Pathway to Japanese Literature

I had always lived concerned only with myself. Since there was nothing else certain for me，I regarded that as my own form of justice. I had always defined myself，explained myself，chased after my own incomprehensibility—snickering as I ridiculed and despised myself—yet out of necessity resignedly kept company only with my own self. I associated only with myself. Whether that was possible or not was another matter. Only I wanted to do that. Whether that was the reason or not—I don’t know. To me，I was always the most detested stranger. I was convinced that I couldn’t love anyone.

Once a week, I went to the boarding house—to my three-mat room that belonged to me alone. From Friday until Sunday night. In our cohabitation with family, from waking until sleeping—even at times while asleep—I could never be alone. My mother, who had quit her business due to cholecystitis and still alternated between bedrest and getting up; my thirty-three-year-old unmarried elder sister; and my twenty-five-year-old younger sister. I always had to listen to someone’s complaints. The house did have considerable floor space, but with so few rooms, there was none for me to escape into.

Whether due to her illness lingering on, during that time Mother would spill complaints whenever she saw our faces, endlessly spilling complaints only to then begin raging. Time paid no heed. She raged at her own illness and at doctors; grew concerned then enraged over the resulting increase in my burdens; raged at Grandfather’s selfishness in separating from us and at me for permitting it; raged at Father’s early death… In short, Mother raged that not a single member of the family was the same as herself, taking it as a lack of consideration toward her. We thought that showing consideration toward Mother was simply a matter of quietly and kindly listening to her complaints. But that frustration spread and exploded. It continued endlessly. Truly, trivial matters became major issues there; in the end, the past would not return to the present, and the understanding that no one else was like oneself would be reiterated and driven home, which in turn became the ignition point for fresh grievances and complaints. I was utterly exhausted by this.

So on Fridays, upon arriving at the boarding house, I would collapse into sleep like a felled dead tree. I would wake the next late afternoon, having slept straight through for an average of twenty hours—sometimes even twenty-four. Waking meant noticing hunger. Perhaps hunger itself roused me. Then I would go to the soba shop near where Okame masks hung framed on the walls and eat two full portions. Afterward I'd watch movies or wander town seeking distraction, usually only starting my week's work when Sunday had already arrived.

At the time, my job was a radio serial drama commissioned by a production company. It was what they called a "daily drama"—six fifteen-minute episodes broadcast every day except Sundays. Since it was an adaptation of a novel serialized in the newspaper, all I had to do was keep up with however many weekly installments there were—no particular hardship required. On Sunday nights, I returned to the house where my family's emotions poured into the TV screen alongside their gazes; on Monday mornings, I handed my manuscripts to the woman from the production company and received payment for last week's six episodes. This covered the family's living expenses.

I had almost no interaction with my friends. I did not attend gatherings and never drank together with them. To others, I must have appeared as nothing but a lazy man who kept neglecting his obligations. He does not take care of himself. Does not think about the future. He lacks common sense. Why can he not carry out a decisive tidying up of his personal affairs? Apathetic yet impudent fool.

What troubled me most was that I felt no urge whatsoever to protest them. I thought those criticisms were exactly right. The criticisms all hit their mark, and others—every single one—were entirely justified. From my perspective, there was no "something" I dared want to do for myself. Even if just barely, I felt that merely managing to provide for several household members this way constituted an unbelievable grand undertaking. I believed there was no other work I could do and no surplus of ability. I had no woman I loved, nor any particular hobbies.

My world was grey, like dried-out aged rubber with no resilience whatsoever. But since I had always believed there was no other world for me, that didn't trouble me. If I could earn money like this, I thought I would have done anything. The only way I could fulfill my responsibilities to my mother, sisters, and grandfather was by earning money. No matter what I did or didn't do, I had no desire to evade that responsibility. It was more than an obligation—because while living, the only thing I had to do was that. Only there lay both the cause and reason for me being myself. To leave that place meant ceasing to be myself—meant abandoning myself. I used to think that.

The friend who arranged the boarding house for me was the only one who often called, conveying news of other friends' activities and words of criticism directed at me. His words were appreciated, but to me, he and all my other friends were great men. They were either heroes or wealthy men. I did not even feel contempt or respect, jealousy or envy toward them. I simply had no interest. The friend's calls too eventually grew sparse—perhaps exasperated by my lack of response—until after one final drunken scolding, they ceased altogether, leaving me rather unburdened... Let me reiterate: I possessed neither the courage nor ingenuity, energy nor financial means to "cleanly" resolve or sever those heavy, repulsive blood ties and entanglements with my relatives as they suggested—and above all, I had no reason to do so in the first place. Including myself, I was convinced I loved no one and nothing.

Therefore, no matter how foolish, apathetic, or strange my actions may have appeared to others, it could be said my life maintained its own equilibrium. I was neither lost nor self-destructive. Nor did I want to kill myself. Though I still possessed nothing but fantasies about myself and interest in myself alone, that proved sufficient sustenance. Put another way—in a world devoid of joy or illusion—how was one to live without a single self-deception? ...Meaning that through those days, I came to believe my ability to endure without truly enduring stemmed from some deadened part within me—a portion grown wholly numb. This necrosis would likely spread further. Yet humans—those bastards—don't die. They don't perish like burns exceeding sixty percent of skin surface. They survive. Insensate to politics, love, power dynamics—even dreams—yet humans persist in living; indeed, persist they do.

I poured my attention solely into that "myself," in a mood akin to gambling everything on fear—a sort of animal experiment. It also seemed this was solidifying into a single rigid, warped notion—one that might exhaust me but shed no blood—and becoming responsibility itself. Moreover, in my view, an ordinary person's entire life amounted to just that, and in that sense, this could hardly be denied as my own perfectly natural mode of social adaptation.

I was living blithely. I lived so blithely, cheerfully, quietly, and peacefully that the friend who phoned grew astonished. Looking back now, it occurs to me that my concern at that time was to know the true nature of my own fanaticism as a singular entity. I may have been inwardly pleased that I was gradually becoming a non-human, non-living existence. Life itself, I considered to be a murder weapon that spawns all manner of complexity, chaos, pain, and illusions; I feared it and sought only to escape from it.

The boarding house stood in a corner of a residential area not far from a private railway station—an old country general store that seemed to narrate the suburb’s past when farmland still encircled it, selling groceries and sundries. We tenants occupied rooms on its second floor. Entering the gate next to the shop and climbing the steep stairs that led straight up from the entrance, immediately to the left was my three-mat room. On the right side of the dim corridor—that is, along the hallway before my room—two sliding doors stood in a row. Making a right-angled turn leftward revealed a combined sink and kitchen area on the right and two more rooms on the left, with the toilet situated at the hallway’s end. The toilet was Japanese-style, its black hole directly connected to the cesspit below. Relieving myself there felt quite pleasant. Like an airplane releasing bombs, after a moment’s delay would come that nostalgic sound of impact. This counted among my few pleasures at that boarding house.

Once, apparently a drunkard had urinated standing up, leaving urine reeking of alcohol splashed across the wall. Indignantly, I took a magic marker and wrote in large letters on a sheet of paper: "WHEN DRINKING ALCOHOL, IRRESPECTIVE OF GENDER, ONE MUST RELIEVE ONESELF IN THE DESIGNATED AREA," then pasted it on the front wall. I didn't want my carefully maintained place of enjoyment to be soiled.

Because I slept when everyone was waking up and was awake when they slept, I hardly ever encountered my fellow tenants. According to the landlord’s explanation, of the four other tenant groups besides myself, two were dual-income young couples, while the remaining occupants were sisters working at a beauty salon and a theology student—a distant relative of the landlord—who occupied a room alone. In time, I came to encounter all of them (I believe) in hallways and such places, but they would merely avert their eyes in silence or offer slight nods, never exchanging words beyond routine greetings. The boarding houses I knew were perpetually hushed and dimly lit, devoid of socializing among tenants—they seemed never to look directly at one another’s faces. At least where I was concerned, even had we passed each other on the street back then, I doubt we could have recognized one another. Since our encounters occurred within the boarding house, I would simply think “Ah, fellow second-floor residents,” but of course, I can no longer recall anyone’s face.

