Pathway to Japanese Literature

Ina world of moan, And mysoul was a stagnant tide,

Edgar Allan Poe

I dwelt Ina world of moan,

I was living alone. My spirit was a stagnant, rotten pool. Edgar Allan Poe

The house now appeared before his eyes. It was around the time when his two dogs—who had initially bounded about with wild energy, kicking up dust as they darted before and behind their master—had gradually grown docile enough to walk side by side behind him, padding along in subdued steps. As the road curved sharply beneath a tall grove of trees,

“Ah, we’ve finally arrived.” As she spoke, their guide—a sturdy, reddish-haired woman—wiped the sweat dripping from her sunburned forehead with a soiled handkerchief in one hand while pointing ahead with the other. Following the thickened masculine finger’s direction, their gazes fell upon what lay buried in shadowy deep green—there, within the dazzling shimmer of a summer morning’s light, glowed a modest thatched roof, dull-hued and steadily composed.

That was the first time he had seen this house. He and his wife, at that moment, directed their gazes—which had been wandering over this thatched roof—toward each other’s eyes and conversed through sight alone— “There’s a sense this could be a good house.” “Yes, I feel the same way.”

He walked while gazing at the thatched roof. This house—he felt he had glimpsed it before in some distant past, whether in dream or vision, or perhaps from the window of a rushing train. The vista centered on that roof showed indeed the commonplace countenance of a countryside one might find anywhere. Yet precisely this ordinariness now captivated his heart. For his present longing dwelt in such unremarkable qualities. And thus his choice to make this region his dwelling could stem from nothing but this very reason.

Where the vast Musashino Plain tapered off at its southern extremity—where the terrain began its gradual transformation into mountainous country—there undulated these small hills that might be called an epilogue still imbued with faint afterglow from the highlands, or perhaps a rippling prologue to great plains yet to come. As far as the eye could see, they rose and fell here too, threading through the unremarkable scenery they formed. Near where one flat highway ran east to west and another stretched north to south along these roads lay a deeply rural village with several humble thatched roofs. It lay immediately adjacent—a mere twenty-five to thirty kilometers—to the great metropolises of T, Y, and H, yet resembled a vacuum formed at the convergence of three violent whirlwinds: abandoned by the century, forgotten by the world, swept aside by civilization, left forlornly in place.

Now, it was on a certain day in late spring of that same year that he first discovered himself on such a road—experiencing boundless delight and an unexpectedly relaxed state of mind. Discovering that such a remote village existed in this place, he was first astonished. Moreover, the tranquil scenery surrounding him struck him as unfamiliar. Born at the tip of a certain southern peninsula where rough seas and precipitous mountains clashed violently—where a great torrential river flowed churning toward the wild ocean, its surface crowded with long rafts jostling past a small town where humans lived diminutive yet wise lives amidst this dramatic landscape—he found that this village of rolling hills, skies, mixed woodlands, rice fields, cultivated plots, and skylarks was by comparison but a modest prose poem when measured against his hometown’s theatrical scenery rich in climaxes. If the former nature had been his austere father, then the latter was his mother who doted on her child. He, who had likened himself to "the prodigal son who could return," while suffocating in the heart of the city, had long harbored an ardent wish to dissolve into nature—gentle, tender, and therefore ordinary. Ah! There, a classical sort of tranquil happiness and joy must surely be waiting for people. Vanity of vanity, vanity, all is vanity! "Vanity of vanities; all is vanity." Or perhaps not... No, there had been no logic to it. In the very heart of the city, his breath had been stifled. He felt crushed under the weight of humanity. He was too delicate a machine to be placed there; that place rendered him all the more delicate. Moreover, the clamorous spring surrounding him rendered him all the more solitary. Ah, on nights like this—anywhere would do—inside a serenely still thatched-roof country house, beneath the glow of a dim red lamp, stretching out arms and legs to their full extent, he wished to sink into a deep sleep where past and future were forgotten. This yearning would surge painfully within him—truly often—as he walked with the exhausted gait of a vagabond beneath garish incandescent lights along stone-paved roads. Ah! Deep sleep—how many years has it been since I last knew you? Deep sleep! That was—so to speak—a religious ecstasy. What I want most now is that.

It was the ecstasy of deep sleep. That is, the ecstasy of one whose flesh pulses with true life. "I shall first seek this. Let me go where this exists. Now make haste!" He whispered these words within his heart. Or perhaps had even given them voice. And so this unbearable heart—nameless yet nostalgic—implored him to carry himself away to that unknowable place... (He was a youth possessing an elder's reason, a young man's passions, and an infant's will.)

The house now came into view before his eyes.

On the right side of the road ran a small canal following its course. When the road curved sharply, the canal swept around in a matching bend. Through this space, water flowed onward and circled back. Past mixed woodland foothills, beside persimmon trees, alongside stables, beneath thickets, through paulownia fields, and before farmhouse gardens where large lilies and hollyhocks bloomed here and there in corners. Though this six-foot-wide canal served as irrigation for rice fields, drawing water straight from distant mountain headwaters, its beauty made him feel compelled to call it a mountain stream. Sunlight filtering through fresh green leaves deepened this impression. The water flowed shallow over ochre clay mud, scouring it clean without clouding—flashing fiercely when dammed by obstacles one moment, then shimmering with crepe-silk wrinkles or sparkling in small twitching spasms like seizure-like bursts of light. In places those glimmers overlapped like fish scales. When cool winds blew low across its surface, stretches became slender momentary silver foil. Pampas grass clumps and wild rose thickets—long stripped of their sentimental white blossoms that once seemed to plead with lovers—alongside nameless flowering shrubs crowded both banks until their vegetation formed a tunnel. The water passed beneath, reflecting cool black shadows as it swayed gently away. At times it pooled languidly, resembling a traveler pausing to glance back along their path. Then it mirrored the summer morning sky—turquoise like Ottoman jade or the edge-lit hue of glass panes. Lively dragonflies skimming against current and breeze glided inches above water, periodically dipping tails to deposit eggs. One dragonfly rode the breeze awhile—keeping pace with their group’s speed and direction—then abruptly soared skyward. He gazed at water then sky, recognizing a childlike impulse rising within him—to call out blessings to that dragonfly. And imagining this merry stream flowing before that house filled him with joy.

As each leaf glistened like a gemstone’s fractured plane attempting to articulate the fierce heat’s dual agony and ecstasy, cicadas beneath them groaned as though scorched. The searing sun had climbed near the sky’s zenith. Yet his wife scarcely felt the heat’s intensity. Yet what shielded his wife from that heat was not the hydrangea-hued parasol above her head—embroidered with hydrangeas, that poor woman’s canopy— That was his wife’s brooding.

His wife walked absorbed in thought, too preoccupied to feel the heat’s intensity. She thought—this way they could escape that temple room where the western sun blazed relentlessly through their rented space. More urgently—escape proximity to that vulgar monk’s wife with her crass greed and ceaseless chatter. To live quietly together in cool tranquility—speaking only what they wished, swallowing every unwelcome word. Perhaps then his mercurial temperament—as elusive as wind currents and oversensitive as tidal shifts—might find calm. Despite arriving with such rural fervor, he neither pondered using their painstakingly acquired plot (though she’d naturally assumed he would) nor attempted writing even a line—nothing tangible seemed within his grasp. Were she to raise such matters he’d surely snap—already deemed hopeless by others since their recklessly premature marriage—showing no regard for parents who likely judged her harshly, merely drifting through days of idle fancy despite his protests otherwise. He’d spend hours drafting impractical house plans with no construction timeline—dozens of sheets filled with minute details—then abruptly dash outside to imitate the dogs, rolling through sun-scorched meadows before erupting into jarring laughter—this man must harbor profound loneliness. He never confided anything—how could she possibly understand? Was he hiding something…? She remembered finishing Toson’s Spring days earlier. In her guileless mind—incapable of doubting his innate talent—she imagined her husband stepping from those pages into her reality…a character made flesh beside her. Did he truly mean to abandon his once-confident artistic work—to let life decay in this backwater? What bizarre visions must compel him… Yet why treat others with such kindness while growing prickly with her alone? Had his lingering affection for that woman—not yet faded when she entered his heart—now resurfaced to displace her? Thus he turned cruel… The man himself surely suffered thus—but worse for her beside him. Shoved violently when answers displeased him—struck outright—enduring days of mute hostility over unknown offenses… He must regret wedding her.

He must surely think at times—how much happier he would have been had he lived not with me, but with that woman. Not only did he think it—he had actually said as much to me: "Had I been with that woman back then, that pure, guileless girl—had she molded me into shape—I would be living a far more beautiful, far better life in every way by now......" In truth, that woman—though I myself knew this—was more beautiful and kinder than someone like me. I knew full well how deeply he thought of that woman... No, no—that wasn’t it. He was, after all, pondering something entirely his own……. Yes, she thought, her husband had said, "Just leave me alone..."

Suddenly—

“It’s not that I lack tender feelings. I’m simply ashamed to express them. I was born with such a disposition.” As she walked, his wife recalled the words her husband had spoken to her the previous night—unusually candid—and found herself ruminating on them with each step. She thought about the layout of the house she had yet to see. Even when they had long since awakened from their newlywed dreams, even beneath such sweltering heat, that her spirits could grow far more animated than usual merely from the prospect of relocating—that she could grieve, rejoice, and console herself through such contemplations—remained the privilege of a young wife who still knew nothing of the world. And this too explained why she showed no interest in the house’s history that the guide woman kept prattling on about, offering only curt, perfunctory replies. Throughout that entire long, sweltering path, this guide woman had chattered incessantly without pause. For she belonged to that simple breed who believed anything holding her interest must naturally fascinate everyone else.

Along such a path, they walked nearly two and a half miles.

And now, the house had come into view before them all.

Before the house flowed a canal. A small earthen bridge left a single narrow trail of human footsteps amidst weeds left to grow wild, making those who walked across it traverse that canal measuring just over six feet wide and guiding them to the house's entrance.

To the left of the entrance stood a large persimmon tree. And there was also one further in. The thick branches of those trees—twisting freely like serpents—seemed to proclaim to those who looked upward: "I have stood here for ages. My fruit-bearing days grow few." On the aged trunk, beneath the crook of a large branch, a parasitic plant had taken root. To the right of that tree ran a narrow ditch demarcating the house from its contiguous paulownia field. What manner of water might this be. The water had dwindled to a thread—through one section of that slender channel it flowed thinner still than a man’s sash, gasping faintly as it passed. In the sodden earth, sky-blue moonflowers grew thickly across the ground. Mingling among them spread small pale blossoms shaped like sweets—called “konpetō” by children—and wildflowers they named “Red Rice,” their tendrils creeping through the expanse. It was a thicket to awaken nostalgic childhood memories. From what must serve as fireflies’ daytime refuge—a tangle of low plants—emerged reeds bearing leaves striped vivid white along their veins. Fifteen or sixteen stalks stood clustered together, slender and straight, their cool elongated leaves—broad at the tips—rustling as they swayed in the wind. Water flowing from the estate’s depths slipped between stems of those small grasses, cleansing the reeds’ short nodes as it wound sinuously onward—lustrous and supple as untwisted silk threads rippling in their course. These meager waters—having bent beneath their flow the slender elongated leaves of some grass while leaving them rooted, their passage briefly obstructed by those blades—now trailed along the foliage to drip like clepsydra droplets into the broader roadside canal. To him, it seemed this house’s rear might harbor a fresh-bubbling spring—for such was the lay of this land.

Behind the house, contiguous with the mountains, lay a bamboo thicket. Within the bamboo stood a remarkably large and tall camellia tree, looming heavily like a heretic amidst this pristine bamboo thicket. The estate’s garden was surrounded by a tall—higher than a person’s stature—sakaki hedge. The entire house, just as it had appeared when viewed from afar, remained buried amidst branches of trees left to grow wild even when seen up close, resting upon grass left to grow wild.

The dogs descended one by one from the earthen bridge and took turns sampling the canal water. He stood without attempting to cross the earthen bridge, gazing for some time at the house—as though wanting to recite “三径就荒” (“Three paths have grown wild”)—with an air of contemplative depth.

“Hey, isn’t the atmosphere here at the entrance rather nice?”

After extracting several sensibilities from the house’s surroundings that resonated with notions of secluded living or hermitage, he turned to his wife and said: “Yes…” “But it’s terribly overgrown.” “We won’t know until we go inside…”

His wife answered thus with some apprehension and a knowing air, in the tone all wives adopt when admonishing their capricious husbands. However, she immediately reconsidered,

“But if I think about living in the temple now, anywhere would be fine, I suppose.” The two dogs, having suddenly regained vigor from their recent drink, leapt into the garden a step ahead of their masters. Choosing the deep shade beneath a pine’s roots, the pair stretched out at length on the ground as if they owned the place. They thrust their muzzles forward, chins and throats pressed flat against the earth, aligning their faces in perfect mirror images. Bending their bodies in identical curves with hind legs extended behind them, they formed an utterly charming symmetry. With lolling red tongues and labored breaths, they gazed up innocently at their entering masters’ faces, quietly wagging tails in apparent contentment. Their thoroughly settled demeanor appeared to him as if they’d fully anticipated—even before their masters—that this place was now their home. Had his wife been beside him then, he would have told her—

“Hey, Frate and Leo (both dogs’ names) agree too.”

Yet his wife, together with the guidewoman, was attempting to open the long-sealed doors along the engawa veranda, rattling the key in the lock.

Every tree grew thick upon thick, the greenery layered in fold upon fold. The tangled branches formed meshes, walls, and eaves, leaving the garden nearly devoid of sunlight. The smell of earth welled up coolly from the black ground. He savored the scent of earth rising from beneath his feet, sharply attuning his senses like one appreciating incense—until the cool clinking of keys ceased and the veranda doors were opened.

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“Finally, it feels like a home.”

Yesterday, his wife had installed the shoji screens she had washed clean at the entrance, her hands moving with unfamiliar motions. When he had finished fitting the last panel into the threshold between the tea room and middle room, watching her husband’s back as he stood adjusting it, the wife said with a radiant look of satisfaction. “It finally feels like a home.” His wife repeated the same words. “The tatami mats will come soon, they say…” “But I truly loathed it when I first saw this house the day before yesterday. I thought, ‘Can people really live in such a place?’”

“But surely this isn’t some fox-and-raccoon den.” “It’s exactly like the Asaji ga Yado house! If not that, then a cricket cottage! Remember how those crickets went hopping mad across every tatami mat that time? Utterly horrifying!” “Asaji ga Yado? Now that was a proper ruin... Hey—let’s name this place Ugetsu Cottage from now on.”

(The two of them—the wife, influenced by her husband, had come to praise Ueda Akinari.)

The wife was happy to see her husband's cheerful face after so long.

“Now then, next comes replacing the well—this will be quite an ordeal. If it hasn’t been drawn from for a whole year, even the water must have gone quite foul.” “Rot it will! If you don’t draw it up every day, it’ll rot just like my head.”

At these words, the wife—who thought *Not again*—forgot her earlier lively tone and timidly looked up at her husband's face. However, her husband’s words today seemed to be mere lip service, for his gaunt face still bore its usual smile. He was in such a good mood. The wife, relieved upon seeing this, added in a coquettish manner.

“And then, you simply must do something about the garden.” “I can’t stand this gloominess!” Against the wall where his exhausted wife leaned back, their beloved cat was supplely and stealthily climbing onto her lap. “Ao.” “You’re sweltering, aren’t you?” Even as she said this, his wife cradled the cat.

In his household, there were dogs. There was a cat. Once he came to love something, his nature—which made him unable to help but dote on it excessively, forgetting all moderation—eventually became a household custom, such that both he and his wife would regularly speak to the dogs and cat as though they were people....

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From the day the couple began living in this house, going back several years――

The old master of the N family—reputed to be the wealthiest household in the village—had grown old and begun to keenly feel life’s loneliness. For ordinary people, what was most needed at such times—regardless of age—was companionship with the opposite sex. And so, this old man brought a young woman from the city. Though this wealthy family had lost half its rice fields during this aesthete’s tenure, the old man’s considerations were indeed befitting a man of means—he did not bring home a woman who was merely beautiful yet utterly without practical skills. Even if she was somewhat plain, he could tolerate it so long as she was young—he had chosen a woman who would benefit both the village and, more importantly, his own finances. To put it plainly, he had taken a concubine who served part-time as a midwife—a role whose absence had long caused inconvenience in the village. He then dismantled the detached guest house from his own residence and rebuilt it just below his mansion. In winter, having calculated the sun’s path from dawn till dusk, there stretched a veranda four ken in length. Passing through the three-tatami entranceway, they had cut a hearth into the six-tatami tea room. The black persimmon pillar of the alcove and the shoji screens’ hemp-leaf latticework transoms made villagers’ eyes widen in astonishment. "Truly a pillar handpicked from our mountains—not a single unsightly knot," the carpenter praised while stroking the repurposed pillar as if it were his own work. Unlike farmhouses with their awe-inspiring earthen-floored kitchens—domains of soot-blackened beams and massive rafters—this house now had wooden floorboards where a woman in white tabi socks stood working, her garment hems trailing behind her. The old man transferred family headship to his eldest son, now in his forties. Now, this old man was happy. The villagers gossiped about the retiree who had acquired a tea companion not half their age. Yet such trifles did not diminish the retired man’s happiness.

