Pathway to Japanese Literature

In those days, I lived with my ears perpetually strained.
Of course, this did not mean I was concentrating my attention—on the contrary, having lost all energy to think, I had come to listen in that manner.

I lived alone in an apartment in the factory district and remained perpetually alone, yet the woman came every day. And around me began to take up residence kettles, pots, rice bowls, chopsticks, plates—even filthy things like miso jars and scrub brushes.

"I hate having kettles and pots and plates and rice bowls—things like that—around me."

I protested like this whenever more items appeared, but the woman paid no attention.

"There's nobody alive who goes without rice bowls or chopsticks."

“Haven’t I lived this long?”
“There’s a kitchen called a dining hall.”
“Throw away the rice bowls and kettles.”

The woman merely smirked quietly.

“A delicious meal will be ready soon, so just wait.”
“You must get tired of dining hall food.”

The woman was convinced of that.
She didn’t believe there was even three pennies’ worth of truth in ideas like mine.

Truly, among my possessions, when it came to utensils useful for eating, there was only the single cup I used when washing my face.
I was a drunkard, yet I possessed neither a sake cup nor a flask—not even a beer opener.
In my room, I had made it a rule not to drink alcohol either.
I had resolved to keep what we call instincts out of my room, but above all else—before even food—the woman’s body had begun intruding unceremoniously into the solitary futon of my existence, so that even when kettles and pots came slithering in of their own accord, my resolve to cling solely to Nyozegasetsu-like purity through chastity had already begun wavering.

In human existence, some form of purity and a sense of chastity become crucial elements.
When even someone like me—a shiftless outcast—had their sorrow seep into their very marrow, clinging to some form of purity and its chastity became an existential necessity.

I detested shabbiness and found the mere awareness of subsisting to live utterly intolerable—so I squandered money in proportion to my poverty, blowing through a month's living expenses in a single day, even giving away what I couldn't spend myself, for this was my one day of revenge against twenty-nine days of destitution.

Living frugally over a long span was something I inherently loathed; my wastefulness would leave me subsisting on water for about three days or forcing me into night flights to escape debts from boarding houses and diners—the lives of defeated samurai find no place in official histories, and when one grasps even a fraction of this wretchedness compounded upon wretchedness, laughter becomes inevitable. Because I was convinced that a life of spending everything in one day, drinking water, and resorting to night flights was preferable to eating sparingly every day without fail. I was a drunkard like the scum of the streets, but I regretted nothing.

The reason I didn’t own pots, kettles, or utensils wasn’t for the convenience of midnight escapes. This alone was my fervent lifelong aspiration—truly, it’s no good—I was born scatterbrained, prone to making wild exaggerations at every turn, and indeed, it’s precisely by soothing myself in this manner that I’ve managed to keep living. This was my lullaby. In any case, to justify to myself that I was not merely eating to survive, I did not permit even a single rice bowl or pair of chopsticks near me.

My manuscripts had almost ceased to bring in money.
I was utterly an outcast.
I, however, was resigned to the fate of an outcast.
People cannot live as they wish after all.
There was no significant difference in spiritual heights and depths, safety and peril between Toyotomi Hideyoshi fretting at Momoyama Castle and myself drifting dazedly in a one-room apartment—only their external forms differed somewhat.
Yet my greatest fear was this: while Hideyoshi at least labored with all his might, would my own power—distorted by the shrinking of being an outcast—lose its capacity to grow?

Looking back, I had loved outcasts since my boyhood days.
When I became able to read some French, I began meeting weekly with a man named Nagashima Tsui to read Lenormand’s play *The Outcast*.
(Admittedly, this play was tedious,) but however, since my boyhood I had loved Poe, Baudelaire, and Takuboku both as literature and as outcasts—and my fervent love for Molière, Voltaire, and Beaumarchais amounted to nothing less than a passion for the nihilism that lay exposed like an immovable bedrock beneath life’s undercurrents.
However, my inclination toward being an outcast reached back even further.
I was expelled from Niigata Middle School in the summer of my third year, but at that time, on the underside of my school desk’s lid, I had carved a pretentious declaration: "I shall become a great outcast and one day be resurrected in history."
Of course, as an elementary school student I had intended to become a general or a minister or an aviator—but when had I changed my aspirations to becoming an outcast?
At home, in the neighborhood, at school—everywhere I was despised—I had come to cast a scornful glare upon the world.
Of course, being a scatterbrain of the highest order, it’s possible such a notion was simply one of the prevailing ideas of the time.

However, the outcast of my boyhood dreams—Lenormand’s lyrical outcast, those romanticized outcasts—differed entirely from the outcast I had truly become in reality.

There was no lyricism whatsoever in my surroundings.
To mistake my profligate nature for a dreamer’s sentimentality would be misguided.
I maintain that those who treat poverty as some grave affair—putting on a solemn face and calling it harsh living—are the true infants.
If one views poverty merely as poverty, the solution lies in working to earn money.
When survival alone is the aim, methods always exist; indeed, the very concept of being unable to eat stems from inherent slovenliness—neither profound nor solemn, but downright absurd.
Unless one grasps poverty’s intrinsic slovenliness and sheer idiocy, one has no business dabbling in literature.

