

The woman went out to the entrance, took the usual brown hat, and stood up slenderly—at that moment, the man ambled out from his room toward the entrance, and upon seeing her, started in surprise as his face changed color.
Strangely, no matter when it happened—whenever he prepared to go out—even if engrossed in urgent work, the woman would invariably anticipate his departure, emerging first to wait at the entrance as was her custom.
While anyone might naturally feel inclined to go out after meals, even before eating she would always stand there holding his brown hat, motionless as soundless water.
Thus with the dark-hued sliding door behind him, seeing her standing there precisely now struck him sharply in the chest.
Though he had changed clothes so quietly—had she already sensed it?—as he stole a glance, the woman said in a dampened voice,

“Please take care on your way.”

With those words, she handed him the brown hat.
While observing her slender, broad bean-like fingertips aligned along the soft hat’s brim, the man accepted the hat in silence. Habitually slipping into his geta, he threw open the lattice door with surprising force and slid out through the box-like entrance.
After seeing him off with a slightly upturned gaze, the woman softly closed the shoji screen and settled back down by the long hibachi.

Even as waterlogged darkness crept into every corner of the evening light, the woman remained seated, continuing her prolonged stare at a single spot.
With one hand drooping limply onto the tatami mat and the other resting on her knee, her eyes appeared rigidly fixated—her brows, nose, lips, and emaciated cheek muscles all converging toward that focal point as though her entire face had sharpened into a blade of concentration.
At that moment she stared intently at the newspaper laid before her, but after her expression seemed to shift briefly, she continued gazing with even fiercer intensity.
Her pale face became like a single strip of cloth spread over the newspaper until she quietly lifted it, revealing beneath a multitude of red ants—resembling sesame seeds—forming faint, nearly indiscernible trails that extended from the tatami edge to the shoji screen's threshold.
When she saw this, she wiped each one away with a damp rag before sitting back down to stare at walls and shoji screens as she did nightly.
Strangely, as she stared at these surfaces hour after hour, her mind grew clearer—shadow-like forms routinely projecting themselves beyond the shoji and walls.
This gradually became habitual; whenever the man was away she perceived beyond their shared wall (though in reality just their neighbor's boundary) another room where an electric lamp hung brightly, its stark white light now clearly visible.
The features of this vision—possessing a brightness utterly alien to her home and an air of newness—seemed meticulously arranged with hanging scrolls and floral displays.
Most vivid stood the man's figure—wearing that same smile he'd once shown her long ago, sitting in that same cross-legged posture, speaking with that same familiar tone.
While smiling identically and conversing animatedly, he moved with apparent interest—his gestures now betraying delight.

In contrast to how vividly the man’s figure appeared, the woman’s side remained blurred like a shadow; no matter how hard she strained her eyes to see clearly, she felt herself gradually shrinking smaller and receding into the distance. Yet even in that indistinct, rather hazy countenance, a warped, nearly crushed seductive smile surfaced—particularly her darkened, thick lips rebounding like a solitary newt, coalescing into an intense embodiment of carnal desire. When the two frenzied shadows—a man with drunken, swaying eyes fixated on those lips, reaching to seize her hand or press his mouth to hers—had utterly commandeered her vision and nerves within that uncanny room beyond the wall, accompanied by the dragging rasp of tatami, the woman sat rigidly upright as if deranged, stiff as an iron rod. The pallid skin now lay fully shrouded in an increasingly violent whiteness and unhinged mental tension, while across its surface a faint tremor quivered violently. Now especially, her squint—narrowed to slits—seemed to ceaselessly spill white thread-like filaments beyond the wall. The suspicious figure beyond whirled like a magic lantern projection while their smiling mouths—now nearly merging into one mass, now abruptly darting like vermilion newts—were dimly etched into the shadowed periphery. The man clung to the woman’s side like a starved beast, radiating a vigor and vitality so unlike his languid daytime self at the workbench that he seemed transformed entirely.

While I spend every night like this thinking of that person，I gradually waste away to skin and bone.
I have been watching everything that happens after that person leaves every night for a long time.
That person does not know it.
Even as I try not to look，I find myself dragged into thinking of that person every single day.
While thinking this，the woman suddenly—as if her spirit had drained away—dropped her hips between her heels.
No sooner had she shriveled like a pallid bubble than her eyes darted about as though roused from a nightmare.
Beneath her utterly exhausted eyes，even a darkened ring formed，and a greasy sheen rose across her forehead.

