Pathway to Japanese Literature

Author: Edogawa Ranpo

If this story was neither my dream nor a phantom of temporary madness, then that man journeying with the oshi-e must indeed have been the madman.
Yet just as dreams may sometimes fleetingly reveal glimpses of worlds diverging from our own, or as madmen perceive things beyond our senses, this might have been me—through some uncanny atmospheric lens apparatus—catching in an instant a chance glimpse of another world's corner lying beyond mortal sight.

It was an indeterminate day—warm and hazy.
At that time, I was returning from having made a special trip to Uozu to see the mirage.
When I tell this story, close friends sometimes interrupt me: "You've never been to Uozu or anywhere like that!"
Faced with this accusation, I find myself unable to produce clear evidence of exactly when I visited Uozu.
Then was it all just a dream after all?
But I have never before experienced a dream with such intense coloration.
Though dreamscapes lack color like films do, that train compartment's view from that time—centered on that garish oshi-e surface—remains seared into my memory with its dominant purples and vermilions, vivid as a serpent's eye pupil.
Do such things as color-film dreams truly exist?

At that moment, I saw a mirage for the first time in my life.
I, who had been imagining that old-fashioned image of the beautiful Dragon Palace floating within a clam's exhaled mist, was struck by a shock bordering on terror—like greasy sweat oozing from my pores—when confronted with the actual mirage.

On the pine-lined beach of Uozu, bean-sized people swarmed together, holding their breath as they gazed out at the vast expanse of sky and sea stretching to the horizon.
I have never seen a sea so quiet, so mute-like in its silence.
For me, who had believed the Sea of Japan to be a raging sea, this too was extremely unexpected.
The sea was gray, without a single ripple, seeming like a marsh stretching endlessly into the infinite distance.
And, like the Pacific Ocean, there was no horizon; the sea and sky dissolved into the same gray, shrouded in haze of unknowable thickness.
What I had taken to be sky—the upper reaches of haze—turned out instead to be sea surface, where enormous white sails, floating ethereally like ghosts, slid past.

The mirage was like an enormous film projected across the heavens—as if someone had dripped sumi ink onto the surface of milky celluloid, letting it seep outward naturally, then magnified that process into something impossibly vast.

The distant forests of Noto Peninsula, through the warped atmospheric lens, appeared magnified absurdly and indistinctly like a black insect under an ill-focused microscope in the vast sky right before our eyes, looming over the viewer's head.
It resembled a strangely shaped black cloud, but whereas a black cloud's location remained clearly discernible, the mirage's distance from the observer stayed curiously ambiguous.
At times resembling a giant monk-like figure drifting on the distant sea, at other moments appearing as a grotesque haze looming just a foot before one's eyes, and ultimately feeling like nothing more than a single speck of cloudiness that had popped up on the surface of the viewer's cornea.
This ambiguity of distance gave the mirage an eeriness beyond imagination—a maddening quality.

Vague forms coalesced—a pitch-black giant triangle piled like towers only to collapse in an instant, stretched sideways to race like a long train, then crumbled into fragments resembling rows of cypress treetops, all while maintaining deceptive stillness before transforming into entirely different shapes without warning.

If the mirage’s magic had been capable of driving humans mad, then I likely would not have escaped its influence at least until the return train journey.

Having stood for over two hours gazing at that eerie phenomenon in the sky, it was certain I remained in a state of mind entirely divorced from everyday life from the evening I departed Uozu until spending that night on the train.

Could that have been a kind of temporary madness—like a passing demon grazing and violating the human mind?

It was around six o'clock in the evening when I boarded the train from Uozu Station to Ueno.
Was it a strange coincidence, or were the trains in that area always like that? The second-class car I boarded was as empty as a church, with only one other passenger besides myself crouching on a cushion in the far corner.

The train ran ceaselessly over the lonely coast's steep cliffs and sandy beaches, resounding with a monotonous mechanical noise.
In the marsh-like sea’s haze-shrouded depths, a sunset the color of black blood was dimly perceived.
Abnormally large white sails glided dreamily through it.
Since it was a completely windless, muggy day, even the faint breezes that crept in through the train’s partially opened windows as it advanced were ghostly and intermittent.
Countless short tunnels and rows of snow barrier posts passed by, dividing the vast gray expanse of sky and sea into striped bands.

As we passed the Oyashirazu cliffs, the evening gloom had deepened to the point where the train’s electric lights and the sky’s brightness felt equally stark.
At that very moment, the sole fellow passenger in the far corner suddenly stood up, spread out a large black crepe furoshiki on the cushion, and began wrapping into it a flat package—approximately two shaku by three shaku in size—that had been propped against the window.
That gave me an indescribably strange feeling.