Yet all peace and happiness prove fleeting within our brief lives—like the shadow of a bird that suddenly falls upon sunlit shoji paper on an autumn day. It comes abruptly and vanishes just as swiftly. And in that momentary glimpse of avian shadow wells up an inexplicable loneliness. The old man’s days of such peace too were but transient. The young concubine soon lured a city youth to join her. Villagers dubbed him “the Clerk” or “Midwife’s Clerk,” though none could say whether a midwife truly required such assistance. This retired gentleman grew displeased at his concubine hiring this “Clerk” without consultation—indeed, profoundly displeased. First, this young pair’s lifestyle struck rural eyes as excessively lavish. It diverged too sharply from the retired man’s budgetary constraints. He began insisting they ought to live more modestly—a demand he pressed upon his concubine with increasing frequency. Initially couched in indirect hints and restrained phrasing, his admonitions gradually hardened into blunt declarations. One midnight saw these reproaches reach their peak. The “Clerk” had likely overheard every word through the paper-thin wall. On an evening following such nocturnal strife—about a year after her village arrival and half a year since hiring this “Clerk”—the couple vanished without warning. A horseman returning from village errands claimed to have spotted distinctly pale, rounded cheeks glowing through mountain twilight—cheeks he later identified as belonging to “N-san’s midwife” when reporting to villagers next dawn. Yet this account likely sprang not from actual witness but inventive falsehood—the sort of artistic fabrication instinctive to those seizing opportunities for dramatic narration when hearing of disappearances.

Otherwise he should have reported it immediately upon returning, with an air of novelty and triumph on his face. In such moments, everyone possesses a certain artistic instinct that makes them want to try saying something like this. Be that as it may, this story pleased the country folk—starved for conversational topics—for a time. And thus it became the village consensus that for a twenty-eight-year-old woman, a young man of twenty-four or twenty-five would have been a far better match than that retired gentleman nearing seventy.

What was pitiful was how this retired man, abandoned by his young concubine, thereafter began devoting himself to gardening as a pastime. He began to collect flowering trees for his garden. Today he transplanted that tree over here; yesterday he moved this tree from another garden into his own. And so, day after day, there was no respite from his soil tinkering as he told himself he must find some fine tree tomorrow. In spring, there were peonies. In summer, there were morning glories. In autumn, there were chrysanthemums. In winter, there were narcissus. And so, in the bed where he had his two granddaughters—aged seventeen and ten—sleep on either side of him in place of the concubine who had fled, this old gardener lay awake. He became absorbed in conventional haikai poetry.

The retired man died—exactly one year later. He had only just barely enjoyed each blossom of the flowering trees he had gathered in this manner. And so that house—along with his youngest daughter—came into the possession of the village school principal. For the village school principal was this retired man’s adopted son. Then there appeared a shrewd gardener—skilled in arithmetic’s four operations and adept at applying them to the abacus, yet utterly indifferent to beauty in any form—who deceived the household’s school principal and uprooted every notable garden ornament to carry them away. Large white magnolia trees, camellias, podocarps, flowering crabapples, black bamboo, weeping cherry trees, sizable pomegranate trees, plum trees, oleanders, and potted orchids of diverse varieties. And so those unfortunate trees had to change their dwelling places with such restless frequency. They never had time to grow accustomed to the soil. And so some of them may have withered because of this.

The village school principal moved into part of the newly constructed school building. The house he had inherited was left vacant. As time passed, he conceived the idea that if a tenant could be found for this house, he ought to rent it out. Without inhabitants, he reasoned, the structure would only decay further. Even two yen—no, even one yen fifty sen—would still turn a profit; his calculations on rent collection were impeccably clear. Yet country folk generally owned their homes outright. However dilapidated—with sagging eaves and moss-choked thatch rotting beneath—these dwellings passed through generations: from parent to child, grandchild after grandchild. However fine a house might be, those reduced to renting were inevitably paupers who had forfeited their ancestral lands to creditors. Thus did this residence—built by the retired gentleman for his beloved mistress and golden years’ repose—transform into a wretched peasant hovel. In the tearoom hearth where once hung an elegant iron kettle, peasants now tossed resinous pine logs that smoldered miserably—their smoke trapped beneath absurdly lofty ceilings never meant for such use. Walls grew sooty within weeks; shoji screens yellowed; tatami frayed at the edges. The pitiful family endured the smoke’s sting—grateful at least for winter warmth as they twisted rope and wove straw sandals through autumn’s long nights and winter’s deeper dark. By April or May, rent payments began lapsing. Tatami wore through to their rush cores. Pillars accumulated scars—knife nicks from meal preparations, charcoal tallies tracking debts unpaid. “Surely night soil at least accumulates,” thought the School Principal—yet when his man came mornings to collect it, the privy stood empty. For the tenant peasant had long since hauled every bucketful to fertilize his rented fields. The School Principal’s contempt for this tenant curdled into hatred. To every acquaintance he denounced “that cunning pauper’s” ingratitude—railing against peasant slyness wherever ears would listen.

And thus he delivered his conclusion: "A man so destitute has no grasp of duty or decency—nothing but a cunning rogue." The other villagers immediately showed agreement with the School Principal’s opinion. There, the School Principal came to feel that his logic had been established as truth. Next, he came to think that rather than continuing to rent the house to such a man, it might be far better to simply let it fall into ruin. For the reason being, renting the house to this man was an active act of ruination. On the contrary, leaving it abandoned as a vacant house was the passive approach. And so this tenant was driven out. The villagers considered the School Principal’s attitude rational.

During all this time—after that retired gentleman had passed away—there was not a single person who gave thought to the garden’s plants and trees. The house and garden had fallen into utter ruin. Only one person remained—the poor peasant’s daughter—who would discover each autumn morning the small blooms of yellow and white chrysanthemums in what had once been a flowerbed. These chrysanthemums, planted during the retired gentleman’s lifetime, now grew wild among the grasses, their leaves growing more pitiful year after year, their stems twisting crookedly. She would pluck them to adorn her frizzy hair with these makeshift ornaments.

He stood on the veranda gazing at the garden, blending his own brand of fantasy into the tales that russet-haired guide had ceaselessly told along their journey—his thoughts drifting without conscious intent, his mind idly lingering on such matters.

“Frate, Frate.” From the rear veranda came his wife’s voice calling the dogs. “There, there. Did you come too, Leo?” “Oh, you’re so sweet!” “I didn’t give you anything, you know.” “Frate, you mustn’t play in those overgrown areas like this.” “There are vipers here.” “Look—if you get bitten on the nose again like last time and your face swells up big as a temple monk’s, wouldn’t that worry me terribly?” “Do you understand?” “Frate must have had enough of that last time, right?” “Leo, you must be careful too.” “You’re the quiet one, so you’ll be all right…” His wife spoke to their two adopted dogs in a voice like a maiden singing pastoral songs, with a heart to match. And the cool wind from the bamboo grove swept through from there to where he stood.

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The midsummer abandoned garden stood rampant in its overgrowth.

All the trees spread their roots as deeply as possible into the soil, drawing up its strength, clothed their entire forms in leaves, and drank in sunlight without restraint—pines lived as pines, cherries as cherries, podocarps as podocarps. To bathe in maximal sunlight and expand themselves, they thrust out their branches. While each pursued their own will, their limbs overlapped, collided, entangled, and jostled one another. To secure the sun’s exclusive favor for themselves alone, they could spare no consideration for others. Thus the branches deprived of sunlight grew gaunt by the day. A small pine had withered crimson beneath cedars. The sakaki hedge stood uneven in height, its row of crowns undulating grotesquely—for only sunlit sections flourished tall while shaded portions sank beneath larger trees. Some areas gaped with castle-wall peephole-sized voids where leaves could no longer survive. Others bore thick leaf clusters thriving in rounded masses. Certain stretches lay utterly broken—concealed by a towering pine planted along the hedge’s length, and further disrupted by a wild wisteria vine thicker than a human thumb that burst unexpectedly from the hedge’s heart. Splitting through the barrier, it coiled round the pine’s trunk like shackles binding a captive, climbing until it crowned even that vertiginous height—yet still unsatisfied, this serpentine growth now twisted skyward like deranged fingers convulsively grasping at void. One tendril bridged to a cherry surpassing its pine neighbor, stretching higher than any comrade toward heaven. In another garden corner stood a new plum branch erect and towering like a spear aimed to pierce the firmament. Where chrysanthemums once grew in soft earth now spread tenacious weeds—a hardy grass resembling bamboo in form and nature. Its tough stems and leaves crawled across soil surfaces weaving nets while anchoring roots at each joint to claim territory. When plucking a portion to uproot it, those tufted roots lifted clumps of black-gritted earth like human hands grasping soil—this being their will to live, this being Summer’s blazing command over creation. The garden’s motley vegetation with its dense branches and leaves appeared altogether as gloomy as disheveled locks hanging over a madman’s ashen brow.

Those plants and trees seemed to press down upon the not-so-spacious garden with an invisible weight, encircling and bearing in on the central building from all sides.

However, what had given him such an intensely terrifying feeling was not this violent will inherent in nature. Rather, it was a wisp of artificial elegance lingering on the verge of extinction amidst this chaos. It was the ghost of some will. Though that shrewd gardener had stripped away nearly everything from this ruined garden, even among what still remained, there were indeed not a few things that vividly evoked the late flower-cultivating old man’s horticultural indulgences. Even nature’s power had not yet been able to completely erase it. For example, there stood a variegated podocarp that one could imagine had originally been densely rounded into a jujube-like form through careful pruning. It stood along the path from the gate to the entrance. Then there was also a sasanqua that concealed the toilet from the sitting room. Under its shade grew a daphne. There were several Kirishima azaleas shaped like overturned pots. Large leaves had wilted from the heat, and in their shade stood an aged hydrangea whose grand blossoms had withered and shriveled. These remnants lay scattered about the garden like debris hurled by a raging giant—white magnolias, daphnes, camellias, begonias, plum trees, hibiscus, ancient Koya pines, sasanquas, bush clovers, orchid pots, massive natural stones, plump mounds of moss, weeping cherries, black bamboo, dianthus, grand pomegranate trees, and irises near the water—all that remained of what had once been artfully arranged and tenderly cherished. Now abandoned to nature’s trampling—more violent than any northern barbarian’s—in this present day where none remained to tend them, they still seemed to cling to that unfulfilled dream. Even if not a single such plant remained in any corner of the garden, one could still readily acknowledge—from merely the branching form of that pine tree draping over the entrance gate—that though today it stood clad in dense clusters of needles now merely hard, thick, and long, there had once been a time when human hands had tenderly shaped its branches, aligned its needles, and caressed its trunk. In truth, the Village School Principal—its owner—was already considering selling that pine next time, and had resolved that when these tenants called a gardener, he would have them trim its roots and remove any unwanted growth from this particular tree.

Behold how nature and fate—cruel precisely because that will was so great—had vigorously destroyed the deceased’s grand will through their relentless force. The remaining trees—the garden—were neither nature’s vibrant barbaric force nor an artificial construct of human artifice. Rather, it was a haphazard, discordant amalgamation of both. And within this amalgamation lay something not so much ugly as eerily desolate without cause. The house’s new master stood beneath a tree’s shade, gazing upon the abandoned garden in summer. Then he felt himself cowering before something. A momentary terror seemed to pass abruptly through him. Yet what exactly it had been, even he himself did not know. For it had flashed by too swiftly to grasp. But he perceived it had been—strangely enough—not spiritual terror but sensory fear, akin to what an animal might harbor.

That day, he wandered for some time through this dreadfully poignant garden of their new residence, tracing the shade of trees as he walked and observed.

Beneath the white oak on the side of the house, ants marched in a long black column. Some bore what seemed like treasured provisions in their jaws. Slightly larger ants stood scattered among them, appearing to issue commands. When paths crossed, they halted from both directions, pressing their heads together as if exchanging courtesies, sharing whispers, or relaying urgent dispatches. This was but an ordinary ant migration. He crouched low, transfixed by the miniature caravan. For a time, their industry granted him a childish delight he'd thought long extinguished. It struck him then—how many years had passed since last he noticed such things? How often had they crossed his vision unremarked? Now that he considered it, since boyhood days—days when he'd reveled in such sights more than any playmate, though even those memories had faded—he'd never paused to admire the moon's face nor mark a sparrow's flight. This awareness filled him with peculiar sorrow and stranger joy. As he rose from contemplation, his eye caught a cicada's discarded husk clinging to the oak trunk—a comical effigy with scythe-like forelegs still embedded in bark as though mid-assault. The tiny carapace gleamed vermilion where its back had split cleanly open. Peering closer, he found the cicada itself three inches above its vacated armor—utterly still, as if carved from jade. No wonder it showed no alarm at human presence. The creature's newborn state declared itself at glance—body still pliant, unhardened by sun's forge. Thus motionless did it abide, newly baptized into air's mysteries. Wings yet unformed hung milky and crumpled—achingly delicate membranes shriveled like crushed tissue. Only their green veins stood vivid against pallor—a green so vital it conjured bean sprouts cleaving seed casements with cotyledons thrust skyward.

It was not merely in color alone—the entire wing resembled a plant’s germination. In all that is born, though differences exist between insects and plants, he saw a certain common form being revealed within them. In nature itself, there might be no laws at all. Yet from that moment onward, people could discern their own laws however they pleased. Upon closer inspection, precisely at the center of this insect’s flat head, there was something minuscule—ruby-red and even more brilliant—impeccably inlaid. As for that jewel-like something—what it was scientifically (perhaps an ocellus)—he had no means of knowing. But regarding its beauty, he believed he himself understood it better than anyone else. That beauty proved particularly potent in making him perceive this small, insignificant insect’s birth as sacred—compelling him toward worship.

He recalled that within his vague repository of knowledge—somewhere between certainty and conjecture—there existed a half-remembered fact heard days ago from perhaps an agricultural student or other source: that cicadas require roughly twenty years to finally mature into adults. Oh, that this small insect—so dismissed by humans as mere clamor (the very term “frog-cries and cicada-noise” exists for such)—should have spent nearly as many years as his own age to live a life deemed meaningless by humans! And their lives would last a mere few days—two or three days, perhaps a week! Nature—on earth with what intent does it create such things? No, no—to call them 'such things' isn’t limited to cicadas alone. Humans too. Himself? This nature that is said to have been created by God—might it not be utterly haphazard? For there is no moment when randomness appears more mysterious than when one tries to comprehend it without recognizing it as randomness. No no—he understands nothing. Yes, only this much is clear—cicadas are ephemeral, and who can say that the life of an eloquent congressman is not that of a cicada? As he watched, the cicada’s wings visibly stretched out their crumpled parts. Simultaneously, their semi-transparent milky whiteness was changing moment by moment—bit by bit yet unmistakably—into something colorless and transparent. And that sprout-like refreshing yet fragile green was correspondingly gradually darkening, while a certain realistic strength—as though young grass’s green were transforming into that of an evergreen—was unmistakably becoming evident there as well. As he observed these transformations for over twenty minutes—with what might rather be called a pathological meticulousness—there gradually arose within him a solemnity that made his breath catch.

Suddenly, he said to his own heart.

"Behold the anguish of that which is born. For even this small creature to be born, there exists such patience here!"

And then he said again.

"This small insect is me!" "O cicada, please take flight swiftly!" His strange prayer was performed in this manner. It was performed not only at this moment but always thus.

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Now, here in the corner of this garden stood several rose bushes.

They were planted along the wellside drainage like a hedge. Had they flourished sufficiently, they would have displayed "a long trellis adorned with ten thousand spring blossoms," creating a splendid flower hedge spanning two or three ken. However, they were profoundly unfortunate. Blocking the morning sun stood a grove of cedar trees. The evening sun—the house's large shadow loomed over them, obstructing. And during the hours around noon, persimmon trees and plum branches stole sunlight from these rose bushes. Thus the unchecked branches of cedar, plum and persimmon spread over those rose bushes, forming a roof-like canopy. And so these rose bushes stood unsteadily amidst weeds over a foot tall, their stems painfully slender like creeping vines.