The woman, as though fleeing something terrifying, let out a sigh—“Ah!”—but her shoulders quivered visibly from her labored breathing. After a while, the woman went out to the kitchen, but immediately, the gulping sounds of her drinking water continued heavily several times. When the woman sat back down in her usual spot, she couldn’t help but feel something flickering and moving before her eyes. Thinking it might be her eyes, she rubbed them with her palms, but the movement persisted without ceasing. When she startled into awareness, she saw the wall clock hanging there. It had been without thought,

The clock had been moving.
With those words, the woman formed a faint smile.
It was an extremely peculiar smile—one could hardly tell whether she was smiling or not.
When she glanced at the clock again shortly afterward and this time let out a smile so uncanny it escaped audibly, the woman startled at her own smiling voice and looked around.
At that moment, the hands past half past nine appeared to wriggle like tadpoles swimming.

Ten o'clock passed, eleven o'clock passed, and until the final train's whistle sounded as usual, the woman remained seated—neither asleep nor awake—swaying as if drowsily cradled in a basket. Before long, as usual from that hour, she felt something like water creeping upward from her hips and sensed her pupils sharpen with a clarity as though eye drops had been administered. For reasons unknown—that late hour dragged her back once more into the illusion that had assailed her earlier. She stiffened as though clamped in a vise and began intently focusing her hearing. At that moment, footsteps sounded somewhere along what seemed to be a road. A distant rhythmic sound—like hurried temple blocks—seemed to approach from the brightly lit expanse, hook sharply around a corner and suddenly draw nearer along the dimly lit street.

At that moment, the woman closed her eyes and focused only her ears.
The strange clatter of wooden clogs grew gradually clearer as it ascended what seemed to be a slope.
The rows of new houses on both sides lay silent in sleep, and only the man’s blackened figure dragged an even darker shadow through the night.
“That corner has a fruit shop, and next to it is a barber.”
Only the barber’s shop cast bright electric light onto the road along the slumbering street.
A dark shadow emerged there.
The man passed through there.
Then came the heavy gurgling of the ditch, and as the man quietly passed through there, he turned into a dark alley.
At the fifth house where lacquer-like darkness continued, a dimly lit electric lamp revealed a lattice door fitted with vivid clarity.
As she sank into thought with "...", a clattering sound rang out.
The woman was startled and opened her eyes.
The lattice door opened, and the man returned.

The woman fluidly rose and went to the entrance.

“Welcome home.”

The brown hat returned to the woman’s hand but was immediately hung on the hat rack.
The man whispered in a drunken voice and a low, hesitant tone.

“Did anyone come? Any mail?”

“No. No one came.”

Having said this, the woman glanced at the man’s face—he showed no difference from earlier.
She felt as though a woman with newt-like lips was standing just inside the entrance and gazed at the dark man’s back.
The lattice, with the eaves light behind it, was set bleakly into a coarse frame.

“I see.”
“Were you lonely?”
“Since it’s late, you should sleep.”

As the man said this and looked at the woman’s face, it seemed that since he had left in the evening, she had shed yet another layer of gauntness. Her complexion worsening day by day also caught his eye. “Let me prepare the bed.”

After saying this and preparing the bedding, the man lay down his limply exhausted body.
She was truly an eerie woman.
She was making a strange face as though she’d seen everything—even me.
With that thought, he squinted his eyes open to see the woman placing her hands on the threshold,

“Good night.”

She stared intently at the man’s face but rose soundlessly and went to her room.
Strange woman.
She moved soundlessly as a cat.
When stared at intently through those upturned eyes, he would make a face that seemed to know everything about him as if photographed.
The man dozed off while thinking this.

While changing her kimono, the woman reflected her slender chest in the mirror and gazed intently at her own strangely emaciated body.
The small breasts, the desolate swell of her pigeon chest, and the slender throat stretched upward.
Above her throat lay her pallid neck.
The woman, exposing the paper-like whiteness emanating from her raw, vivid body to the clear late-night electric light, stared at it for a long time until—

She let out a soft chuckle... and smiled to herself.
This time again, she assumed a firm, earnest, tense expression and glared with wide eyes.
No sooner had she assumed this expression than her eyes suddenly took on an entranced, coquettish allure—only for her to abruptly shatter that look with another smile.
White teeth appeared.
It was cold.

From the man’s room, small snoring began to emerge.
The woman—who had pricked up her ears like a rabbit—burst into quiet tears from between her gloomy, clouded brows and eyes the moment she heard it.
The long-suppressed sobs—accumulated all at once in various sorrowful forms—continued.
They strangely resembled both the sound of a flute and somehow the sniffling whine of a dog.