Since I had no notion of working to eat, poverty was inevitable; resigned from the outset, I observed my own foolishness. I’ll work if it’s for play. I’ll work if it’s for luxury or wastefulness. But even were I to work, I could never achieve the luxury and opulence I desired—so ultimately I simply didn’t work. My guiding principle in life remained straightforward.

I lived fixated on desiring supreme luxury and pleasure, disdaining any compromise through lesser indulgences; through this pursuit I meant to pluck the fruits of my thought and literature at their final moment of maturity. Hence poverty troubled me little. Night flights and fasting brought nothing beyond a bitter smile. The opulent pleasures I contemplated could exist neither on earth nor in history—they dwelled solely behind my life’s back. Back-to-back with it all. Reflecting now, I was a fool—yet humanity itself stands as folly incarnate.

The one thing I had to keep holding onto to live was work and confidence in power.
But confidence—its inherent nature lies in collapse, and in the form of confidence, it never lingers in one’s heart for more than a few days in a lifetime.
This bastard was the most honest in the world; no matter how much people flattered him, he never deceived himself.
I too had been flattered and praised at times, but the bastard of confidence always remained a thing unswayed by other noises—in that sense, a refreshing presence—yet to engage with it earnestly in order to live made it a bitterness-filled entity.

Because I possessed a visceral philosophy that did not balk at poverty, I never became an atmospheric outcast, nor did I harbor lyrical outcast sentiments or a pessimistic worldview.
I had little consciousness of being an outcast.
Instead, I had to constantly contend with confidence while never forgetting some practical means to check it at the final step.
In essence—confidence was something that permitted no deception.

My revulsion toward tableware was instinctive.
I loathed tableware as one might loathe snakes.
Moreover, I disliked furniture altogether.
Even books—once read—I made it a rule to sell all except those particularly necessary.
As for clothing, I owned nothing but a dotera padded robe and yukata.
I "strived" not to own anything.
A half-hearted desire for possession is sorrowful and wretched.
I was someone who could never be satisfied unless I owned everything.

★

For someone like me to own a woman was already a mistake.

I had managed to keep her body from taking root in my room—but this amounted to splitting hairs.
Pots, kettles, tableware began their occupation.
My soul crumbled into decay and ruin.
Having claimed ownership of the woman, I'd forfeited that chastity toward purity which might have barred tableware from my chamber.

The sight of her wearing a work sash repelled me.
Watching her wield a dusting cloth—I'd have preferred gazing at some circus freak's grotesquely stretched neck than endure such domestic pantomime.
Let filth pile an inch thick across the floorboards—better she wallow in that squalor than lift a broom.
During my stay in Toride town, half my face ballooned with coin-sized clusters of painless pustules.
Nakamura Chihiro and Masugi Shizue came visiting just then—when Shizue mused "Perhaps spiders wove their webs?" it all rushed back.
The spider had indeed spun its trap.
One midnight awakening found me brushing gossamer strands from ceiling and cheekbone alike.
To this hour I wonder—what sixth sense revealed those webs to Shizue?
That such thoughts even occur—isn't this less intellectual vigor than pure idiocy?

New spiderwebs are beautiful.
Old spiderwebs appear filthy and repulsive—the spider's greed looks unclean—but new spiderwebs render even that greed pure, and I sometimes think I want my body bound within them.
I like enchantresses fresh as spiderwebs, but I have yet to meet such a person.
The common type of enchantress in Japan has old spiderwebs for masters, where both weakness and strength are carnal; I think true enchantresses are not carnal.
Among women who write novels, there are no true enchantresses.
"A character in *Liaisons Dangereuses* says that, and I too believe it true."

I like enchantresses, but true enchantresses would not deign to associate with a man like me.
Shake it upside down and swing it around—nothing spills out but nihilism, nothing else remains.
Indeed.
Is there vanity left beyond this?
The man himself would call it an unfettered and independent soul.
An insufferable creature.

Life's fatigue has no relation to age.
At twenty-nine, I was more fatigued, more gloomy, and gazed only at life's decay than I am now.
I have no desire to describe the woman.
The woman I had taken was one who had left her husband for me.
Rather, she might have fallen in love with me precisely to leave her husband.
That was probably correct.

At that time, we avoided her husband—that man—wandering from place to place: staying at hot springs, old post-town inns, this mountain and that sea.
From the very beginning, I had not particularly loved the woman.
Nor had I any desire to possess her.
It was merely that the dream of aimless fugitive wanderings—lending a fitting sentimentality to my life's fatigue while I grew somewhat entranced by the perverse pleasure of defeat—had brought about this emotional conclusion where the woman had settled into being my possession.
She was a woman who had detested and fled her husband—a woman who by nature wore a work sash across her shoulders, who before knowing me had danced about with some European gentleman—and yet took pleasure in making miso soup for me.

What the woman hated most among my attributes was this unfettered and independent soul.
"Don't you go becoming some great artist," she would say.
She wanted us to remain ordinary people growing old together like withered trees.

