Pathway to Japanese Literature

It was Hatta’s dog from next door. With its head lowered as if pondering something, it wandered unsteadily toward the peony he treasured. After circling the roots several times while sniffing intently, it ambled vaguely back toward the veranda. Apparently having fallen somewhere, two or three wet dead leaves stuck to its flank. Before the veranda lay an overturned bucket with his old boots drying on top. When it stopped there, its expression suddenly turned contemplative as it meticulously sniffed every part of the boots—then abruptly seized the tied laces, letting one boot dangle limply from each side of its face. Still clutching them, it seemed to flick a glance his way. Inside the glass door, he had laid out several cushions and lay sprawled across them watching it.

(Something's off,) he thought, resting his cheek on his hand.

The spotted dog, still clutching the boot in its jaws, averted its gaze from him, gave a ponderous shake of its head, and staggered back along its original path toward the hedge. Through the glass door, the vision of the dog remained starkly clear to his eyes yet strangely imbued with a yellowish glow. At last, the dog's tail flashed momentarily through a gap in the hedge before disappearing outside with its stolen prize. (If I don't fix that hedge soon, it'll completely fall apart.)

He languidly lifted his body and blankly gazed toward the hedge. The decaying bamboo hedge had served as a partition between Hatta’s house and his own, preventing passage between them—but ever since Hatta’s wife had started pulling it out for fuel, gaps had recently formed that allowed dogs to come and go freely. Before long, people would be able to pass through, and eventually even horses would manage it. For now it was only dogs, but that spotted dog came to his garden three or four times a day as if drawn by some vague impulse. With its brown patches and all, it was an unpleasant-looking creature. It would dig up peony roots or carry off discarded items—doing nothing but trivial mischief. Just the other day it had trotted off with a light bulb whose filament had snapped—what on earth had that been about? The one that had made off with his leather wallet—left out to dry days earlier—must have been this dog too.

(But why does my body feel so heavy?)

He had recently become clearly aware that something in his body was amiss. In any case, his body felt terribly sluggish, and correspondingly his mood grew oppressively heavy. His emotions remained utterly still. A torpor vaguely filled his entire being. Even when he looked at things, he merely looked—no urge to interact with them arose at all. Indeed, even now it was so. They were old boots he’d brought back when demobilized, not yet so worn that he couldn’t wear them. It wasn’t that he particularly minded them being stolen, but they were boots that would prove quite useful if kept. Why was it that even as he clearly watched that spotted dog carry them off, he couldn’t muster the will to rise and retrieve them? When the dog’s figure had completely vanished, he was suddenly seized by a physiological anxiety similar to his usual ones. That anxiety descended over him—vaguely, surely, relentlessly.

Outside the fence, a sudden wind began to blow.

This strange state—since when had it begun? This wasn’t something that had started just yesterday or today. He had first become aware of the derangement in his bodily functions about a week ago—no, it must have been closer to ten days now. His appetite gradually diminished, moving his body became a chore, and he had grown averse to doing anything at all. Just as the pendulum of a grandfather clock, forgotten to be wound, would eventually stop unnoticed, so too had his emotions gradually narrowed their swing and begun losing their responsiveness. In response to phenomena, there was nothing within him that stirred or responded. Judging from the loss of appetite, there seemed to be a digestive system disorder, but there were also definite signs of having caught a cold. That had been since that night he drank with Nakayama and fell into the water.

Sangen, an old friend of his, had for some reason committed robbery and was finally apprehended by the Himonya Police Station. Since he couldn’t just leave it be, he had met Nakayama that night to discuss countermeasures, but they ended up deciding to have drinks instead and went together to Kanda Market. He remembered drinking five or six glasses of pungent liquor at Nakayama’s regular haunt. Then they went outside and were wandering unsteadily through the dim back alleys behind the market when his body suddenly reeled as if hurled forward and he fell into the fire-prevention reservoir still wearing his coat. It felt less like falling than being violently thrown down. The reservoir was alarmingly deep with thick sediment at the bottom that made finding footing impossible. Immersed up to his chin in black water, things might have turned disastrous had he not instinctively grabbed the reservoir’s edge with both palms. With Nakayama’s help he finally clambered out, sobered up, and rushed home—water had soaked through to his underwear while his boots and trouser creases were packed with wet black mud. Even as drunk as I was, how did I end up in such an idiotic predicament?

It was a dark vacant lot, scattered with wooden fragments and rope scraps—a difficult place to walk—but the faint reflection from the black, stagnant puddle could not have escaped his notice. When he stepped into the vacant lot, his mood—indeed twisted by drunkenness—was in terrible turmoil. While drinking at the bar, they had talked only about Sangen the entire time, and had even argued a bit with each other over it.

“The reason Sangen did something like that was your influence from the start.”

Nakayama had repeatedly said such things to him in an overbearing manner. He spoke in a tone fixated solely on that point. Nakayama appeared thoroughly drunk. "In times like these, wasn't it you who taught Sangen that robbery was acceptable?" "That's impossible," he kept protesting. "There's no way I'd say something so absurd. Even if I had said it, would Sangen have taken it seriously?"

“There, you did say it. Even if you didn’t say it outright, you must have at least hinted at it. And then that poor bastard went and did it. Since he went and did it, it’s his loss.” Nakayama’s eyes glinted as he said such things. Though they had met to discuss handling Sangen’s criminal aftermath, they scarcely touched on practical measures, instead circling endlessly around why Sangen had committed such an act. The whole business of drinking while using Sangen as conversational fodder felt vaguely unsavory, yet swept up by Nakayama’s forceful tone, he too found himself putting on something of a front. At first he’d been drinking this way to keep his intoxication at bay, but as the alcohol gradually took hold, Sangen’s deeds began to seem like something fundamentally alien to him—utterly disconnected from his own existence.

“Now that a robber’s emerged from among our own, we’re really something.” What had crossed his drunken mind came spilling out. Nakayama listened with gleaming eyes.

Nakayama was two years older than him and worked as an editor for a weekly magazine. It was said he wasn’t particularly competent. He had been a heavy drinker since his youth, and even when sober his nose remained bright red. The way that vivid redness concentrated at the center of his face gave it a somewhat uncanny appearance.

The morning after his underwear had been soaked through with water, he awoke to an unpleasant throbbing deep in his nose and ears. From his feverish body rose a faint smell of the ditch. When he took out his leather wallet from the inner pocket of his soaked jacket, only two or three ten-yen bills remained, and here too lingered a strong smell of the ditch. He had washed it with water and left it to dry in a sunny spot in the garden, but before he knew it, it had vanished from where he’d laid it out. Because he hadn’t thought of Hatta’s spotted dog, he vaguely suspected that Shiroki’s daughter must have taken it. Because it was widely rumored in the neighborhood that Shiroki’s daughter had sticky fingers.