One day, the man was stirring wood shavings in his workshop and clattering his toolbox about, as if frantically searching for something.

The rain had dyed the outside air amber—it was a gloomy afternoon.

When the woman suddenly showed her face in the workshop, the man asked in a flustered manner.

“I can’t find the chisel.”
“The chisel….”

he said while stirring the wood shavings.

“Yes. Perhaps it isn’t in the toolbox?” The woman peered into the toolbox, but it wasn’t there either.

“No—it’s not in the box.”
“Strange.”
“It’s truly strange.”
“But I was just using it.”

The man said this and stared blankly at the woman's face.
The woman then sharply cast her eyes around and began staring intently at the shelves, finished works, and lumber nearby.
At that moment, strangely, the woman's eyes gradually began to narrow.
The usual intense squint crawled over the wood shavings like flickering flames.

When the man casually glanced at the woman's eyes, he was immediately startled.
They possessed too fierce a stare and a suspicious light akin to that of a mad person.
At that moment, the woman stood up and pointed at the straw bag filled with wood shavings.

“Could it have gotten into that one?
“That’s how it seems to me….”

“In the straw bag?”

“Yes.”

“No way—wait, when I packed the wood shavings earlier… Didn’t my hand touch something hard…?”

The man pondered awhile before startling and moving straight to the straw bag.

“Ah.
“Indeed, I did pack it in with the wood shavings.”

With that, the man began pulling out the wood shavings.
And there, he discovered a chisel with a white blade mixed in with the wood shavings.

“That was close.”
"Even so, it's a wonder I didn't get hurt."

When the man ran his palm along the blade's edge and finally realized she had stated it was in the straw bag, he jolted in surprise, his complexion altering as he stared at her.
Yet the woman remained composed, appearing like pale crumpled paper that seemed spent, even wearing a faint tender smile.
Seeing this calmness, the man felt coldness spread beneath his arms.

"But how did you know the chisel was in the straw bag?"

When he said this, the woman smiled and replied.

“But it couldn’t possibly be anywhere else, you see.”

“That may be so, but…”
The man fell silent and stared creepily at the woman.
At that moment, he felt as if he were seeing something different from his usual partner.
Though he couldn’t grasp what it was, he thought her body contained something he himself lacked.
He even began to feel a strange, indescribable sensation—as though her flesh harbored some special electricity or phosphorus.

After the woman quietly went to the next room, the man thought about various things.
The woman's ceaseless sinking into persistent contemplation of something and her strange capacity to sit idle in one place without growing bored were now gradually weighing strangely on the man's heart.

Night fell.

While the woman was out in the garden, the man quickly stripped off his work clothes and threw on his outer garments.
When he hurried to the entrance, the man was startled and jumped about a foot in the air.
For there she stood—before he knew it—holding the usual rat-pelt-brown hat, her slender form elongated as though she had sniffed her way there.

“Just now you seemed to have gone out to the garden—or were you in the house?”

The man took his hat and gazed at the woman’s face as he spoke.

“But since it seemed you were going out….”

Having answered, she gently slid open the entrance’s *shoji* screen and—

“Please go safely.”

—said while placing her hands on the floor.
Round hands resembling fingerless mittens rested on the tatami.

“Hmm…”

The man stepped into his *geta* and went outside.
In the dusky sky where twilight still lingered, dark bats darted low—skimming the ground as they stitched through the gloom.

"It seems that woman has different feelings," he thought. "She’s constantly lost in thought, trying to find something."
As he dwelled on this and reached the usual Mizokawa Bridge, he abruptly stopped.
He watched bubbles swell from the ditch and burst like fish entrails when—instead of crossing—he turned back toward his house.

At home after his departure, the woman had again sat slumped, seemingly drowsing over some thought until she jerked her head up as if yanked by the collar.
Her face turned pure white.
Her ears revealed layered spiral contours, standing rigid with piercing sharpness.

"What in the world?"

When the woman muttered in a small voice, outside, the man had stealthily approached the damp wooden door and clung to it like a flat spider.
Though it was a starry sky, complete darkness had already dyed everything around, and something dark was languidly crawling across the ground.

“If that’s the case… he must have turned back near the bridge and be at the kitchen door now.”

When the woman muttered this inwardly, she distinctly envisioned the man’s figure lurking dimly—flattened against the kitchen door made of horizontal planks like a black speck. And she quivered violently like a dragonfly. As she stared, a large black shadow resembling a flounder appeared on one *shoji* screen, unable to fit entirely upon it, extending its form onto another. She felt the *shoji* paper strangely rasping against itself.