I was reading the newspaper with reading glasses on.
The woman too wore reading glasses as she sewed buttons onto my shirt.
Both our waists were bent.
Sunlight fell across our backs.
This was the scene the woman described to me.
To become like that—this was her genuine wish.
"Let's buy some land and live in the countryside."
She pressed this relentlessly.

It wasn't that I disliked her being this way.
The true fault lay in my having "possessed" her—her affection had grown so cloying I could scarcely endure it.

“Why not take up with another man? And go through with a proper marriage this time?”

I said this, but there were reasons why the woman didn't respond—I was intensely jealous, or rather consumed by an aversion to defeat.
An instinctive fury rose within me at her capacity to harbor affection for another man.
Though such rage would dissipate completely within three days—her very visage fading from memory—in that moment my wrath pulsed with a venomous vitality.
She distrusted my words yet clung blindly to belief in my devotion—a paradox rooted in grim inevitability.

There was a ten-sen stand I would sometimes visit for drinks around one in the morning. Because of its stall-like structure—a setup where even operating until two or three in the morning rarely drew the ire of patrol officers—it was conveniently suited for me, who often craved a drink around one o'clock. A woman around thirty ran the place; when customers left, she would lay something like a plank over the chairs and sleep on it—a highly promiscuous woman who’d detain customers when drunk. But more than a million others, she was a disgustingly ugly woman, and though I was occasionally invited to stay over, I could never bring myself to do so. She must have hated sleeping on the dirt floor—"Since I’ll be staying over at your place, tell me your apartment," she’d say—but I never told her my address either.

This woman had a husband. He was an ex-soldier—one of those engineer corps members who planted bombs on the railway during the Zhang Zuolin assassination incident—and he told me he'd rather enjoyed his confined house arrest life afterward. A rogue living in some apartment, he was utterly despised by the woman, who only let him stay when no customer proved brave enough to spend the night. Each evening he'd come scouting; if there was a paying lodger, he'd leave after extorting three or four drinks and pocket money instead of making a jealous scene. None of the other customers knew he was her husband. Since I never stayed over despite her invitations, he took a liking to me and opened up, while she herself didn't hide anything either—calling him "that idiot" while complaining how instead of jealousy, he clung like a leech that wouldn't let go. When just the two of us men remained with no other customers outside, they'd start nagging—"Let me stay tonight," "I won't have you"—until he turned violent. Then she'd grow fiercer still, snarling "Get lost, you bastard!" before she'd even finished speaking, she'd fling a plateful of water at him. "Bastard!" He'd slap her across the face; she'd crawl out through the lower hatch and hurl a chair at him like a warrior swinging a club. When enraged, she became a lunatic. Glass shattered; sake bottles went flying. He'd give up, whistle, and walk away. Lustful and promiscuous as a stray dog, she reserved her obstinacy solely for her husband.

The man had a splendid physique—a handsome face with a bitter edge—and compared to that filthy woman, there was no comparison; among the customers, there was no young man as fine as him, which was laughable. A natural-born idler, the lowness of his soul—exploiting women instead of working—rendered him base. This baseness was well understood by the woman and by me, who knew the circumstances, but not by others. When he drank sullenly, unfamiliar customers would become as reserved as out-of-place high-class patrons. He wore sunglasses. That was the man’s taste.

One late night was nearing three o'clock, and the customers were just two: me and the man.
The woman was quite drunk and, after straightforwardly promising to let her husband stay that night, insisted on treating me specially—forcing sake bottles on me, she with one and he with another.

Then a novice detective arrived.
Though called a novice, he was a man nearing forty with a mustache.
He began drinking and blatantly propositioning the woman, but his manner of seduction made it easy to infer he had stayed over before.
The woman did not respond.
Not only refusing him, she openly scorned the detective—showing no gratitude toward those who exploited her trade’s vulnerabilities to claim her body—and though her drunkenness framed “Don’t flatter yourself” as euphemism, its crudeness bled through.
The detective concluded I was her guest that night, and that was why she refused him.

At that time, I was holding a hiking stick with a sharp steel tip.
I had a habit of never letting go of my walking stick—the original handle was a high-quality piece a friend had bought in Singapore for ten dollars—but after drunkenly leaving it behind in a one-yen taxi, I opted to buy this hiking stick and swing it about rather than settle for some worthless inferior replacement.
The rattan walking stick I had lost—its tip having come loose—was such a remarkable piece that when I took it to a shop in Kanda for repairs, the owner summoned even the young female clerks to admire it, declaring, “A piece so rare there are few like it in all of Japan.”
Once you possess a walking stick of this caliber, you can’t bring yourself to carry counterfeit mid-grade articles.

“You bastard, come here.”
The detective suddenly grabbed my arm.

“Bastard!”
“If you’re not a fraud, then what are you?”
“That walking stick’s a murder weapon, isn’t it?”

“This is a hiking stick.”
“What kind of detective doesn’t know something like that?”

“You lecher!”

The woman stood up indignantly.