The sole exception would be the dual-income couple who lived in the room immediately to the left of the toilet. A short, sturdy wife of about twenty-five or six with a rugged, ruddy face reminiscent of an American Indian, and her fair-skinned securities company employee husband who appeared amiable yet shrewd. One night, without meaning to look, I ended up peering through the keyhole at their act.

It was late at night, not long after I had started staying there regularly. I think it was Saturday. I returned late and, feeling the need to perform a preparatory ritual before starting work, went to the toilet and satisfyingly dropped a bomb. At that moment, a woman’s stifled scream and violent kicks against the tatami mats continued intermittently.

It wasn't that I didn't know a woman's moans of pleasure could resemble those of pain or torment. But that scream struck me as something more urgent—an unmistakable cry of terror. When it repeated two or three times before abruptly cutting off with a brief trailing whimper of anguish, there came a dull thud against the tatami followed by a dragging sound like something heavy being moved.—No human voices remained. Curiosity made me forget the chill on my bare skin. However irresponsible it might seem, I'd just imagined a murder occurring in the room next to the toilet, and now my heart raced. Within the night's hushed stillness, those intermittent yet persistent noises couldn't have been made by multiple people. This was the sound of one person handling an 'object.' Surely the husband had strangled his wife and was now disposing of the body. ...The muted but distinct thuds continuing through the quiet contained enough eeriness to make me genuinely believe this. My heart hammered; anticipation flushed my face.

After exiting the toilet, I quietly brought my eye close to the keyhole and peered inside. In some corner of my heart, I might have even anticipated a sea of crimson blood. But within that narrow, blurred field of vision, what gradually became clear to my eyes was the naked body of the wife—bound like a potato sack and turned to present her backside. A single, likewise naked man’s leg skillfully rolled that nude body and turned it over. Diagonally above, I saw the flushed young face of the husband looking down at his wife with a serious expression.

Startled, I pulled my face away from the keyhole and, doubting my own eyes, peered in again. In front of an eight-tatami-mat chest of drawers illuminated by a bright electric light, the wife was trussed up with a thin white cord, lying completely naked directly on the tatami mats in a slightly arched posture. Her reddened face was tilted back, eyes thinly closed, stomach rippling, lips parted as if gasping.

Finally, even to my insensitive self, it became clear that this was the couple's lewd act. I had seen such photos in erotic-grotesque magazines before, but this was the first time I witnessed it in reality. The white cord binding the wife's entire body like a carefully packed parcel demonstrated a hobby-like fastidiousness—something done half in jest that transcended any practical purpose of depriving freedom. Suddenly, the husband's ankle reached toward the wife's face. The wife expressionlessly parted her lips and, keeping her eyes closed, took the big toe into her mouth with practiced ease.

I returned to my room. I felt something terribly unpleasant—a nauseating sensation. I might have been sensing the strangeness, eeriness, and gruesomeness intrinsic to human beings. Yet alongside this stomach-churning revulsion, I suddenly found humanity’s sheer absurdity and outlandishness comical, bursting into laughter. Smiling bitterly—“...Madman.” “A couple of madmen,” I muttered, noticing for the first time my own hardened manhood. Using tissue paper, I masturbated.

The next afternoon, I went to pay rent to the landlord and encountered the wife—who resembled an unkempt Indian—attending to her husband. “He keeps calling me stingy, but when I try to buy even one lipstick, he pulls this ‘What a waste’ face.” “Yet he blows through his own allowance in a flash, then claims it’s my fault for being bad at budgeting—that I’m stingy yet can’t handle money properly.” “If he’d just manage himself better,” that’s what I tell him. “After all, men and women operate on completely different financial scales.”

I had vaguely thought that deviant couples were either intensely close or coldly despising each other—bound in any case by some special affection. But the wife I saw there was nothing more than an ordinary, commonplace woman—utterly average in her sentiments toward her husband, a perfectly wholesome wife you might find anywhere. That the woman from last night and this present one refused to align as a single entity proved how youthful illusions still clung to me—and yet, I thought, now another layer had shed.

I remember the landlord’s carefully tended yellow and purple pansies beginning to bloom in the sunny corner of the backyard. White plum blossom petals had also fallen. I believe it was that time of year when March was just beginning.

But after that, I never held any curiosity or interest in them as a couple. I lacked the ability to expand and nurture interest in others. It may have been because it was a season when I was half-consciously making efforts to discard any interest directed toward others. In any case, before I knew it, I had forgotten about them and completely forgotten the stimulation from the bizarre scene I had peeked at.

The reason I now remember their faces as a couple is because I had recently run into them coming out of a movie theater in Shibuya. At first I couldn't place them. They too only gave me the same look reserved for passing strangers. By the time I finally recognized them, I was already standing at the bus stop watching them walk past without even recalling their surname. Neither holding hands nor walking separately, yet moving as a couple. Neither particularly engaged nor bored, sharing that same vacant blankness. In that moment it struck me—the bleakness of their boredom seeping into my chest with crystalline clarity. For those two, life amounted to nothing but perpetually filling the hollows of their respective tedium.

But perhaps even this was nothing more than proof that I still clung to some self-serving "illusions," treasuring them for later use. In any case, whether that impression was correct or not wasn't the issue. I didn't know about such things. Their business as a couple was theirs alone. It wasn't for the likes of me to know.

In the end, the only time I could roam around was on Saturday nights. I went to listen to up-and-coming girl singers, attended Western music recitals, and stayed up late in modern jazz cafés before they became trendy. I was always alone. When waitresses started smiling at me or regulars I’d somehow become acquainted with began talking to me, I would look for another place. To me, those humans were far more bothersome. And in the deafening volume of music and screaming vocals, I would clench my fists, shut my eyes, and—keeping time with my knees while sometimes even shouting out—occasionally think to myself that this solitary figure riding the rhythm was a madman.

"You're a madman! A complete madman! Yet whenever I thought that, I felt inexplicably refreshed and happy. It's a strange way to put it, but I felt as though I'd finally come to stand on the same ground as the 'normal' people around me. Like dynamite containing danger—that unpredictable urge to bloodily destroy and slaughter whatever came to hand—I existed among them yet remained apart. To exaggerate, that pleasure might have resembled the thrill of rootless delinquents prowling through crowds with daggers—that intersection of love and terror toward the surrounding masses. Perhaps I'd come to crave that very shudder. Giddily trying to intensify my sense of being a 'madman,' I got carried away and amplified my shouts. There were even nights when my excessive yelling got me beaten up by young men."

That was during one of the jam sessions in the city center—it might have been the very first—where from the outset, the not particularly spacious hall was filled with stifling heat. Late that night before the hall, on the asphalt road awash with light, young men in colored shirts and skinny pants formed a vortex of feverish commotion, while lanky Black men stood here and there like bluish-black totem poles in the building's shadows, observing the Japanese youths' boisterous antics with only their eyes moving.

The scheduled time was definitely from midnight to five a.m. In the hall's corridors, papers labeled "Highball," "Beer," "Yakitori," "Onigiri," "Sandwiches," and so on were posted, and those vouchers were selling like hotcakes. I bought four or five highball vouchers and used one right away.

When the performance began, conversely, standing conversations in the corridor multiplied. These were likely mainly the jazzmen's.

The hall was packed with youths.

About two hours had passed, I suppose.

I gradually grew bored, and with feigned irritation, found myself getting angry. To put it my way, what disappointed me was that none of the Japanese jazzmen showed any madness. They were skillfully mimicking only the outer forms of Black people's insanity. I hadn't come here merely to experience subtle tongue techniques, attack strength, or lung capacity. I'd come to go mad alongside others. Jazz or not, I couldn't care less about Black people's moans or madness. All I needed was Japanese madness to be present there. But those on stage were all amiable and normal—so normal it verged on absurdity—nothing but technique fetishists. Regardless of their own thoughts, they struck me at best as performers who'd grown frenzied over imitating "frenzy."