The clock passed ten or twenty minutes in that time.
Soon thirty minutes had passed.
The night lay quiet; beyond the sound of insects in the damp soil after a light rain, within a heavy silence where nothing seemed likely to occur, the darkness appeared to gradually deepen.
Though the woman had swallowed her breath due to intense tension, this had now turned into a labored, gasping rhythm; as she tried to draw in air with convulsive gulps, her body seemed bound tight, leaving her unable to move freely.
Her legs, hands, and face stiffened as if clenched.
Her chest stiffened like a board, and the strength to move her body seemed to have drained away.

The figure outside remained stuck to the wooden door, and as it was reflected back onto two shoji screens, it cast an increasingly darker image into the woman’s eyes.
The woman’s face was dry as paste—nothing more than a sheet of paper bearing a deathly pallor.
Her breathing appeared increasingly labored.
The usual squint had already persisted for over an hour since its initial ten minutes.

And then, as the outside shadow peeled away from the wooden door with a swift ripping motion, the silhouette on the shoji screen slid sluggishly.
When the woman’s squint flickered in a Z-shape,

“One step, two steps, three steps….”

With her heart pounding violently and breath coming in gasps, the woman began counting in a low voice.
The soft earth made no sound, but when she had counted to five steps, the shadow on the shoji screen had completely vanished—suddenly the entrance lattice rattled with thunderous noise as the man came in.
But just two seconds before that lattice clattered, she was severed from that terrifying world of tension and staring, and as though folded at her slender waist, lost consciousness and collapsed forward.
as if her bones had shattered—she slumped—

Soon the woman went to bed.
Her eyes remained fixed not toward the light, but on walls and shoji screens, on corners thick with shadows.
She had withered like a dried sardine, subsisting on meager portions of rice gruel, pallid milk, and occasional fruit.
Yet her pupils were abnormally dilated, their gleam growing sharper and more intense than before she took to her bed.

She passed the hours listlessly examining her own fingerprints or timidly stroking her slender arms with a rustling touch, drifting through spells of drowsiness only to startle awake again.
No sooner would she cease these motions than she would resume counting numbers in near-ceaseless repetition.

"One, two, three, four, five…"

This was repeated endlessly without reason.
The doctor diagnosed it as neurasthenia and warned the man she had sunk into a melancholic state verging on mental illness.

During intervals between his work, the man would visit the woman’s room and,

"Is there anything you want?"

He often asked，but the woman would shake her head and，

"No."
"There’s nothing I want."

She would simply close her eyes after answering.
Whenever he looked at her pale, emaciated forehead or the nape of her neck, he would immediately recall the woman’s body from that evening she had fainted—strangely contorted and limp like a corpse’s.
This was because both her hands and neck had come apart and gone slack.
When he lifted her head, her arm—dangling limply from the shoulder joint like a languid stream—and her upturned wrist scraped against the tatami matting, producing an unpleasant scratching sound like centipedes crawling.

“Please tell me how I was lying just now.”

When the woman said this and faintly opened her eyes, the man gradually came to understand—with an eerie clarity—why she had fainted.

“You were lying face down—like this.”

When the man bent at the waist himself and demonstrated a prostrate posture, the woman assumed a delighted expression,

“Oh….”

With that, she glanced briefly at the man’s face and smiled.
To the man, this too felt as if it had been done deliberately, and he suddenly fell silent.

The man returned to his workshop and began steadily carving.
While doing so, he quietly slid open the shoji, grew concerned about how the patient in the next room was sleeping, got down on all fours, and crept silently toward the next shoji door.

When the man peered through the gap in the shoji, the woman who had sat up turned deathly pale and spoke in a voice that seemed to have long detected and awaited his stealthy approach.

“Is there something you require?”

The voice was calm.
The man was shocked and turned cold, shrinking his body and remaining silent without answering.

“Even if you do such things, I’ll know perfectly well.”

When he was told this, the man resolutely slid open the shoji screen.
The woman put on a smile.
Wrinkles like those of a cold turtle gathered at the forehead.

“Why can you see me?”
“You’re creepy—”

When the man stood rigid and said this while staring at the emaciated woman’s exposed chest,

“You’re the disgusting one, crawling on all fours and sneaking up like that.”

When the woman answered like that, the man turned cold again and suddenly found himself at a loss for words.
He simply stared intently at this strange woman as though beholding something uncanny.
By now, she had grown so gaunt and elongated it seemed she was subsisting on nothing but frayed nerves.
Once she lay down, she remained prone—too sluggish to even attempt crawling out, her body slick and emaciated, her eerie pallor now translucent.