“This gentleman here—even when I tell him to stay over，he’s never once done it.”
“He’s not someone who’d even give you his apartment address if you asked.”
“Don’t misjudge him!”

So the detective gave up on me.
Then he grabbed the man’s arm.
The man had been detained before and was acquainted with the detective.

“You bastard, still loitering around? Where’d you steal that wristwatch?”

“I was given it.”

“Enough. Come here.”

The man didn’t resist—he was used to this. He stood up calmly and walked out alongside him. At that moment, the woman used a chair as a stepping stool, leapt down from the stand’s counter, and dashed out barefoot. The sake bottle and cup on the counter bounced off, fell, and shattered; she lunged at the detective and wailed.

“This man’s my husband! What’re you doing with my husband?”

I liked this phrase. However, because the woman was howling and sobbing uncontrollably, even her whirlwind-like sharpness in leaping down from the stand’s table ended in anticlimax. The detective stood momentarily dumbstruck, but since her crying held no dignity, he didn’t back down.

“This man is truly this woman’s husband.”

I too went out to explain, but it proved futile. The man gave me a silent bow, calmly straightened his shoulders, and departed. That’s when it happened—right there where an alley branched off, my woman emerged from its depths. Clad in black garments under a black overcoat, her pale face floated into view beneath the streetlamp’s dim glow. Though I couldn’t comprehend why she appeared there, a profound unease gripped me. About the fated unnaturalness binding us together—anger surged hot through my chest.

My woman said to me, "Let's go." There was something blatant about both the command I had to obey and her air of superiority. I felt a seething anger flare up. I silently returned inside the bar and began drinking. Before me were two bottles of sake the woman and man had each given me, but by now I felt nauseous and in truth didn’t even want to catch a whiff of the liquor. The woman said she wouldn’t go home, but then declared, "I’m not going back. You go alone," and left in anger.

But I was in a wretched state—I was driven out by the lunatic woman from the stand.
When this woman flew into a rage, she was a lunatic.
“Get out, you bastard—quit putting on airs!” the woman shouted at me.
“So that’s her, huh? Disgusting. If she doesn’t scram, I’ll douse her with water.”
Then she slammed the rattling glass door shut right against my retreating back and said, “See ya! Ain’t serving you here no more—get lost and don’t come back!”

There was a reason my woman had come walking down the late-night road—her former husband had come to her place, and though they spent hours glaring at each other, she resolved to go out.
The man reportedly did not give chase.
While hurrying to my apartment, I happened upon a strange scene; hiding in an alley, I observed every detail.
The woman’s emotional state held some pathos, but to a nihilist like me its vulgarity only grated—I buried myself under the futon and passed out drunk while she stayed awake through the night still in her coat against the wall until shaking me awake at dawn.
The woman was furiously angry.
She had been insisting we take a trip at daybreak.
Yet I too was angry.
When I sat up I spoke.

“Why do you come bursting in during incidents like yesterday’s and order me to go home?”
“You can’t shackle me.”
“There are parts of my life untouched by you.”
“Yesterday’s events, for instance—they’re none of your concern.”
“In those situations, your sole privilege is trespassing into my vacant room to await my return.”
“That you chanced upon that place grants you no power to curb my actions.”
“Our bond contains no privileges beyond its existing threads—nothing that binds each other’s freedom.”

The woman was extremely stubborn, but when she had other pressing objectives, she knew how to bide her time for their sake. She forcibly dragged me out and put me on a train, and after it had run for an hour and reached a place where nothing was visible beyond the wheat fields,

“Even if you say we shouldn’t bind freedom, I’m your wife—it’s only natural.”

I no longer answered. That I had owned the woman was wrong. Yet more than that, there was something even more heartrending—that I had not written down a single thing about myself. Around that time, I had developed a habit of growing bitterly pensive whenever considering Radiguet’s age. Radiguet died at twenty-three. What a wasteful age I’ve reached, I thought. Now that I’ve lived so absurdly long, I no longer dwell on Radiguet’s age—but back then, contemplating my own years and work’s emptiness filled me with heart-rending sorrow. Where on earth am I going? This train journey might be taking me along with the woman, but who would take my soul to its destination? The only thing I understood was that I myself did not grasp my own soul. This is the true outcast. Being financially ruined and socially disregarded isn’t tragic. That I cannot grasp my own soul—there can be no emptiness, foolishness, misery as profound as this. The hollowness of being led onto this destinationless train—was it that ultimately one either possessed the highest thing or nothing at all? Why had that chastity been lost? Yet as for whether ceasing to “own” this woman could restore true chastity—by now I’d lost all confidence. I had no bearings left.

To my own soul.
And to the destination of the soul.

★

I disliked "the decay of form." This was because I believed it to be merely grimy and inherently trivial—something unconnected to the soul’s own fall.

There was a woman named Aki who was the cousin of the woman.
Though married seven or eight years with a husband still present, she frequented coffee shops hunting college students for affairs—a woman who declared she wanted to know a thousand men and made carnal pleasure her sole reason for living.
Such women were trite, and I detested the baseness of their souls.
At first glance pretty-faced—emaciated and unmistakably cold-hearted—she carried an air of perpetual availability that never failed to rouse my lust; yet I refused to debase myself by joining ranks with such trite souls.
Were I to whisper but one word—"Let's play"—to the woman, that would suffice.
What followed would be mere vulgar sport—devoid of any refinement or complexity that might deepen its intoxication.
There remained only cheap, discarded carnality.