But upon reflection, I decided that no matter what they were like, it was enough if I went mad. So regardless of the performance on stage, I closed my eyes and began bellowing out rhythmic shouts. And it was when I went into the corridor to redeem my last highball voucher that it happened. When several young men surrounded me, muttering some incomprehensible complaints, one suddenly punched me in the cheek with his fist. I was startled and stood there dumbfounded, unable to move. Suddenly finding myself standing there blankly struck me as absurdly funny, and I burst out laughing. The young men seemed disconcerted, staring at my laughing face as one muttered under his breath, “Is this guy nuts?”

Despite it being the middle of the night, he was a young man wearing sunglasses and a shirt with a red-striped collar fastened with shell buttons. I took a liking to those words and, suddenly putting on a serious face, gave an exaggerated nod. The group warily cleared a path for me. Having already lost interest in the performance—with no reason left to stay—I took a taxi back to the boarding house. At any rate, I possessed this impulse to unleash such chaotic shouts. I had merely obeyed it; they weren’t the problem. But they say merely wanting to walk naked through Ginza doesn’t make one mad—it’s those who actually do it who are insane. Thinking this way, I found myself convinced of how thoroughly justified those flustered youths’ reaction—“Is this guy crazy?”—had been toward the me who acted on my desire. Chuckling softly in rapturous bliss, I kept laughing alone. ...What exactly was so funny? This had to be neurosis. Yes—imagining others would surely label this version of me neurotic—small detonations of laughter erupted ceaselessly within my chest. It had been a bizarre night. Nowadays, I would diagnose that self as exhibiting hysterical symptoms. In other words: “a biologically purposive regulation” that amounted to nothing more than “an excessive production of aimless motion.” I believe these were words describing Kurokanabun’s hysteria—but mightn’t they fit me perfectly as I’d been then?

I think it was around April that one of my old girlfriends began occasionally visiting the boarding house. I had encountered her by chance while riding the private railway toward the boarding house—when she asked where I was going, I answered—and she ended up coming to visit. I remember she wore a white dress with navy polka dots scattered across it and a pale blue cardigan at the time. The woman sat with her knees properly aligned and maintained this posture until the very end. Perhaps because the roundness of her youthful thighs had disappeared, the slope from her knees to torso as she sat in seiza had flattened and thinned out, making her—petite since long ago—appear strikingly mature and stable in her own way.

The woman was an old friend with whom I had had a relationship several times in the past—so old that I had even forgotten why we had ended it. I knew she had been a voice actress who later became the wife of my university friend. When I remarked that her surname—my friend’s—didn’t suit her at all, she formed a stiff smile and answered, “Then just use my given name.” She kept her eyes lowered, gazing somewhere around my chest, and whenever she occasionally looked up, she would bare her teeth in an overly distinct manner and offer a dutiful smile. Her cheeks may have been slightly flushed. Yet as I brought the cake she had brought to my mouth, I thought this woman held no more meaning for me than an old calendar. Ah, so that had happened. That’s how it was. Right—but all ancient history now. She likely thought the same. ...Though it had never occurred to me that old calendars held sentimental value, perhaps she had placed importance on exactly that. At any rate, when this petite woman with large lips came visiting for the second time, we became involved.

It was a dark-skied Saturday afternoon, and my still being asleep had been a mistake. She entered the three-tatami room with the futon still laid out and sat down on it. (At the head of the futon, beneath the always-shut glass window, there was a work desk; there was nowhere else to sit.) She offered a confectionery box from the same shop as last week, and when I returned from washing my face, she remained in the same spot and posture, her shoulders having stiffened rigidly as if frozen. For an instant, I reflexively averted my eyes. I had realized it.

It wasn't because she was my friend's wife. I had purely—or perhaps more accurately, simply—found expanding human connections burdensome and troublesome, so I thought I'd escape if possible. I invited her to walk in a nearby park with a small pond. Then she said, "Why not eat the cake first?" "You're hungry, aren't you?" she added. I picked up the cake with my fingers and ate it. Cream clung to my fingers. When I reached for the dishcloth to wipe them off, she suddenly seized my hand and sucked them. Her face flushed violently red in an instant. ...With eyes so bloodshot they seemed nearly feral, she looked up into mine.

I had no desire to shift responsibility for this outcome onto her. I was speaking of the facts within me. After that, there was no helping it. As I wordlessly pressed down on her - my skin tight against her panties - touched the already spread hot mucous expanse of her sex from beside them, then ran my finger over that small protrusion above the cleft, the woman moaned like a virgin and sharply arched her back. Gasping into my chest as my hand lowered the zipper, she thrashed wildly with bent knees and sent her skirt flying to the corner. "Lock it," she said in a low voice through closed eyelids, "lock it properly." I slid effortlessly into her. That same place where she'd once cried in pain - where I'd finally made her bleed during our second hotel visit. Yet at climax she released that same feral cry from years past.

It was only then that I noticed, for the first time, a faint smell of rain on the woman’s clothes. When I opened the window, a fine mist-like rain was silently glistening on the roof tiles.

An hour later, the woman returned alone. I watched from the window as the white vinyl umbrella receded along the road toward the private railway station without swaying.

Prior to that, for nearly three years, I had spent my days without having any dealings with women. I had had no intention to. Affairs were enjoyable because they involved the collision of each participant’s self-centered illusions overlapping with the form of passionate double suicides, but the act itself had never been particularly interesting to me. I never for a moment believed that human truth resided solely there, and far from any sense of life, I would almost invariably experience a kind of "death" in those moments. Moreover, this "death" was not erotic but rather an identification with "objects"—something sentimental to the point of being comical, like a sorrowful sense of absence that missed its mark, or simply despondency. At that time, all emotional excitement felt burdensome to me, and I had no desire to go through such complications to seek relations with that woman. By myself, I could reach even the places that itched. Even if the act itself wasn’t physically unpleasant, anticipating the procedures involved before and after always made me think, Do I really need to go through all that? That had distanced me from such opportunities, made me let them pass by, and so I had distanced myself, continued to let them pass by.

Just as I felt no regret about that matter, I held no regret over what had ended either. There was no helping it. That was all there was to it; coloring it or assigning meaning lay beyond my interest. The long-awaited act did let us taste the tangible reality of those years standing like a black wall between the woman and me, but ultimately it proved neither particularly enjoyable nor something I could deem necessary. The woman's screams—which I took as performative—struck me as absurd too. The near seven-year gap had—while somewhat enlarging her breasts—flattened the woman overall, sapped the taut tension her skin once held, replacing the round firm elasticity of her former flesh with the supple strength of a woman's body well-versed in its ways. Yet I felt neither disillusionment nor any newfound attraction to her matured charms. Not that I was embracing a different woman from before either. In the texture of those hip bones—where seven years prior the flesh had been thick with resilience—I'd merely sensed a vague recognition that years had passed. Back then, she must have been twenty or twenty-one.

The week after next, the woman came again. It was also a Saturday. We found ourselves in a mood where there was nothing else to do and engaged again. The woman cried out again. After that, the woman brewed tea, prepared a simple meal, and left. The following Saturday as well, the woman came.

But there was no change in my life. I continued circling the same tracks with mechanical regularity, and the woman’s visits never disrupted the schedule’s rhythm. Through our conversations though, I had realized that my younger self—the college student I once was—had cherished confirming his own loneliness more than he’d ever cherished her, had been more enthralled by that validation than by any human connection. But even this realization now held no significance. It seemed my past self had genuinely believed in something called “loneliness”—that fact alone—but it was merely another phantom I’d long since discarded. Now there was only myself and those others who stubbornly refused to let me be “lonely”—this was what I’d concluded. My sole preoccupation lay in managing this arrangement.

The woman did not penetrate my interior. It seemed that for me, the only others who refused to leave me solitary were blood relatives. ……All remaining ones merely orbited my exterior, others who only made contact with my outer membrane—toward them, I could bear no essential responsibility. Precisely because they dwelled within, the presence of those others weighed heavily and became my burden—so I believed I had no means to assume responsibility for those outside. To me, the woman remained ultimately nothing more than one such external other.