“How on earth do you always know when I’ve sneaked up here?”

The woman smiled listlessly and,

“Why… It’s just that I can’t help but see you.”

The man turned pale and, still standing, suddenly caught sight of the woman’s ear.
It had a thin, white fungus-shaped form that occasionally twitched as if trembling.
How strangely unsettling a human’s moving ear could be—today was the first time he realized hers could twitch like that.
It had been moving even during times he hadn’t been aware of it.
The man asked with this thought in mind.

“Do you close your eyes to figure it out?”
“Or do you think with your eyes open?”

The man said while inwardly sensing the strangeness of his own question,

“It’s neither….”

“So it’s neither…?”

The man answered like that, fell silent, and started to withdraw.
The woman tried to slip her body back into the futon at that moment.
The ribs along her flank rippled with mechanical regularity, their gritty texture imprinting on his vision, so that the man felt a chill as though he’d run his hand over those knobby bones.

“Please close that as you leave.”

When the woman said this, she abruptly slid her pallid neck out from the futon.
The man shuddered involuntarily and closed the shoji.
Even after closing it, her gaunt figure lingered stubbornly in his vision.

Even when he went outside, her ashen face would materialize before him, leaving him unsettled.
When riding the train, catching an unexpected glimpse of any woman’s face among the passengers would inexplicably summon hers from home.
A dark room surfaced in his mind.
Her profile—deliberately angled toward the wall and shoji screen—staring fixedly while lost in thought kept haunting him.
She must have been obsessing over his route again: “By now he must have turned that street corner,” he imagined her thinking, “entered that cluttered avenue, boarded the train as abruptly as hurling a stone.”
“Then he’d take out his wallet to buy a ticket... and then...” Whenever he reconstructed these conjectures of hers, he’d feel her presence beside him so vividly that he began glancing about furtively.

When the man got off the train, he entered the quiet house he always frequented.
That was a room somewhere in the backstreets of the town, furnished with alluring bamboo blinds, armrests, and a slender tobacco tray.
Visible were a cold rosewood dining table and a long, well-polished corridor glimpsed behind sliding doors.

“It’s been some time since you last came.”
“Shall I seat you?”

When the maid said that, the man replied in a weary voice,

“Ah—then hurry and bring me sake.”

When the man gave this order, the maid promptly left, and as usual, he was left alone in a daze within the spacious tatami room.

The heavy, rainless, overcast air outside settled the house into a hushed stillness.

Before long, the telephone rang.
It seemed to be a call for the woman.

The man, while puffing on a cigarette, recalled what the woman had said when he left the house—unlike his usual self—"Please come back soon." When he had tried to go out for the first time in ages since falling ill, she had said those words while leaning her pale neck out from the futon as was her custom. Her glinting scale-like eyes and emaciated pointed nostrils surfaced in his vision once more.

"I mustn’t—mustn’t let this strange unease take hold."

The man stopped smoking and, after another tedious five or six minutes passed, a woman in flamboyant attire—as though quietly awakening—knelt there.
The man’s face immediately brightened.

“It’s been a while, hasn’t it?” she said, leaning forward slightly.
She seemed to have come in haste—patches of her sallow complexion showed where the foundation brush hadn’t fully reached, leaving those areas oddly smooth and glossy, like bald spots.

“You’re being oddly quiet.”
“Somehow…”

“No, I’m not thinking about anything in particular.”
“It’s a heavy, unpleasant day.”

“So many strange things happened today.”
“The bathhouse clock had stopped, ours stopped at three, and on top of that, it’s truly strange.”
“Mine had stopped too.”

When the man heard this, mechanically,

“Hmm…” he said, searching through his obi, then took out the watch that had slipped down and gazed at it. As it was making small ticking sounds, the woman brightened as if relieved,

“Oh, how wonderful!”
“If yours had stopped too, I was thinking what I’d do.”
“I’m so strangely nervous—a real worrywart, you know.”

When the man suddenly looked up at the transom, he found a small sliding door left open there and couldn't shake the feeling he'd glimpsed something shadow-like.
Though it wasn't clear who or what it was, he felt uneasy and looked around restlessly.
A dull reddish-brown wall, the shoji screen, and a small incense burner in the alcove came into view.

“How strange. You… you’ve been doing nothing but interrupting and fidgeting since earlier, haven’t you?”

The woman, following the man’s eyes as they darted about, said this,

“Hmm, maybe. I just feel unsettled somehow.”
“It’s also because it’s strangely quiet.”