The flat object was likely a framed picture, but he had propped it against the window glass with its front side facing outward, as if it held some special meaning. Since it had once been wrapped in a furoshiki, one could only assume he had deliberately taken it out and positioned it that way. Moreover, from what I glimpsed when he rewrapped it, the vividly colored painting on the frame's surface appeared unnervingly lifelike - somehow beyond ordinary reality.

I observed the owner of this peculiar package once more.
And I was astonished to find that the owner himself was even more bizarre than the uncanny package.

He wore an antiquated black suit—the narrow-collared, narrow-shouldered sort one only sees in faded photographs from our fathers' youth—yet this garment suited his tall, long-limbed frame so uncannily well that it even appeared dashing. His face was oval-shaped, and aside from his slightly too-glinting eyes, his features were well-proportioned overall, giving a refined impression. His neatly parted hair gleamed with such rich black luster that he initially appeared around forty, but upon closer inspection, his face bore countless wrinkles that made it impossible not to suddenly perceive him as sixty. The stark contrast between his jet-black hair and the pale face crisscrossed with wrinkles gave an intensely uncanny impression—so startling when first noticed that it made me gasp.

When he finished fastidiously wrapping the package, he suddenly turned his face toward me—but precisely because I too had been intently observing his movements at that moment, our gazes locked firmly together.
Then, he twisted the corner of his lips in an embarrassed manner and offered a faint smile.
I too involuntarily nodded in return.

After that, as we passed two or three minor stations, we remained seated in our respective corners, repeating this pattern—exchanging occasional glances from a distance before awkwardly turning our gazes outward again.
Outside had plunged into complete darkness.
Even when pressing my face against the windowpane to peer out, there was absolutely no light except for the occasional porthole lights of fishing boats floating dimly far offshore.
In the boundless darkness, our narrow carriage alone continued clattering onward endlessly, as if it were the sole world in existence.
In that dimly lit compartment, with only us two left behind, it felt as though the entire world—every living creature—had vanished without a trace.

In our second-class car, not a single passenger boarded from any station, and neither train attendants nor conductor ever appeared.
Now that I think about it, even such circumstances felt profoundly strange.

I gradually grew frightened of the man—who appeared both forty and sixty years old, with the bearing of a Western magician.
Fear—when there are no external matters to distract from it—grows infinitely large and spreads throughout one’s entire body.
At last, when the fear had filled me to the very tips of my downy hair—unbearable now—I suddenly stood up and trudged over to where that man sat in the far corner.
It was precisely because the man was loathsome and frightening that I approached him.

I quietly sat down on the cushion facing him, and with a peculiar, inverted feeling—as if I myself were some supernatural being—narrowed my eyes and held my breath while staring fixedly at his wrinkled white face that grew increasingly bizarre the closer I drew.

The man had been tracking me with his gaze since I left my seat, and when I peered into his face, he—as if he had long awaited this moment—tilted his chin toward the flat package beside him without preamble, as though this gesture constituted the most natural greeting imaginable.

“Would this be the one?” he said.
The very matter-of-factness of his tone startled me all the more.
“This would be what you wish to see.”
Since I remained silent, he repeated the same thing once more.
“Would you show it to me?”

I found myself drawn into the cadence of his speech and blurted out something odd.
Though I hadn't stood up from my seat because I wanted to see that package at all.

“I would be delighted to show it to you.”
“I have been thinking about this for some time now.”
“I thought you would surely come to see this.”

The man—or rather, it would be more fitting to call him an old man—said this while deftly unwrapping the large furoshiki with his long fingers, then propped up the framed object facing outward by the window.

When I caught a fleeting glimpse of its surface, I involuntarily closed my eyes.
Why I did this—the reason remains unclear even now—but somehow feeling compelled to do so, I kept my eyes shut for several seconds.
When I opened my eyes again, there before me was something strange unlike anything I had ever seen.
Having said that, I possessed no words to clearly explain these “strange” aspects though.

The frame showed a scene slathered luridly in indigo-dominated mud pigments - pierced-through rooms resembling a kabuki theater's palatial mansion backdrop, where blue tatami mats and lattice ceilings appeared to continue endlessly into the distance through extreme forced perspective. In the front left area stood depicted an ink-black clumsily rendered shoin-style window, with a writing desk of matching hue placed beside it in flagrant disregard for perspective. To say these backgrounds resembled the peculiar style found on ema votive tablets might convey their nature most clearly.

Within that background stood two figures about one shaku in height, rendered in relief.
The reason they appeared raised was because the figures themselves were crafted through oshi-e techniques.
A white-haired old man wearing antiquated black velvet Western clothes sat stiffly—(strangely, his features were identical to those of the framed picture’s owner save for hair color, even matching the suit’s tailoring)—while a seventeen- or eighteen-year-old beauty in a scarlet-dappled kimono and lustrous black satin obi leaned against the old man’s knee with ineffable coquetry, her waterfall-like coiffure cascading down. It formed a scene reminiscent of kabuki’s love scenes.