The woman came every Saturday. The act became habitual, and afterward I would go out to Shibuya with her to eat meals. We watched movies too. After parting ways, there were times I went to listen to jazz—since those jam sessions happened in early summer, I think it must have been around that same period. The time when I parted from the woman gradually grew later.

One night, when I said, "Go home already," the woman began to cry. Exasperated, I walked to the register and paid for our meal at the restaurant. Having no small change delayed me briefly. When I left the restaurant, the woman was nowhere to be seen. "This might be the end," I thought, and headed straight to the modernist coffee shop in Shinjuku as planned.

I returned to the boarding house after 2 a.m. I entered the dark room, fumbled to turn on the light, and found the futon—which should have remained disheveled from when I'd left that morning—was gone. The teacups I had used had been washed and placed upside down, and the electric kettle had been filled to the brim with water. The cord had been neatly bundled; the work desk had been cleanly wiped; and when I opened the closet, the futon had been properly folded and stacked. The woman must have stopped by this room on her way back, borrowed the key from the landlord despite the late hour, and cleaned before leaving.

For some reason, I became violently angry. "...Don't meddle," I snapped aloud. Keep your hands off my life—no interference—I won't allow it. Seized by a maddened black flash of rage, I hurled every curse I could muster, then grabbed a teacup and slammed it onto the tatami. Perhaps because it was cheap, the teacup didn't break. ——But by the following week, I had completely forgotten that anger. Unemotionally, I held the woman and felt my male part move autonomously to fulfill its role. My hand stroked slowly along her spine—nothing but my usual habit to provoke her most sensitive response. Yet even afterward she kept clinging painfully to me, murmuring from below: "...Relieved." "You weren't angry after all." "...You're kind," she added softly, wrinkling her nose in apparent delight. She bared her canines and smiled at me.

I scoffed. This woman was mistaking my apathy for kindness. ...I—and suddenly last week’s memory resurfaced—thought that perhaps back then, I had been on the verge of loving this woman. But now, clearly, certainly, I didn’t love this woman at all. That something which had once rapidly approached me during that black anger, nearly entering myself, had fled far away and vanished somewhere—I thought with a terribly hollow heart.

Undoubtedly, that judgment had been correct. About once a month, there were weeks when the woman didn't appear, but I didn't mind it. When she came, that was fine; when she didn’t come, that was fine too. To me, she could never become anything more than that—and I had no inclination to consider her as anything more.

And I would precisely set aside every week from Friday through Sunday for days at the boarding house; every Monday morning, I continued delivering six manuscripts each time without fail. I had never once delayed them. I didn’t know about public reception, but the production company conveyed favorable reviews. Above all, my “keeping promises and not interfering” must have been what pleased them. Though the serialization hadn’t ended yet, they came asking me to adapt other works continuously. I replied I couldn’t commit until that time arrived. Because more favorable opportunities existed elsewhere. Still, my life maintained a semblance of stability. Strangely when pocket money ran short, thirty-minute or one-hour script jobs would rush in—manuscripts I always finished at the boarding house. And sometimes with parched intensity, I’d cram notebooks full of tiny script. Not meant for anyone’s eyes—a physiological compulsion—so I considered this too a symptom of “neurosis.” I wrote these at home too.

A family consisting only of women, I thought, was like a lump of boneless raw meat. If you threw it anywhere—even against a wall—it would stick flat there and begin to carry on its own existence without incident.

I had certainly fulfilled—to some extent—the responsibilities demanded for my family’s livelihood, but as one of the children, I possessed only a child’s right to speak. The household’s “master” had been none other than Mother, who for over a decade since Father’s death had stoically supported our family alone. Though Mother now clearly showed signs of recovery, she still clung to her stance that “things will take their course,” causing my proposal to ultimately vanish into thin air. I had believed myself to be stating the obvious—that we should actively resolve family matters one by one: marry off Younger Sister soon, and if Elder Sister remained unmarried, have her secure income through some means (even a tobacco shop license would suffice). Yet this had been grotesquely misinterpreted by my family members—particularly Mother. My words dissolved into vague small talk, Mother’s sudden repetitive complaints, and old stories; within the house, today imperceptibly became yesterday while tomorrow’s yesterdays continued flatly without end—my efforts proving as effective as slashing a wooden sword against a mountain of cotton waste. Rather, before I knew it, the wooden sword had vanished from my grasp, and amidst swirling flurries of cotton fluff, I found myself gasping on the verge of suffocation.

I thought. ...women cannot understand what men think or what sustains them. Just as men cannot comprehend that of women. Women remain convinced they sit anchored upon a fixed, stable plane they call reality—or so they believe—while men drift through invisible spaces, dwelling on delusional irrelevancies; women fail to grasp that men actually subsist on precisely these notions. Thus in being "realistic," they stay perpetually correct and strong, their existence comprising nothing but daily life—an endless mundane serial drama precisely because it's everyday routine. All other dramas find no credence there. They either get dismissed as nonsense with a laugh or at best remembered through reactions like "Hmph—so that's all it was."

I didn’t particularly have any complaints about that. That was correct in its own way. Even if it wasn’t correct, it didn’t matter either way. At the very least, my family seemed to be living more "certainly" than I was, and I wasn’t harboring any aversion toward them. ……As for them too, they must have shown more than enough consideration and care toward me, the sole male. But to me, those things were fundamentally misaligned; rather than helping, they ended up causing me confusion, irritating me, becoming a burdensome load, and tiring me out. I remained as tired as ever and had no intention of stopping my weekly visits to the boarding house. Irrespective of the woman’s visits or our affair, it was due to my own hygienic necessity.

But now that I think of it, I myself may have been greatly influenced—unconsciously—by that all-female family environment and their feminine approach to reality. I had always maintained that brooding over imaginary matters—things beyond actual reach—was futile. I had come to believe there existed neither a self I could trust nor an opponent—only the present tasks I perpetually shouldered and was compelled to confront (even when knowing them impossible).

Even when summer came, my relationship with the woman continued. Out of social obligation, I spared no effort in accommodating rather unusual positions, passionate caresses, or the obligatory accompaniment of "I love you" when she demanded them. True to my nature of fixating on whoever stood before me, I would lavish time on hospitality and cloying attentiveness—which invariably made the woman grow excited, her nostrils flaring as if gasping for oxygen. At times her eyes would roll back white, her face turn ashen pale, lying motionless with tongue protruding. I watched all this with dispassionate eyes.

What particularly pleased the woman were caresses on her back and biting hard on the small raisin-like mole beneath her right nipple; she would moan and groan like a madwoman. At such times, I would always experience anew—as if it were a fresh shock—my inability to recall any past with the woman. Her in slacks that suited her well. My college-student self. Even though the woman followed me endlessly, I passed by several hotels in silence. Though I could finally recall such scenes, all those emotional facts—my love, sorrow, anger, pain, passion for her back then—had vanished cleanly, and I could no longer see them within the present. Everything had been stored away like sealed boxes far behind me, where it had all concluded. No matter how much I looked back or strove to revive it, not a single thing from my heart toward the woman in those days connected to the present or "resurrected" within that self. Countless times, I confirmed this.

The woman, strangely enough, never spoke of her husband or their life together at home. And I didn't say anything either. In that regard, I may have been stubborn myself, but the woman was excessively stubborn. Since spring when we met, the woman had put on some weight; her skin had developed a dewy vitality and luster that seemed thoroughly conditioned by a man, and the dampness of that skin likely wasn’t solely due to the season. From this, I thought that my friend—the woman’s husband—might be impotent or in a state close to it. And since it was obvious enough for even me to notice, I also considered that he must have been aware of it. But even if something was happening in their married life, it wasn’t anything I had been involved in. When those "occurrences" became my problem, that would be the first time "something" would happen for me. Until then, thinking would be nothing but a waste of time and energy. In short, all I needed at that time was to have a "policy".