When the man said this, the woman immediately,

“Every customer gets lost in thought and sinks into this strange gloom.”
“They always seem to be searching for something deep inside themselves.”
“What do you suppose they’re thinking about?”

“Those with families must be thinking about their homes.” When the man caught sight of the long figure lying down and the pale face turned toward the shoji screen and wall, he wondered if perhaps she might take a turn for the worse tonight. If she were going to die, she wouldn’t be here now—but if her condition worsened… As he sank into thought, the woman smiled sweetly, “Those who have a wife must end up thinking about their wives after all, I suppose.”

she said in a serious voice.

“Well, I suppose so.”

The man wasn’t feeling the effects of the alcohol at all.
When the man reluctantly attempted to open the lid of the incense burner in the alcove, the woman immediately grabbed his sleeve.

“You mustn’t.”
“And you mustn’t look at that thing again either.”

The man had a habit of gazing at the incense burner lid whenever he felt restless. On the back of the lid was depicted a detailed crimson painting of a beautiful man and woman embracing warmly, and strangely, whenever he looked at it, his body would invariably surge with a different kind of strength and vitality. Whenever he felt gloomy, he would fixate his gaze for a long time on those two white fish entwined like glistening lovers.

“I’m feeling restless.”
“Who cares if I look?”

The man picked up the lid and stared fixedly at it.
Looking at this made it easy to forget trivial matters—that was what made it good.
As he tilted it sideways and held it up to the light,

“How funny.”
“If you keep staring like that—ha ha ha.”

The woman smiled and tried to snatch it.
Then, the crimson-bellied lips—sharply delineated like those of a salamander—came vividly into the man’s view.
The man tried to grab the limp hand.
At that moment, he was struck sharply.
She wasn’t the type to do such things normally, though.

“You fool!”
“What are you doing?”
The man said while rubbing his struck hand,

“I didn’t do anything.”
“It must have been someone else who struck you.”

“To say it must’ve been someone—”

“It wasn’t me.
“I’ve got a cigarette in this hand, see?
“So I can’t strike you.
“How strange.
“Ha, ha, ha.”

When the man looked at the woman’s left hand, a cigarette—as long and pale as her fingers—was held there, quietly emitting smoke.

“You’re lying!”
Having said that, the man was seized by an inexplicable rage and raised his hand to strike the woman.
A seething, irritated fury raised veins across his forehead.

“Ha, ha, ha, there!”

When the woman laughed shrilly through adulterous provocation, the man stiffened rigidly.
Then, the woman turned as pale as if washed blue and, startled, remained silent for a while.
But she began to laugh strangely again.
The woman, who had such habits when drunk, simply found it amusing.

“Ah…”
Yes—it could be heard.
Disgusting.
The man heard a sound like a neck limply scraping down from the floor onto the tatami.
If something were to happen to her, he would still feel sorry.
Tonight might be the critical moment.
When the man began to think regretfully that he should have stayed home for her sake, the alcohol had already made his legs unsteady.
She had never once said anything that sounded like a complaint.
While feeling guilty, he had sneaked out of the house.

“What’s wrong?”
“It hurts.”

“Don’t talk nonsense.”
“Bring more sake.”
“Heat it up.”

After the woman descended the ladder stairs, the man remained alone for some time.
Being alone made the shoji screen appear unnervingly white and vivid, inducing an eerie anticipation that something might project itself upon it.
Whether it was the wall or the needlessly spacious tatami room—neither felt right.
When the man picked up the Shikishima pack, a dry rustling like fallen leaves sounded from it, making him gaze curiously at it.

"And then—hasn't some changed event occurred?"
"Or maybe she's sleeping facing the wall every hour? Why did she develop this habit of always sleeping turned toward walls?"
"When did she become such a strange woman...?"

At that moment came the sound of footsteps walking quietly along the long corridor—those of the woman who had descended downstairs. And when she entered the room,

“How terrifying—” she said, her face turning pale. Her eyebrows fluttered as though startled.

“Why are you scared?”

“I was truly frightened. But you keep blinking those eyes like that—something’s definitely off about you today.”

“Am I really acting different?”

“You really are acting strange. What are you holding in your hand?”

“What… what do you mean…?”

When he noticed, the man was still firmly gripping the incense burner lid.
The hand that had been gripping it had held on for so long that it had nearly lost all sensation.

“You’re so disagreeable. You’re still gripping that thing, you know.”

The woman said and tried to snatch it back, but the man would not let go.

“I’d completely forgotten. Hand it over? Never.”

The man said this and kept stubbornly gripping it tight. All the while drawing two squirming creatures in his mind with a soft, itching sensation that made his scalp crawl.