The contrast between the old man in Western clothes and the colorful girl was undeniably bizarre, but what I felt was "strange" was not that.

Against the crudely rendered background, the exquisite craftsmanship of the oshi-e was nothing short of astonishing.
The facial portion used white silk molded into three-dimensional contours, depicting each fine wrinkle individually; the girl's hair had real strands implanted one by one and arranged like human tresses; as for the old man's head, this too undoubtedly consisted of genuine white hairs meticulously planted.
The Western clothes had proper seams with poppy-seed-sized buttons placed precisely where they should be; from the swell of the girl’s breasts to the alluring curves around her thighs, from the spilled crimson crepe to the glimpses of skin tone, even down to the seashell-like nails growing from her fingers—every detail was rendered.
When viewed through a magnifying glass, it seemed as though even the pores and downy hairs had been meticulously crafted.

I had only seen oshi-e in the form of actor likenesses on New Year's battledores, and while some of those carvings were quite intricate, this pressed picture exhibited a level of exquisite craftsmanship that rendered such comparisons utterly meaningless. Could it have been crafted by a master of that art? But that was not what I called "strange".

The entire frame appeared quite aged—the background’s mud pigments had peeled in places, the girl’s scarlet-spotted kimono and the old man’s velvet suit had faded beyond recognition—yet in their peeling and fading, they maintained an unnameable luridness, possessing a glaring vitality that seared itself into the viewer’s retinas. To call this strange was indeed to name it strange.
"But even that was not what I meant by 'strange'."
To put it plainly, it was that both oshi-e figures were alive.

In Bunraku puppet theater, there are times—once or twice in a day's performance, lasting but a mere instant—when puppets handled by masters truly come alive, as if touched by divine breath. Yet these oshi-e figures appeared to have preserved eternally that fleeting vitality of living puppets, as though their very essence had been captured in that instant and affixed to the board before life could escape them.

Perhaps having noticed the look of astonishment on my face, the old man spoke in a most reassuring tone, nearly shouting—

“Ah, you may understand.”

As he spoke, he carefully unlocked with a key the black leather case hanging from his shoulder, took out from within it an exceedingly old-fashioned pair of binoculars, and presented them toward me.

“Here, please look through these binoculars.”
“You’re too close from there.”
“Pardon me, but move a bit further over there.”
“Yes, precisely there should do.”

Though it was a truly peculiar request, I—utterly captive to boundless curiosity—obeyed the old man's instructions and rose from my seat to stand five or six steps back from the framed picture. The old man held up the frame with both hands toward the electric lamp to improve my view. Reflecting now, it must indeed have presented a grotesque spectacle tinged with madness.

The binoculars were likely imported goods from twenty or thirty years prior—those oddly shaped prism binoculars we often saw on optician shop signs during our childhood days. Their black leather casing had worn away from handling to reveal patches of brass beneath, rendering them nostalgic relics of bygone days that matched their owner's antiquated Western suit in vintage character.

Out of curiosity, I spent some time twisting and turning the binoculars in my hands, but it was when I finally brought them up to my eyes with both hands to peer through them that—
Suddenly—truly suddenly—the old man let out a scream-like cry, causing me to nearly drop the binoculars.

“You mustn’t!
“You mustn’t!
“That’s upside down!
“You mustn’t look through them upside down!
“You mustn’t!”

The old man had turned ashen, his eyes opened wide and perfectly round, while he waved his hands frantically.
Why looking through the binoculars upside down warranted such alarm—I couldn't comprehend his bizarre behavior.

"Ah yes, of course—they were inverted, weren't they?"

Preoccupied with adjusting the binoculars, I paid little attention to the old man's suspicious expression; having corrected their orientation, I hastily pressed them to my eyes and peered at the figures in the pressed picture.

As the focus gradually sharpened, the two circular fields of view slowly overlapped, and a vaguely rainbow-like blur came increasingly into clarity; then, the upper half of an astonishingly large girl’s torso—as if it constituted the entire world—expanded to fill my entire field of vision.

The way that thing manifested was something I had never witnessed before or since, making it difficult to convey to readers, but if pressed to recall a similar sensation, one might liken it to observing an ama diver at that precise moment when she emerges from beneath the sea while watching from a boat.
When the ama diver’s naked form lingered deep below, her body—distorted by the blue water’s turbulent layers—twisted unnaturally like seaweed, its contours blurred into a pale specter; yet as she surged upward through thinning azure depths, her shape sharpening until her head breached the surface with a pop—in that very instant, as though startled awake—the aqueous phantom would abruptly reveal its true human form.
In exactly this manner, the oshi-e girl materialized before me through the binoculars—a living maiden of full stature—and began to stir.