I had intended that if my friend were to come, I would answer that I would marry this woman. After that, if we broke up, the matter would be resolved. ...After all, I have no love for others whatsoever. If the woman were to learn of it, grow dissatisfied, and make a scene, we would part ways. That would probably settle things—I wasn’t taking it lightly, nor was I exactly staking everything on it either. "Marriage" was, of course, not an act of moral obligation toward the woman or her husband, but rather a technical maneuver for evading my circumstances. After all, I had no qualification whatsoever to become anyone’s spouse.

I had likely foreseen that I myself was incapable of handling anything beyond that. No matter what misfortune it might bring upon others—the woman, her husband—regrettably, it was none of my concern. After all, there was nothing I could do about it. The weak die. That is the law of all living things. When even I thought about myself—neither a hero nor a strong man—all I heard were two voices: the bare-assed cry of "Even so, I'm giving it my all!" and the curse of "But what a repulsive man you are." However, I was not unhappy. Even if abnormal, even if cowardly, I was not unhappy. I left others' affairs to others. That was the "policy." ...I had thought so.

One evening, we wandered through a park with a small gourd-shaped pond. A child wearing nothing but a tank top was catching crayfish. As I crouched to watch them, the woman abruptly said, “I’m a pig.” For an instant, I couldn’t reply. The meaning escaped me. She gripped a pine trunk; when I turned back, her cheeks flushed crimson. Her eyes blazed as she fixed me with a repeated glare. “I’m a pig.”

I understood and began to laugh. To ask “Why?” in return was meaningless. Indeed, snorting and clinging to me, I held the hot, naked woman as if holding a pig.

“You’re a spider,” the woman said.

“Spider? “Cut it out. That—I really hate that.”

I had been thinking of a spider.

“That’s not it.” “A cloud in the sky,” the woman answered. “You’re always so distant—then sometimes flare up fiercely like lightning—only to vanish somewhere again.”

“Huh, a thundercloud? Not bad, is it?” Absentmindedly—truly distracted—I had answered her, but from that moment on, the woman began calling me things like “Kumo” or “Kumo-chan,” saying “Kumo. I love you,” and so I called her “Boo.” When I called her that, she would grow even more frenzied, her eyes twitching as she laughed, and start imitating a pig on her own.

We gradually began exchanging more words—irresponsible ones (at least on my part) like declarations of love and indulgent, clingy banter. To me, my own words were all just ritual shouts—directed at myself, of course. Of course, directed at myself—I knew full well that our exchange amounted to nothing but a sham game of catch with empty words. I threw my ball, and the woman threw hers. Each time a different ball came back; we always ended up throwing only our own while the other's ball grazed past our skin—yet we kept pretending to enjoy a game of catch with a single ball. ...I think she was likely aware of that too.

Ever since my mid-teens—having been dragged into family and relatives' consultations as my deceased father's proxy—I had become skilled at putting on solemn faces, sincere faces, earnest-looking faces, though in truth those were precisely the expressions I wore when least serious. Because I didn’t believe in words, I could use any words. I was convinced that I knew exactly how to escape from those not bound by blood to me, and so I felt utterly free in her presence…And it seemed the woman liked that very phoniness of mine. “When we first met, you were still in your fourth year of university, weren’t you?” “It’s been exactly ten years since then.” “You’ve become an adult.” “Back then, you were always so serious and high-strung—almost intimidating,” the woman said. “Honestly, I could never have imagined you sticking out your tongue after a mistake.”

I did not correct her. But fundamentally, I had been a fraud from the very beginning—in that sense, I had always been an "adult." Though I thought that back then, simply due to youth, I had been somewhat oversensitive and had merely grown more adept at concealing my audacious traits. Yet she often repeated those words. She may have discovered "sentimental value" in those perceived changes of mine within her own framework.

On a certain Saturday in August, I was abruptly required to attend a thirty-minute script reading I'd been commissioned to oversee, leaving the boarding house early without encountering the woman. This happened because the director had cast some glamorous movie stars. Between managing those actresses and rewriting their atrocious performances into the script, I didn't return home until three in the morning. There she was. "...Is this all right?" I asked while reheating my meal in the kitchenette sink area as she reentered my room. She laughed quietly. "Eat quickly. It'll get cold," she replied with unsettling composure. It was spaghetti flecked with meat. While I ate, she changed into nothing but a chemise and settled onto my futon. A towel draped over her chest, she lay motionless staring at the ceiling.

I had already steeled myself for the fact that “something would happen” soon and had settled on my “policy,” so I said nothing. The woman was silent too. Because I was tired, I fell asleep immediately without the woman making any demands.

The next day, I saw her in the morning for the first time. First, I was seized by an eerie sensation. It wasn’t that she was ugly. Rather, in the bright morning light, the woman with her small face—eyelashes lowered, sleeping innocently—appeared unexpectedly youthful, her skin white and smooth, even cute in a way. —Yet that was, so to speak, not the woman I knew. It was not the woman’s form as that regular visitor who would come on Saturday afternoons and leave in the evenings.

Even though it had been merely a single overnight stay, I intuited that the relationship between myself and the woman had already begun to live within a viscous daily life—an inexplicable, transparent, mucous-like substance—transcending the realm of purely transactional contact. Rather than a human being—another person—I saw there a single strange creature. It—exactly like those invasion-type creatures that frequently appear in S.F.—had without my noticing planted itself squarely within my domain, sleeping peacefully in my room as if it owned the place, and had begun taking up permanent residence...

I hurriedly woke the woman. The reason was fear. The invasion had begun. But she did not open her eyes; smirking slyly, she stretched out her arms and embraced my neck. The woman then made her demand. Her body had already been fully awake......Within the absurdity of the act, I finally regained my composure. She remained after all the woman I knew—a regularly scheduled stranger. It had reverted to that. I found my earlier panic ridiculous. Wasn't it merely her stay being slightly prolonged? Do I love her? No, I don't. Is this creature still outside me? Outside. ......I confirmed this, confirmed it repeatedly, and at last reassured, expelled my spent self from her. The woman returned home that morning. From my window vantage, she waved—squinting as if dazzled, smiling with counterfeit bliss.

......The following week—it must have been around one in the afternoon when she came. At the knock I awoke and undid my futon's sliding-door lock with sleep-puffed eyes. When I slid open its wooden panel and let her enter through it—there stood this pallid figure wearing hysteria's full mask. Her cheekbones protruded starkly; those naturally upturned eyes now slanted even higher at their outer corners; those large bloodless lips quivered like some convulsing child's mouth cornered by tetanus.

I was surprised and frightened. Being cried on was troublesome—it was something I was no good at handling.

But the woman clattered the wooden door shut, inserted the key, and sat facing it without another word. She wore a mustard-colored dress that hung from her shoulders, but those shoulders didn't appear to be crying. Her only belonging was a white leather handbag—apparently she hadn't run away from home.

“What’s wrong?” I said as I returned to the futon. “Did he get angry?” “…It’s fine. “I have something on him, after all.”

The woman answered while still facing the wooden door. Her tone was firm.

“Huh. Was he fine with it? Even staying over?”

“He was fine. He didn’t say anything. That’s why it’s fine.” The woman turned around and forced a smile with stiffened cheeks. “He’s just someone I live with. So I do what I want. I can do it. Because he has a weakness.” I saw another person’s face superimposed on the woman. Her pale face looked severe, and I realized for the first time—the woman had never once shown me an expression that asserted her own will until that moment.

“He’s rich, right? “That person.” “An easy and comfortable life—that’s appealing to a woman.” “Somehow, since I’d gone through the trouble of getting married, I couldn’t bear to throw that away.” “So I stayed with him,” the woman said.

“Ah,” I answered meaninglessly. My friend—though we’d shared the same university department—was the young president of a subsidiary under a sizable heavy industry conglomerate headed by his father. The wedding with the woman had apparently been obscenely lavish; I hadn’t attended, but I remembered Mother marveling at the invitation that arrived at our house.