Even though I believed this, I was no good.
Once, when my woman had returned to her hometown for divorce matters and was absent for about ten days, Aki came over and, saying she’d cook me a meal, drank sake—though her true intent was clear from the start—and I couldn’t suppress my own lust.

The object of this woman’s interest was solely each man’s genitalia; her curiosity toward them constituted her entire being.
What I had to discover at the end of our dalliance was that I myself was not myself but mere genitalia—a fact that, as long as I faced this woman, remained an inescapable reality.
If I were to heap futile efforts upon the woman in order to rise above being mere genitalia and prove myself some higher human being, I would only grow more foolish by the day.
In truth, I was already not a shred higher than that.
So I anchored myself firmly in genitalia itself and began idle banter with the woman.

The woman, knowing I was a third-rate writer, asked in minute detail how to appear cute to men. She appeared to have primarily acquired her techniques from popular writers’ novels, but since they were undoubtedly more skilled than I in that domain, I had nothing to add to them. When I said this, she seemed satisfied. The woman said that the majority of students were unsatisfied. “I trick Hazu, you trick Madam, and sneaking around to have fun is delightful, isn’t it?” said the woman. I wasn’t particularly enjoying it. I was merely trite—it was triteness itself, nothing but grating.

The woman’s body lacked allure.

The woman lived solely on her curiosity about male genitalia and thus harbored profound anxiety about her own physical allure.
Yet she remained utterly unaware that living solely for carnal satisfaction itself held the least allure of all.

Mere egoism was a lowly, shallow thing even in carnal desire’s final throes.
The egoism seeking only one’s own intoxication could never hold true value there.
True prostitutes must surely sacrifice their own rapture.
They were artisans of their craft.
Innate artisans.
That demanded genius.
It resembled our own work.
To create something truly valuable required self-sacrifice.
A soul devoted to serving others was essential.
When divinely inspired, such a soul became no petty buffoon but something dwelling in art’s heights.
And when any genius fixated on base immediate desires, that height—its true worth—would plummet and perish outright.

This woman pondered in minute detail the techniques of kimono styling—how to appear innocently demure, how much to expose at the collar or wrists to stir men’s lust—and from such calculations, she abstained entirely from tobacco and alcohol. However, this woman’s ultimate concern was solely her own intoxication; there was no soul of innate self-sacrifice. Once stripped bare, that was all there was. No matter how much she made herself look innocent and calculated the allure of exposing her nape or arms, once stripped naked, that was all there was. As for the true lowness of her soul, this woman remained utterly unaware.

At that time, I thought most about the devil.
The devil desires everything.
Yet he is never sated.
This boredom, I think, is life's final precipice.
Yet the devil knows no path back to self-sacrifice from that edge.
The devil is naught but a nihilist - nothing more.
While discovering self-destructive grandeur in that devil's infinite tedium, I simultaneously found myself compelled to curse it.
I must not remain merely a devil.
I must become human.

However, my efforts to remain human had to collapse into chaos throughout all my thoughts whenever I considered my confidence in my literary talent.

Then I myself was nothing but the most petty egoist.
By "possessing" the woman, I could not help but curse her very existence.
I could not help but curse and lament even the fact that my woman’s body—that her genitalia—had so little special allure.

“Your Madam’s body seems to have allure.”
“It has no allure.”
“Among all women—among the bodies of every woman I’ve known—more than anyone—”

“Oh, that’s a lie.”
“But she’s very cute—and hairy.”

I found myself descending into a base state where I wanted to enumerate every detail about the structure of my woman’s genitalia—but as I considered how I myself had been reduced to nothing but this same worthless scrap of genitalia, I coldly observed within my heart the wretched effort I was making to suppress delivering one final insult to her.

“How many men have you been with?”

“Hey, what’s Madam’s like?”
“Don’t dodge it—tell me.”

“Shall I tell you about yours?”
“Yes.”

The woman maintained her unshakable confidence, laughing with glittering eyes as she stared at me.

At that moment, it suddenly occurred to me.
That was because of the woman’s glittering eyes.
I thought of the stand’s dirty woman.
That woman always talked about genitalia when she got drunk.
Men’s, and women’s.
And whenever she asked me to stay over, she always laughed with those glittering eyes.

I resolved that this time, I would stay at that stand.
To the filthiest depths—I’d go as far as I could go.
And what happened in the end—that, I no longer knew.

★

Since being driven out of that stand late one night, I hadn’t returned to drink at that place. Those were the golden age days of ten-sen stands—if you were willing to walk just a little, finding late-night drink posed no hardship whatsoever. All-night oden stalls perpetually dotted the streets too. True, this district teemed with shady types, making unfamiliar establishments anxiety-inducing prospects, but I’d long since stopped caring about such trifles.