Beyond the lenses of that nineteenth-century prism binoculars lay a realm wholly beyond our wildest imaginings—a separate world where resided the coiffured beauty and the white-haired man in antiquated Western clothes, living out their grotesque existence.
Though one shouldn’t peer into such things, here I was now—compelled by this magician to gaze deeper.
With this indescribably bizarre sensation—as if some unnameable thing had taken hold—I nevertheless found myself gazing into that uncanny world like one possessed.

The girl wasn’t moving per se, but her entire being had transformed completely from when viewed with the naked eye—now brimming with vitality, her pallid face slightly flushed peach-pink, her chest pulsing (I swear I even heard the beating of her heart). Through her crepe garments, the young woman’s life force seemed to steam forth thickly from her very flesh.

After visually devouring every inch of the woman's form through the binoculars, I turned them toward the blissful white-haired man upon whom the girl was languidly draped.

The old man too lived within this binocular realm—though while he appeared to embrace a woman forty years his junior in an attitude of perfect happiness, his deeply wrinkled face filling the entire lens revealed beneath its countless creases an expression mingling doubt and torment.

This grotesque proximity—his features magnified to within a foot of my eyes by the lenses—likely contributed to this effect, yet the longer I gazed, the more his countenance morphed into an uncanny amalgam of anguish and terror that made my flesh creep.

When I saw that, a nightmare-like feeling came over me, and peering through the binoculars became unbearable, so I instinctively pulled my eyes away and darted my gaze around the surroundings.
Then, it was still the desolate night train interior—the oshi-e framed picture remained as it was, the old man who had presented it unchanged in appearance, the window outside pitch-dark, and the monotonous clatter of the wheels continuing unabated.
It was the feeling of waking from a nightmare.

“You seem to be wearing quite a look of bewilderment.”

The old man propped the framed picture back against the window, took his seat, then gestured for me to sit opposite him while fixing his gaze on my face and spoke these words.

“I must be losing my mind.
“It’s awfully stuffy in here.”

I made a self-deprecating remark to hide my embarrassment.
Then the old man hunched his back, thrust his face close to mine, and—wiggling his slender fingers on his knees as if signaling something—lowered his voice to a faint whisper,

"They were alive, weren't they?"

he said.
And then, in a tone suggesting he had resolved some grave matter, he hunched even further forward, his gleaming eyes opened wide and perfectly round, staring as if to bore holes into my face while whispering these words.

“You wouldn’t care to hear their true circumstances, would you?”

I wondered whether I had misheard the old man’s low, murmuring voice through the train’s swaying and clattering wheels.

“Did you say ‘circumstances’?”

“It is indeed their circumstances.”
The old man answered still in that hushed tone.
“Particularly those concerning one party—the white-haired old man.”

“Does it date back to his youth?”

I too found myself speaking in a strangely off-key manner that evening for reasons unknown.

"Yes, that dates from when he was twenty-five years old."

"I would very much like to hear it."

I prompted the old man as though urging him to recount an ordinary living person’s circumstances, treating it as the most trivial of matters.
Then, the old man twisted his wrinkles in a seemingly delighted manner and said, “Ah, you will listen after all,” before commencing a story so strange it defied the world.

“As this was the great incident of my lifetime, I remember it well—it was on the evening of April 27 in the twenty-eighth year of Meiji that my brother became like that (here he pointed at the old man in the pressed picture)."
“At that time, both my brother and I were still living at home—our residence being in Nihonbashi-dōri Sanchōme, where our father ran a kimono fabric business."
“It was not long after Asakusa’s Twelve-Story Tower had been built."
“So my brother would go up that Twelve-Story Tower every day and take great delight in it."
“You see, my elder brother had an odd fondness for foreign things and was quite the novelty seeker.”
“As for these binoculars too, he actually found them—the ones said to have belonged to a foreign ship’s captain—at a peculiar tool shop in Yokohama’s Chinatown and brought them back."
“He said he paid a considerable sum for them back then, you know.”

Every time the old man said "my brother," he would look toward or point at the old man in the pressed picture as though that person were sitting right there.
The old man conflated his actual brother from memory with the white-haired old man in the pressed picture, speaking in a manner that suggested awareness of a third party nearby—as if the pressed picture were alive and listening to his tale.
But strangely, I did not find this odd in the slightest.
In that moment—transcending natural laws, intersecting somewhere with our own world—it seemed we were inhabiting another realm entirely.