“Hey,” the woman said, shuffling closer to my pillow. “From now on, I’ll stay over once a week. Today too, I’ll stay over… Is that all right?”

“I come here to work, you know,” I answered. “As long as that doesn’t get in the way, I couldn’t care less about anything else.”

The woman nodded like a child, then suddenly her eyes moistened and glistened. "I've been caught with kiss marks so many times. Today too, I didn't just make up excuses about going to Sato's place or visiting a female friend's house. I didn't mention your name, but I clearly said I was going to a man's place, that I'd go and stay over." "So even then, it's OK?" The woman nodded. Tears spilled over.

“You’re a strange one, really.” I laughed. “But every couple has their own special circumstances. It can’t be helped if others don’t understand.”

I stopped the woman with a hand gesture as she started to say something.

“That’s enough.” “I get it.” “Let’s just drop him.” “No relation.”

I closed my eyes. The situation had changed. It occurred to me that perhaps my friend also wanted to separate and was silently gathering facts advantageous for divorce—rich people are stingy, after all. Also, perhaps due to this "weakness," he disliked having it exposed and might have intended to overlook seeing her once a week rather than separate. ……But in any case, I should stop thinking about it now. If I ever ran into something, I’d think about it then. That was my way of life. Since I couldn't fall asleep, I ended up drifting off again without realizing it.

“Well, well... What a dust storm you’ve got here. “It piles up this much in just a week, huh?”

When I noticed, the woman was cheerfully muttering to herself as she quietly cleaned around my futon, careful not to make a sound. For a while, I watched the woman's small ankles moving busily. I grabbed her ankles. I pulled hard.

I let out a low, voiceless scream, but the woman skillfully collapsed against my chest, pressing her shoulder into me. Her eyes that held a startled laugh gazed at my face, and gradually I realized they were settling into that familiar vacant stare—a gaze that seemed sad, fearful, yet neither anxious nor displeased, fixed in expectant focus. The woman closed her eyes. Her panting breaths came in shallow gasps, her face flushed as if straining; when I sucked her lips, that scent had already begun to thicken intensely.

—Probably, at this moment, this woman was happy. Driven by something akin to jealousy, I proceeded roughly with a violent anger or vengeful feeling toward some incomprehensible target. "Aren't you ashamed? "You're working so hard to deceive the other person, yet that person is happier than you." Those words I'd read somewhere flickered persistently in my head.

After that, the woman never mentioned her husband again. I didn't ask either.

The woman would invariably appear on Saturday evenings and return near Sunday evening. I stayed at the boarding house from Friday afternoon until Sunday night. Our lives continued in a rigidly regular pattern, repeating over and over.

I had not changed my belief that I loved no one and therefore had no right to be loved by anyone. I had not forced anything upon the woman beyond the occasional inescapable lust—and even that lust was, so to speak, being "forced" upon me through an excess of sociability toward her and a weakness for the person before my eyes. Even if the woman were to disappear, therefore, there would be no inconvenience whatsoever.—

I did not doubt that. I could calmly maintain my isolation for a lifetime if I so desired. I believed in the concentration of my interest solely on myself and in that stoicism. ......It might be foolish. No, this was probably a clearly foolish self-deception. But for me, it was also the one and only "right thing," and I believed that thoroughly reinforcing the anxiety of having interest only in myself was precisely the sole support and strength I had chosen for myself.

Among humans, there are those who can impose themselves on others and those who cannot. From my awareness of being unqualified—unable to love others—I had thought I belonged to the latter category. Depending on the other person, I could tell improvised lies, agree, flatter—do anything—and that itself caused not the slightest pain. Because the other person remained themselves—I couldn't believe in, love, or cherish them more than I did myself—there existed no object worth abandoning myself to devote to. Within me there was only myself, and that self was always an incomprehensible anger, a humiliation, a shame, a voiceless scream of terror—yet all I possessed was this tainted and guilty passion that sought to burrow into nothing but that self. There was no other passion I could believe in—no other self.

I had grown somewhat bored with the monotony of my acts with the woman. For me, the "bombing" here in this toilet was always far more pleasant. However, once she began staying over, the woman would persistently demand it multiple times, and if I grew annoyed midway and stopped, she would nearly become hysterical and weep. At such times, the woman—originally fox-faced with a pointed chin, narrow upturned eyes, and large lips—would transform into a monster with red lips split to her ears, appearing as though she herself had become a single genital organ, greedily sucking and attempting to swallow me whole.

Therefore, when Saturday night ended and the clock passed one, I resolved to sit at my desk like a machine. From the futon right behind me, the woman would tickle me or sometimes kick me, trying to get me to engage with her. She would brew unnecessary tea or clamp my neck between her legs like a pro wrestler and pull me down.

One night, when the woman became too noisy and disruptive, I pinned her down by straddling her and bound her limbs tightly with whatever shirts and ties were at hand. The woman reacted with abnormal excitement. Shaking her shoulders in rapid gasps with eyes fixed wide, rolling about the futon like a log, she left astonishing stains on the sheets. ……After that, as if deliberately wishing to be treated that way, she would say things like “...robber, robber” while twisting her hands behind her back and leaning against me. I too would bind her wrists behind her back out of habit to keep them secure, then lay her down on the futon as if cradling her. And then I returned to my work.

The woman, however, would wait without sleeping until I fell asleep. Bound as she was, she arched her neck back, let out a coquettish voice, and begged me to tell her some story. While continuing my adaptation work, I spun made-up nonsense off the top of my head. Affairs with other women. About my ex-wife. About when I applied to emigrate to Brazil but failed. About the bank robbery planned with three friends that ultimately ended in failure. A fantasy of terrorism; about a woman devoured by Amazon River fish. My proclivity for loving corpses. ……Everything was according to the mood of the moment—the kind of idea I hadn’t even considered before I began speaking. So that’s why, while explaining or describing things midway, they would veer off into absurd directions. But the woman listened to them with delight. She would laugh in exasperation, nod along with every detail in sympathy, or listen intently while voicing exaggerated horror, reproach, or admiration. “You take me seriously.” “I love that seriousness,” the woman said. It didn’t seem like she was joking or teasing at all.

“Kumo.” “Do you love me?”

“Of course I love you.”

“Hey, do you really love Boo?” “I do love you.”

“Do you really love me?”

At times the woman would persistently ask that question—it was our signal. Growing annoyed, I turned around and lifted her twisted upper body, pressing my lips to hers. Her breathing through the nostrils turned coarse as she curled her tongue like a miniature tornado, straining to suck mine into herself. She kept up those small hitching breaths through her nose while endlessly tangling tongues with me, refusing to stop. During those moments, staring at her trembling closed eyelids, I felt myself becoming a complete stranger—a nonexistent person unknown even to myself. The one playing this woman's "love" partner was a man who existed nowhere—someone even I didn't recognize. ......It felt good. Thrilling too. I was nothing but a doll. In truth, nothing but a fictional entity masquerading as an utterly unqualified impossibility of a human being. This "I" was someone else.

—In the end, I might have liked that sensation. By alternately wielding my dual nature—irresponsibly watching from the dark interior's other side as she grew aroused and secreted against my outer layer, observing and savoring it all—perhaps that was what I had liked. Then suddenly turning sadistic, I would violently pin down the woman—eyes closed, entire body feverish—stroke the darkly pigmented folds between her thighs, and violate the still-bound woman as if raping her. I would stuff a handkerchief into her mouth as she cried out and shook her head side to side, bind it tightly over with a scarf or towel, then finish the act while listening to those moans.

At that time, I think I was treating her as nothing but a "thing," so to speak. While feeling the eruption of my own dark passions - disqualifying her humanity while disqualifying my own - did I feel ecstasy at becoming sheer brutal madness itself? In any case, it was during such moments that I burned most intensely. As I entered her bound form with cloth pressed into her cheeks, I thought: Yes - this is me. This is my true self. I don't love you at all. I'm merely assaulting you as some lone hoodlum, some lone madman. It's not because you're you. Because you're a soft "thing" - I'm just using you as a "thing." This is me.