One morning, I remembered that day with strange vivid clarity, down to the very weather. Though called morning, it was around half past ten, close to eleven. A radiant noon. I was hurrying to the Keihin Tram stop to run an errand in the city center when I passed by the stand—but on that day alone, for some reason, I carried a considerable sum of money in my pocket. The woman at the stand had just woken up and finished cleaning the shop. Because the glass door stood wide open, the woman inside spotted me and came running after me.

“Hey.”
“What’s wrong with you?”
“You mad?”

“Morning.”

“Sorry about that night.”
“When I get carried away, I lose all sense.”
“Come drink here again, yeah?”

“Let’s drink now.”

I made a snap decision.
I felt the money in my pocket.
Forget the errand.
Squander the cash.
Squander myself.
I resolved to drag this woman down to the deepest pit.
I calmly started drinking.
The woman didn’t drink.

Since I hadn’t eaten breakfast, the alcohol coursed through my entire body, but I wasn’t yet fully drunk.

“Let’s go stay over.”

I said.
The woman recoiled, grinning slyly as she shook her head.

“Let’s go. Right now.”

I spoke with certainty as if stating something obvious, but the woman’s laughing face gradually grew audacious and composed.

“You’re out of your mind today of all days.”

“I like you.”

A bitter smile surfaced plainly on the woman’s face.
The woman did not reply, but her bitter smile held more meaning than any words could convey.
I coldly rearranged in my consciousness every unappealing aspect: her face being filthier than any earthly thing—a filth that simultaneously signified uncleanness; her body resembling a lump of dumplings pressed together; her whole being feeling like some hybrid between a short-legged, malformed dwarf and a human—none of which could be considered beautiful by any measure.
And I thought about my own figure—being smirked at, despised, and pitied by that woman.
Yet within my self-conceited heart, there was neither anger nor rebellion.
I felt no regret.
From such a state of void, I think people can probably construct various aspects of their own minds and attain a state where they can exercise will.
However, I suddenly chose the pleasure of falling and surrendered myself to it.
Of all my actions that day, I believe it was in this moment that I acted most calculatedly and despicably.
Because what I had chosen was not so much an act of will as it was a vulgar cliché.
I surrendered myself to it.
And I felt a kind of excitement as if I were immersed in pleasure.

I opened the crawl space beneath the table and tried to worm my way in like a dog.
The woman stood up and tried to hold the door, but since my action was quicker, I easily slipped inside.
But while I tried to restrain her, she had already slipped through and crawled out to the opposite side.
When our positions had reversed and we faced each other again, even I couldn’t help but force a bitter smile to mask my embarrassment.

“Let’s go stay over.”

And even as I laughed, I kept insisting.

“Go find yourself a prostitute.”

And the woman’s smile grew increasingly brazen.

“In broad daylight? How slovenly.”
“I hate pushiness.”

“Go find yourself a working girl,” the woman spat.

The words “Go find yourself a working girl” clung fiercely in my head.
That there existed a class capable of shaming even this unclean woman came as a profound surprise to me.
I remembered Aki.
That idea sent me into raptures.
Aki would not refuse.
Unless there were special circumstances, she couldn’t possibly refuse.
The fact that the woman who could even be shamed by this unclean, deformed creature—a hybrid between dwarf and human—was Aki remained unknown to this malformed woman herself, and of course, neither Aki nor anyone besides me knew.
The joy of this discovery stoked my carnal desire.
I had become nothing but a lump of lust.
And through the satisfaction of conjuring Aki’s beauty instead of that malformed hag’s visage, my lust swelled until expectation alone comprised my entire being for this new purpose.

I drank again.
The woman was reluctant to pour the alcohol, but since I had calmed down like a different person, she seemed not to understand what was happening.
I had the beer bottle filled with alcohol.
I hung it at my side and left.

Aki was a pretentious woman.
She had been spreading rumors of being a wealthy idle Madam who entertained college students, but in truth was the wife of a poor salaryman—her lavish kimono being her sole finery.
I felt repelled by that pretentiousness.
I despised how her substance fell so far beneath her pretensions.
She was conceited.
And yet she remained constantly irritated.
This stemmed solely from unfulfilled carnal desires; eyes perpetually hunting men constituted the entirety of her soul.

I summoned Aki and went to a seaside hot-spring inn.
Everything went exactly as I’d planned.
I said I despised Aki.
And I said I was overflowing with joy at having discovered that this pretentious creature could be shamed even by a malformed hag.
That I’d once thought this way was undoubtedly true—but it was merely having thought so, a flourish to enrich my carnal desires—and my expectations and excitement were entirely lust.
I don’t like shaming and wounding people.
I lack any foundation within myself that could endure shaming and wounding others.
The spit you hurl will inevitably fly back at you.
I was fundamentally timid and humble.
This came from lacking confidence and compromising with others—I despised it but couldn’t escape.