Even though it was past mid-August, there were not only no flowers but also not a single—truly, literally not a single—green leaf upon them. To confirm whether their stems still lived, he had to snap one off and examine it. The sunlight and warmth had been completely robbed by all external things, while even the nutrients stored within their soil were entirely stolen by nameless weeds that had spread around their roots. They appeared to receive no blessings from nature. Becoming nothing but perfect footholds for spiderwebs that most favored such places—serving no purpose beyond that—the roses had no choice but to persist in survival even like this.

Roses were one of the things he had deeply loved. And at times he even called them "his own flowers." For why else would Goethe have left him this unforgettable, consoling verse about the flower—"If it be a rose, it shall bloom"—had he not done so? Moreover, it was not merely such logical connections—he felt he loved these flowers from the very depths of his heart. That bountiful beauty—so excessive it seemed to overflow from a chalice—particularly in its crimson blooms, captivated his heart. That vertigo-inducing heavy fragrance evoked for him the sweetness of his first kiss. And it was precisely so that he might feel it thus that since ancient times, numerous poets had dedicated numerous beautiful poems to this flower. Since ancient times, Western script had woven crowns and presented them for this flower. The poets of Cathay too did not overlook singing of that flower’s radiance with their pictographic characters. They too prized Dashi’s “rose dew,” and to obtain this “Bone-Transforming Incense,” were made to lament: “How can we obtain overseas roses when they remain beyond our watery realm?” The words of those poetic verses had forged within poetry’s domain a vein of tradition akin to precious metal’s ore—now so firmly established as to have become convention. Once one steps into poetry’s realm, they hear whispers of roses everywhere they turn. And so—the roses’ color and fragrance, even their leaves and thorns—drawing up and absorbing each of those countless exquisite verses as nutrients, they made their branches sag as if weighted down by radiant phantoms of beautiful characters shimmering behind them. That was what imparted to him an added measure of beauty from those flowers. Was this a blessing? Or rather, was it not a profound misfortune? Within his character such general artistic conventions had taken deep root in his heart. That he had come to choose art as his vocation must have stemmed from this very heart. His artistic talent had originated from such conventions and awakened very early. ……All these things must have unconsciously led him to love roses to such an extent. From when he could not yet directly pluck truly fresh beauty and joy from nature itself—through those artistic conventions—he had come to devote such deep love solely to this flower.

It might seem utterly foolish, but he even felt love for the very characters that spelled "rose". Even so, the wretchedness of this rosebush now before his very eyes! He had also once seen, in his childhood home’s garden, roses that had budded in midwinter due to having been in an unusually warm sunny spot. It was a pale pink bloom of grand proportions that had attempted to bud under the sun’s unnatural warmth, yet without morning and evening sunlight, even in this southern region, midwinter must have been too harsh for roses. The buds remained stubbornly closed as days passed, and what’s more, he had seen how even the faintly crimson outermost petals—still white at their base—developed thin green lines each day in a most peculiar manner, gradually hardening into something intermediate between petals and leaves, as if sharing properties with foliage. However, the rose bushes he now saw before his eyes were beyond comparison in their wretchedness to those buds of yore. As he looked at these bushes, he impulsively conceived an idea. He wanted to somehow bestow the blessing of sunlight upon these shade-dwelling rose bushes, these long-suffering rose bushes. He wanted to make them bear flowers as well. Such was the wish that arose in him at that moment. Yet within this wish lay a heart filled with an affected, playful so-called “poetic” attitude—the kind of attitude that suited his current self to engage in such things—occupying its greater part. To such an extent that even he himself could not help but notice it. (This heart had often betrayed his sincerity, bit by bit, in every circumstance.) Now, he felt a desire to test himself through these rose bushes—“If it be a rose, it shall bloom!”

He went himself to a nearby farmhouse. The two dogs keenly noticed their master departing briskly and gave chase. Bearing a rusty saw and mulberry pruning shears on his shoulder, he reappeared in the garden with both dogs in tow—exuding an air of triumph—within five minutes. He stood smiling by the rose bush. While surveying how best to direct sunlight there by looking upward, he rolled up his sleeves. First with the saw, he began cutting through the persimmon tree's most overgrown thick branch. White powder crumbled like snowfall from the branch; when the saw teeth bit halfway through, the remaining uncut portion—too fragile to bear its own weight—snapped off spontaneously, sending the heavy branch crashing downward while striking its smaller boughs against the ground. Through that gap sunlight immediately cascaded upon rose branches now resembling deadwood—hurled, surged, permeating. The sunlit area embracing the roses gradually widened. For plum, cedar and persimmon branches that had been smothering them were progressively pruned away. He used mulberry shears to sweep aside spiderwebs above the rose bush. Various spiders lurked there. Fly-catching spiders—small with stubby legs—had built nests like paper bags at branch bases. A large female spider bearing tortoiseshell-hued lengthy legs had spun an elaborate web. When shears disrupted its web, the spider retreated with acrobatic skill while reeling its thread. The large shears pursued them. They dangled from shear tips while spinning threads, descending to flee onto soil amid grass or puddles. The shears snipped through them.

Such things drenched his body in sweat. They also stirred his heart. At the sound of the largest branch crashing to the ground first, his wife—who had come to observe his unusual work—seemed to call out something to her husband, but he gave no response at all. When the dogs realized their master would pay them no attention today, they began chasing each other, the two of them causing a commotion through the entire garden. He felt a pleasure so intense it bordered on ecstasy. And then he felt a desire to indiscriminately cut down everything he could lay his hands on.

He severed the thick wisteria vine entwined around the pine tree at its base with mulberry pruning shears in one swift motion. He was surprised to find unexpected strength within himself. As he twisted the vine counterclockwise while pulling it from the pine trunk, he imagined the tree releasing a deep sigh of relief. Gripping the severed end with both hands, he yanked with all his might. Yet this proved utterly futile. The vine that had climbed from pine twigs to treetop and across to a neighboring cherry tree merely bent both branches violently, shaking loose leaves that rained to the ground and dislodging a caterpillar onto his straw hat—the tendril itself now taut as a bowstring. "I'm hardly surprised by your strength!" "Go on then—try harder if you want!" The wisteria seemed to sneer at him with infuriating smugness. Defeated by the vine, he could only abandon his efforts. Turning away, he began trimming the hedge instead.

By evening, what had begun as his midday play resulted in the hedge’s crown aligned in a crisp straight line. Upon its wall-like flattened side—now struck by sunset rays streaming parallel to its surface—the light reflected off the sacred evergreen tree’s black, rigid leaves and glittered beautifully. Now that things had come to this, that large hole appeared all the more unsightly and conspicuous.

“Well now, this has been properly tidied up, hasn’t it?”

There were also farmers returning from fields who, while uttering such flattering words, peered through that hole into the house. Then, taking advantage of the occasion, he even attempted to tidy the willow branches arching over the canal.

That evening, he ate heartily for once. The night brought its own reward—a deep, satisfying sleep he could fully surrender to. And yet, when he awoke the next morning, he had to acknowledge with a wry smile that his body had stiffened like a tree, every joint aching.

Several days later, when a real gardener—though he was also a part-time farmer—entered the garden of his house, those wisteria vines that had so tenaciously entwined themselves around the pine and cherry trees now had leaves resembling centipede legs that had withered away, with some parts having completely lost their greenness. And those coiled vines that had writhed like maddened fingers now hung completely limp and lifeless. With the heart of one who rejoices in watching a villain meet their end on stage, he squatted beneath the eaves and gazed upward at the thick wisteria vine that the gardener was brutally cutting from atop the pine tree.

“If ya let this dry out four or five more days, it’ll make good kindling,” the gardener suddenly called down from atop the pine tree. “That one’s quite thick, isn’t it?” He answered such things, then thought to himself: That’s right. "That stubborn wisteria withered so quickly and grotesquely because of the very same solar power that had so thickly and robustly nurtured it," he felt as though this vine were recounting an ancient fable to him. He once again thought that his will—the human will—had exerted control over the forces of nature. Rather, he prided himself as if he—a human—had instead executed nature’s will. While the wisteria’s presence there likely posed no inconvenience to nature, after all, a garden initially shaped by human hands requires human care until its very end. He absently contemplated such things.

Even so, how would that rose transform? Would it bloom, he wondered? Driven by a heart that delighted in waiting, he stood up and walked over—to see the roses. Yet above them, aside from the sun shining bright and steadfast, there remained no change at all—something he should have well known from seeing it clearly that morning.

Thus several days passed. The roses were forgotten. And thus several more days passed.

＊　　　　　＊　　　　　＊

The natural scenery quietly transitioned from summer to autumn. That, he could clearly see.

Night had already turned to autumn. Bell crickets and katydids—vanguard insects of autumn—began their chorus in the grasslands, before his desk, beneath his bedding. The joyful anticipation of a fresh autumn in the countryside lifted the villagers' spirits. The village youths walked with sturdy steps through several miles of cool night breeze as they searched for the girl. Others were practicing drums in preparation for the village festival. The earnest reverberations of that simple percussion traveled across the fields, reaching his window until late into the night.

The female student who had been visiting this village—a student at Y City’s Normal School and the sole female student in this village—had become friends with his wife at summer’s end, but soon after had returned to the city where her school was located, leaving his wife behind with apparent delight.

His violent restlessness and irritable temper seemed to have finally left him after moving into this house. And now that autumn was approaching, his mood had naturally become calm. He found it both pleasant and even took some pride in realizing he now perceived nature’s influence upon his being with a sensitivity akin to grass, trees, wind, and clouds. The lamplight around this time of night became one of the cherished things. It cast a soft, comforting glow for eyes like his—eyes belonging to someone exhausted in both body and mind. He had bought that lamp from an itinerant peddler visiting the region for twenty-odd sen. The paper shade cost one sen. Yet the lamp’s glass reservoir, illuminated through kerosene, shone as beautifully as a lump of amber. At times it turned pale purple, reminiscent of amethyst. Beneath that light, he first tried reading Saint Francis’s biography with devotion. But he quickly grew bored. Not a shred of perseverance remained in him now. And no matter which book he started, every volume felt uniformly dull. More than that—when he considered how such tedious books found perfect acceptance in the world, it struck him as utterly mystifying. Something—something tremendous enough to drag humanity into an alien world spun from different matter; something that might transform this ancient reality carelessly spread before him into something wholly other; something capable of overturning existence’s very foundations—whatever it might be, surely such extraordinary marvels must exist somewhere out there. He often found himself absently pondering these things. Was it truly that “there is nothing new under the sun”? And then—what reason did ordinary people find sufficient to keep living? Were they not merely building hollow dreams upon their own folly with such casual pretense that they failed to recognize their dreams’ emptiness—living with desperate fervor? Be they sage or fool, philosopher or merchant. Was life truly worth living?

And is death truly something worth dying for? He contemplated such things every night. And so—given that this oppressive, utterly exhausted boredom nested deep within his heart—it followed naturally that all things in the world perceived through the eyes of that heart’s owner must forever, entirely, and endlessly remain tedious. When he came to realize this truth—that the sole method for living anew in this ancient, ancient world lay nowhere but in transforming his own mental state—then arose the question: by what means, through what method, could he make this stagnant self fresh again? What exactly was this "Daiyūmōshin (Great Courageous Heart)" that his father had referred to in that irate letter? From where could that be brought, and how could it be implanted into his heart? How could one stir it up within his heart? All of those things were utterly beyond his capacity to know. And in neither countryside nor city—nowhere on earth—existed any paradise that could bring him peace. There was nothing.

"Only according to the will of God, Creator of all things..."

"Shall I try saying such things?" Yet his heart was not shattered in the least. It had merely withered...... He listened to the drumbeats and enviously pictured before his eyes the vigorous youths who must be gathered around their source.

On his desk lay pages from books he neither read nor could read, occasionally laid bare before his eyes. He would meaninglessly pick up those characters. Sometimes he brought out a large dictionary again—to hunt for characters that seemed as rare as possible within it. Though his exhausted mind and body could no longer read texts where words coalesced into organic wholes, each isolated word now conjured fantasies instead. At times he even felt he could vividly perceive their spirits—the so-called kotodama dwelling within words. In those moments, language struck him as an ineffable mystery brimming with divine essence. Each word already contained a fragment of human existence. Could their collective mass form an entire world? Might not the individual states of those first inventors linger nostalgically within each term? When someone creates even one new word destined for eternal daily use by all people—doesn’t that person achieve immortality through it? Yes yes—I must grasp this more clearly... He sensed these truths only faintly. Vaguely too did he contemplate humanity’s mysterious urge—that sublime compulsion to convey precise feelings to others through language’s flawed vessels. When words wearied him, he turned to studying the dictionary’s minute illustrations—delighting in discoveries about unseen fish and beasts and grasses; about household tools and weapons and ancient execution devices; about ships’ sail configurations and architectural details. Within these humble forms lay myriad suggestions. Most profoundly among human inventions, he sensed thoughts and dreams saturating objects just as kotodama infused words—though glimpsed only fragmentarily. Thus his mental life now possessed strength sufficient merely to contemplate such shards.

He would sometimes, following those late-night inspirations, write something resembling poetry. In those midnight hours, he became convinced these were verses of exceptional brilliance. Yet when he awoke the next day and first looked at the paper, it proved merely a string of utterly meaningless characters arrayed before him. What astonished him most was how these fine ideas had brushed against the very edges of his being—and yet when he reached to grasp them, nothing remained. When he thought he'd seized one, it dissolved into empty space—like embracing a lover within a dream. With each frustration came that familiar anxiety: turning at the sound of his name called aloud, only to find no speaker there.

He began drawing house blueprints again. He sometimes imagined structures resembling immensely complex labyrinths. At other times he would envision houses like those in Corsica—structures serving as both parlor and kitchen with nothing more than a single large room. The outlines of their exteriors, the layouts, the design details of windows and other elements were haphazardly sketched across his notebook nearly every night. At last not a single white page remained; even margins of about an inch square—now sought as precious spaces—were densely packed with countless straight lines combined in various configurations. For each meaningless straight line he could conjure infinite fantasies. At such times his state of mind bore striking resemblance to those mad painters who when confined alone would lose themselves drawing arabesque patterns with single-minded obsession.

Thus, once again, the lifeless ennui finally came. And so it continued for several days.

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One night, something came flying with a rustling sound to the paper shade of his lamp. Upon looking closer, he saw it was a single katydid. The sleek blue insect landed on the lampshade—its edge dyed in blurred crimson—where the contrast of red and blue first seized his gaze, but it was the creature’s form and deliberate movements that gradually deepened his fascination. The insect, while slowly waving antennae nearly half as long as its own body above itself, proceeded to move round and round along the crimson area of the lamp’s round shade in a blue-tinted motion. To him, it even seemed like the affected gait of someone strolling along the outer edge of a circular garden. This elegant, slender blue insect had a reddish-brown color only at the peak of its ornate back. He discovered for the first time the redness of a firefly’s nape and could now sense the sentiments of Matsuo Bashō, who had composed verse about it. For a while, the insect walked round and round that circular space. And at times, abruptly—to the decorative wall beams, the shoji frame slats, the scattered bookshelves, or somewhere atop the mosquito net where his wife slept alone after letting her husband stay up indeterminately late—it would nimbly flit over and chirp. “Merely being born human is not necessarily happiness,” said a certain poet regarding the katydid. When next reborn, becoming such an insect might not be so bad. One time, as he contemplated such thoughts while observing the insect, he suddenly imagined a scene—a tiny world where a pale-winged antlion alighted upon a silk hat. That small blue insect with transparent large wings on its back—fluttering like the breath of a young girl—alighted uncertainly yet distinctly upon the precisely angular crown of a jet-black, glossy hat of somewhat grotesque shape, and began crawling slowly along the surface of that edge, following its contour... That was silently illuminated from above by a bright electric light... He suddenly raised his eyes and peered into the light. That was not an electric lamp. It was lamplight. For he had mistaken the lamp’s light for his fantasy, making him feel as though he were now beneath an electric light.