At times, I would leave her as she was and return to my work. And then I forgot about the woman's existence. When I finished a section and suddenly noticed, the woman was still looking at me with pleading eyes. With those eyes, she smiled at me.

By the end of September, I renewed my contract with the production company. The adaptation of the newspaper novel had come to an end. However, the production company did not release me and instead requested the adaptation of the next newspaper novel. When I kept silent, they raised the script fee by twenty-five percent. I consented.

But ultimately, I had to keep working without a single week's respite. I maintained my routine of visiting the boarding house every weekend, and the woman persisted in her Saturday-to-Sunday overnight stays. Though I'd largely stopped going out for jazz by then, no matter how much she muttered complaints, I never met her on other days and continued refusing to share proper meals at the chabudai beyond those playacted instant suppers. Whatever she said, I enforced it. I'd been terrified that a husband-and-wife-like "daily life" might take root between us unnoticed. The woman too seemed to have resigned herself and stopped speaking.

It was a night near autumn's end. The wind and rain raged like a typhoon, growing fiercer still from midnight onward. But being utterly numb to such external clamor, I kept working without interruption. Then abruptly, the electric light died. A power outage.

The wind howled near and far, and the storm shutters clamorously rattled on. After two or three minutes, the light came on, but when I faced my desk, it went out again, plunging into darkness. After several such brief power outages repeated themselves, I grew annoyed, quit working, lit a cigarette, and turned to look at the woman behind me. That night too, the woman was rolling on the futon with her knees bent. Her wrists and mouth were bound with a towel and scarf, and only her eyes, gleaming like black stones, were watching me.

"Shall I untie you?" I asked. But the woman smiled with her eyes and slowly shook her head. And then she returned her head to the same spot on the futon, her eyes once more becoming gleaming black stones that gazed at me. That might have continued gazing fixedly even in the darkness.

Under the flickering light, at that moment, I thought that I just wanted to be alone among others. If I wasn't completely alone, I couldn't relax. Yet when truly alone, I became unbearably anxious and utterly exhausted. I grew overwhelmed by the terror that I might endlessly veer off down some grotesque path of madness. Restlessly, I would head out into the city seeking strangers. There, surreptitiously confirming my "madness," verifying and restoring my balance against them, I felt relief. For me, I might always need strangers. To exist among others while inhabiting a separate world from them—apparently that was my "stability." Maintaining surface-level normalcy in interactions while irresponsibly deepening my sole focus on myself... So when I considered it, being with others like this—those reduced to mere 'things' that didn't interfere with me at all—this might just be what you'd call my ideal.

While puffing on my cigarette, I laughed in the darkness. Then the light came on, and I casually smiled at the woman's eyes. The woman looked back at me and laughed too, and in that utterly natural, blissful connection between our gazes, I suddenly saw that I was now sharing a madman's happiness with her. Along with a paralyzing joy, there abruptly rose before my eyes that indecent scene of the young couple by the toilet in this boarding house—the one I'd witnessed some time before. Back then, I'd indeed sneered, "You madman." Now I was wallowing in that same gloomy, grotesque indecency. ...In this madman's pleasure, this dismal madman's happiness—here I lay completely exposed. I was revealing my true self to this woman, this acquaintance... Panicking, I stubbed out my cigarette and hurriedly undid the scarves and towels. I pulled the handkerchief from her mouth.

“Water, please.”

“Water,” said the woman. I took water directly from the pot into my mouth and passed it to hers. That was how she preferred it. Then her face softened with evident delight as she wrapped both arms around my neck and sang out, “I love you, I want you, I want you.” Like a suckling infant she sought my lips.

A strange shudder ran through me, and for some reason I shoved the woman away. The petite woman fell onto her back, her belly exposed like a frog’s. But without getting angry, she began slipping her arms into my pajamas. “……Shall I make some tea?” she asked in an ordinary voice.

I did not answer. ...What filled me was not disgust but rather a despairing terror. I felt that the precious time when I had sensed madness's connective thread had vanished—there, the raw habitual time with the woman had resumed once more. No—even what I had believed to be "madness" was, for her, merely her own version of ordinary continuity with me—indeed that was correct—that thrilling instant of happiness I'd felt earlier was nothing but childish delusion and self-indulgence—this I understood reflexively.

―Was I not abnormal to her? Could even those perverse acts—manifestations of what I called "madness," born from my abnormal longing for isolation and morbid fascination with destruction and corpses—be perceived by her as nothing more than the intensity of affection? ...Once again, I thought of S·F’s strange creature—the one that swallows all conflicting elements, converts them into energy, and endlessly expands—just as I had that morning long ago.

The sound of water boiling in the pot filled the air. Ironically, the light no longer went out. The woman was dropping powdered milk into her tea when she said, “Oh my. Hasn’t it spread quite a bit? “The wall stain,” she said loudly. “What shoddy construction. “For a storm this mild to create such a rain map on the wall… Three thousand yen is too much for this.” I silently drank the tea. It was hot. I involuntarily yelped, “Ouch!” The woman started laughing.

“Hey, what’re you thinking about?” “Your face is bright red.” “...Fool. That’s why you burned yourself.”

“...Do you want to know what I’m thinking?” I asked in all seriousness. The woman looked up diagonally. “Well... I gave up long ago on trying to fully understand what you’re thinking.” “I just need you to keep me in your heart even a little—that’s all I ask.”

“Aren’t you afraid of me?” “I am afraid.”

Without hesitation, the woman answered. "But that's all right—I don't like people who aren't scary."

“Hmm.” “Oh my. What’s with that look of disbelief?”

The woman, her eyes rounded like a child's, kept laughing.

――That was the next day. The clear sky stretched high—a fine day with crisp sunlight. We were on a bench in a small park near a pond amidst pine trees after returning from the soba shop.

In truth, I had hardly touched that week’s work. I couldn’t bring myself to start working. I had been thinking about it nonstop ever since. I would live alone. My concern was solely myself, and my conviction that I could love no one remained unchanged. I still believe I have no qualification to live with anyone. ...Certainly, there is no "love." There is no "qualification" either. But what in the world is that? Is that not, so to speak, my own part—an infantile obsession with the subtle, secret part that everyone conceals?

The morning after the woman first stayed over, and then last night—a certain everyday life in which I found myself, however unwillingly, together with her within it. The woman who calmly digested my abnormalities, my madness, even the terror that was me—showing no more disturbance than a marsh swallowing a thrown stone.

Perhaps I might be able to make it work with this woman after all. We might become an utterly ordinary couple. No—if women as a whole believe only in this daily life and can only live within it… then I might actually be able to get along with any woman after all. “What’s with that serious face?” the woman said, pressing her cheek against my shoulder. “You know, when you’re thinking about something, your face looks just like a child completely focused on a game. Your lips get all pointy…”

“Is that so?”

“That’s right.… You’re such a strange person.”

The woman laughed and, while gazing at the dark surface of the pond in the same manner, I started laughing too. “I’m a strange person, you see.” “In short—I’m just a lazy coward too scared to move in any direction, like a child.” “The lazy one is me,” the woman said. “My dream is—you know how fishing boats go putt-putt-putt?” “To board that boat, go out to the open sea, and sleep on the water while basking in sunlight.”

"That sounds wonderful." I agreed wholeheartedly. "That really is supreme. Let's sleep on the open sea together." "You mean... together?" The woman asked with surprise, lifting her head from my shoulder. "But you see—I'm a hysteric."

The woman picked up a stone and, instead of throwing it into the pond, hurled it at the pine trunk diagonally behind her. It missed. “All women are hysterics. And all men are madmen. I only trust hysteric women and madmen.”

I said.

At that time, I think I felt something akin to friendship toward the woman. She too was a "woman" like my family members, and I had not forgotten that—but the flow of our daily life here was neither so burdensome nor so unpleasant.

The woman was wearing a light-gray, high-waisted two-piece suit. But she looked less like a married woman and more like a college student somehow. It might have been due to her petite stature and her simple, casually styled hair.