Three or four days later, stew was served for dinner. When he saw the thick, muddy stew on his tray, he immediately associated it with the muddy reservoir behind Kanda Market and felt a sudden urge to vomit. It felt as though a mass of disgust that had been dormant beneath his consciousness had been abruptly stimulated by the real-world stew and directly connected. He grimaced and said to the old maid helping in the kitchen: "I can’t eat this. Take it away."

And he poured hot tea over his rice and finally managed to eat one bowl. The rice had an unpleasant taste like an eraser. Then, just to be sure, he took his temperature, and the thermometer read thirty-six point eight degrees. For him, whose baseline temperature was far lower than an average person’s, this was not normal body heat. Since his normal body temperature had never exceeded thirty-five degrees, it was certain that something abnormal was occurring within his body. (Regarding Sangen, Nakayama seemed downright angry at me.)

He suddenly wondered if he hadn’t fallen into that puddle because Nakayama had pushed him rather than his legs being unsteady from drunkenness. The reason Nakayama had so persistently fixated on Sangen’s state of mind that night was undoubtedly because Sangen’s deeds were no mere distant matter to him. He could vaguely imagine that. Sangen and Nakayama were old acquaintances, and it could be said that emotionally, they had lived nearly the same course. However, that night, the feelings with which Nakayama had provoked him over that matter were something he couldn’t comprehend. He could only visualize Nakayama’s large red nose—features that resembled a soiled Red Dragon tile.

(If it was Nakayama who pushed me, what kind of expression had he been wearing at that moment?)

Every time he thought that, he became aware of an oddly cold absurdity rising to his lips. Within that absurdity lay the comical ridiculousness of his own knocked-down self. And it was nothing but absurdity. All emotional impulses toward Nakayama—the one who had pushed him—had died within. What remained now was just the chill from being soaked and the inscrutable disorder it had brought to his body. Determining which part of him had gone awry felt wearisome. A fatigue like that after a long march had lingered day and night these past few days. He wanted to spend whole days drowsing asleep, but obligations kept swarming in, forcing him to walk about and meet people against his will. When moving, his mind would scatter—he even felt intensely engaged with reality—but upon finding himself alone and noticing how little his emotions actually fluctuated, he’d be seized by a peculiar anxiety. To call it anxiety missed the mark; it was an opaque collapse, elusive in nature, like an ejaculation devoid of pleasure. This had occurred intermittently over the past week. Yet this week was merely his own perception; in truth, it might have stretched back years—decades even.

And yet, tasks kept arising one after another. When he pressed his face into the pillow and tried to sleep, it resembled that imp of consciousness that repeatedly summoned him back from slumber.

Meetings had piled up one after another, and he also had to go to M Psychiatric Hospital regarding Sangen. He needed to make inquiries about applying for a psychiatric evaluation in preparation for the trial. That was something Nakayama had proposed that night. A date had been set for him to go with Nakayama to M Hospital, but Nakayama appeared intent on using this trip to write a psychiatric hospital reportage for his weekly magazine. At M Hospital there was a doctor he knew, but he had not yet made contact.

Moreover, he was being pressed with the necessity of finding a new residence. The current house was under hesitant eviction pressure. The landlord was Shiroki from the neighboring house, and both his and Hatta’s houses were properties owned by Shiroki. There was a gate in the hedge separating Shiroki’s house from his, and by opening this gate, Shiroki would come over to his house about once every three days. It was to play hanafuda with him. Shiroki was a slightly younger and smaller man than him. His skin hung white and flabby like tofu. His small black eyeballs were covered with pale eyelids. Having no steady occupation, he always seemed impoverished. Every day he idled about the house, either sunbathing or tending his chickens. What Shiroki kept was a gamecock. Shiroki would raise it from a chick, train it, nurture it into a formidable adult bird, then take it to cockfights. Shiroki’s poverty stemmed from this. Therefore Shiroki wanted to sell his own house to raise money. Yet with tenants like him staying put, no buyer could be found. Moreover, whenever Shiroki urged him to vacate, he did so in such roundabout terms it almost sounded like he was asking him to stay.

“You still haven’t found a new house, have you?” When Shiroki said this abruptly, he suddenly adopted a pitiful expression and began blinking rapidly. There was also an air about him as if he were ashamed of his own abruptness. And he hurriedly added more words. “No, it’s not that I’m trying to rush you.” “It’s just… well, there’s something I need to take care of.” “Well, finding a suitable house must be quite difficult nowadays, I suppose.” During lulls in small talk, Shiroki would slip in a mention of this matter only to quickly change the subject. Yet at times, this made him feel a more urgent pressure than any direct demand. At such times, he would silently gaze at Shiroki’s face. Since Shiroki was the one to abruptly end the conversation on his own, he could usually avoid giving any response.

Through the glass door, from the gap in the landowner’s gate, Shiroki’s house was visible. As the terrain dropped a level below, a single gamecock strutted like a monarch in the sunken garden. Only this one remained now. He occasionally saw Shiroki tending to the gamecock—at such moments, despite his youth, Shiroki gave an impression of collapse, as though all vitality had been drained by the bird. Yet on his face lingered something resembling anguished joy. Every time he witnessed this figure, he keenly felt the word “incompetent.” All that “incompetent” entailed. This young incompetent landlord had a fair-skinned, well-fleshed wife and one daughter—the girl rumored to have sticky fingers. Whether this reputation held truth, he did not know. Inheriting her parents’ pallor, her skin was so excessively white that her eyeballs appeared tinged with blue—and those eyeballs never ceased their restless motion.

“They say it’s still frozen!”

The girl came running in from the front of Shiroki’s house, shouting. She swirled a bamboo sieve in her hand.

“They say it’s still frozen!”

What was frozen? He knew it. He had seen it when walking through town earlier—the fishmonger had received a shipment of rationed frozen fish piled up there. It was walleye pollock. Because it was frozen solid, kitchen knives still couldn’t cut through it. After all, in this neighborhood—especially in Shiroki’s household—when it came to fish, they only bought rationed ones, so they seemed gripped by a compulsion: if it was rationed fish, they had to buy it. That’s why they were so sensitive about what had arrived at the fishmonger’s today. Still, if it remained frozen, there was nothing to be done.

He had never found it amusing that hundreds of households in this neighborhood ate the same dish for dinner—if it was cod, then cod. If they had gathered to eat together, that would be one thing—but instead, each person holed up in their matchbox-like home, listlessly poking at the same food as their neighbors across the way. His current mood particularly mirrored this exact sensation. Since that night he'd seen the viscous stew, his appetite had been rapidly dwindling. Nothing he looked at stirred hunger; nothing he ate held flavor. Merely imagining food made him feel his throat constricting. Cod. When he thought about that walleye pollock's rough texture—like a cat's tongue—it felt as if something hairy were being forced down his esophagus. Hundreds, thousands waited for the frozen walleye pollock to thaw enough for knives to slice through, transforming it into countless fillets...