“Have you ever deigned to ascend the Twelve-Story Tower?”
“Ah, you have not.”
“That’s a pity.”
“What sorcerer from where could have built such a thing? It was truly an outlandish, bizarre structure indeed.”
“The exterior was said to have been designed by an Italian engineer named Barton, though.”
“Just imagine.”
“When one speaks of Asakusa Park in those days, its attractions were first and foremost Spider Man’s freak show, maiden sword dances, ball balancing acts, Gensui’s spinning tops, and peep-show devices—the most unusual offerings being perhaps the replica Mount Fuji, what they called the Maze, and the Eightfold Hidden Cedar exhibit, you see.”
“And then right there—imagine!—this absurdly tall brick tower sprouted up out of nowhere. Wouldn’t you be astonished?”
“Its height being forty-six ken—over half a hanchō—the octagonal summit tapered like a Chinese-style hat’s crown. If one merely ascended even slightly to higher ground, that red monstrosity could be seen from anywhere in Tokyo.”

“As I mentioned earlier, it was spring of Meiji 28—shortly after my elder brother had acquired these binoculars.”
“Something strange began happening to my elder brother.”
“Father and all thought his mind had gone astray—they were terribly worried—but as you might surmise, I too was foolishly devoted to him. His increasingly bizarre behavior left me worried sick.”
“To describe his condition—my elder brother would barely eat his meals, refused to speak with anyone in the household, and whenever at home, would shut himself in a single room doing nothing but brood.”
“His body had grown emaciated; his face was as sallow as a consumptive’s, with only his eyes darting restlessly.”
“Admittedly, he was never one with a good complexion to begin with.”
“It had grown even paler and more sunken, so he truly looked pitiable.”
“Yet despite all that, he would go out every single day without fail—from noon until dusk—wandering off aimlessly as if heading off to work.”
“Even if we asked where he was going, he wouldn’t say a word.”
“Though Mother worried and questioned Brother’s despondency in every way imaginable, he wouldn’t open up.”
“This continued for about a month.”

Because I was so worried, one day I quietly followed my elder brother to see where he was going.
Because my mother had asked me to do so.
“That day too—just like today—was an overcast, unpleasant one, but from early afternoon onward, my elder brother donned that black velvet Western suit he’d had tailored in his preferred style back then—ultra-modern for the time—hung these binoculars from his shoulder, and loped his lanky frame toward Nihonbashi-dōri’s horsecar line.”
“I followed my elder brother without letting him notice, you understand?”
“So then, my elder brother waited for the Ueno-bound horsecar and nimbly boarded it.”
“Unlike today’s trains, I couldn’t simply board the next horsecar to follow him.”
“After all, there were so few carriages available.”
“I had no choice but to muster up the pocket money I’d received from Mother and take a rickshaw.”
“If it was a rickshaw pulled by a somewhat vigorous puller, keeping up with the horsecar line without losing sight of it posed no difficulty whatsoever.”

“When my brother alighted from the horsecar, I too got down from the rickshaw and once again trudged after him.”
“And then, the place we arrived at was none other than Asakusa Kannon Hall.”
“My brother passed straight through Nakamise, bypassing the front of the hall, pushed through the crowds between the show tents behind it, and arrived before the Twelve-Story Tower I mentioned earlier. Then he entered through the stone gate, paid his fee, and vanished into the tower through the entrance bearing the plaque inscribed ‘Ryōunkaku’—can you imagine?”
“Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine that my brother would be frequenting such a place day after day, so I was utterly dumbfounded.”
“In my childlike mind—for I was still not even twenty at the time—I conceived this strange notion that my elder brother might have become possessed by that monstrous Twelve-Story Tower.”

“I had only ascended the Twelve-Story Tower once before, when Father took me there, and having never gone again since, I felt somewhat uneasy about it. But as my elder brother was ascending, I had no choice but to follow, lagging about one floor behind as I climbed those dimly lit stone steps.”
“The windows were not large either, and with the brick walls being thick, it was as cold as a cellar.”
“Since it was during the Sino-Japanese War, oil paintings of the war—rare at the time—were hung in a row along one wall.”
“There were oil paintings of unspeakable grotesquery—Japanese soldiers with wolf-like visages howling as they charged, Chinese soldiers clutching their sides where bayoneted rifles had gouged them, their faces and lips purpling as gushing blood soaked through their hands, scenes of severed queue-wearing heads soaring balloon-like into the sky—all glistening in the dim light from the windows with a nauseating sheen.”
“In between them, gloomy stone steps spiraled upward endlessly like a snail’s shell.”
“I had such an utterly bizarre feeling.”

“The summit had become nothing but an octagonal railing—a wall-less observation corridor—and when I finally reached it, everything suddenly burst into brightness. Having endured that long dim journey until then, I was quite startled.”

“The clouds hung so low they seemed within reach, and when I looked out, the roofs of Tokyo appeared like scattered garbage—a chaotic jumble—while Shinagawa’s Daiba resembled a miniature rock garden.”

“Suppressing my dizziness when I peered downward, Kannon Hall appeared far below, the show tents looked like toys, and the people walking about seemed nothing but heads and legs.”