Why he suddenly recalled such a juxtaposition as a silk hat and a pale-winged mayfly—that even he himself could not comprehend. Only such a world of beauty in form—strange, delicate, futilely small—somehow felt deeply familiar to his current sensibilities. The horse-chasing beetle visited his lamp every night. At first, he did not understand why this insect sought out the lamplight or why it circled endlessly around the shade. However, he quickly understood as he watched. That was by no means the insect’s whim or diversion. This creature had leapt there and perched to devour the even smaller insects that lingered there. Those insects were mere blue specks—so minuscule they might have been powdered fragments of summer’s nature. The horse-chasing beetle used its slender legs to rake in those insects and carry them into its maw. Its mouth gaped open like some intricate steel mechanism before snapping shut from all sides at once. The tinier insects were left to be munched through at this predator’s leisure. Those being devoured were so insignificant and alien that watching their consumption stirred no particular feeling. When lightly pressed with a fingertip, these small creatures would vanish completely, leaving only bluish-brown smudges.

The horse-chasing beetle, one night—having lost one of its long jumping legs from some unknown cause—came flying in. One of its long antennae had also been broken short.

Finally, one night, the cat that would not heed his commands captured this unfortunate creature—his master’s nightly companion—on the bookshelf. After toying with it mercilessly, the cat devoured the horse-chasing beetle. When he recalled having thought that becoming such an insect in his next life might not be so bad, he found himself contemplating the small insect’s life, wondering if even such a creature might not live entirely free from care.

While he was lost in those fairy-tale-like fantasies, intoxicated and toying with them, his wife lay listening keenly to the cricket chirping beneath their bed, immersed in a different reverie. From the cricket’s song, her thoughts turned to preparing winter clothing—considering her now-empty wardrobe that swayed whenever the cat leapt upon it—then drifted to the various formal dresses she no longer possessed. And then, each stripe, pattern, and hue of those garments came back to her mind in vivid detail. And along with that, she recalled the respective histories held within each and every layer of those garments. A deep sigh mingled with those thoughts, and before long, it had turned to tears. Through the self-centered subjectivity peculiar to women, she could regard the toy-like tribulations of her existence as life’s greatest ordeal. And yet, this grief had nowhere to direct its plea. Even if she were to belatedly tell him all these things, he would likely show no intention of addressing them—merely reciting phrases like "Though seeming to possess nothing, he holds all things"—this husband who lived self-indulgently, this husband who dwelled in his ivory tower dreaming while believing he was surveying a life he couldn’t even see. That she found little to rely on in such a husband was inevitable. She would sometimes try to reflect upon herself—now having come to live in such a mountain village—her brief past, and her fate, as though they were a dream. Now, there were times when she would vividly yearn for her former artistic rivals—those still living the stage life even now—(she had once been an actress herself) comparing them to her present self. ……From N Station in the mountains—two *ri* to reach it, one and a half *ri* to where the carriage waited—whichever route they took, it would then require another hour on the Railway Ministry’s streetcar; even by straight-line distance of six or seven *ri*, Tokyo remained half a day’s journey……Still, whatever grand ideal might exist, she could not help but condemn most of all her husband who had proposed living in such a backwater—and herself for having heedlessly agreed. Distant Tokyo… near Tokyo… near Tokyo… distant Tokyo… The streets of that city transformed into theater corridors and dressing rooms—arc-lights and show windows and *Season*—all drifting slowly through her drowsing eyes.

＊　　　　　＊　　　　　＊ The evening skies burned red day after day. Yet this was no longer the seared crimson expanse that had persisted until mere weeks before. Beneath lay a pleasantly vibrant yellow concealed within, while only its surface blushed crimson. This was not a sunset threatening tomorrow’s heat, but an evening glow pledging clear skies ahead. In the northwestern heavens, through a hollow in a nearby hill, Mount Fuji revealed only its snow-white crown—shining distinct within the twilight’s radiance. This mountain, infamous to the point of vulgarity, preserved its essential beauty precisely through such fragmentary revelation. What until recently had lurked shadowed beneath layered evening clouds—that gray-black band along the western horizon once ambiguous as cloudbank or peak—now stood revealed beyond doubt as distant mountain ranges. Each time he beheld this twilight spectacle, the commonplace regret of another wasted day surged violently through him. Perhaps these chromatic splendors provoked such agitation in his fevered mind. When he lowered his gaze earthward, canal waters beneath his earthen bridge flowed like a shimmering vermilion thread—mirroring the glowing sky above.

On the surface of the rice fields, the wind advanced slowly, tracing its form with shore-like curves as it rippled onward. It was a cool evening breeze. Though not yet golden enough to be called ripened, the rice flowers had already formed grains. And amidst those slightly drooping ears, locusts were beginning to emerge in scattered numbers. Along the ridges where red snake strawberries lay scattered like marbles, locusts occasionally sprang from near his feet. Then his two walking companions—the dogs—would spot one faster than thought, pin it with their forepaws, and relish devouring the half-crushed insect where it lay. In detecting prey, one surpassed its companion in swiftness. Yet when it came to trapping them underfoot, the other proved more dexterous. While one readily abandoned escaped quarry, its partner would stubbornly pursue them deep into paddies, paws sinking into mud. Observing these distinct temperaments both amused him and deepened his fondness for them. As rice heads grew heavier with grain, locust numbers swelled abruptly each day. The dogs now took daily initiative in leading him fieldward—walking ahead as guides rather than followers. Whenever locusts crossed his path, he sometimes felt compelled to catch treats for them. Spreading his fingers wide, he'd attempt captures. The dogs seemed to recognize their master's preparatory stance; abandoning their own hunts mid-pounce, they'd track his hand movements expectantly—awaiting bounty from above. Yet he succeeded perhaps once in five attempts, often clutching only severed legs in his palm. He proved clumsier than even the less adept dog at this pursuit. Still they appeared convinced of his superiority in all matters canine—trust unwavering even here. When he revealed empty hands after a failed catch, they'd peer quizzically between palms and face—heads uniformly cocked—before curling lip corners upward to gaze at him through adoringly bright eyes.

They looked both astonished at their master’s failure and disappointed, yet somehow still fawned on him regardless. Those dogs truly had such expressive faces! Though having repeatedly experienced these vain expectations, they never seemed to lose their conviction that their master must surely be greater than themselves at catching insects too. Every time they saw his posture and gestures as he tried to catch locusts, they would abandon insects they had practically already secured themselves, instead fixing their gaze on their master’s hands as they waited endlessly for his bounty. He stroked the heads of the disappointed dogs with his empty palms. The dogs wagged their tails contentedly even at that. To him—the dogs’ ignorant trust, and his inability to repay it—felt strangely piercing. Compared to how he had betrayed countless trusts between fellow humans, this inexcusableness toward his pure devotees struck him as severalfold more intense. Finally overcome by the poignancy of their uniquely clear gazes looking up at him, he began taking meticulous care not to even attempt the reflexive motion of catching the insect before his eyes.

Before long, the shaded rose bush he himself had tended—after pruning away the overhanging branches of surrounding trees to let sunlight bathe it—now bore faintly crimson buds here and there upon its branches for the first time, no longer shaded roses, about a week having passed. And then within just two or three days more, the sun’s astonishing power had already shaped those buds into youthful leaves. However, though he came to the wellside every morning to wash his face, he had—without even realizing it—completely forgotten about those rose bushes.

Unexpectedly, one morning—less than twenty days after he had tended to it—he discovered a flower blooming on a new branch of one vivid green stem among those trees. Red, aloft, solitary. After a year that felt like an interminable imprisonment, could it be that May had finally come again? The out-of-season blossom from that nearly withered tree now gazed about its surroundings as if proclaiming this very thought, exhaling a deep sigh of rapture while autumn-tinged light poured down upon it.

Oh, rose—his very own rose. "If you are a rose, then bloom!"

He unexpectedly found himself vividly recalling the emotions he had felt on the day he tended to it. He reached up high and grasped the branch. There, soft thorns as vividly colored as an infant’s nails—a carnation hue—lightly pricked his hand that gently held the branch. It gave him an itch no more intense than when an affectionate cat nibbled his fingers. He bent the branch and pulled it close. That sole flower—alas! It was exactly an anemone’s size, its double-layered petals smaller than mountain cherry blossoms. Less a garden flower than one found by the roadside. Yet when he realized this small, pitiful deformity—redder than a boy’s lips yet bearing a rose’s delicate grace, even fragrant at close breath—he was struck by ineffable emotion. A feeling neither sorrow nor joy but indivisible from both welled poignantly within him. More intense than being gazed at by those trusting dogs with crystal-clear eyes. Like showing forgotten kindness to some girl on a whim, only to meet her later hearing: “I’ve thought only of you since that day.” He shuddered with peculiar fervor; an involuntary blink blurred the small red rose as tears seeped unbidden from his eye corners.

Once the tears spilled forth, the surge of emotion passed immediately. Yet, still holding the flower branch in his hand, he stood blankly rooted to the spot. His cheeks were stiff where the tears had dried. He steadily turned his eyes toward his own mind. And he listened to the conversations between his different selves within his heart as if they belonged to strangers——.

“Ridiculous—here I am weeping like some maudlin poet. To the flower? Or to my own fantasy?” “Heh... Is this young recluse starving for human connection out in these backwaters?” “Well now, I’m a first-rate hypochondriac!”

＊　　　　　＊　　　　　＊

One night, the trees in the garden rustled, and when he looked, a quiet rain was falling over the fields, the hill, and the trees, dimly whitening and veiling them in mist. The early autumn rain fell steadily, yet beneath the thatched roof, neither its footfalls nor droplets could be heard. It simply made the indoor air serene and rendered the lamplight delicate. And there, enveloped within these elements as he sat upright, he was filled with a faint emotion—something akin to the melancholy of travel. And that autumn rain itself, like a lonely traveler journeying afar, passed over this village. As he opened the night's rain shutters, he gazed at the white rain's departing figure.

When such rains passed through the village two or three times, the cat, chilled by the evening wind, pressed close to its master. With nothing but an unlined kimono about his person, he too trembled.

The rain that began one evening showed no sign of letting up—not after a night passed, nor two days, nor three. At first, he had found a certain charm in those rains and even enjoyed them, but now he had grown thoroughly tired of this gloomy weather. Still, the rain showed no sign of ceasing.

Fleas infested the dogs' bodies. The two dogs, piteously yet endearingly, picked fleas off each other's backs and tail tips. He gazed at this act of theirs with tender sentiment. However, before he knew it, the fleas from the dogs had transferred to him. And so every night he began to be tormented by fleas. Fleas crawled sluggishly throughout his body in countless thin trails.

Moreover, due to lack of exercise, the chronic stomach illness he had temporarily forgotten first made his body gloomy. That soon made his mind gloomy. The day after day of exactly the same meals made his appetite wane. He could not help but feel that the same daily food was rotting his blood. Even the dogs had grown tired of it. Just pressing the tips of their noses against their plates was enough—even they didn’t so much as glance at it again. Yet regarding this, he should not have said anything to his wife. For the food available in this village was limited to just this.

His unlined kimono clung limply to his body, the soles of his feet sticky with greasy sweat. When seated, the sweat from his feet and its strange warmth crept up to his buttocks, drawing swarms of fleas to gather there. He felt as if fleas infested even his hair. When he tried to comb it, his stiff, unkempt hair tangled tightly in the comb until the teeth snapped off. Though he longed to wash his flea-ridden body and refresh himself with a bath, his house contained no bath bucket. The neighboring farm households said they heated baths daily during fair weather, but saw no need to draw water specially for bathing on these rainy days when no fieldwork was done. There were even families among them who stayed in bed from morning onward, neither working nor eating.

The cat went out day after day, roaming unchecked through the house with its drenched body and mud-caked paws. Not only that, but ever since one day when this cat carried a frog into the house in its mouth, it began bringing frogs—sluggish from the cold—day after day, one after another. The wife shrieked hysterically and fled in panic. No matter how much she scolded, the cat did not stop bringing them. The wife too kept on shrieking. The frogs lay dead in the tatami room, their pale bellies exposed.

The cat regarded the interior of the house as no different than a wilderness. And the interior of the house was indeed a wilderness itself.

One day.

His two dogs had been caught red-handed by that household’s tenant farmer as they seized and devoured a chicken from the neighboring house, then returned home after being savagely beaten. When his wife went to apologize at that neighboring house, the old mistress of the rural grandee’s family—unversed in diplomatic language—proved unexpectedly ill-tempered. “You’ll keep those dogs tied up at all times henceforth.” “If you must exercise them, since you idle folk have nothing better to do, take them out yourselves.” “They trespass into gardens scattering droppings.” “They ravage paddies and fields.” “They bark raucously through the night.” “Because of that racket, our children wake screaming.” “And now they’ve devoured our finest hens—hens that only began laying eggs this past week!” “Those curs might as well be wolves!” “Should they ever set paw in our grounds again, we’ll show no mercy—we’ll beat them dead! We’ve chickens enough to spare!” Thus transferring her spleen—already inflamed by some unrelated grievance—onto his dogs, she shrilled hysterically until spent. Her voice carried clear to where he sat inside his own home. This matron had long nursed resentment against their household’s master for failing to show her the deference accorded by other villagers. Strangest of all, through her rustic logic interpreting their avoidance of field labor, she seemed convinced her new neighbors must be indulging in decadent luxury. Thus it came that two vigorous young dogs must daily endure their chains. For those first days he himself took them walking. Managing two large dogs alone proved arduous. He had to juggle an umbrella besides. The road lay deep in mire.

Recalling those words—"You're all just idle idlers anyway; if you want to exercise them, take them out yourselves..."—he let out a sorrowful-bitter smile as he walked. The young large dogs could not possibly be satisfied with mere five or six blocks' worth of exercise. Moreover, detesting ordinary roads and brimming with vitality, they would pull hard on their chains toward ridge paths that soaked one’s thighs with dew when stepped into—dragging him stumbling along. Above all, one with a fighting dog’s nature possessed tremendous strength. He thought how the Neighboring House’s Old Mistress must be watching these scenes from indoors. Such moments did indeed occur. The dogs—chained and irritable from lack of exercise—each evening took but one bite of food before cowering fearfully and barking long lonely howls that seemed to plead. Their voices traveled through rain-whitened haze toward the hill across from the house, only to return as oppressive mountain echoes. Unaware these were their own voices, they barked back more fiercely. The sound reverberated again toward the mountains. Thus their distant howling never ceased. Even when he tried calming them by name, these terrified dogs recoiled from their own master. Left barking by necessity, their shrill futile voices seeped into his heart’s depths—vibrating there and pressing his chest like a heart gripped by foreboding. Every evening thus they loosed ferocious prolonged howls. At times hearing this, from that wealthy neighbor’s house would come a child’s loud cry: “What truly insufferable dogs!” He realized this was that same old mistress making her daughter shout thus—growing exasperated at this intolerable woman. As for cats—they still brought frogs in their mouths, lumbering through twilight tatami rooms on mud-caked paws. He sometimes kicked them violently away. Smoke from rain-dampened firewood that refused to burn properly drifted spitefully each day into just the tatami room—spreading thick across every ceiling beam.

During the daytime when the dogs were quiet, at that neighboring wealthy family’s house, hens that had laid eggs—one after another—kept up their clucking for an hour or more in voices so grating they could fray one’s nerves to the limit: cluck-cluck-cluck-cluckcluckcluck. One day, one of them slipped into his house, but upon seeing that the dogs were tied up, they nonchalantly swarmed into his garden one after another. And then they began nonchalantly picking up the rice grains the dogs had scattered. The dogs, enraged, gave chase. The chickens pulled back slightly. The enraged dogs barked furiously, but the flock of chickens remained unperturbed. As for the dogs that had started running to chase away the intruding group, the chain was firmly gripping their collars. The more he hurried, the tighter his own throat constricted. In the end, their two chains had become so entangled with each other that they could no longer move. And they barked in protest of it. He went down into the rain and tried to fix the chains whose tangled state defied comprehension. The dogs joyfully pressed their mud-caked paws against his chest. Because the dogs wouldn’t stay still, their chains became ever more intricately entangled. Frustratingly, no matter what he tried, they simply wouldn’t come undone. Finally, the dogs let out a scream. The chickens that had been chased away once would, in the meantime, calmly climb up onto the veranda again and leave filthy, sewage-like droppings there. When he spread his arms wide to chase them, they let out such exaggerated cries. It even seemed as if they had been sent by that malicious mistress herself, coming expressly to mock him. The mistress, while watching these scenes from beyond the wall, was deliberately pretending not to notice. When his wife saw this and seemed about to scold the chickens as if making a pointed remark, he stopped her.