(Now then, how should I go about retrieving those boots? There’s no way I could sneak in and come back with them clamped in my mouth—)

As he listened to the girl’s shrill cries, he thought vaguely. Just thinking about it made the act of actually retrieving them feel almost unreal. His skin itched incessantly here and there.

“It really is yellow. No matter how you look at it, it’s yellow.”

Nakayama said while attaching a yellow filter to the camera. He stood before it with a slightly miserable expression. “Is it really that yellow?” “If you’re saying it’s not yellow—why, you’re like a summer mandarin!”

Then Nakayama looked down and adjusted the lens position. He let his hands hang limply and gazed at Nakayama’s red nose. It seemed the focus wouldn’t settle properly; Nakayama kept shifting his position yet still didn’t press the shutter. While watching this, he found himself imagining his own yellow face inverted and reflected within the camera. Behind his inverted and condensed face, the gray building of the mental hospital should have been reflected as well. Handling the camera seemed unfamiliar; Nakayama tilted his head, adjusted the machine, yet made little progress.—

Regarding the psychiatric evaluation matter,the doctor he knew had replied that unless it was precisely that time,there was no way to know how things would proceed; moreover even if the court accepted the psychiatric evaluation application,there was no certainty whether this hospital would be commissioned for that case.He had given a brief explanation of Sangen's incident,but the doctor maintained an air of near-total disinterest."There's nothing particularly abnormal about this case.The reasoning remains coherent and—"

After listening to his explanation, the doctor said that. Now that he mentioned it—that was true—he thought. However, the next moment, he realized it was he himself who had organized Sangen’s actions into a coherent narrative. Nakayama sat next to him and remained silent throughout.

“Since you’ve come all this way, would you care to tour the hospital as well?”

And first, they were shown the brain surgery room. It was an absurdly narrow, dreary room. However, when the doctor opened the large case he had taken from the cupboard, he felt something stinging run through his body. It was surgical instruments. Large scalpels, small scalpels, compact drills, and various other instruments were neatly arranged and polished to a dull luster. The drill was for boring holes into the skull. Then insert the scalpel into the hole and sever the tissue of the frontal lobe. The scalpel had a dull blade and a heavy, cumbersome shape.

“The brain, you see, is like a soft-boiled egg—squishy and wobbly. If you sever a blood vessel while cutting through it, things become quite troublesome.” “That’s why we use such a dull blade.” “Groping around like this—”

The doctor demonstrated the motions of manipulating the scalpel with both hands. He watched the slender fingers gripping the scalpel move subtly. Nakayama asked from beside him.

“How long does the surgery take?” “It’ll take about thirty minutes.” “Do you leave the hole in the skull as it is?” “No. “We do close it.” “We use a drill to shave the bone.” “The fragments and powder mix with the blood, get kneaded together, and end up like clay.” “We roll that into a ball and push it into the hole—it closes up on its own.”

The doctor closed the case and returned it to the cupboard. When the parts of a human’s thinking, feeling entity were being groped at or severed with a metal scalpel, what could that entity itself be thinking or feeling? According to the doctor, the surgery was performed under local anesthesia, and the patient could even converse with the surgeon during the procedure. As for that local anesthesia, it was said to be necessary only on the outside of the skull, and thus unnecessary for the skull itself or the brain. The fact that the brain—which thinks and feels—lacked sensation struck him as strangely eerie. This feeling connected back to an article he had read about a week earlier—an experiment in which a heart was excised during an animal test and had remained alive for several hours in saline solution or some such liquid. As science advances—if brains and eyeballs were ever reduced to such states—what would ultimately become of a brain isolated without sensory organs ceaselessly thinking, or eyeballs isolated ceaselessly seeing? However, this did not come to him as a question, but as a certain eerie reality. He exited into the cold corridor following the doctor, a faint smile on his cheeks. In the corridor, the sound of his geta clattered. Since his shoes had been taken by the dog and not returned, he had no choice but to come wearing geta.

There was nothing new in the ward area. Patients with commonplace faces were merely in the sooty ward. From around that point, Nakayama suddenly became talkative and started asking all sorts of questions. They seemed to be questions intended for his article.

Along the wide straight road within the grounds, a tall, thin man was strolling slowly, stretching his legs gracefully. The man had taken off his jacket, revealing suspenders on his slender torso. In the sunken eye sockets behind glasses, small black pupils dazedly shifted and looked their way. And the man walked quietly past him. Something like a cold wind brushed against him.

It was after bidding farewell to the doctor that Nakayama took out his camera. While taking it out, Nakayama said, “I’d meant to get permission to take photos in the wards too, but I got so caught up in the questions that I ended up forgetting.” “You’re spacing out,” he answered with a slight smile. “Planning to publish them as a photo spread or something? Why don’t you take some shots of the buildings while you’re at it?”

“I was just thinking that.”

When Nakayama wasn’t drinking, his shoulders seemed oddly cold, and his eyes had a parched look. He seemed unsure about the photographs, muttering things like “Will this even come out?” but still took three or four shots. “How about I take one of you?”

The sky churned gray. While staring as if probing at his figure standing vacantly beneath it, Nakayama said in a suppressed voice.

“I’d been thinking for a while now that something was off—but your face is horribly yellow.”

When the camera shutter aimed at him clicked, he tilted his head slightly upward and gazed at the distant sky. The distant sky, too, was faintly tinged with yellow. A sickly feeling began to spread steadily through his chest.

On the way back, as they were jostled by the train, Nakayama said. “You should drink clam miso soup.” “Three times a day, you hear?”

“Do you really think that’ll fix it? Every part of my body is so itchy.” “You should avoid fatty foods.” “You need to consume plenty of starch.” “And you should aim to store glycogen in your liver.”

“You know all sorts of things, don’t you? After all, when you’re a magazine reporter, you end up picking up all kinds of stuff.” “It’s not from work that I learned it. I had jaundice once myself, you know.”

Then they talked a little about Sangen. Nakayama recounted how Sangen had gone to the house of the victim he’d broken into and tried to make them write a settlement document. “When I told them I was Sangen’s friend and had come to apologize about what happened—they were being quite friendly at first, seemed like things might work out—but the moment I mentioned getting a settlement document written, their faces went stiff and they refused.” “Did you actually say ‘settlement document’ outright?”