At the summit, about ten spectators had clustered together wearing apprehensive looks as they gazed toward Shinagawa Bay while whispering in hushed tones, but when I looked for my elder brother, there he stood alone in a separate spot, pressed binoculars to his eyes as he intently surveyed Asakusa’s temple grounds. When viewed from behind against the thick, whitish haze of clouds, my elder brother’s figure in his velvet Western suit stood out starkly. Since none of the jumbled scenery below could be seen, even though I knew it was him, he somehow seemed like a figure from a Western oil painting—so divine that I felt hesitant to address him.

However, recalling my mother’s instructions made it impossible to remain passive, so I approached my elder brother from behind and called out, “Brother, what are you looking at?”
My elder brother started and turned around, but with an awkward look on his face, he said nothing.
“Brother, Father and Mother have been terribly worried about your recent condition. When we wondered every single day where you could possibly be going—it turns out you’ve been coming to this place.”
“I beg you, tell me the reason.”
“Please, at least confide in me, who’s always been so close to you,” I pleaded with my brother atop that tower, taking advantage of there being no one nearby.

He remained tight-lipped at first, but through my repeated entreaties, my elder brother seemed to relent, and at last divulged to me the secret he had harbored in his heart this past month.
“However, I must say that the cause of my elder brother’s anguish turned out to be something truly bizarre indeed.
My elder brother explained that about a month prior, when he had ascended the Twelve-Story Tower and was surveying Kannon Hall’s precincts through these binoculars, he had caught a fleeting glimpse of a young woman’s face amidst the crowd.
This girl—she was indescribable, an unearthly beauty—and though my elder brother had always been utterly indifferent to women, the mere sight of her through those binoculars sent such a chill down his spine that it completely unsettled his heart.”

At that moment, my elder brother—startled by just one glance—had removed the binoculars from his eyes. Though he tried desperately to find that same spot again, the lenses simply would not align with the young woman’s face.
“Even if something appears close through binoculars, it’s actually far away, and being in such a dense crowd, one can’t simply assume that just because you spotted it once, you’ll be able to find it again a second time, you see.”

And so it was that my elder brother, unable to forget the beautiful girl he had glimpsed through those binoculars—and being a man of extreme reserve—began to suffer an old-fashioned case of lovesickness.
“You may find it laughable now, but people in those days were truly gentle and unhurried souls—it was an era when many a man would fall in love at first sight with a woman he merely passed by and pine away for her.”
Needless to say, dragging that emaciated body of his—one that could scarcely manage even a proper meal—my elder brother would climb the Twelve-Story Tower day after day like clockwork and peer through those binoculars, sustained only by that sad, futile hope that perhaps today she might pass through Kannon Hall’s precincts.
“Love is such a mysterious thing, isn’t it?”

After confiding in me, my elder brother began peering through the binoculars again with feverish intensity. Though I sympathized completely with his feelings—knowing this was a hopeless search without one chance in a thousand—I couldn’t bring myself to tell him to stop. Overcome by it all, I teared up and simply watched his retreating back.
And then at that moment—Ah, I cannot forget that eerie yet beautiful sight.
“Though it happened over thirty years ago, when I close my eyes like this, those dreamlike colors rise up so vividly that it feels as though they’re right before me.”

As I mentioned earlier, when I stood behind my elder brother, all that was visible was the sky. Amidst the swirling, clustered clouds, his slender figure in Western attire stood out like a painting, and as the clouds shifted, it nearly seemed as though his body were floating in midair.
"But then, suddenly, as if fireworks had been launched, countless red, blue, and purple spheres came floating gently upward through the whitish vast sky."
"You may not grasp this even through explanation—it was truly like a painting, yet also like some omen. I found myself overcome by an indescribably eerie sensation."
"Whatever it was, when I hurriedly peered downward, I realized a balloon seller had—through some mishap—accidentally released all his rubber balloons skyward at once. Yet even after understanding their true nature, that peculiar feeling lingered within me—for rubber balloons themselves were far rarer in those days than they are now."

“Strange as it may seem—though I wouldn’t say that served as the direct trigger—at that very moment, my elder brother grew terribly excited. His pallid face flushed crimson as he came panting toward me, suddenly seized my hand and declared, ‘Come! We must hurry or we’ll be too late!’ all while pulling me along vigorously.”

As he pulled me down the tower’s stone steps in haste, I asked why. He explained that the young lady from before had apparently been found—since she was sitting in a spacious tatami room with blue mats, she would surely remain there even if we went now.

The place my elder brother had pinpointed was behind Kannon Hall, marked by a large pine tree where he claimed there was a spacious tatami room. But when we went there together to search, though the pine tree stood plain before us, not a single house-like structure existed nearby—leaving us in a situation akin to being tricked by a fox spirit.
"I thought it must be my elder brother’s delusion, but seeing him so utterly wilted with dejection was too pitiful. As a hollow comfort, I made rounds of the tea stalls in that area—yet neither shadow nor form of that young lady could be found."