More than thinking it wrong to do such things, it was from cowardice and servility that he couldn't bring himself to act. Yet inwardly he seethed with even greater indignation than his wife. From another neighboring house came two grimy girls—carrying an infant on their back—who pushed their way into his home with feet and clothes filthier than the cats', having nowhere else to play in the rain. The infant on her back wailed. All three coveted everything they laid eyes on. Okuwa, the eldest at thirteen, already exhibited that peculiar feminine quality, bombarding his wife with shrill gossip about the neighboring magnate's household misdeeds and other trivial matters. His wife explained these were children from the house where they sometimes borrowed baths, making them difficult to shoo away—though in truth, she craved even such paltry company. Still, there were moments when even she seemed vexed by their clamor. "You really must go home now," she urged, to which the children chorused, "Nooo! Everyone's asleep at our place with the doors shut—" "It's pitch black there!" "They told us to come play at the house below!" This "house below" meant his own home. Not just dogs and cats—these brats were surely hauling in fleas by the dozen, he thought bitterly. Though irritation gnawed at him, his nature shriveled before even strangers' children, leaving him incapable of uttering a single reproach. When he witnessed his wife—utterly insensible to such concerns—repeatedly dispatching them through downpours to fetch tofu or sugar, his anxiety flared into harsh rebukes.

When he went to the children’s house to bathe, a blind and nearly deaf old woman of about seventy—while stoking the fire beneath the bath cauldron—asked to hear stories of Tokyo. Not Tokyo—Edo. This crone, who had described her past as “smoke-like” in words oddly reminiscent of Turgenev’s, began recounting in fragments how she’d served in some Edo lord’s mansion during her girlhood: tales of her master’s failed appointment as Kōfu magistrate during the Restoration turmoil, that ill-omened year when even the Sannō Festival couldn’t be properly held. Then she started interrogating him about Edo as she’d seen it with eyes now decades blind. Though claiming to have returned to the country because of the Restoration, she knew nothing of what that “Restoration” truly meant. “I thought everything would change then,” she muttered, “but it’s no different from before. All that fuss for nothing…” She possessed no conception of this Tokyo with its streetcars and parks—only pestered him with Edo questions he couldn’t answer. When she noticed his ignorance of Edo matters, she subjected him to interminable accounts of her family’s former glory, her idiot son’s present incompetence at managing their dwindling fortunes despite his miserliness toward neighbors, complaints about nuisance children constantly visiting—then demanded equally lengthy replies to each triviality. Even without this burden, his tongue-tied nature left him floundering for responses. And her deafness meant she likely heard nothing anyway. “I don’t care about this drivel!” he wanted to roar. “Other people’s affairs mean nothing to me!” In the end, her rambling stories made no sense yet succeeded in smothering his spirits completely. With a pleading expression—half-dead, less vivid than a dog’s—she gazed up at him through those eyes that had described their own blindness at fifty-six. Stared. The bath fire flared suddenly, casting light upon her hunched form clutching long firewood—a witch uttering curses against the storage shed’s darkness.

When he finally emerged from the bathhouse, the night breeze indeed caressed his freshly bathed skin with refreshing coolness. But when he returned home and looked in, his wife was reading a letter—likely from her mother in her hometown—in the shadow of the soot-blackened hanging lamp with its glass chimney. She seemed unwilling to show it to him, for she abruptly rolled it up at length. Then, with a face of utmost displeasure, she looked directly up at him as if blowing her sigh upon him, her eyes glistening with tears. It appeared as if to threaten, yet also as if to plead. That letter—he knew its contents without reading it. To him it was trivial, but to those women it must have been something significant. Those women were likely commiserating with each other about their bitter hardships... There was now another woman who came crying to his house. That was a woman named Okinu, nearly forty years old. She was the woman who had guided them to this house and helped with their move when they first came here. It was through this connection that she had come to visit their household from time to time. At first, she often cried when recounting her life story. Okinu was a woman who had drifted to this village after living through various lives. It was all because he had initially listened just once—out of mere novelty—to this woman’s personal story that Okinu thereafter would always repeat the same tale. Eventually, he grew irritated whenever he saw Okinu’s face. What was most strange was that whenever he saw even Okinu's face, a dull ache would begin in the pit of his stomach...

Beneath the floorboards, the dogs—harassed by fleas—shook themselves to chase them off, and each time, the clattering sound of their rattling chains reached him. He felt more sympathy for the dogs plagued by fleas than for Okinu's tales of woe. And he sensed countless fleas beginning to writhe across his own back, his flanks, his collar, and within his hair…….

If only the rain would stop soon—he looked up at the sky every evening when dusk fell. For some reason, he looked up at the evening sky. And he scanned the sky to see if any stars were out. Not a star in sight; the fields lay pale and hazy, while the sky hung infinitely heavy.

The trivial, monotonous combinations and permutations of events were repeated dully day after day. Once those things became connected to his physical or mental state, they transformed entirely into gloomy, world-weary matters. The rain showed no sign of ever letting up. How many days had it been now? Five days? Ten days? Two weeks? Or perhaps one week? He did not know. Each and every day became indistinguishable—monotonous, oppressive, drawn-out days without end. Is this how people spend their days in prison? Ah! That's it. In perpetual shade—even when May came and mid-August arrived—not a single green leaf remained; only stems swayed like vines stretching out aimlessly—such was the existence of that rosebush by this house’s well. He thought of the roses again. He hadn’t merely thought of them. Now he contemplated the anguish of those shaded roses through life itself while remaining seated day after day at this desk.

As for the roses—after that one pitiful bloom (indeed, a deformed flower that had brought him to tears) emerged some time ago, they had blossomed ever more splendidly each day, their beauty resplendent—yet now, under the relentless rains, all their petals had turned limp as scraps of paper, drenched through and crumbling away. They crumbled even as they bloomed.

＊　　　　　＊　　　　　＊

During these days, only the deep night granted him solace and calm. On nights when no chickens roamed, imagining the dogs they'd released from their chains now vigorously leaping about the rice paddy banks filled him with an unburdened ease as he lay in bed.

However, it was one such night. From outside the house came a call. He—still seated at his desk and crushed beneath his thoughts—opened the veranda door to find a black-clad man standing on the path beyond hedge and ditch. Then that figure addressed him with arrogant summons. Perhaps a policeman—the thought flickered through his mind.

“This must be your dog.”

“Yes. Why?” “This is terrifying! I can’t get past here!” He thought there was probably no village in the entire world that feared dogs as much as this one. One of the villagers had explained that it was because there were so many rabid dogs in this area. Moreover, one of his dogs was a purebred Japanese dog. “They’re okay. They may look scary, but they’re gentle dogs.” “What do you mean ‘okay’? I can’t get past here—it’s terrifying!” “They’re not rabid. They aren’t even barking.”

“Those who keep them might say that, but to those who don’t, they’re downright terrifying. Come out here for a moment—why don’t you chain them up?”

When he thought this unknown person's arrogant tone stemmed from being masked by darkness, he grew intensely indignant. He suddenly grabbed the cane lying there and rushed out toward the road without even opening an umbrella. The rain wasn't falling as thickly as rice bran. The unknown man was still muttering something. Then he stubbornly insisted they must chain these dogs without fail—otherwise he couldn't get past. While absurdly afraid of the dogs, he was ridiculously putting on airs all by himself. "These are gentle dogs. They're still just pups, so they approach passersby out of friendliness," he defended them.

For him now, the dogs were innocent beings. That man was a tyrant. He himself was a righteous commoner. Finding each of the man’s words utterly unreasonable, he finally cursed him at the top of his voice.

His wife came out to the veranda to see what was happening, but upon seeing this situation, she began apologizing profusely to the passerby in the darkness. That irritated him all over again. “Shut up! You servile wretch! There’s no need to apologize. It’s not the dogs’ fault! This man’s the coward. It’s not like they’re children or thieves...” “What? A thief, you say?” “I’m not calling you a thief! I merely said that anyone who’s so terrified of a dog wagging its tail without a sound must look like a thief.”

In the end, he intended to strike that man. They were arguing five or six ken apart. Then, from behind the unknown man came a lantern. The lantern-bearer was saying something to the man, but the lantern came toward him. "They’re in cahoots," he immediately thought. If they came closer to say something more, he regripped his cane and braced himself.

“Please show him some forbearance.” “The old man’s had too much to drink, you see.” The lantern-carrying man was apologizing to him instead. When he realized the man was drunk, he suddenly felt foolish. Yet he couldn’t even laugh. With some inexplicable emotion then, he raised the cane he’d been gripping defensively and brought it down hard upon his own dog wagging its tail obliviously before him. The dog yelped “yelp! yelp!” in surprise as it fled into the house. The unhit dog followed suit. He stood there dazed for a moment before clicking his tongue, hurling the cane into the canal, and striding briskly inside. Both dogs were hiding deep beneath the floorboards. When they saw him enter the garden, they raised thin mournful cries and barked their plea. Even after discarding the cane, his palm stayed clammy with sweat from gripping it.

“Just you wait. “I’ll gather the villagers and beat those dogs to death!” The drunk man departed while saying such things, led away by the young man carrying a lantern. The drunk man’s threat had become an immense source of anxiety for him since that evening. When he began to wonder whether the villagers might actually kill his dogs, he recalled the words that plump woman—the one who had wept while telling her life story—had once told him: “In this village, we kill and eat dogs come winter. “Be careful—they were saying things like how yours are young and plump, so they’d be just right for eating. It was probably a joke, but still…”

The more he thought about it, the more intensely he regretted having discarded that cane. It was a cane with a silver grip carved in arabesque floral patterns. Though not particularly valuable enough to merit such regret, he found himself mourning its loss with inexplicable intensity. The next day, under pretense of exercising the dogs, he walked over ten chō along the canal's course searching for it. The canal's once-clear water had grown turbid from ceaseless rains to no avail. The cane remained unfound. He kept hidden from his wife how he had lost it in such fashion. It had been utterly humiliating.

The cane and the drunkard’s threat weighed on his mind so persistently that even he himself sometimes found it absurd. If only he had beaten that man when he had the chance—there were nights in bed when he grew frustrated beyond measure—and now letting the dogs out at night became a torment, fearing they might be mistreated. Listening intently with frayed nerves, he heard the dogs’ cries. When he hurried out to the veranda and opened the door while whistling, the dogs would immediately return from somewhere. The one barking was another dog. However, there were times when even if he whistled or called their names, they would not easily return. And they continued barking even more clamorously. At such times, he could neither sit still nor remain standing. His wife, saying things like “That’s not our dog barking” or “Dogs don’t just bark anywhere,” had initially refused to engage with him. But as he persisted with such vehemence, this delusion eventually infected even her. They were trembling in terror like cursed beings. On top of that, for some reason, the lamp’s flame flickered fitfully every night without pause, and no matter how they tried adjusting it here and there, it would not stay steady. He stared at the lamp’s flickering wick as though gazing at his own anxious heart, his nerves fraying. One night, hearing dogs bark in an extraordinary manner, he went out to the garden to check, where Leo was barking at him as if sounding an urgent alarm. In the distance—was that Frate? Frate’s plaintive cries could be heard drawing near. He followed Leo’s lead, guided by the screams—“Frate!” “Frate!” calling out all the while as he searched for its whereabouts. When he saw Frate return at last, half of his face and body were caked in mud. Frate must have been pressed down into the mud and beaten.

From somewhere, laughter that sounded like a triumphal song reached his ears……. Since that night, they decided to let the dogs out only for one or two hours at midnight before tying them up again. Moreover, he moved the location of their chain to the dirt-floored entryway—for even if they were tied up in the garden corner where people could pass through freely, it would still be unsafe. However, once the dogs realized they were being called to be tied up, they would not easily return even when summoned. Even when they did return, they would run around the garden while watching their owners’ expressions, making themselves nearly impossible to catch. Even when they tried luring them with food, the dogs wouldn’t come near the chain. Frate, being the offspring of a fighting dog with sturdy legs and thick fangs, one night bit through his chain at its midpoint, dug a large hole in the earth beneath the floorboards to escape through the surrounding walls, squeezed his large body out through it, then dragged half the chain dangling from his neck across the muddy ground as he spent the night merrily roaming about. To inform his master of this, and to be freed himself, Leo barked furiously.

He had occasionally reconsidered his nighttime worries about the dogs during daylight hours, but found himself unable to deny this was a form of obsessive compulsion. Surely even dogs knew how to protect themselves by their own power... Yet he burned with shame at his pathetic fixation on such trivial canine concerns. But when darkness fell, the thoughts returned unbidden—My dogs will be stolen. Murdered! "Absolutely!" By now the animals had ceased being mere dogs to him—they'd become symbols of something greater. To love meant precisely this torment, he realized. Nor could he shake thoughts of the lost cane either. During rare respites from canine anxieties, he'd lie awake envisioning that silver-handled staff—its weighted end dipping beneath turbid canal waters as it drifted downstream, bobbing and sinking with the current's whim, carried toward some indeterminate nowhere and beyond to endless dissolution.

＊　　　　　＊　　　　　＊

The rain would let up slightly for a day, only to pour down even more heavily the next. Then, on the day after that, it would let up again. However, on the day after next, it would pour down again……. This intermittent rain kept falling forever……. For days and days, for days and days it fell… The rain fell trying to rot his body and mind……. The rain fell trying to rot the world itself.

Let everything rot...,

If it’s going to rot, then rot……,

Go ahead and rot...,

Rot, rot…,

Your head...,

Rot first……,

……………………, ……………………,

…………………,

………………,

…………………,

………………………,

A soundless chorus came from outside the house—from all directions—a chill and dimness drifting through every corner of his home. When he looked, the rain fell in that same rhythm. Whether he turned to the north window or the south window, it kept falling—repeating its listless measure endlessly, over and over……. It fell without hope of ceasing, no matter how many days passed...

＊　　　　　＊　　　　　＊

There was a single hill here.

When viewed from his house's veranda, the pine and cherry branches in the garden jutted out from both sides and intertwined, forming an arched space between them—the graceful curve formed by these trees' interlocking branches and leaves was supported from below by the hedge's straight top line. They formed, so to speak, a green frame. It was a picture frame. And thus, from the very depths of that framed space, the hill could be seen in the far distance.

When did he first discover this hill? In any case, this hill caught his eye. And he grew very fond of this hill. During each of these long, gloomy rainy days lately, whenever he turned his eyes—those windows to his sunken heart—away from life’s vexations and directed them outward, what appeared reflected in his gaze was that hill.

That hill, particularly when viewed through the arched picture frame formed by his garden trees' interlocking branches and leaves, naturally assumed an air of being another world. It stood at just the right distance—more dreamlike than reality yet more real than a dream—and depending on the rain's density, would sometimes seem to draw slightly nearer to him, while at others feel to have receded far away. At times it appeared faint, as if seen through frosted glass.

The hill somehow resembled the flank of a woman—a three-dimensional form of elegant curves imbued with a leisurely sensibility meandering across its surface, countless lines racing in their own chosen directions that had risen up, mutually supporting one another to create this shape. There it sat, neatly contained within that green frame like a story unfolding with utmost boldness yet maintaining perfect coherence between its beginning and grand finale—the scene was beautiful, free of any strain, composed without the slightest fuss. It contained with leisurely fullness a serene yet vital beauty said to reside in ancient Greek sculptures, resembling the corner of a woman’s mouth bearing a noble yet charming smile. At the hill’s summit stood a mixed grove, its trees all spreading their branches like fingers splayed toward the sky; from where he stood, they appeared visible at a distance of perhaps an inch or five inches—at times seeming about an inch away, at others five. The grove, standing as neatly trimmed as short hair, grew only at the crown of the bare hill that served as its forehead, appearing to sprout with a beautiful hairline where grove met sky through minute undulations bearing an inexhaustible rhythm. Where this rhythm seemed lacking, the thatched roof of the house owning the grove stood alone, compensating for monotony. Upon its lush green velvet-like flank ran hundreds of vertical lines spaced at regular intervals—parallel arcs curving downward from top to bottom across the slope’s surface, creating vivid daimyo stripes like a cross-section of green striped agate. This was probably a seedling bed of cedar or cypress, but that didn’t matter at all. What made this hill appear so pictorial was how nature’s slight artificiality had unintentionally contributed its most striking effect—like seeing a roof amidst groves—blurring where nature ended and human creation began until they blended harmoniously. What beauty! As he gazed at it, gentle fondness welled within him. The artistic world I want to live in is a place like that...

“What are you staring at so intently?”

His wife asked him. “Yeah. That hill. It’s that hill, you see.” “What about it?” “Nothing’s wrong… Isn’t it beautiful? I can’t put it into words…” “That’s true. It does look rather like a kimono.”