“No, I told them to write down that while I detest the crime itself, I don’t harbor any hatred toward the person who committed it.” “That’s why it didn’t work—approaching it like that,” he laughed. “No. When we were talking, I’d gotten that far.” “He got caught over something trivial like that—I was saying how pitiful it was.” “But when I ask them to put that sentiment in writing, they refuse.” “That’s how it goes.” He answered while feeling deep fatigue. “You shouldn’t push yourself too hard.”

“What do you mean by ‘overdoing it’?”

Remaining slumped against the strap, Nakayama brought his red nose closer. “No. "It must have been tough, going all the way there like that."

“Because I felt sorry for him.” “Who do you mean by ‘pitiable’?”

Outside the window, on a street running parallel to the tracks, whether a car had collided or run someone over, cars and people were jumbled together in a chaotic crowd that caught his eye. Blocked by the row of houses, it soon disappeared from view. Perhaps momentarily captivated by the scene himself, Nakayama didn’t respond. The train’s roar resounded terribly monotonously. After a while, he asked.

“Will that hospital story make it into an article?” “Yeah.” Perhaps due to the lighting, Nakayama’s face looked dark and gloomy. “I can manage to write it. It’s just business, you know.”

"But it’s strange, isn’t it?" After a brief pause, he said: "If you request a psychiatric evaluation and he gets declared insane, Sangen would be acquitted." "But from Sangen’s perspective, he might rather choose prison than being labeled a madman." "That might be so." "Looking at it that way, I think we’re doing something terribly presumptuous." "Not just with Sangen—with everything." "More than presumptuous... It’s like everything we do has no real substance. Just these limp, half-hearted methods—that’s what makes me feel alive."

He parted ways with Nakayama at the crowded station.

While struggling with his sluggish body, upon returning home he passed through the Chojamon gate, descended toward Shiroki’s house, and begged him to spare some clams starting the next day. Shiroki sat on the engawa gazing at the gamecock hunched in its cage. He had always known Shiroki brought clams from somewhere daily to feed the bird. Once during a hanafuda game, Shiroki had inadvertently mentioned those clams. They were supposedly large clams of exceptional nutritive quality.

“Yes. Yes.” “I can share some with you.” Shiroki answered without taking his eyes off the gamecock in the cage. In the faint evening sun that seeped through the clouds, the gamecock raised its neck and stared fixedly at one spot with sharp eyes. The height of its back was about three shaku. Shiroki, remaining on the engawa, muttered something with apparent irritation. “This is my only pleasure now.” “Now there’s only this one left.”

“Are you going to enter this one in a match too?”

“Yes. “There’s one being held in Chiba soon, so I’m thinking of entering it.”

Shiroki resumed his explanation in a quiet voice: if it won consecutive matches, tens of thousands of yen would come in, but if it lost, not only would it become worthless, it would end up a ruined gamecock altogether.

“It would be good if it wins.” “It can also bring in money, you know.” “I don’t really care about money, but once I’m poor, I still end up wanting it, you know.” “I want it to work out now.” “It’ll win, right? Because it has such a good physique.” “Physique alone won’t decide this one.”

"If this gamecock loses, I intend to stop raising gamecocks altogether," Shiroki said as if soliloquizing, turning his face toward him. “Will you try again with this one?” Shiroki kept flipping through the hanafuda cards as his gaze grew insistent. He wore a faint smile while observing Shiroki’s flabby, pallid face.

It was Sangen who had taught him hanafuda. After being demobilized and returning home—without having a place to live—he had spent about half a year sharing Sangen’s house, during which time they played hanafuda every night. Though Sangen had been demobilized from the army like him, he had somehow managed to rent a proper house despite being single—a small two-room dwelling where he prepared the damp three-tatami room for him. Sangen excelled at hanafuda. His touch was so precise it seemed his fingertips had eyes. He sometimes found something unsettling about Sangen’s uncanny perceptiveness. Once, he had sat around a mahjong table with Nakayama, Sangen, and others. It was then he discovered that while Sangen could barely keep score—so inept was he—his tile-drawing possessed an almost professional precision. Once, when he mentioned this to Sangen while they were alone together, Sangen made a slightly displeased face.

“My old man’s blind.”

He believed Sangen’s words without question. Something murky seemed to click into place somewhere. “Want me to teach you how to lead a blind person by hand?” “The trick is—you take one step ahead and just keep moving forward.”

Sangen’s fingers were thin and long. They were fingers that seemed to lack joints. Strangely, Shiroki’s fingers felt just like those. Shiroki’s fingers were not long, but they were thin and moved in a sinuous manner, as if lacking strength.

From the next day onward, he drank clam soup three times daily.

The clams in the bamboo colander that Shiroki brought chirped on the kitchen sink all day long. When he heard them on his way to and from the bathroom, he felt something like quiet music flowing inside his body. The clams were delivered every morning by Shiroki’s daughter. When the girl came to the engawa, she called out to him in a loud voice. “Here are your clams!” She should just leave them on the engawa, he thought from his futon. But when he didn’t respond, the girl raised her voice even higher and shouted.

“Here are your clams!”

From the moment morning light began to filter in, his world would unfold into yellow. Every object within his vision appeared yellow regardless of its true color. After realizing it was likely jaundice, his perception of that yellow had changed somewhat—the yellow membrane veiling his vision now felt rooted not outside his eyes but adhered to his retinas through some nerve-like connection. He sometimes thought about the bile seeping through his body. In his imagination, this bile was a thick, viscous yellow like pus mixed with ointment. The hallucinatory sensation of this fluid flowing out from the small gallbladder near his liver and permeating blood vessels and tissues faintly overlapped with his body’s lethargic state. His body remained sluggish and dull. When alone, everything simply stayed frozen within this yellow world. Going out for walks or playing hanafuda with Shiroki—he felt these weren’t things he desired, but merely wearisome habits of existence forced upon him by something.

"(Even if there were awareness of illness—)" he would sometimes think to himself as he picked clams one by one from the broth. (That alone wouldn’t change anything.)

One evening, in this state of bodily and emotional numbness, he heard a word that stung sharply against the surface of his heart. At that time, he had sealed off the room and was playing hanafuda with Shiroki. It was a game called Koi Koi. Shiroki pronounced it as *Koyokoyo*. Comparing his captured cards with the protagonist’s and deeming it still safe, Shiroki pushed to escalate the stakes by repeating *Koyokoyo* to maximize his winnings.

“Koyokoyo” “Koyokoyo” At such moments, Shiroki’s small black eyeballs would suddenly take on a cruel glint and shift. He reflexively handled the cards—discarding and collecting them—while his mind remained tethered to the radio playing beside him. From the radio came the live broadcast of the Tokyo Trials. English and Japanese intermingled in chaotic overlap. From within that mix, his ears picked out a particularly solemn and distinct phrase. The words fell upon his ears with a certain weight and substance.