“Then keep it forever. Ha, ha.”
“Ha, ha.”

The woman reluctantly said this and poured more sake.
The man had thought of asking the woman about the scar on her throat someday but had been unable to bring himself to mention it—now he inquired about it.
It was a strangely chestnut-colored scar, about a quarter-inch in length—unsettling in its dimensions.
It was a scar that invited—the more one imagined, the more interpretations it could sustain.

“It’s nothing. Just a mark left from lancing a boil.”

The woman said and stroked the scar with her index finger.
The soft, pale neck that seemed to constantly rotate like a potter’s wheel, and the small, distinct scar beneath the throat—these drove abhorrent delusions through the man.

“A boil?” he said.
I wondered if she’d botched a lovers’ suicide attempt.

“If that’s the case, how thoughtful…”

The man said and abruptly fell silent.

“Something had happened.”
Something had happened to the extent that I noticed.
That scar was not just a scar.
"That scar was by no means just a scar."
The man began thinking this way.
The woman too fell silent.
The man immediately thought again of the woman at home—her pallid neck, a neck like a white onion ready to snap.
He desperately hoped nothing had occurred, yet in his tormented mind insisted rather: Nothing could have possibly happened.
“She must be sleeping peacefully like that, facing the wall,” he thought.
He sighed in relief and brought the cup to his lips.

"What could possibly have happened?"
"The anticipation is worse than the event itself."
"Surely nothing has truly occurred... But if she's there hour after hour staring at the wall, deducing—or trying to deduce—that I'm sitting here talking with this woman, glaring with that familiar squint... Wouldn't she have deteriorated to her worst state, grown even thinner, become utterly hysterical?"

The man recalled the chisel and being challenged from the room next to the entrance and thought, “Perhaps—unexpectedly, truly unexpectedly—she might have completely deduced everything here.”
“The entirety of me being here.”
When the man thought this, he jolted.
The cigarette ash crumbled into gritty whiteness atop the low table.

“I’d like you to let me go home now.”
“You see, I’ve been asked elsewhere…”

While fearfully watching the man’s eyes shine strangely, the woman spoke timidly and keenly gauged whether he would consent.

“Leaving?”
“Hmm.”
“If you’ve been summoned elsewhere, fine.”
“I won’t stop you.”

Contrary to expectation, his anger subsided completely, leaving his mind thick as a forest.

“Please don’t think badly of me.”

The woman peered into the man’s face as if deliberately doing so, flashed a catlike smile tinged with overfamiliarity for an instant, then immediately left the room. The sound of footsteps faded from the long corridor.

"I'm alone again now."
"There was no reason it specifically had to be that woman."
As he resentfully muttered “Hmm,” an unsteady wave of drunkenness suddenly surged through him.

After paying the money, he lumbered off and began walking around the edge of the pond.

“Let me just go home.”
“I firmly believe nothing has happened.”
“Definitely.”

The man obstinately repeated under his breath and, while drenched in the blue light of the gas lamp, abruptly collided with something when he took about two steps.

Due to his drunkenness, his vision blurred slightly.
When he looked down, straw scraps lay scattered everywhere.
They rustled with a dry, unpleasant smell.

Around the time the man boarded the train, she turned pale as a frog, her upper body leaning out from the floor as she exhaled rough shoulder-heaving breaths - newly released from a world of extreme fatigue and staring.
Strangely, rather than passively observing everything through vision alone, she perceived each of his actions through near-precise imagination.
Even she herself could not determine how much of this fixation realm consisted of imagination versus hallucination - or whether she wandered through some clairvoyant dreamscape.
She had long grown accustomed to vividly reconstructing every detail whenever she saw his figure emerge into city streets - discerning within his form an unmistakable hue amid urban bustle - clearly sensing through his ordinary routines every nuance of gait and gesture down to his entry into that woman's house and all minute movements within its rooms - rendering them with photographic precision.

At that moment, the woman precisely sensed—as if viewing something nearly transparent—the separation between herself and whichever street the man now walked through, this separation that gradually drew nearer. Amidst various shops and pedestrians and electric lights and festival stall vendors, his shadowed figure advanced step by step—projected in tandem with the town’s rows of houses narrowing into distant lines behind him. The man she saw appeared utterly exhausted, his expression intensely irritated as he maintained his oppressive stride, seemingly consumed by some burdensome thought. When through this she could confirm it undeniably concerned her own affairs and that his awareness remained fixed solely upon her, she allowed a faint version of her characteristic concealed smile to surface.