The hill was wearing a refined silk kimono of subdued taste, his wife thought. It was a monochrome painting rendered entirely in green. Yet this monochrome—like all excellent ones of its kind—contained nearly infinite colors within its single hue. The longer one gazed at it, the more its richness welled forth. At first glance it appeared as a solid mass of green, yet each part revealed countless variations of green. And it wove together an immovable color tone. It resembled a green gemstone that, while maintaining its fundamental verdancy, produced varied hues and effects across each polished facet.

His eyes always gladly found rest upon that hill. "A transparent heart! A transparent heart!" The hill, facing his eyes, spoke those words.

One day. That day, the rain had stopped abruptly since the previous night, and from morning onward, it remained dimly overcast. Before noon, even the shape of the sun began to appear faintly through the clouds—an egg-colored glow emerging from the sky’s depths.

His wife proposed going to Tokyo under the pretext of preparing autumn kimonos. Anxious to depart while her husband's temperament remained stable rather than worrying about meteorological conditions, she finished an early lunch and rushed toward Tokyo—the city occupying her nightly reveries. Her consciousness had likely reached Tokyo three hours ahead of her physical form. He stood vacantly alone on the veranda, gazing without truly seeing at the hill that ordinarily anchored his vision. At that moment he noticed something subtly altered about the hill's overall aspect. This difference couldn't be attributed solely to atmospheric illumination. Yet he couldn't determine its cause at all. As he continued staring blankly, he suddenly remembered and began rummaging through his desk drawer for eyeglasses. Though severely nearsighted, he'd recently started forgetting even to wear his spectacles. For him who did nothing these days, glasses had become nearly superfluous. Thus he remained unspectacled, oblivious that this very neglect exacerbated his neurasthenia. When he donned the glasses and looked out, heaven and earth resolved into distinct entities. Today between sky and ground he could discern something akin to joy. Because sunlight brightened the atmosphere. The hill stood clearly visible. Ah. The hill appeared transformed—above its mixed grove clustered a murder of crows. Bathed in fading light from above, the hill's flank revealed rounded contours as though its roughness had been burnished away, gleaming smoothly with green-gold radiance. The hundreds of vertical stripes comprising seedling beds—ah! There lay the alteration. Examining the earth between those striped rows revealed ordinary green ground transforming inexplicably into blackish purple from a pivotal leftward point upward through spreading fan-shaped triangles. What sorcery?!

When had it changed so completely? For what purpose had it changed? He felt utterly mystified. He stared at the hill as though witnessing some extraordinary phenomenon. The hill now seemed to him like a Fairyland. Beautiful and small—and today it even bore its own mystery, did it not? As he kept watching, the boundary between purple and green on the hill's surface began swelling of its own accord, the purple territory appearing to gradually expand outward naturally. When he peered even more intently—though this made the space between his brows ache faintly—there appeared Tiny Issun-boushi, hunched over and squirming as he busily harvested the green color. Between those rows of saplings, perhaps the farmer had planted something. Yet to his eyes, it seemed less that crops were being reaped than that purple soil was now bulging upward.

He peered into the lens of some mysterious telescope—as though observing fairies from Fairyland at work within it—and while feeling a transcendent emotion toward this small hill, gazed intently with unblinking yearning, like a child peering into a kaleidoscope. He finally brought out the tobacco tray and zabuton cushion to the veranda, ceaselessly gazing at this purple soil that rose of its own accord. The purple soil swelled up as if welling forth. Rising up again and again. The purple territory rapidly encroached upon the green territory from one edge. And then, the fading daylight gradually brightened. Suddenly, the sunset’s light gushed forth in a single mass through a thin gap in the gradually clearing western clouds and struck the hill. The hill suddenly began to shine amidst dancing rays. As if footlights of color had been cast upon that hill. On the hill, both the fairies and the mixed grove cast long, thick shadows across the ground. And thus, the scenery of Fairyland rose up even more distinctly. The freshly risen purple soil, with a voice like the deepest tones of an organ, seemed on the verge of crying out in unison. The thatched roof within the grove at the hill’s summit had become smooth, and from within it, thick white smoke rose in wisps—a single strand ascending just like incense from a burner. And now, entranced, he became the king of Fairyland.

The glory of heaven and earth, nature's own rapture—vanished like a momentary dream when the setting sun was hidden by clouds. The setting sun sank from the clouds, then into even darker clouds and toward the distant mountain range at the horizon's edge. At that narrow gap between clouds, leaving behind a bright, radiant remnant of light.

When he noticed, the hill had already turned completely purple... Because the fairies had finished their work.... While he remained transfixed, his surroundings had grown completely dark without him noticing. Yet within his eyes, only Fairyland's hill still seemed clearly visible in the darkness.

Eventually, even the hill he had thought would remain visible forever vanished…….

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When he had returned to his senses and was no longer the king of Fairyland, darkness came surging from the distant fields and mountains, packing itself tightly into every last room of the house. His surroundings were plunged into complete darkness. First thinking he must light the lamp, he struck a match from the tobacco tray. Then he struck matches everywhere throughout the house. It was to search for the lamp's whereabouts. But no matter where he looked, he simply couldn't find it.

Truly, such things had been occurring to him with disturbing regularity of late. Though a lamp could scarcely be called large, its place was taken by objects that had been in his hands until mere moments before—things he had been using like pens or pipes or chopsticks—which would abruptly vanish without trace. These temporarily hidden items would later materialize from unimagined places—locations that seemed perfectly ordinary upon reflection, or from preposterous spots where one would swear they had searched thoroughly—appearing suddenly without warning. Yet during active searches, they spitefully refused to reveal themselves. Such occurrences happen to everyone. But none experienced them with the relentless frequency that now plagued him. For him these days, such incidents occurred unfailingly two or three times daily. How profoundly significant each trivial disappearance must have seemed in those moments. It felt like something truly inexplicable—so mysterious as to border on mystical, so ominous it verged on fatalistic. He even fancied some unseen presence was there, momentarily concealing these objects. Thus he perceived his belongings vanishing daily from his surroundings—two or three items at a time. Therefore even with the lamp—"There it goes again," he thought—he resolved to temporarily abandon the search. For perversely, relinquishment hastened reappearance. Noticing this, he groped for the candlestick atop the chest of drawers. To it he brought a sullen red flame that wavered uneasily.

On such a night, in such a rural place, being alone in a house with its four sides not yet shuttered made him uneasy—an indescribable strange presence, not some known entity like a burglar but a different kind of intruder, ultimately a formless invader he felt were being allowed to come and go freely. Shutter boxes by their nature occupied every corner of the house. For him—by birth the most timid of men, now with that timidity intensified to a degree beyond ordinary people's comprehension (let alone sympathy) save perhaps overly sensitive children—even house corners felt sufficiently unsettling. As he stood sliding the shutters one by one, the sound of their movement crawled heavily toward the open fields, echoing hollowly there. Startled perhaps by the noise, his two dogs—until now silently asleep—emerged faintly pale from beneath the floorboards and began their usual evening howl... After closing the veranda's ten-odd shutters and moving to close another short set opposite, he stepped through into the six-mat tatami room— There in the tokonoma it sat—compact and upright! The lamp— I searched everywhere until now—isn't this the very spot I checked thoroughly?! Could it be one of those usual small things? But this was large. ...Thinking this, he felt something bordering on terror... This lamp—mustn't touch it carelessly. The moment he absentmindedly reached to take it—if it vanished before his eyes again... such imaginings came. While deriding these thoughts as foolish, he resolutely reached toward the lamp. The lamp proved reassuringly genuine.

After lighting the lamp and closing the shutters, when he came before the brazier, he realized there was no hot water even to make tea. The charcoal had turned to pure white ash, and the iron kettle that had been boiling and groaning all day now sat completely cold along with its water. This was only natural. When his wife had left around eleven o'clock, she had left it as it was, and he hadn't added more charcoal since. Charcoal hardly mattered—for him, nothing existed in this world except that Fairyland Hill—not even himself. The dogs, whose howling had fortunately ended more quickly than expected today, now began snuffling in unison. This was their demand for supper. It wasn't just them and the cat who were hungry. He himself was so famished that he concluded at least some of this strange anxiety—that timid feeling making his heart flutter since earlier—and lingering chill must surely stem from his empty stomach. Yet to eat dinner tonight, they first needed cooked rice—his wife, who'd suddenly announced her trip to Tokyo, had made lengthy excuses about train schedules preventing preparation, saying she'd ask Okinu on her way to the station. But having endured Okinu's life story for what must have been the tenth time just last night—thoroughly tormented by it—he'd had his wife wash the rice and add water before resolving to cook it himself. Sitting before the fireless brazier, he thought skipping one night's meal might be tolerable. Yet pestered by the dogs like this, imagining these perpetually starving creatures' hunger, he couldn't avoid cooking rice. Lately dusk fell before they noticed—they had to prepare early, his wife had said—and recalling her words, he dragged himself toward the kitchen.

He released the dogs from their chains and called them to the kitchen. The dim kitchen riddled with shadowy corners felt too desolate for him to endure alone. As if intimately understanding their master's mood, the dogs came to where he crouched on the dirt floor—both Frate and Leo pressed close against him as they settled. The cat for its part crept to the edge of plank flooring and squatted near his face. When his strange family gathered in wordless communion before the earthen stove piled high like a horse's hoof, he finally felt something resembling reassurance. He set about building the fire. Only the kindling burned properly. As it flared up, his spirits brightened. But the flames died immediately, refusing to catch on the two or three logs he'd thrown in. He merely wasted kindling in vain. The firewood had been thoroughly soaked by endless rains. And the kindling—if only I'd stockpiled more of this stuff! The meager kindling had already turned to ash after five or six feedings. He had an idea and fetched the kerosene can. With trembling hands, he splashed kerosene over the firewood. Immediately the fuel formed a great floating mass of flame three inches above ground, blazing up. It burned like something fleeing. It burned with nervous intensity. It burned with the frantic excitement of someone utterly ungrounded—someone like himself. It burned recklessly, abandoning reason yet lacking force—all consumed in one breath.

Immediately, it collapsed limply and died down. The kerosene burned only itself while it lasted; once consumed, that once-enormous mass of flames split into several smaller ones. Each fragment crawled across the wood's surface—blue tongues flickering faintly as if licking the surface—only to vanish moments later. The peculiar smoke with its dull black stench and color—resembling the heavy mood following foolish exhilaration—clumped together in a mass and rose listlessly. The cat, startled, leapt to its feet, while the two dogs uniformly turned their faces away—so dense was the clump of smoke. After attempting the same method once more, he discovered that kerosene spilled on the ground burned longer than that doused on firewood—(indeed, with his usual pathological meticulousness, he had observed like a researcher this concrete manifestation of his agitated fervor in the kerosene's burning)—whereupon he retrieved from beneath the stove the firewood bearing only charred surfaces as combustion evidence, setting it outside. Now, after pouring all his resolved kerosene onto the ashes at the stove's base, he arranged and stacked firewood upon that earthen foundation. Now he threw in a handful of burning matches. A wisp of black smoke and great flame crawled along the kettle's underside before bursting forth in full force. Gradually, it began spreading to the firewood.

“Perfect! “Perfect!” He involuntarily cried out, muttering those words to himself. Hearing that low voice, Frate lifted his slender, pointed face and looked up at him as if questioning their meaning. At last, the firewood that had gradually begun to burn produced a reliable flame—like the powerful exaltation of one moved from the depths of their heart. Oh! How joyful is a burning fire! He and his dogs gazed with equally shining eyes at this blazing fire that primitive peoples had worshipped as a god. At that moment, within his eyes reflecting the flames, there suddenly appeared—with no apparent connection—the figure of his wife from behind, looking so small she might have been the size of that Fairy. His wife within those burning flames seemed to be moving through an immense crowd… Not mere imagination—it approached a vision flickering before his eyes, taking form as if to say *This is what they call a vision*. When such a fantasy arose unexpectedly within him—*Ah, she’s ventured out into society!*— this was what he intuitively believed. Next, half by his own will, his imagination turned toward one of Tokyo’s bustling districts. And in the very next moment,…what if he himself were walking through such crowds right now?—this utterly impossible notion floated into his mind as an utterly ordinary thought. ……Here in this dimly lit, slightly chilly kitchen corner, hunched before the hearth since earlier, staring fixedly at flames that refused to burn as he wished. As if performing ascetic rites, he stared into the burning fire where he saw his own emotional state reflected—there he crouched, surrounded by dogs and a cat. Could it be this wasn’t his true self—that his real self existed properly elsewhere—and what sat here was merely some shadow-self?! Such feelings pressed upon him with crushing weight. When that sensation permeated him completely, a coldness shot down his spine like lightning. Everything around him—himself, the hearth’s flames, both dogs, the cat; when he looked up, the rice tub, water pail, lamp, sink—all seemed poised to vanish into nothingness at any moment.

And fearfully, he glanced around his surroundings. On the wall, three shadows—his own and those of the two dogs—spread out in three directions, cast large and black across the entire surface, quivering on the wall’s plane as the fire burned, now shrinking, now swelling. With each ceaseless movement, they drew ever so slightly closer to their very beings until it seemed they might engulf them entirely. Then Leo, who had been sitting to his left, abruptly stood up and slipped through the door gap—left slightly ajar to let out smoke—and went outside. Then he suddenly began barking in short, shrill yelps. Frate, who had pricked his ears back at his brother’s voice, likewise slipped out. They barked in unison. ——as if some unseen presence were approaching to inform him. Fear made him spring to his feet. However, the dogs immediately ceased their barking and sat back down in their original spot beside him with a sullen, serious demeanor.

The dogs' demeanor struck him as profoundly suspicious. Having composed himself, he stretched up slightly and tried peering outside through a knothole in the door. Then through the faint gloom, his straining eyes saw a small dark figure emerge from behind the persimmon trunk—mysteriously soundless! The figure's small stature afforded him some relief. Yet this was truly a being that made no footfall at all! But when it moved into the lamplight seeping through the door's crack, nothing seemed particularly strange. This was unmistakably Okuwa—the thirteen-year-old neighbor girl who often visited his house. But...? That chatterbox who always came shouting from afar, calling dogs' names or whistling—who never visited after dark—for her to approach this way tonight seemed impossible. Yet this softly padding Okuwa remained uncanny all the same. He called out to verify—

“Okuwa-san?” “Oh! “You scared me!” “Uncle! Were you here?”

The one who had answered was indeed Okuwa. Yet whereas his call had been an oddly composed, loud utterance that seemed like a soliloquy, Okuwa's reply was truly an exaggerated shout. At that voice, he who had been suppressing his loneliness until now was nearly startled into leaping to his feet. Reassured by Okuwa's voice, he opened the door. Outside, Okuwa’s strange expression stood out starkly in the light. “What’s wrong, Okuwa-san? …Did they scold you at home?”

“……”

Okuwa did not answer immediately. However, after a while, she started chattering away as usual—asking whether Uncle had been cooking rice, when Auntie would return home, and so on. After a while, Okuwa spoke up as if suddenly remembering. “Oh right! “I’d forgotten. “Today I lit the bath—since the weather was good, everyone went out to the fields. “It’s lit right now. “You should come over once it’s ready.—You’re such a strange one, Uncle! All eager to come when there ain’t none ready, then don’t wanna come at all when there is!” Having said this, Okuwa began shuffling back home. Tonight of all nights, he had wanted even Okuwa to stay and talk longer. The girl had walked five or six paces when—

“Uncle. It’s started raining again, I think.” And there she was—the same old Okuwa as ever. He thought Okuwa must have sighed in relief now—for when he had heard about the bath, he had already coincidentally come to understand the presence of that soundless Okuwa. He recalled his wife mentioning rumors warning them to be wary of Okuwa’s family, how the firewood piled outside had been decreasing too much lately, and how on some mornings two or three logs from the bundles lay fallen by the well.