In the midst of searching, I became separated from my elder brother, but after making the rounds of the tea stalls and some time passing, when I returned to the original pine tree, there among rows of various stalls stood a peep show booth where its proprietor cracked a whip rhythmically to drum up business—and what should I find but my elder brother crouching before its viewer, peering through it desperately.
“Brother, what are you doing?” I said as I tapped his shoulder. When he turned around startled, I still cannot forget the expression on his face at that moment.
“How shall I put it? It was as if he were dreaming—the muscles of his face had gone slack, his gaze fixed on some distant place, and even the voice with which he spoke to me sounded strangely hollow.”
And then he said, “You—the young lady we’ve been searching for is inside here.”

Having been told this, I hurriedly paid the fee and peered into the viewing lens, only to find it was a peep show depicting Yaoya Oshichi.
There was a picture of Oshichi leaning against Kisaburo in the study hall of Kichijoji Temple.
“I will never forget it.”
The peep show couple, joining their hoarse voices and keeping time with a whip, were singing the lines “Press with your knees, signal with your eyes.”
“Ah, that peculiar melody of ‘Press with your knees, signal with your eyes’ seems to linger in my ears even now.”

The figures in the peep show were oshi-e pressed pictures, but they must have been crafted by a master of that art. How vividly beautiful Oshichi's face was. "Since even to my eyes she looked truly alive, it was not at all unreasonable that my elder brother said such things." "My elder brother said, 'Even were I to realize this young lady is but a crafted oshi-e, I simply cannot abandon my feelings." "It’s tragic, but I can’t give up." "Just once would be enough—I want to become a man within the oshi-e like that Yoshisaburō and speak with this young lady," he declared, standing there vacantly, utterly motionless. When I consider it now, since the peep show’s picture had an opening at the top to let in light, it must have been visible diagonally even from the summit of the Twelve-Story Tower.

By that time, dusk had fully fallen, the laborers had thinned out, and before the peep show booth only two or three bob-haired children lingered restlessly, unable to tear themselves away.
The sky had hung thickly overcast since midday, and now at twilight the clouds sank lower as if threatening imminent rain, creating an increasingly oppressive atmosphere—the sort of weather that makes one fear it might drive a person mad.
And deep within my ears pulsed a dull, throbbing sound like distant drumbeats.
Amidst this, my elder brother stood rooted in place, endlessly staring into the distance.
This state persisted for what seemed a full hour.

When night had fully fallen and the distant juggler's gas lamps began to flicker beautifully, my elder brother suddenly startled awake as if from a trance, seized my arm, and exclaimed, “Ah! I've had a splendid idea.”
“You—I beg you, take these binoculars and invert them. Place the large glass lens against your eyes and look at me through them,” he said, coming out with this bizarre request.
When I asked, “Why?” he simply wouldn’t listen, insisting, “Never mind that—just do as I say.”
“To begin with, I’ve never much cared for optical devices since birth—whether binoculars or microscopes. Their ghostly effects strike me as uncanny: distant things leaping right before my eyes, tiny insects swelling to beast-like proportions.”
“And so, I had rarely peered through my elder brother’s prized binoculars either. Precisely because I had used them so little, they seemed all the more like some fiendish device.”
“Moreover, peering at my elder brother through inverted binoculars in the dimly lonely grounds behind Kannon Hall—with night fallen and faces barely discernible—seemed not just maddening but deeply unsettling. Yet since my elder brother so vehemently insisted, I had no choice but to do as he instructed and look.”
Since I was peering through them inverted, the figure of my elder brother standing two or three ken away shrank to about two shaku tall—and precisely because of that diminution, he appeared clearly, floating forth from the darkness.
The outside scenery was no longer reflected—only the diminished figure of my elder brother in Western attire stood rigidly upright at the very center of the lenses.
That was probably my elder brother walking backward.
Shrinking rapidly before my eyes, he finally became an adorable figure about a foot tall, like a doll.
And no sooner had that figure swooped up into midair than it dissolved into the darkness in the blink of an eye.

"I was overcome with fear—(you may think it unbecoming of my age to say so, but at that moment, a chill truly ran through me)—when I suddenly let go of the binoculars, called out 'Brother!', and ran toward where he had vanished." But for some reason, no matter how much I searched and searched, my elder brother’s figure was nowhere to be seen. "Given the time that had passed, he couldn’t have gone far—yet no matter where I looked, I couldn’t find him." “Why, you see—my elder brother vanished from this world then and there… And from that day onward, I came to fear binoculars—those fiendish devices—all the more.” "Above all, these binoculars—once belonging to some foreigner (who knows what country’s captain he might have been)—were especially detestable. Other lenses I cannot speak for, but this particular pair must never under any circumstances be viewed inverted." "If one looks through them inverted, a calamity will occur—this I firmly believe." “You must now understand why I hurriedly stopped you when you held this inverted earlier.”