“Death by hanging” “Death by hanging”

“Death by hanging” "It’s almost as if I can see a human figure swaying limply before my eyes," he muttered inwardly. Yet the weight of those words extended beyond mere imagery. They carried an indescribable resonance. Because it was a mechanical voice stripped of human timbre, the impression intensified all the more. This utterance stood at a culminating point of the violent storm that had slaughtered multitudes and hollowed out something within him.

(How long had it been since I last heard such substantial， weighty words?) He handled cards reflexively—discarding and flipping them—without focusing his mind there. Shiroki would occasionally raise his eyelids， glance at him furtively， then handle cards. He suddenly remembered—alongside M Brain Hospital’s cold corridors and surgical tools that stung skin—the figure of a tall gaunt man he had encountered on hospital grounds' wide straight path. When they had passed each other， he had heard muttered words. Though he hadn't understood their meaning， he knew without doubt they were German. The man's slender upper body had been constricted by black suspenders and had appeared to be gasping for breath.

(That guy was saved... that guy.)

That was the man who had been excluded from the Class A war criminals’ tribunal with a diagnosis of paralytic dementia. He knew this man had been confined to M Hospital, and when he saw that figure in the distance on the straight road, he immediately intuited who it was. That tall figure approached, emanating an aura like a cold wind. Until they passed each other, the three of them remained silent as they walked.

(Why did we fall silent back then, I wonder) He saw Shiroki’s supple fingers take the flipped Rain Ten and combine it with the Paulownia Twenty to form a set. He wore a faint smile and watched. And the match was over. He took several bills from under the cushion and pushed them toward Shiroki. "I’m a bit tired," he said. “You still look quite yellow.” While gathering the cards, Shiroki replied. “Shall we stop now? Today I won.”

The radio continued reporting the details of the verdicts. However, Shiroki seemed almost entirely uninterested. He puffed on his tobacco, leaning his ear toward the radio. After a while, Shiroki peered at his face and spoke rapidly. “You still haven’t found a new house yet, I suppose.”

Instead of replying, he gave a slight nod. “Well, you see—I’ve been in a bit of a bind. I don’t want to sell this house with you still here.”

“Yeah. I’ll find somewhere to move out to,” he answered wearily. “If you move out, I won’t be able to get clamshells from you anymore.” “If he could just win… well, even then I might manage for a while—”

“What if I sold Mr. Hatta’s house?” “Yeah. If you can manage it.” “My wife says she wants to return to the countryside, you see.” “But you should still keep raising gamecocks,” said Shiroki. “If you stop that, you’ll definitely end up in a strange condition.”

Shiroki raised his swollen eyelids and glanced at him briefly with small pupils. The color of his pupils was cold and hard. He took the neatly arranged hanafuda cards from in front of Shiroki and, while putting them into the box, said.

“If it comes to that, you could sell this house with me still attached.” “But I’ll try my best to look for one too.”

“Yes. Yes.”

Shiroki nodded ambiguously. And he stood up. He escorted him out to the engawa veranda. Shiroki said while putting on his geta sandals.

“Mr. Hatta’s dog comes into this garden too, doesn’t it?” “Yeah.” “Yesterday, it got into a fight with my gamecock. Doesn’t that dog sometimes take things from your house?” “No,” he lied. “That’s a good dog.” Shiroki suddenly lowered his voice and said.

“Mr. Hatta hasn’t been paying his rent for quite some time. "For several months now." "Could you intervene on my behalf?" "I’ll give you a commission.” He simply remained silent, smiling vacantly. Then Shiroki too wore a lifeless smile on his face.

“When is the gamecock gathering?”

“Yes.” “In about two weeks.”

After Shiroki bowed and passed through Nagamon Gate, once he had gone, he returned to his room and began writing a letter using the radio as his desk. It was addressed to Nakayama. As he wrote with stationery spread before him, beneath it played the radio broadcast about the Tokyo Trials. He wrote asking whether Sangen was still at Hibusegaya Police Station and requesting updates on his condition. After some thought, he added that Sangen had fallen into crime because this world's covenants had grown fragile. Writing this, he suddenly found himself steeped in self-mockery.

(I’m always just spouting these flimsy, empty words—saying them, writing them.) When he wrote asking if he could live together for just a little while since they were pressuring him to leave his house, he still felt a faint resistance. He harbored a firm premonition that Nakayama would never take him in. The people and events—Nakayama included—had kept their distance from his heart like flat patterns; yet they also formed a composition imbued with a vague air of retribution that was simultaneously directed at him. Ever since noticing changes in his physical and mental state, the formless anxiety that sometimes arose without reason also seemed—if he pressed on—to collide with such a wall. Heaving up his sluggish body with a vacant smile plastered on his face, he went out to mail the letter.

When he returned, he saw Mrs. Hatta squatting and pulling up the boundary fence. Even when she heard his footsteps, Mrs. Hatta only glanced up at him with a sidelong look and still did not stop her movements. The decayed bamboo broke with a damp sound and was bundled in her hands.

(With that kind of business, can he not even afford to pay rent?)

He had already given up on the shoes the dog had carried off. Because he had seen Hatta wearing them one day.

Nearly a year had passed since becoming neighbors with a man named Hatta, but he had hardly exchanged words with him. Hatta was a man with a sallow complexion and puffy appearance. He had always thought that this man must have a weak stomach. His livid face bore small eyes like gunports. Hatta would leave early in the morning and return at night. He would sometimes catch sight of that figure. Hatta was wearing an ill-fitting, sun-faded suit. Carrying a lunchbox under his arm, he passed by his house early in the morning and late at night. A distinctive set of footsteps resounded at those hours. He had never seen Hatta return home wearing a tie. Over a shirt, he wore a short jacket. And on his feet, there were times he wore shoes and times he wore geta. That he was engaged in a profession that did not require much attention to clothing became clear from that.

When encountering him, Hatta would always flash a glint in his eyes. Unless he initiated a greeting first, Hatta never bowed his head. Then he would scurry past with quick, trotting steps as if dreading conversation.

His house and Hatta’s house were both owned by Shiroki and shared identical designs. From floor plans to cardinal orientation, they mirrored each other perfectly. Hatta had no children and lived there with just his wife. This architectural sameness occasionally stirred peculiar feelings within him. Whenever he considered how a dwelling’s form shapes its occupants’ daily sensations and moods, vague thoughts of Hatta would surface in his chest. Stepping across the shadowed engawa veranda to use the toilet or gazing at the garden from his room, he instinctively understood these atmospheric impressions weren’t his alone—Hatta and his wife must share them too. He had never peered inside Hatta’s home. Yet he’d constructed imagined movements of its occupants through deduction. Only through these fabrications did he feel connected to the couple next door.