When he came to understand it that way, such things no longer mattered to him. Only,

“Uncle. “It’s started raining again, I think.” Okuwa’s words—“It’s started raining again, I think”—and her figure emerging from behind the persimmon tree at that moment remained etched in his mind. But more than that, the rice he had labored so hard over—whether from some utensil it had touched or from his own hands—was thoroughly permeated with the stench of kerosene. (After pouring tea over it and holding it up to the lamplight to inspect, he found nothing floating there.) But try as he might, he could only manage to eat one bowl. That night, it wasn’t just the rice. The collar of his nightgown, the pillow, the area around his shoulders, the inside of his mouth, the very air itself—even the cat that had come to sleep beside him, its tiny heartbeat pit-a-patting against his arm—everything reeked of kerosene. And that barely perceptible smell—whether real or imagined—interacting with all the tea he had drunk in place of dinner, precisely because it was so faint, excited him terribly……. The smell existed when he perceived it; vanished when he didn’t. ...Suddenly recalling how he'd struck matches everywhere while searching for the lamp at dusk, how he'd handled kerosene trying to light a fire; remembering too how he'd found amusement in that dancing trail of tiny sparks at the pot's base when removing it from the hearth—and now this room saturated with kerosene stench—even Okuwa coming for firewood—all coalesced into an inescapable premonition: tonight this house would burn. ...The very air seemed charged with this inevitability, his senses interpreting it provisionally as petroleum fumes. And he could think of it in such terms as well. Finally... Just let this wretched house burn to ashes. Fire is a pleasant thing. No, no—if I dwell on such thoughts, a real fire might actually start, I think... If a fire breaks out, I must first release the dogs from their chains; otherwise they'll burn to death, he thinks. To avoid panicking when that time comes, he thinks maybe he should release them now as a precaution; ...but he also thinks there’s no way a fire would actually break out. Anyway, he also thinks it would be good if night would just break quickly. Even as he thinks such things, another thought arises—does his wife truly go to the pictures? he wonders. He recalls her figure from earlier today, engaged in that Fairyland work. Then, as the setting sun abruptly illuminated the hill—its hue once more brought thoughts of fire to mind…….

He felt as though he were still awake contemplating this himself, yet also thought he might already be asleep and pondering it within a dream. And as for which one it actually was—looking back afterward, it became even less clear.—

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It was an evening after the rain cleared. It may have been a day much later, or perhaps it was around what should be considered the appropriate time to write this—I cannot tell. In any case, it was an evening after the rain had cleared. A large round moon had once risen quietly from that hill, like a stage backdrop gliding into position.

That night, both dogs barked more sorrowfully and more fiercely than usual. He went out into the garden intending to let the dogs play. He stepped out from the garden again. The moon being out in the sky filled his heart with joy. The moon had risen nearly to the zenith. The sky was crisply clear in the east, growing cloudier toward the west where its edge turned pitch black. The vast sky had been blurred with a single brushstroke. He gazed intently at the moon. And he walked. The sound of a distant waterwheel clonked, clonked, clonked as it resounded across the fields. On the flank of Fairyland Hill's woman figure, moonlight showered down in fine particles, glistening wetly. He walked back and forth along the road before his house countless times. With the moon behind him, he looked at his short shadow. At times he walked without regarding his shadow, gazing instead into the boundless moon. The two dogs followed behind him, playfully teasing each other as they frolicked joyfully. When he stopped, they chased each other around where he stood. He listened to water's murmur. Beside the road, beneath his feet, a narrow stream—the ditch tracing that path—flowed while scattering moonlight. It lay black like a great mica slab yet shone bright, quivering with sound. Suddenly beyond southern hills passed K-to-H's last train around ten-something p.m., rumbling through and shaking a corner of the moonlit world.

The sound lingered for some time. At this moment, sounds felt dear to him. The moonlight made it bright as day—no, brighter than a rainy day’s noon—yet as he looked beyond the fields toward the southern hill... Where the sound had come from, beyond that hill lay a splendidly bustling metropolis. ……There, from the windows of houses, lights glittered and clustered, shining brightly……. He abruptly—without any associative link—heard only the distant rumble of a train, when suddenly such a fantasy welled up within him. Come to think of it, for an instant—just a fleeting moment—the entire sky behind that hill flared crimson as if reflecting countless lights... only to vanish immediately. It was indeed a mysterious instant.

“Am I getting nostalgic for the city?” He averted his gaze from the hill while thinking this. As he did so, he noticed a black figure approaching him along the straight path where he stood. It was about two hundred meters away. Staring at it, he felt an inexplicable eeriness watching someone traverse that exposed space under moonlight. And he thought moonlit nights were more terrifying than pitch-black ones. Just then, from that figure’s direction—

“Hyooh!”

Then came a single whistle—high and clear. At once both his dogs suddenly dashed toward the figure with gale-like force. First and foremost, this was deeply unpleasant to him. For until now, these dogs had never attempted to approach anyone except when called by him—their master. Yet on this night alone, upon hearing that one whistle, they dashed off as if taking flight. He felt a surge of panic and—

“Whee-oo!”

Then, he blew a high-pitched whistle in the same manner. It was to call back the dogs. When they heard his whistle, the dogs seemed to notice and hurriedly turned back toward him. "Frate!"

The figure said that and called the dog’s name.

“Frate!” He too panicked and called out the dog’s name. His shouted voice was uncannily identical to that figure’s voice. And because he immediately called back the same words, his voice resounded exactly like an echo of the figure’s voice. The two voices, with this inexpressible similarity, felt even to him himself to be utterly identical. Even the dogs must have heard it that way. Once they had dashed off, the dogs went following the figure and never returned.

He stood dazedly on the road, straining his eyes to make out the figure. The figure seemed to follow the rice field ridges from the road out into the open fields, turning at the stone Jizo statue. And then—!

What an unfathomable mystery! There in the bright moonlight, in that open field devoid of any obstructions, the figure abruptly vanished without trace.

"Ah!" he choked back the cry in his mouth and dashed through the gate into the house.

“...There’s no reason anyone in this village would remember my dog’s name.” Because it’s a difficult name to call. No—the children know it. But they must’ve misremembered ‘Frate’ as ‘Kurate.’ Even if someone called their names, my dogs shouldn’t go to anyone but me. Even if they did go off, they should come back when I call them back. “This has never happened before.” He thought this through alone. “...And why did that figure vanish so suddenly? Could it be that I—this very self—split into two separate beings at that moment? Does this ‘soul-separation sickness’ truly exist? If so—could I be suffering from it? Dogs must possess an innate ability to distinguish sounds by nature. Especially their master’s voice—they should recognize it clearly...”

The violent palpitations of his heart continued for over twenty minutes. For some reason, he kept watching the clock's pendulum swing while dwelling on literary accounts of soul-separation sickness and matters concerning the dogs, waiting for his heart to settle. When his mind finally calmed, he ordered his wife to check if the dogs were under the veranda as usual—for he feared they might never return if they kept following that figure. The dogs weren't there. Yet when his wife called them, they fortunately returned (or so he believed). He asked whether the moon still shone. His wife replied that it did.

The next morning, he finally told his wife about the previous night’s events. He had been too terrified that night to muster the composure to speak of it to anyone. When his wife heard this story, she laughed with such amused delight that it angered him. She explained that the figure’s sudden disappearance occurred because when the dogs had pressed close to the person’s feet, they—that person—must have bent down to pet their heads. Consequently, the figure walking along the embankment path would have been hidden by the shadow of rice plants and vanished from view. That was his wife’s interpretation of the matter. Indeed, it seemed a reasonable explanation, he thought. Yet the peculiar terror he had felt in that moment remained undispelled by her rationale.

* * *

Once, such a thing also happened— One time late at night, a moth was drawn to the lamp. In this region where sericulture thrived, around that season these insects would often be flying about. He detested this insect most of all. Once before when this insect had come to his lamp, he had struck it with a handmade fly swatter. Crushed on the spot, the insect first quivered its thick antennae—shaped like eyebrows or comb teeth—with minute vibrations too fine to describe. Then with a final effort it flipped over to expose its grotesquely swollen belly. All six tiny legs twitched convulsively as if trying to clutch something, while at intervals it strained its wings to lift its abdomen. Each part—antennae, legs, wings, belly—continued perpetually those small yet methodical movements, forcing him to witness its death throes. Though small, this was enough to terrify him as he watched. Ever since then he had come to particularly detest and fear this insect.

The insect’s head—strangely small, covered entirely in grey hairs like glossy silk—and there, within its ashen-black surface, eerily, deeply gleaming bright red, small, slightly protruding eyes. A form of oppressive stillness, its wings pressed flat against the lampshade as though glued there. The sight of it suddenly flapping its heavy wings violently, as if in a fit of madness. And then, no matter how much one drove it away, it would persist shamelessly and tenaciously, frolicking around the lamp with utter composure. When it convulsed in ecstatic throes like a dance of death near the lamp, its grotesque shadow would blacken over half of the whitish, blurred brown wall—soundless yet whirling madly like a riotous crowd shouting in turbulent unease. Evading his attempts to drive it away with sluggish defiance, the moth lumbered up to the top of the shoji screen. Then, with those thick wings of its, it began beating against the paper—flap-flap, flap-flap—like the stamping feet of a wild dance.

He waited until the moth grew still, then finally managed to seize it with a piece of newspaper. Then, sliding open the door, he threw the eerie insect outside. Because he had learned his lesson about killing them. However, before even ten minutes had passed, the moth (or perhaps a different one) crept back toward his lamp from somewhere. And then once more began the terrifying, black, oppressive, clamorous wild dance of wings. He seized the moth once more with a piece of paper. Then, sliding open the door once more, he threw it out the window.

However, before even ten minutes had passed, the moth crept up for the third time from somewhere. Whether this was the same moth that had threatened him twice before or a different one, he could not say. But given how thoroughly he had crushed and wrapped it in paper earlier, it seemed impossible for that creature to have survived or even emerged again. Thus, this must have been an entirely different moth. In any case, they attacked his lamp twice, three times—up to four times. ……Within these small flying insects dwelled some evil spirit. He could not help but think so. Once this thought took hold, he found himself too terrified to attempt capturing it again himself. So he deliberately roused his wife from sleep and made her capture the insect. Then, having received from his wife’s hands the insect captured in a large sheet of newspaper, he wrapped the small creature layer upon layer within that vast paper, then used another sheet to fold it away with extreme meticulousness. And this time, instead of throwing it outside, he placed it on the desk, then set a thick old magazine on top of it.

Thus, finally relieved for the first time, he got into bed.

After a while, unable to sleep, he lit the lamp on the candlestick—and at that moment, something came fluttering in and mockingly grazed the flame. That too was a moth!

*　　　　　*　　　　　*

He had become unable to sleep. At first, the sound of the clock grated unbearably on his ears. He stopped both the bedside clock and the wall clock. In truth, clocks served no purpose in their current life beyond being mere nuisances. Yet each morning upon waking, his wife would set them to approximate times and set their pendulums swinging. She claimed that without at least the sound of a clock in the house, she felt unmoored—the silence grew too desolate. To this he wholly agreed. There were moments when all sounds ceased abruptly—the neighbor's voices, dogs barking, chickens crowing, wind rustling, his wife's speech, even his own voice—instants he had often experienced. Those suspended seconds struck him as profoundly lonely, achingly sorrowful, even terrifying. During such voids, he would yearn for any noise or utterance to break the stillness, a longing that filled him with restless anticipation. When even ambient sounds vanished completely, he would initiate meaningless conversations with his wife about anything at all. Otherwise,

"Yeah, that's right."

He would mutter such meaningless soliloquies to himself. But the clock's nocturnal sounds clung too clamorously to his ears, rendering sleep utterly impossible. With each quarter-hour chime goading him onward, his mental state ascended step by step into heightened agitation. Therefore, upon retiring to bed, he made it his practice to stop all clock hands. And each morning, his wife would set in motion the clocks her husband had halted. The husband would arrest the clocks his wife had set moving. This act of starting and stopping timepieces became their respective morning and nightly ritual.

When he stopped the clocks' sounds, this time the murmur of the canal flowing before the garden began to bother him. And now he felt it was hindering his ability to fall asleep. The water's noise must have grown somewhat more intense than usual from the daily rains. One day, he peered into the canal. There lay submerged - still refusing to wash away even now - the thick branch he had cut days earlier from the embankment's willow when first moving into this house and tending its derelict garden. Acting as a weir-like tangle, it trapped floating debris - leaves and newspaper scraps from upstream - while the water churned restlessly, welling up repeatedly to surge over this obstruction. So those clamorous nightly water sounds had indeed been caused by this. Having reached this conclusion alone, he waded into the rain-soaked canal and pulled the branch up from the water's depths. Slimy green waterweed had climbed up and spread across the thick branch's many smaller limbs, entangling them completely. He temporarily set it by the roadside. When he peered into the water again, his eye caught something long floating and sinking five or six ken downstream amidst the leaves, paper scraps, straw fragments, and strands of women's hair that had been caught in the willow branch weir and were now drifting away.

When he looked, it was that silver-handled cane—the one from the other night when he had quarreled with the drunkard, that same night when he had struck the dog and hurled it into the water. He rejoiced immensely that through some strange fate, it had returned to his hands again. Inexplicably ashamed and feeling utterly foolish—having even concealed its loss from his wife—he had nevertheless ended up impulsively confessing it. And he thought—that clamorous water noise must surely have been this cane's doing. The cane must have been announcing its whereabouts through that act—informing him who sought it of its own location.

He held the cane in one hand and gazed intently at the unimpeded, straight-flowing surface of the water. With this done, he thought tonight would finally be quiet and he could rest assured. However, that proved mistaken. That night too—though whether noisier than before was debatable—the stream's murmur, though fundamentally faint, pierced his ears with unbearable intensity, hindering his sleep just as it had the previous night.

Yet there was nothing more he could do about the stream's murmur. Beyond this, another sound began visiting his ears. It was the last train running beyond the southern hill, heard only when night grew deep. And since it was so late—the clocks weren't working so he couldn't know the exact time—was it truly 10:06? For what should have been the final train departing T Station and passing his house across a hill four kilometers distant, this hour seemed far too late. Not only that—it wasn't just once nightly. After first hearing it at such depth of night, within another hour's span would come the train's rumble again. These sounds diverged completely from actual schedules... Even were they pitch-black freight trains, no rural railway would dispatch cargo trains so frequently through midnight's heart. Yet while these train sounds rang clear to him, his wife insisted she never heard them. When that distant train-thunder reached him, he couldn't escape the conviction that within that train rode some friend come unexpectedly to visit him in this backcountry. And if such a thing were truly happening—who might it be? O? ...E? ...T? ...A? ...K?... He tried summoning every friend he could recall. But none seemed plausible candidates. Yet still he saw with perfect clarity—a person, someone known, leaning solitary against a carriage window. Stranger still were nights when this figure abruptly seemed himself—this seated form kindling within his eccentric fancies terrible yet enthralling story-beginnings worthy of Poe.

The ticking of the clock. The murmur of the canal, the rumble of the train moving forward. Through this progression, he finally came to hear various other sounds every night. One of these overlapping sounds was the distant, shrill screech emitted when streetcars braked—a sound he had often heard late at night in the city. At times, it would violently assail the very depths of his ears. One night, as he dozed off and suddenly awoke, he heard the bright sound of an organ drifting in from the village elementary school just a block upstream. Thinking that morning had grown late and perhaps singing classes had begun, he looked around only to find his wife still fast asleep. No morning light leaked through the door gaps either. There was no sound... save that of the organ. It was late at night. While doubting whether he was half-asleep, he strained his ears even more intently. The organ’s sound—with its distinctive timbre both refreshingly sweet and plaintive, imbued with the sentiment of a late spring evening—wasn’t it now drifting in on the capricious wind, carrying some familiar march? He listened, entranced in rapture, to the music’s sound. On another night, a certain melody from the brass bands often heard at moving picture theaters—this too being some kind of march—drifted in from nowhere. Once he began perceiving those musical sounds, the murmur of the water no longer caught his ear at all.

And so he stopped trying to sleep anymore, and the fact that he couldn't sleep no longer pained him so deeply. All those sounds—save for the streetcar's screeching brakes—came bearing their own pleasures: some lively and bright, others ethereal and distant. Before suspicion could take root, he found an indescribable comfort in surrendering to them. The organ's tones pleased him most of all. Next came the brass band's resonance. There were even times when faint bell chimes persisted—like those rung by winter pilgrims. Though the organ sounded only two or three times, the band's music drifted in nearly every night without fail. As he listened intently, unconsciously mimicking their melodies under his breath, he felt his reclining body lift slightly, his entire being keeping rhythm. It was a pleasure bordering on the carnal—simultaneously sensual and spiritual in nature. Had this occurred within monastery walls, people might have named it religious ecstasy.

The auditory hallucinations brought visions in their wake. Or they came alone without any precursor of auditory hallucinations.