However, it was when I had exhausted myself from searching for a long time and returned to the front of the peep show booth that it happened.
I suddenly realized something.
What I mean is this—might it not be that my elder brother, driven to obsession by his love for the oshi-e woman, used the power of those demonic binoculars to shrink his body to her size and stealthily infiltrate the world within the pressed picture?
“So then I asked the peep show operator—who still hadn’t closed up shop—to show me the Kichijoji scene. And what do you think? Sure enough, there was my brother transformed into the oshi-e—in the lantern’s glow, wearing a blissful expression as he embraced Oshichi in place of Yoshisaburō!”

"But you see, I didn’t feel sad—seeing my elder brother achieve his heart’s desire and find such happiness made me so glad that tears came to my eyes."
"I made the peep show operator swear to sell me that picture at any price—(strangely enough, he showed no sign of noticing my elder brother in Western clothes sitting where Yoshisaburō the page should have been)—then rushed home and told Mother the whole story, only to have both Father and Mother exclaim, 'What nonsense are you spouting?'"
"They said, 'You must have gone mad,' and no matter what I told them, they wouldn’t take it seriously."
"Isn’t that absurd?"
"Ha ha ha ha ha ha!"
The old man burst out laughing there, as though he found it utterly absurd.
And strangely enough, I found myself in complete agreement with the old man and joined him in roaring with laughter.

“Those people were convinced human beings don’t become things like oshi-e pressed pictures.”
“But as proof he became an oshi-e, after that his figure vanished completely from this world—isn’t that so?”
“And yet even that, those people make wildly off-mark guesses—‘he must have run away from home’ and such nonsense.”
“How absurd.”
“In the end, no matter what anyone said, I begged Mother for money and finally obtained that peep show picture, then journeyed from Hakone toward Kamakura with it.”
“That’s because I wanted to let my elder brother have a honeymoon.”
“Riding this train now, I find myself unable to stop remembering that time.”
“After all, just as today, I propped this picture against the window and showed my brother and his lover the scenery outside.”
“How happy my elder brother must have been.”
“How could the young woman find such sincere devotion from him unpleasant?”
“The two would behave like true newlyweds—blushing shyly, their skin touching as they exchanged endless sweet nothings in perfect harmony—they did.”

"After that, my father closed his Tokyo business and withdrew to our hometown near Toyama, so I too have lived there ever since. But with over thirty years having passed since then, I wanted to show my brother how Tokyo had changed after so long—which is why I am traveling with him like this."

"Yet here lies the tragedy: though the young woman lives on eternally—being originally fashioned by human hands—she does not age. But my brother, even transformed into an oshi-e figure through forced reshaping, retains his mortal human core. Thus he ages just as we do."

"Look closely—my brother who was once a beautiful youth of twenty-five has now turned white-haired, his face creased with hideous wrinkles."

"How heartbreaking this must be for him."

"That woman stays forever young and fair, while he alone grows repulsively aged."

"It’s dreadful."

"My brother wears a sorrowful expression."

"For years now, he has always borne that tormented look."

"When I think on it, I feel such unbearable pity for him."

The old man was gazing despondently at the elderly figure in the pressed picture when, as if suddenly noticing something,

“Ah, I’ve gone and told you such an interminably long story. Yet I trust you’ve understood me properly. You won’t dismiss me as mad like others do, will you? Ah, then I may say this telling was not in vain. Well now—Brother and his companion must be thoroughly exhausted. And having recounted such matters right before your eyes, they must be feeling terribly bashful indeed. Let me allow them their rest at last.”

As he said this, he gently wrapped the oshi-e frame in a black cloth.
In that instant—whether it was my imagination or not—the faces of the oshi-e dolls seemed to soften slightly into bashful expressions, their lips curling at the corners as if sending me a greeting smile.
The old man fell completely silent after that.
I remained silent.
The train continued unchanged, making a dull clunking sound as it ran through the darkness.

After about ten minutes of this continuing, the sound of the wheels grew slower, flickering lights became visible here and there outside the window, and the train stopped at a small mountain station whose location remained indeterminate.
A lone station employee stood solitary on the platform.

“Well then, I shall take my leave first, as I will be staying with relatives here tonight.”

The old man stood up nimbly holding the framed package, left that farewell behind, and exited the carriage. As I watched from the window, his slender retreating figure—how perfectly it matched the old man from the oshi-e!—appeared to hand his ticket to the station staff at a simple barrier before dissolving into the darkness behind him and disappearing.