On that clear day, we parted ways just after leaving the park. “Will you come next week?” I asked the woman for the first time. But she showed no look of surprise. “Yeah, see you next week,” she answered and started walking toward the private railway.

I returned to the boarding house as I was and sat down at my desk, but somehow couldn't bring myself to start working, instead becoming engrossed in filling my notebook with tiny characters. Of course, the six scripts remained unfinished, and for the first time I stayed at the boarding house on that Sunday night to complete them.

The following week, the woman did not show up.

It was mid-October.—I had written before that my thoughts had been misinterpreted by my family, especially my mother, but from the beginning of that month this had begun manifesting as fact. "In order 'so as not to worry me,'" Mother had taken various actions during my weekend absences and ended up selling the house.

Indeed, the plan to move to a smaller house had been proposed before. But Mother had sold the entire house along with the surface rights to the land at a considerable discount, and in exchange had entered into a contract with my late father's old friend to have a small rent-free house built for her in a corner of the same property—valid for as long as she lived there. It was only after the fact that I was informed of this.

If Mother were to die suddenly, we would immediately have to start looking for a place to live. Even as Mother said, "It's a gentlemen's agreement, so there's nothing to worry about," if that president were to die or have a change of heart, we would legally be evicted, and Mother and we would be left clutching what little money remained, forced to wander around aimlessly seeking somewhere to go. Even so, we could no longer voice complaints.

I was appalled, but it was all water under the bridge. "The phrase 'lifetime occupancy free of charge' must have held the greatest appeal for Mother as her own source of security." “Marriage this, marriage that—I have to keep control of the expenses for two girls’ weddings,” Mother said, completely missing the point. But the stamped documents had already been exchanged, and there was no changing Mother’s resolve now. We—though in truth it was mainly I who spoke, while everyone else merely tried to convince me—exchanged conversations about the dangers of that contract nearly every night.

Finally, Elder Sister said. "But in any case, both the house and land were all left by Father and Mother, and hasn't Mother been sustaining everything by herself until now?" "So I think Mother should be allowed to do as Mother pleases."

I fell silent and thought it couldn't be helped. But even having to obey Mother eventually felt unbearably precarious. With Mother having no income left, I—her only son—would ultimately have to live in that house. And if Mother, not yet fully recovered from her illness, were to die suddenly... No, I wouldn't dwell on that anymore—things would unfold as destined, I resolved.

Contrary to the fair weather, heavy, unsettled days followed one after another, and I had no capacity to dwell on myself at the boarding house or turn my mind to last week’s absence of the woman’s regular visits. There was also a sense that she was bound to show up again eventually.

It was Friday. That afternoon—again for work—I had intended to go to the boarding house. That morning, I learned why the woman hadn't come to the boarding house the previous Saturday. —I remained motionless for some time, staring blankly at the postcard. I couldn't believe it. The woman had died. It was too abrupt. Even calling it a lie seemed absurd—it felt like some childish prank. Yet among that day's letters and direct mail addressed to me lay a printed black-bordered notice from that friend, announcing his wife's sudden passing. The wife's name was hers. The woman had "suddenly passed away" two days prior, it stated, with the funeral scheduled for tomorrow.

Mother entered the living room. I read the notice again and displayed my usual reaction there in the living room. That is to say, I treated it as the death of a distant stranger—an old female friend who had become my university-era friend’s wife, a former voice actress acquaintance I hadn’t seen in seven years—something from the remote past. I immediately tore it up and threw it in the wastebasket, then reached for the several design plans in Mother’s hands—plans she was bustling to consult me about regarding the new house’s layout. I decided everything—the toilet’s location, the position of Mother’s room, even the color of its walls. Of course, according to Mother’s instructions.

It was at the boarding house on a Saturday after I'd fallen into deep sleep that I first felt the woman's death as an intense shock in my chest, my cheeks suddenly beginning to burn with heat. A leaden void spread through the core of my chest, and I grew agitated finding no foothold there. By now she would usually have arrived. But that woman would likely never appear again. It felt like a lie; I wanted to laugh, wanted to say something, yet my heart had nothing to offer. That clue proved baseless. I smelled the woman's thickly lingering scent on the futon, imagined her form, and saw it nowhere present. Staring into the numb heaviness at my heart's depths, I tried to fix my eyes on something squirming within that emptiness. Yet there too, the woman's form was absent.

I later heard through others that the woman had been hit by a car—it had even appeared as a small article in the newspaper. She’d been carried to a nearby hospital and died a week later without regaining consciousness. Whether it had been an accident, suicide, or someone intentionally hitting her remained unclear, and such details—like whether her husband had kept vigil at her bedside during that time—made no difference to me, I suppose. But the woman’s death constituted the entirety of the incident for me, and at that time I possessed no “facts” about it beyond a torn death notice postcard I’d discarded.

Something incomprehensible resembling anger came over me. Partly to compose myself I went to the toilet and bared my behind. I dropped a bomb. Suddenly my eyes caught on characters from that notice I had written. Back then I'd written it in dead earnest but now thought - what nonsense was this 'REGARDLESS OF GENDER ALL MUST CLEAN...'? Wasn't it only natural for Woman to bend down? Half-hearted. Why had I left this posted? That Woman too. The second-floor tenants too. The anger intensified until I tore that yellowed paper crumpled it dropped it into the toilet bowl. "...You idiot!" I shouted at full volume.

Suddenly, my chest trembled. When I took a deep breath, tears suddenly overflowed. It was unthinkable, but they showed no sign of stopping. I hurried back to my room, threw myself face down on the futon, and began crying. Tears streamed down my cheeks as I sobbed aloud—I realized this was the first time I’d cried like this since becoming aware of myself. At any moment I might hear a knock; she might come. Let her see me—no—I wanted her to see me like this. Why was I crying? There was no reason. It didn’t matter. I was crying simply because I needed to cry—not for anyone else’s sake—probably just because sadness had finally broken through.

While crying, I took out my notebook and read the words I had written earlier while still resisting the reality of the woman's existence. It was ridiculous.

“—I have been certain of my own abnormality since childhood. Regarding others, regarding the self I show to others, I have always tried to be conventional. I hated standing out. I was scared. I was scared of being figured out. Mental hospitals were scary. Sex also terrified me. Because I knew I could only love 'objects.' And as my madness became clear, I was afraid my family would be inconvenienced. I hated that I was the cause. Therefore, I wanted to kill myself as a lethal weapon.”

“Therefore，my justice was my own annihilation. To have no interest in anything but oneself meant being capable of devotion solely toward self-erasure. Yet now，I feel certain all others share this abnormality too. In other words—‘I’m just like everyone else.’ My faith in personal aberration had spiraled into deranged confusion. A laughable twenty-nine-year-old infant. Frantically，I attempted to safeguard my agency by merging it with that former self who’d perpetually deemed others normal and authoritative— Then discovered an alternative daily reality: ‘I don’t love her.’ Yet perhaps through affection for this routine...I might compensate.”

...How absurd, I thought again—stop lying to yourself. This was nothing but empty sophistry—that baseless notion one could coexist with others without love. And yet, at that time, I had undoubtedly loved that woman. ...Fool. But I could no longer sustain this existence fixated solely on "myself." For none of it held certainty anymore—because certainty now resided in relationships and daily mundanity—I could no longer believe that clinging solely to my "anxiety" remained justified. The season of childishness had ended.

Before I knew it, the tears had stopped. I suddenly thought—Oh, today was that woman's funeral. It must have already ended. And I also thought—the earliest my mother's planned house would be built was early summer next year. There was still half a year left. The daily radio serial I was working on would likely continue for another half a year. In any case, I had to keep working at this boarding house for another half a year—as I stared at the rainstorm stains still lingering on the wall, I felt that coming here on weekends without the woman had become a form of torture. But even if I left this room, would the torture end?

The window was crimson as if splattered with fresh blood. I laboriously rose and opened the window. The sunset blazed intensely.

The vast western sky—both clouds and firmament—blazed in deep crimson, and I realized that red light was striking my face too.