However, I was drunk.
Aki returned home around eight in the evening out of deference to her husband, but I drank cold sake from the tokkuri flask on the chabudai and, as if chasing her retreating figure, suddenly began recounting why I'd invited her that day and everything that had transpired.
I didn't even notice Aki's furious expression.
I was smug with self-satisfaction.
After Aki left, I summoned a geisha and drank until deep into the night.
When I returned to my apartment the next day, I vomited pitch-black blood from my gut.
I spewed nearly a liter of blood.

However, Aki’s revenge grew even more severe. She told my woman everything. It was vicious. She made her listen to detailed descriptions of every physical act—a meticulous account of all my deeds. That I’d said her body lacked charm, that I’d claimed she was less appealing than anyone else—Aki dredged up every unpleasant remark I’d ever made and forced her to hear each one recounted in exacting detail.

★

I thought how pitiful the woman's desires must be.
I wondered if they were absurd.

When her frenzied rage subsided, she returned to an intimacy that could only be perceived as feeling their love had deepened.
What she desperately yearned for was to flaunt their bond before Aki.
She would throw tantrums, demanding we kiss for a full hour in front of Aki.

Could such emotions truly be sincere?
I could not help but doubt.
They were warped somewhere.
I sensed something unnatural about them.
If women's true nature were truly this base, they would deserve contempt as vulgar creatures—yet I found myself unable to view them so simplistically.
Even the most seemingly genuine emotions—those that appear perfectly natural—contain hidden distortions at times.
First ask yourself this:
Is it natural to cohabitate while being despised?
Is it natural to share a roof without love?

I once invited my friend the oden shop proprietor and drank at a certain bar.
The bar waitress spoke ill of a particular writer.
The oden shop proprietor had been a literary youth personally acquainted with that writer and felt indebted for his patronage.
Enraged, he suddenly stood up and struck the waitress, causing a major disturbance.

Social obligations and human compassion were generally this unnatural.
The man himself believed it natural, thought he had done right and took pride in it—which made the whole affair all the more troublesome.
That he felt indebted was his personal matter and by no means a universal truth.
No matter what the woman without that particular connection said, it inherently had no bearing on his unique circumstances.
I think that in most cases, the mindset behind revenge—as with this oden shop proprietor—has some essential axle come loose.
I think that in most cases, people themselves have bent or left off some crucial axle without realizing it, then self-indulgently transfer even their mishandled emotions into a passion for revenge.

Before long, the woman and I could no longer remain in Tokyo.
Because the woman’s ex-husband had begun brandishing a blade, we had no choice but to flee.

We rented a room in an apartment in a provincial town, and I had ended up having to live in the same room as the woman. However, I thought this was the woman’s scheme. I believed her wish had been for us to live alone together in the same room, isolated from outside acquaintances. She claimed that her ex-husband had tracked down my address and was going to come charging in brandishing a blade, but I had suspected from the start that this was likely her scheme, and when I told her I wasn’t afraid of it, she pressed me relentlessly until I ended up moving into a tiny apartment in an unfamiliar town I knew nothing about.

I was obedient for the time being.
The primary reason was that I could not convince myself of the moral responsibility involved in leaving the woman.
I did not love the woman.
The woman loved me.
I found myself recalling, with strange clarity, a single passage from *Adolphe*.
It was a passage where a father admonishes his child departing for study abroad: “If you need a woman, create one you can leave with money.”
I wanted to read *Adolphe*.
There was a small library in the town, but there were no French books.
The Iwanami Bunko edition of *Adolphe* had not yet been published.
However, I went to the library.
Because I myself lacked the energy to think, I thought of searching for my thoughts within books.
I had no books I wanted to read, nor the patience to keep reading.
However, I diligently kept going to the library.
While flipping through the book catalog, I always thought this.
Where is my heart?
Isn't my heart hidden somewhere around here?
I finally read the Analects and *Tsurezuregusa*.
Of course, before I could read much, I had lost the will to continue.

Then, in a twist of irony, Aki suddenly came seeking refuge with us.
Aki had contracted gonorrhea.
When that became known, she was driven out by her husband.
Though in truth, the actual reason was that her husband had taken up with a new woman—gonorrhea having spread from that woman to him, then from him to Aki—but as Aki herself said, “It doesn’t matter,” it mustn’t have mattered at all.
Aki was a cold-hearted woman and had no friends.
In all the world, there was no one for her to rely on but my woman.

I think the reason my woman had moved me to this provincial town was that separating me from Aki constituted her paramount objective.
That must have been an excruciating awareness.
Because during those moments of supreme physical ecstasy, there would always erupt from her a certain phrase.
"She did this much even for Akiko!"
And those eyes would go wild with fury.
This became her delirious utterance at ecstasy's pinnacle.
At that climactic moment of rapture, her eyes would blaze with anger.
It remained an unvarying ritual.
"What manner of thing is this?" I thought.

"What is this pettiness?" I wondered.
Is this truly what it means to be human?
This pettiness struck me as more bizarre and idiotic than any poignant truth.
What on earth did the woman intend to do were she to see my true heart?
One Aki wasn't the issue.
I desired all women.
When with the woman, I more often than not had other women in mind.