It was said Hatta had worked as a school inspector in Korea before the war ended. He had heard this from Shiroki. Now that he thought of it, Hatta's demeanor still clung to a colonial air—a lingering whiff of someone who had lived in occupied territories, with vague traces of that half-baked authority peculiar to minor officials. His gunport eyes contained a reproving light that warded off unnecessary people. Stubborn self-respect flickered there. In this neighborhood, Hatta was undoubtedly difficult company. And the Hattas seemed to be deliberately erecting barriers around themselves, determined to live in isolation.

He did not know Hatta’s current occupation. None of the neighbors seemed to know either. Of course, he had no interest whatsoever in knowing it.

However, two or three days prior, he had accidentally discovered Hatta’s trade.

On his way back from an errand, he was walking through a certain street. The time was evening. In a narrow street that resembled a bustling district on the outskirts, stalls were lined up in a row on one side. Mingling with the passing crowd, he dragged his leaden legs like a yellow apparition. His body was still terribly heavy, and his throat was parched. As a harbinger of winter’s onset, the air had turned bone-dry. While scanning for a shop selling drinks, he walked listlessly toward the station.

The stalls on one side continued for about fifty meters. It was a cluster of extremely shabby stalls, their arrangement haphazard and lacking any uniformity. In the middle of that stretch, two toy shops stood side by side. Both had soot-stained reed screens, with rubber balloons and such tied to bamboo pillars. In one of these shops, amidst a dissonant array of cheap-looking red, blue, and yellow toys, he saw Hatta’s figure sitting there. (Hatta is sitting here in a place like this)

In a perfectly natural, perfectly fitted frame, there was Hatta’s face. That was his first impression of it. There was nothing odd about it at all. But the moment he recognized Hatta’s face, Hatta seemed to twist his livid face away from him in an unnatural manner. Across the road from Hatta hung the curtain of a shop selling amazake and such. For some reason he found himself wanting to stop at that shop, and with listless hunched shoulders he passed through the curtain.

(My throat had been dry)

However, he sat down at the frontmost table where he could see the street and ordered a cold drink. Through a gap in the curtain across the street, Hatta’s shop stood directly in view. The evening sun slanted across Hatta’s slightly bowed, livid profile, staining his cheeks green with reflections from the toys’ colors. Hatta sat with peculiar restlessness, fidgeting his body and moving his hands without purpose. It was clear Hatta was aware of him. His swollen face stayed rigid as if angered, and though his gaze shifted ceaselessly in small movements, it never once rested toward the amazake shop where he sat. He seemed to be deliberately avoiding looking this way. While sipping his cold drink, he gazed vacantly at it all.

The selection of toys displayed in the shop was pitifully scant. They were arranged on crude shelves and atop a red blanket laid out beneath them. The blanket had worn through in spots, its frayed edges meeting the blackened earth. There lay a pair of shoes that Hatta appeared to have discarded. He distinctly recognized their color and shape. The words slipped from his lips unbidden.

(Ah. (Those are the shoes the dog carried away.)

Then he felt a strange amusement rising like a wave to his lips. The sight of those shoes—which the dog had carried off dangling from both sides of its face—now neatly arranged here as if properly removed struck him as oddly disconnected, tickling him with their incongruity. He drank his beverage in small sips, kept his gaze fixed on the shoes' shape for some time, and stifled a silent laugh.

Hatta, sitting on the red blanket, grew increasingly restless, shifting his knees and fidgeting with the toys on the shelf. His small, downcast eyes—square-shaped and narrowed—occasionally glinted with menace as they darted toward the street. Through the gap in the curtain, he watched as Hatta’s face and entire body gradually contorted in pain.

In the amazake shop, there were no other customers besides him. The table where he sat was also dirty, with several stains having formed. There, the empty glass he had drained was warping the reflections of the shop curtain and the figures passing on the street. And some time passed.

"(Well...)" he thought slowly. "(Maybe I should get going now.)"

At that moment from Hatta’s shop came the sudden ringing of a discordant metallic sound. The noise threaded through the street’s clamor, emitting an ill-fitting shrill clang as it carried on. Through gaps in the shop curtain, Hatta’s bowed figure flickered in and out of view. Looking closer, before Hatta’s knees lay a toy xylophone—metal slats fixed to wood—which he struck with frantic force. Half-bent forward, he kept hammering the small mallet without pause. The maladroit melody was Kusazōshi. A reckless abandon saturated the tinny reverberations. Hatta’s lowered face appeared slightly flushed and anguished. Though the Kusazōshi played off-key and ineptly, through its notes he clearly sensed something sharp seeping into his breast. Abruptly he held his breath, attending to the fractured metallic tones. Hatta kept beating the xylophone with gestures suggesting flight from some unseen pursuer. The sounds dispersed across the roadway like solitary shards. Yet among the passersby, none halted at their summons. All hastened past the spectacle.

At that moment, a small cry—like a rhythmic shout—rose up. It matched the Kusazōshi melody’s rhythm in short, intermittent bursts. At Hatta’s neighboring toy shop, the young owner stood holding up a dog toy with both hands and made it dance in time with the xylophone. The toy dog moved its hands in a playful manner without expression as it danced to Kusazōshi. Hatta’s xylophone playing and the dog’s dance continued unchanged for some time. From his side of the curtain, he stared at Hatta’s face striking the xylophone and at the dog’s movements. Hatta’s downcast expression gradually took on the wretched color of a crushed crab. The young neighbor—either swept up in momentum or forcibly creating it—occasionally raised shrill tones while shaking his head exaggeratedly. Just then Hatta’s xylophone tempo suddenly accelerated before ending abruptly with a sound like all metal pieces being scrambled.

Hatta turned his head sharply toward the neighbor and seemed to say something rapidly to the young man. Those words did not reach him. A somewhat reproachful tone was clearly evident in his expression and posture. Hatta’s small, square eyes were directed piercingly at the young man. The young man seemed to say something back to him. Those words also did not reach him. (Because I’m here—because I’m watching—)

He placed money on the table and, rising listlessly, thought. (So Hatta had grown wretched, and was probably furious about having grown wretched.)

Hatta was half-crouched, leaning slightly forward as he said something to the young neighbor. Judging from the fragments of his voice, it carried a tone of strong reproach. Hatta seemed to be reproaching him for daring to make the dog dance along to the music he was playing without permission. Hatta’s voice, unlike his menacing face, occasionally grew hoarse with sorrow. The young man retorted in response, his face betraying waning interest.

As he passed through the curtain and stepped out into the street, Hatta’s body jerked and froze momentarily as if turned to stone. When he registered this, he turned up his coat collar and began plodding down the street toward the station.