As the man began to cross the earthen bridge, when footsteps sounding like strikes against a barrel reached the woman's ears, she pulled the blanket completely over her head and feigned peaceful sleep.
As soon as he opened the front door and came up from the earthen floor, he slid open the shoji screen.
And then,

“Has there been any change?”
“Are you asleep, I wonder.”
He muttered the final words like a soliloquy and gazed at the woman’s pallid face.
The woman parted her eyelids slightly and replied in an exhausted voice,

“Welcome back.”
“It’s gotten quite late, hasn’t it.”

After saying just this, the woman smiled with a familiarity greater than usual.
“Nothing had happened.”
“I was thinking that perhaps something terribly ominous might have occurred.”
The man wore a relieved expression,

“Hmm.”
“There was something that took a little time. That’s why it’s late.”
“No change is just the right condition.”

When he said this seriously and calmly, the woman smiled deeply and immediately composed her face back to its original serious expression.
Strange creature.
She had lately taken to making such smiles from time to time.
At such times, I always feel as though something has been pointed out about me.

As the man silently tried to return to his room, the woman—

“Um… Just a little…”

She stammered and stared sharply at the man’s left sleeve.
The man mechanically reached for his left sleeve and noticed something hard, like ceramic, inside.
“There’s no way I would have brought such a thing back even if I were drunk.”
“There’s no way… But there’s also no reason for anything else to be in here.”
Just as the man thought this, the idea that abruptly came to him was the incense burner lid.
He couldn’t possibly have brought such a thing… he thought, but his face immediately flushed hot as fire.

“Please show me.”

When the woman said this and smiled with a languid, stretched expression, the man—startled—mechanically retrieved the incense burner lid from his sleeve.
When he took it out, he wore a calm face devoid of shame or consideration—one that seemed rather disgusted.

“What’s the point in looking? It’s trivial.”

Dismissing this, the woman abruptly dragged out her long snake-like white hand sinuously as if slithering from between the bedding.
And when she took the incense burner lid in her hand, she suddenly let out a high-pitched shriek—an almost simian screech.
She began trembling so violently and morbidly that it seemed something catastrophic would happen.
In the next instant, she burst into raucous laughter as if collapsing,

“Ah, absurd!”
“Ah, absurd!”

And she began rolling about wildly. Her thin body, like a white potato, sinews twitching, crawled around like a madwoman.
“You idiot.”

When the man shouted this, her rolling body came to an abrupt halt as if it had reached the bottom of a slope.
At the same time, she slowly began to lift her face.
That face was livid, damp with sweat and heat.
There were areas that seemed to seethe and bubble as if boiling over.
Her eyes and eyebrows and nose—as if brawling in unison—were churned into disparate shapes and glares and fury before being slammed toward his face with violent velocity.

Then suddenly—in an incomprehensible delirium—she began shrieking and clawed at everything around her with rasping scrapes. The man’s heartbeat churned with extreme anxiety and violent pounding.

“Maybe she’s gone mad,” he thought.
“Those eyes aren’t normal!
Maybe—
No—maybe this was an instant long after madness had already taken her.”

Thinking this,

“It’d be good if you’d calm down.”
“What’s with that disheveled look… Stay calm… Stay still and don’t move.”

When he said this in a hurried low voice meant to soothe her, the woman momentarily returned to a stillness where her eyes and nose seemed dead—but then abruptly shattered that clear, quiet expression with seething turmoil, fixing her gaze straight at him with eyes spewing fiery flames.
“Say it once more. Go on.”
“What is this?”
“But what on earth is this?”
“What is this?”
“Ah, what is this?”

And once again clutching the incense burner lid as if to sink her teeth into it, she began grinding her teeth with a terrible gnashing sound. As the man watched this, an uncanny terror and supernatural menace completely possessed his mind—his chest started pounding of its own accord, and he even felt a faint dizziness creeping in.

“What on earth is this?”

With another fresh scream, she bolted upright, and no sooner had her pallid neck settled than she suddenly smashed the incense burner lid against the wall with all her strength.
The old ceramic shattered into fragments, revealing its white surface.

“You did it….”

When the man reflexively shouted back, the woman screamed with a frenzy beyond frenzy—but soon burst into raucous laughter,

“Ah, strange.
“Strange.”

Having said that, she began rolling again.
But this time, her rolling was feeble and listless, and no sooner had it begun than it came to an abrupt halt—like a wheel coming to rest.

“Ah…”

With a yawn-like, drained voice, she collapsed flat on her face.
Her pallid face sank limply into the old tatami mats as if crushed, eyes remaining dull and open—utterly motionless.