However, the woman's spirit was not so pure after all. There was a time when I lodged at a brothel and contracted gonorrhea. Fearing I might transmit it to her, I made an honest confession and declared I would abstain until fully cured; yet she not only refrained from condemning my indiscretions, but even claimed she didn't mind being infected, attempting to resume relations before my recovery was complete. There had been a reason for this. The woman's ex-husband carried syphilis; her child bore congenital syphilis. Though this had been the origin of their marital strife, she remained uncertain about the medical prognosis. Her greatest secret lay in fearing she might pass syphilis to me—and that I would consequently grow to loathe her. For this reason, from our very first tryst onward, she had insisted we always visit sulfur springs. My contracting gonorrhea alleviated her guilt. She came to believe she no longer needed to fear me because of that secret. She had actively sought the transmission of gonorrhea itself.

I did not find such a state of mind touching.
That is not what it means to be touching.
Rather, I thought it base.
I do not care for balancing accounts or efforts to maintain equilibrium.
Is there not correctness only in resolutely casting oneself away and seeking a path of salvation within that very act?
Be that as it may, this was my one and only conviction.
That single conviction alone still remained unbroken even then.
That my woman’s soul was, in any case, a vulgar thing—I continually gnawed at it as though chewing sand, but I had to keep vainly gnawing at the sorrow of being nothing more than myself.

Justice!
Justice!
There was no justice in my soul.
What is justice?!
I don't even understand.
Justice, justice.

There were nights when I would cover myself with the futon and wipe away a single tear.

My woman was deeply compassionate, so even during Aki’s interminable stay—with nowhere else to go—she showed no outward signs of discomfort or harassment.
However, her revenge was relentless.
She flirted with me in a particularly intimate way right in front of Aki.
Aki remained composed.
She didn't even force a bitter smile.

Aki went to the gonorrhea hospital every day.
Then she took the train to a dance hall in a provincial city to look for a man.
Men were hard to find.
She returned empty-handed late at night and crawled into her cold bed.
She invited the hospital doctor to the dance hall, but when he refused, she stopped going to the hospital altogether.
"I got dumped by the doctor," she tittered airily.
Her metallic laughter had a brisk clarity, but in her returning empty-handed late at night to crawl alone into bed, there was a grimy exhaustion like that of an old woman.
There was not a single shred of allure that stirred carnal desire.
I rather doubted my own eyes.
Could the sight of a woman crawling alone into bed really be this devoid of allure?
In the figure of the grimy woman lifting the futon and wriggling her way in from her feet, I felt an unexpected pity for the fate inherent to human existence.

Aki’s belongings disappeared one by one.
She began borrowing small sums of money from my woman to go to dance halls.
But men could not be found.
Even so, she couldn’t muster the resolve to work.
She despised dancers and waitresses, clung to a peculiar sense of pride, and was possessed by vanity.

Declaring it her one last gamble, she went to seduce the hospital doctor, only to be coldly rebuffed and sent back.

It was evening.
When I was returning from the library, I met Aki coming out of the hospital.
We returned to the apartment through the densely wooded park in the shrine precincts.
In the park stood a massive chinquapin tree with sprawling branches.

“That tree looks like a man’s you-know-what.”
“If something like that really existed, it’d be magnificent, wouldn’t it?”
Aki laughed her usual airy titter.

After Akí came to live in our room—and as I watched her solitary figure—there grew within me a dawning understanding of a certain term.
That term was egoist.
She devised methods of deceiving men through calculated adjustments of her kimono.
But once stripped bare, all artifice collapsed.
Seeking only solitary pleasure meant receiving scorn and insults instead of fleeting satisfaction; such encounters could never rise above furtive couplings.
Even carnal desire becomes vulgar triteness when reduced to mere egoism.
A superior prostitute shares an artist’s fate—she must never know satiety nor find means to achieve it.
I remain nothing but an eternal sacrifice.

Artists—I thought then.
Living for others.
Being offered up in service.
I thought about this every day.

“Reaching true self-sufficiency by offering up what one desires.”
“Losing oneself to find oneself.”

I continued to think about the phrase "selfless act."

However, I knew that those words uttered by my own mouth were nothing but lies.
The meaning of the words themselves may perhaps have been true.
But such truth amounted to nothing.
For my "present self," whether that constituted my true life or a false one was all that mattered.

They were nothing but hollow shells of words.
I shuddered at my own emptiness.
I grew sick of this hollow self that chased only hollow words.
Where was I going?
This hollow, wretched shadow of a being.
I had disliked seeing trains.
The freight trains with their special clatter-clatter sounds had been detestable.
Looking at the railway tracks was painful.
Because looking at them made me feel as though I were gazing upon my own path—aimless, endless, stretching into infinity.

I held my breath and listened intently.

In the shadow of women's astonishing carnal desire.
In the shadow of vulgar souls.
In the shadow of egoism.
What in truth was I myself but something beyond that?
Whither?
Whither?
I understood nothing.

(Note: I have already written a novel titled “Twenty-One.” I also plan to write novels titled “Thirty,” “Twenty-Eight,” and “Twenty-Five.” And when they are compiled into a single book, the title of this novel will become “Twenty-Nine.”)