What resolution had that strange quarrel come to?

Even after that, he would occasionally recall that scene and dwell on such thoughts. That such warped anger could ever reach a satisfactory resolution was beyond his imagination. All he could do was let those scattered metallic clangs of the Kusazōshi melody reverberate anew through his flesh. And whether it had been cruel—not simply pretending not to notice Hatta's presence there as he passed by, but deliberately entering the amazake shop across the street instead—and whether observing Hatta's figure had been cruel at all. Each time he pondered this, before any coherent conclusion could take shape in his chest, he felt a shadowed laughter well up within him at humanity's ways—himself included.

Hatta’s dog still frequently appeared in his garden these days. The peony, the sole decoration in the overgrown garden, could no longer be dug up by the dog because he had spread clamshells thickly around its roots. The dog stuck its head under the veranda, sniffed around the base of the main gate, then wandered off somewhere again. The dog had sustained a wound under its eye. It was clear that the wound was recent from the blackened, clotted blood still clinging to it. It was undoubtedly a wound inflicted by Shiroki’s gamecock. Perhaps because of the wound, the dog’s movements seemed to have grown more nervously sensitive than before. When he stood up on this side of the glass door, the dog, startled as if frightened, fled toward Hatta’s house. The hole in the boundary fence had grown wide enough not only for the dog to pass through freely but now even for a human to traverse with ease.

When morning came, he went down to the garden to spread the clamshells from the clams he had eaten all day yesterday around the peony roots. As if preparing for winter, the peony’s trunk had begun fraying into a brownish hue. After winter passed, whether he would still be living in this house until this flower bloomed was something even he couldn’t predict. There was nothing to do but let things take their course. While thinking this, he crushed the clamshells with his wooden clogs. The reply to the letter he had written to Nakayama some days earlier had already reached his hands. Of course, it was a letter rejecting his proposal. Thus, he currently had no immediate prospect of moving out of this house.

Nakayama’s letter had clearly stated that he had no desire to live together with him.

“Considering that Sangen ended up like *that* after living with you, I’d sooner share a roof with a corpse than with you.”

Following those words, in small characters, “This is a joke,” had been appended. According to the letter, it appeared that Sangen had already been transferred from Hibiya Police Station to Kosuge. The trial date and other details had been noted in the P.P.S. He did not know where Kosuge Prison was located. However, in his imagination, the building stood as a thin concrete structure at the end of an alleyway lined with cluttered houses. He could vividly imagine, to some extent, Sangen’s figure confined within. There was a sense of reality akin to looking at a single painting. In that space, Sangen embraced his own knees and leaned motionless against the cold cell’s corner. Despite that posture emerging in his imagination with clear contours, Sangen’s facial features alone remained hazy and indistinct, impossible for him to conjure. When he tried to force himself to imagine it, it would become Nakayama’s face, or Shiroki’s face, or Hatta’s face. It wasn’t that he had forgotten Sangen’s face, but it simply wouldn’t mesh with that imagined scene. However, merely imagining such scenes was all he allowed himself; to stir his emotions further and think about Sangen felt terribly presumptuous to him. What kind of things could I possibly think of? My thoughts immediately darted there. He recalled Hatta from that day.

(No matter how twisted it might have been—) he thought while picturing Hatta’s bluish-black, tense expression. (Why can’t humans maintain that full-bodied impulse—the kind that drove Hatta to strike up the Kusazōshi melody—in each fleeting moment?)

But even then, he had sensed a pitiful laugh in Hatta’s movements. Or perhaps because of that, fragments of the Kusazōshi melody had scraped up through his chest like vengeance—

(I should go to Kosuge once and see.) And then, all sorts of things might start up inside me again.)

He thought such things. Regarding the rent—whether he had broached the subject with Hatta—Shiroki must have come to sound him out. While playing hanafuda, Shiroki brought up the matter in a roundabout way. “No. “No, I haven’t brought it up yet,” he answered with a vacant smile. “Seems faster to win from you at hanafuda than to collect a commission.” That day, he kept winning. The stakes per round weren’t large, but his streak left a thick stack of banknotes beneath his zabuton cushion. He won that round too. Taking the bills and leaving the rest scattered, he lit a cigarette.

“For me to be the one to negotiate would be rather odd,” he said while looking at Mr. Shiroki. “After all, you should be the one to go.”

“Yes. Yes.” “But I’m not good with words.”

“Right.” “You really aren’t good with words.” Shiroki slowly straightened his slouched knees and sat up properly. By Shiroki’s knees only two or three banknotes remained. From under his whitish swollen eyelids Shiroki flicked his gaze between there and his face then spoke in a low voice.

“Is your jaundice better now? It doesn’t look too yellow anymore, does it?” “It’s just the electric light making it look that way.” “Actually, you see…” Shiroki hesitated slightly. “You see, I need a bit of money… Tomorrow’s the trip to Chiba, right? I thought you might have already settled things with Mr. Hatta… No, even if that’s the case, it’s fine, but…”

“Is tomorrow the gamecock day?” “About that… Well, you see, various things came up, and it ended up costing money…” “You’ll surely win tomorrow.” He said with a faint smile curving his lips. “But if you’d prefer, I could prepay the rent.”

Shiroki remained silent. When he stood in the next room, he returned and handed the money to Shiroki. “How’s the rooster doing?” “Well. Sort of.” Shiroki made a slightly miserable face and put the money into his pocket. He said to Shiroki while gathering the scattered hanafuda cards. “Shall we play a bit more?”

“No, that’s enough.” Some time passed as he puffed on his cigarette. What if he and Hatta received moving expenses from Shiroki and swapped houses with each other? He was absently thinking such things. He had once heard such a story in rakugo. Even if that happened, Shiroki might not express his anger clearly—or perhaps it was precisely in such a situation that the true nature of his anger would surface.

Shiroki suddenly looked up. "When I play these little back-and-forth games with you," he said, "it’s strange—I start feeling irritated." "Win or lose."

“Irritation, huh?”

Shiroki formed a lifeless, flabby smile and gave a slight nod.

“I’ve intruded too long. It’s grown late.” “Rest well tonight. Tomorrow will be trying, I expect.” He spoke in a low voice while escorting him to the engawa.

The night air in the garden was strangely lukewarm.

For two or three days starting the next day, the weather stayed warm.

He suddenly decided to visit Kosuge Prison. On the sunlit engawa veranda, he shaved his beard. In the mirror, his face was visible, and far behind him, the gable of Shiroki’s house could be seen. Shiroki seemed to have returned home late last night. Last night, while he was sleeping, there was a noise at Shiroki’s house, and he heard a girl’s voice.

“Dad’s such a drunk!” “He’s completely drunk!”

Then came another clattering noise. As he listened to it, he fell asleep.

(Did he lose? Or did he win and drink celebratory sake, I wonder.)

In the mirror was his face, now smooth. Whether due to the sunlight or his imagination, it seemed to him that the yellowness had diminished compared to before. He picked up the mirror, tilting it at angles and holding it aloft as he examined his face from various positions. The shape of his face changed variously accordingly. On his face, he thought his ears were still quite yellow, but it might not have been due to illness—perhaps they were just dirty with grime. However, in gazing at his own face in the mirror this way and that, he felt a faint happiness. And through that association, he thought of Sangen in Kosuge. In that place, he probably couldn’t keep a mirror at hand, and he would have almost no opportunity to scrutinize his own reflection. And when he thought that, at worst, Sangen would be subjected to a life cut off from mirrors for years to come, he suddenly felt Sangen’s misfortune drawing near with vivid clarity. He recalled Sangen’s face from when he had confessed his father’s blindness—that expression as if enduring anger and disgust that could not be directed at anything. (On Hatta’s face too—the one who’d beaten out the Kusazōshi rhythm—) he thought while putting away his shaving tools. (There was something similar there.) (What exactly was that?)

There were no clouds, and it was a fine day. He prepared himself and went out. The road was thoroughly dry, and dust rose from the wind. In the distant sky above the row of houses, two or three paper kites were rising. And they were swaying in the wind. While watching them, he walked toward the station. As he neared the station, shops selling goods gradually increased along both sides of the road. He walked along, browsing each shop one by one. He had known through newspapers and such that there were supply shops in Kosuge, but he did not know what kinds of things were sent in or how they were delivered. Even if he couldn’t make the delivery, he could just take it back again. While thinking this, he gazed at the shops’ goods and ambled along.

At a small butcher shop wedged between a shoe store and flower shop, he noticed eggs piled high in baskets. Eggs would probably do, he thought, stopping before them. The eggs held a whitish sheen in the clear daylight. Approaching, he pointed at the eggs to the portly old man standing behind the meat-cutting table. “Five of these.” “No—maybe I’ll take about ten instead.”

Absentmindedly peering into the shop’s interior, he saw a single chicken standing on the butcher’s earthen floor. The chicken held its neck perfectly straight, eyes shut, not moving an inch like a taxidermy specimen. He realized instantly that this was Shiroki’s gamecock. The familiar hue of its tail feathers had first caught his eye. A sudden tightness gripped his chest. “What’s wrong?” “This chicken...”

“Its eyes got crushed.” “From a cockfight, see.” The old man jerked his chin in that direction. “Meat from this one’s too tough to eat. “Got forced to buy it last night, but—”

“Even if you don’t tie it up, wouldn’t it try to escape?” “In this state, it won’t move at all. Gallant creatures, those gamecocks are. They don’t thrash about—just wait to die.” While counting the eggs into a paper bag, the old man answered. He looked down again at the chicken on the earthen floor. The chicken stood desolate, beak clamped shut. From comb to eyes, black blood lay caked thick. Whether it heard human voices or not, the chicken remained rooted to the floor, unmoving. In that stance—shoulders squared, wings puffed—the will to fight lingered only as empty form. Beneath the bloodscab, its lids were thinly closed in shadow.

(So it was still alive.) He had been thinking about how he’d shared clams with this chicken and eaten them together. But from today onward, Shiroki would likely stop bringing clams.

"(And now finally, I too—)" he thought as he received the paper bag containing the eggs. "I might end up being sold off along with my house."

He paid the money and left the shop. As he walked, the eggs rustled faintly inside the bag.

He was already near the station. From this station to Kosuge, it would take a considerable amount of time. Thinking he would buy a magazine to read on the train, he stopped in front of a bookstore. Many magazines were lined up on the stand. Amidst the garish-covered magazines stretching in a row, he spotted the latest issue of Nakayama’s weekly magazine slightly wedged among them with its cover peeling. Tucking the bag of eggs under his arm, he reached out and pulled it free. He flipped through the pages briskly. An article bearing Nakayama’s signature suddenly caught his eye. He remained standing there skimming through the article haphazardly.

It was an account of a visit to M Mental Hospital. Nakayama had reported it in a style resembling reportage. As he read on, he sensed a strange incongruity within it. There was a gnawing sense of incompleteness there. It was his own reflections, interspersed here and there, that brought about that feeling.

(I didn't feel anything there that Nakayama seemed to feel at all,) he thought as he kept reading the article. (The things Nakayama wrote about here—I hadn't seen any of them, nor had I felt them.) Nakayama's article emphasized the behavior of patients observed in hospital wards. In his memory, those scenes remained only as a hazy gray continuum. Nakayama had meticulously gathered and described those details. And the explanations he added had directly lifted the doctor's own words.

“…a state of emotional atrophy where they exhibit no emotional response to any circumstances. These unfortunate people show no affection toward relatives or nurses, remaining coldly indifferent even to others’ kindness around them. They feel no joy or interest in anything—no sympathy or moral sense toward others. They show no distress even when afflicted with illnesses involving fever or pain.” After describing the schizophrenic patients’ ward, Nakayama had appended this explanation. Thinking that adopting an omniscient tone must be the key to such articles, he continued reading further.

“…there are also cases where some patients, already in the earliest stages of changes to their emotional lives, find it strange that their interests are waning and their concern and affection for those around them are diminishing, and even feel sorrow.” They come to viscerally perceive the self as being incrementally severed from the real world. When the emotions of those around them reach a state where they fail to elicit reactions from the patients, the means to forge human connections between patients and those around them disappear. Thus, the patients come to be perceived as figures lacking in approachable emotional communicability. The people confined here all bear such misfortune. However, can we simply dismiss these people outright as mentally ill? “When we look within ourselves and at our surroundings…”

He shifted his gaze to the photograph at the bottom of the page. Due to the paper quality, it had been printed blurrily. However, it was indeed his own photograph. It was a photograph of himself that Nakayama had taken back then, wearing geta and standing vacantly. Behind him, part of a hospital ward was faintly captured. He suddenly felt a cold, wry smile rising in his chest. (This was a pretty good joke, coming from Nakayama.)

After closing the magazine and returning it to its original place, he set off walking, a faint smile etched on his cheek. Rather than reading a magazine on the train, he felt it would be better now to gaze at the scenery outside. Before his eyes, the railroad crossing gate slid smoothly downward at that moment. He stood still for a while, shifting the paper bag. Before long, the train drew near, its bluish-black car roaring past before his eyes. The gust of wind from the train's speed struck his face violently in that instant. The wind reeked of iron. He staggered slightly.