One of them was an extremely minute yet clear cityscape - a fragment of some greater whole. With miniature precision, this Lilliputian metropolis constructed itself before his supine eyes, hovering vividly just above his nose. Though magnificent beyond any real-world counterpart, he imagined - no, believed - Tokyo must contain its exact duplicate somewhere in its labyrinthine sprawl. An illuminated nocturne: five-story Western buildings stood no taller than fifteen centimeters, yet even these dwarfed neighboring structures half or a third their size, each boasting entryways and windows aglow with impossible brilliance. The houses gleamed bone-white. Their azure draperies displayed details surpassing both human measurement and ordinary imagination, arrayed before him with crystalline clarity. No - more still! Beside lightning rods crowning turrets blazed a solitary star, a silver stitch in black velvet's expanse... This resplendent nocturnal cityscape held no traffic nor pedestrians - only willow-lined avenues thrumming with silent agitation. Through bright windows seeped an indefinable restlessness... One structure he somehow knew to be a Chinese restaurant. Staring fixedly, he watched the entire city recede from his nasal perch, shrinking to near-invisibility before exploding outward at terrifying speed - swelling to life-sized proportions, then beyond, engulfing his world... Until languid observation triggered inverse collapse, the metropolis retreating to its original miniature scale above his nose. Thus did he traverse Märchen realms - Lilliput to Brobdingnag and back - within seconds or hours unmeasured. When assuming giant-land perspective, the distance between his eyes stretched grotesquely wide, expanding his visual field like some cyclopean titan. Sometimes the phantom city froze mid-transformation at colossal scale. Panicked, he'd fumble for matches - striking one to survey his sooty ceiling, desperate to confirm he hadn't physically entered that impossible streetscape.

Those scenes would frequently appear before his eyes. Each time one manifested, it never differed by even a hair's breadth from its predecessor. This too became one of the uncanny mysteries accompanying this phenomenon.

At times, though rarely, instead of that scenery, it would be his own head. His own head felt as small as a bean... expanded in the blink of an eye... filling the house... becoming as large as the Earth... infinitely vast... How could such an enormous head possibly fit within this universe? Then suddenly, at tremendous speed, it shrank back to the size of a bean. Out of sheer anxiety, he instinctively ran his hands over his own head to check. And so he finally felt relieved. He felt the absurdity and wanted to laugh. At that instant, Key-y-y-y—the screech of a streetcar’s brakes—pierced through between his eyebrows.

However, these visions and sensory illusions did not appear to manifest through any particularly necessary or direct connection to the auditory hallucinations. While the auditory hallucinations had generally been pleasant for him, these visions that leapt from infinite expansion to infinitesimal contraction struck even him as eerie and tormenting.

He felt these bizarre pathological phenomena growing increasingly intense each night. He began to think these phenomena were being transmitted from his wife. The rumble of a steam train. The screeching sound of a streetcar. The moving picture theater orchestra. An unfamiliar town, yet one that must be somewhere in Tokyo. Could it be that all these phantoms—shapes and sounds manifesting before his sleepless eyes and ears—were born from his wife’s intense nostalgia for the city, channeled through some sorcerous influence within her unconscious? He tentatively imagined this. At first, it was merely a supposition. However, before he knew it, this came to feel like reality to him. That was why the kitchen where his wife always stayed overflowed with fantasies of Tokyo—so much so that one evening when he cooked rice alone, he had suddenly recalled that incident. And so he came to think such things as well. He came to think it plausible—indeed felt compelled to acknowledge—that upon one whose willpower had waned to near nonexistence, like himself, the wills of other humans possessing greater volitional strength, or those spirits thronging this invisible world, could exert more powerful influence than even his own. Life is a force that moment by moment conquers all surrounding things, devours them, absorbs their power into itself, yet sufficiently unifies them. Physically, this was clearly so. Spiritually too, mentally too—it must certainly be so. And now, the mysterious force that absorbed and unified other things was gradually declining within him. Rather, he found himself only dispersing moment by moment the self he had maintained until now.

It was during this time that he had realized darkness was a mass of something jostling tightly without gaps—that it had weight. In this manner, his joys and sorrows, angers and fears transformed into something utterly incompatible with those of other people surviving in the real world. Loneliness and idleness—these two siblings—indeed possessed a strange power. ——If I were living in a monastery now? And so he once thought. ...If he were not living this life with his wife, but instead found himself in these recent physical and mental conditions while daily venerating an image of the beautiful Mary—the Eternal Virgin—then his nightly visions would likely have been those of heaven, and the unpleasant ones those of hell. And the noble, gentle lips in the image would have spoken to him as if alive. And all tormenting things would have appeared before him with the ugliness, loathsomeness, and terror of demons painted by Spinello Spinelli, haunting his vision to plague him. Again, during those sleepless nights when faint dawn seeped through door cracks, that lonely, heartrending—yet refreshing—feeling which arose upon suddenly hearing a small bird's sporadic chirps—seeming to beckon tears—would surely have transformed into penitence. In a place called a monastery, both its lifestyle and ideological suggestions—everything was structured through various mechanisms to evoke such phantoms, to make them arise easily, to compel their arising...

He had even thought such things. However, that thought coalesced much later than this immediate moment.

＊　　　　　＊　　　　　＊

Suddenly before his eyes floated the shape of a human foot. Only the foot seemed suspended in midair. Its size was unclear, but since it didn't particularly draw attention to its dimensions, it was likely that of an ordinary person. It was a beautiful white bare foot. As he watched... abruptly, white fingers appeared again. It was a hand shaped like those often seen in El Greco's paintings, thumb and index finger poised as if pinching something small... Soon the hand vanished, leaving only that earlier foot still moving there - now bobbing up and down as if treading something. With each movement, the toes dipped and rose as force surged through them, curling and stretching like inchworms each time. What a strange dream this is, he thought within the dream. That's it! That's it! This is the foot of that silk-reeling girl from the house I stumbled into when lost near Ozenji Temple. That's her hand. She's working the silk-reeling pedal. The gesture of fingers catching all emerging threads... As this thought came, those fingers reappeared. Such unusually white hands and feet for the countryside... When she'd glanced up at him briefly, her face had been lovely. On the way there, somewhere a sudden shower had fallen... a rainbow emerged... he'd seen it in the mountains. That girl must've been sixteen... If only her whole figure would materialize clearly instead of just hands and feet... As he lingered in this dream of swaying white bare feet and such memories, suddenly everything turned crimson bright - when he looked, candlelight from the stand blazed dazzlingly into his eyes. He awoke.

His wife was sliding open the shoji screen and entering from the engawa. She must have gone to the restroom. "You need to be more careful—haven’t I been telling you for days?" "I wake up immediately if even a little light gets into my eyes." "I’d only just managed to fall asleep this very moment." While looking up at his wife and blinking his dazzled eyes, he grumbled irritably. "I thought I was being careful... You must have been sleeping with your eyes open."

Having said such things, his wife now belatedly hurriedly blew out that lamp. "What happened to Ozenji Temple?" "You were talking in your sleep just now."

"When?" "Just now, when I tried to light the lamp and struck a match." He felt utterly ridiculous. What he had thought were beautiful feet in his dream were surely his wife’s feet he had been looking at. I must have removed my pillow and been sleeping with my face pressed directly against the tatami mat, which is why I saw my wife’s feet walking by and mistook it for a dream. He thus realized. Nevertheless, he found it strange how this memory had surfaced in his semi-conscious state—the recollection of a silk-reeling girl from that solitary house near Ozenji Temple. At the time, he had found it curious that such a beautiful young maiden existed in that place, spinning thread in lonely modesty, yet afterward had completely forgotten about her.

This was one example. This was not the only time. At that period, whenever he felt compelled to sleep, he would frequently succumb to slumber of this nature.

＊　　　　　＊　　　　　＊ “There’s absolutely no fever at all—if anything, it’s rather cold.”

His wife, who had been holding her hand over his forehead, said that and removed it from there, then placed her hand on her own forehead to check. “I’m far hotter than you are.” This left him deeply dissatisfied instead. When he tried taking his temperature experimentally and had her bring out the thermometer, it was broken from their many distant moves. If it wasn’t due to fever, then it must be this weather’s doing. This terrible wind’s doing. He thought.

Truly, that day was one of terrible wind. A scattering of fine raindrops, barely there, was driven sideways as clouds and the very wind itself were swept away. Yet despite this, it was oppressively muggy. On days like this, he normally had to cower in fear of earthquakes since long ago, but today, due to this fierce wind, he could at least find relief on that front. But windy days were windy days, and the irritable, uneasy mood brought on by this peculiar weather made him so jittery that it gave him heart palpitations.

Cat! Cat! After me! After me! Follow along! Cat! Cat! Back, back, drive them in!

Suddenly, from the depths of the violently raging gale, fragments of a children's song came flying in broken snatches. They seemed carried by gusts of wind, reaching his ears in intermittent bursts. Yet this too must have been auditory hallucination - for it was a nursery rhyme from his hometown that he had long forgotten. On days when winds raged fiercely (yes, on days exactly like this), the children - particularly the girls - would run about clutching at each other's obi sashes or ducking under haori coats while singing this very melody in endless repetition, their chorus swirling round and round the square before his ancestral home's gate as they reveled in the storm... It was a monotonous yet nostalgic rhyme with cascading verses, perfectly matched to its accompanying game of wind-chasing. Enthralled by this vision, his child self materialized vividly - standing frozen in dust-swirled winds, face upturned in wonder. This became the thread unraveling memory's knot. Back then... within the black cedar grove behind castle ruins - that narrow path skirting the highest stone rampart of the fortress hill. There stretched a primeval cedar forest where through slender gaps between towering trunks one glimpsed river flashes and billowing sails below. At his feet spread great ferns; the path lay perpetually twilight-drenched, heavy with cedar's damp resinous breath. This trail had been his childhood favorite... no, more than favorite - obsession persisting into adolescence. When injured during gymnastic drills and twice anesthetized, his drugged dreams had wandered these same forest paths. Both times... One evening within that wood he discovered an enormous black lily. Approaching to pluck it, staring fixedly until sudden legendary terror struck - sending him tumbling headlong down mountain trails. Next day he'd brought servants to comb every inch, finding nothing. To him this marked nature's first uncanny manifestation - though whether childhood hallucination or some botanical phantom defying categorization, even now he couldn't say.

Yet the beauty of that flower swaying gently in the wind at that time remained etched in his heart for a long time. As if that rare flower had been the symbol of his "Blue Flower," he had been that sort of lonely child since those days. And so he would often walk alone in places like the mountain with castle ruins behind his house and the forest along the river on its back side. The pool that people called "Nabewari" was particularly to his liking. There was a lime-burning hut there. The crystals of limestone and calcite taught the mysteries of nature to his young mind. Moreover, in that pool, he would often gaze dreamily at the countless lapis lazuli-colored whirlpools—each about four and a half tatami mats in size—that swirled there from time to time. And he occasionally saw them even within dreams themselves. At that time, he would have been around eight or nine years old. ……Whenever he told a lie, he would invariably wake in the dead of night that very evening. And then he would worry about it and find himself utterly unable to sleep. He would shake his mother awake, make his anguished confession, beg her forgiveness, and only then manage to fall asleep again. ……And then—yes, yes—there had also been nights when he heard the sound of the weaving reed at midnight. Back then, I must have been around five or six years old. I wonder if I've had neurasthenia since long ago, since back then. And it seemed his tendency for auditory hallucinations also dated back to that time—he startled himself with this realization. Those trivial childhood events were recalled more vividly than yesterday’s affairs (to him at that time, yesterday’s matters were but a vague blur). What was peculiar was this: in a solitary mountain house he had seen just three or four months prior near summer's end—where lilies and crape myrtles bloomed—there lived a young girl alone with her elderly mother in that deserted large house; that girl whose white beautiful feet and fingers had appeared in his waking dream. It was retreating deep into his memory with the atmosphere of a fairy tale. And so these visions were at times erroneously woven into his childhood recollections, attempting to become a fairy within the deep forest of his memory.

Each time he noticed himself trying to think that way, he scolded himself. "No, no—this happened just recently, didn't it?" Thus correcting himself through self-reproof. ......He kept indulging in these childhood reminiscences. Moreover, all were matters he had nearly forgotten without trace until now. And becoming that child within those memories, he achingly yearned for his mother, brothers, and father. For him—who never dwelled beyond his own concerns—never before had he recalled those people with such piercing intensity. To his father, his mother, any brother—he hadn't even sent word for over half a year. His deaf sister, estranged yet returned home, struck him as especially heartbreaking. He first attempted to recall his mother's face. Though she was someone he'd met merely half a year prior, no impression would surface. When he forcibly assembled scattered impressions, unexpectedly and strangely, they coalesced into his mother's grotesque face from seventeen or eighteen years past—when she'd contracted erysipelas. Her face smeared entirely with black medicine resembled a dark mask, only sunken eyes gleaming as she waved him away from her sickbed like some listless monster. As a child, he'd gone sobbing into the garden and cried harder still. The blurred camellia branches seen through tearful eyes, each indistinct cluster of flowers, emerged before him with far greater clarity than his mother's face—matters surely never recalled before now lining up one after another. This feeling abruptly made him contemplate death. This mental state undoubtedly matched that of patients facing death. "Then wouldn't I be dying before long?" ......Even so—in this mountain village knowing no one—am I to die like this now?......And if I am to die thus...? His fantasies flowed endlessly. He had never once directly considered death until now.

And so at this time, first with some curiosity in his characteristic style of fantasy, he began to visualize one by one the circumstances of acquaintances who had learned of his own death at that moment. In the raging wind that separated this clamorous world from stillness, he strained to hear the katydids' cries that seemed to beckon human souls into silent realms. He reached out to randomly pull a book from the shelf far above his pillow. The moment his hand touched the bookshelf—clatter! Something shattered. He startled as if he himself had dropped an object and scanned his surroundings. It was his wife breaking something in the kitchen—the sound carried on the wind to reach him.

His bookshelf too was now in a pitiable state. There stood a few old books amidst the dust, leaning against each other as they began to tilt sideways. Only things of little value had naturally remained—all books he had grown thoroughly tired of seeing over these past two or three years. The book he now pulled out was a translated copy of Faust. Wanting to escape from his own unproductive, overly curious fantasies about death, he tried reading this book that stirred no interest in him. Yet the wind's sound ceaselessly grazed his ears. The single glass pane above the kitchen sink clattered and shook without respite, grating on both his ears and mind.

He lay prone, fixing his eyes on the opened page. "A bliss surpassing earthly pleasures. Lying deep in the mountains between darkness and dew, Embracing heaven and earth with blissful heart, With your own efforts tear out the essence of heaven and earth, Experiencing in his own breast the divine work of six days, Feeling arrogant power coursing through him while tasting something unknown, At times spreading overflowing love to all things, The child of the earthly realm within him vanishing completely."

By chance, it was Mephisto's lines from the "Forest and Cavern" chapter. The meaning of these words became clear to him. Wasn't this precisely the state of mind he had when he first came to this countryside?

He staggered up from his futon to take the red ink and pen from the desk. And then, going back further from the passage he had just read, he began reading from Faust's soliloquy in the cavern. He dipped his pen in red ink and underlined each line he read, one by one, along their edges. He drew thin, neurotically precise straight lines, taking care not to let them touch a single printed character or allow the slightest distortion. That demanded tremendous effort from his violently trembling fingertips.

…………………………………

To put it briefly, at times one may taste such pleasure oneself— There is no hindrance to your partaking. But you won't be able to endure it for long. You already show considerable weariness. If this continues any longer, you'll either go mad with exuberance, Or end up a gloomy coward meeting your demise. "I've had enough..." Preoccupied with underlining, he only grasped the passage's meaning when rereading it. Mephisto was now speaking to me from within this book. Oh, what an ill omen! Or end up a gloomy coward meeting your demise. Was this real? Words so perfectly suited to his present state—no matter how many voluminous books he might desperately scour, line by line—could never again be revealed here. These words were so perfectly apt as a critique of his current existence. As he stared at the too-perfect printed characters, he even began feeling the letters themselves gradually grow terrifying.

“My, what a terrible wind this is! “Look at the trees in the thicket out back.” “They’re so spindly despite being thin and tall—imagine the wind hitting those spindly trunks!” “They’re swaying so violently!” “You don’t think they’ll snap, do you?” His wife’s voice reached his ears—half-drowned by the wind’s roar as if coming from afar, yet seemingly laden with some grave incident or hidden allegory.

When he came to his senses, his wife was standing by his pillow. His wife had been standing there for some time. His wife was asking him about meals. He made no attempt to answer and turned over in bed with labored effort, spitefully turning his face away from her. Yet he immediately turned back toward her again. "Hey! You broke something earlier, didn't you?" "Yes, a Western plate I bought for ten sen."

“Hmm. “A Western plate bought for ten sen?” “You don’t think it’s acceptable to break it just because it’s a ten-sen Western plate, do you?” “Ten sen or ten yen—those are just prices humans have arbitrarily assigned.” “Moreover, that served me well beyond its ten-sen value.” “Even a single plate is precious.” “Well, in a way, that too might as well be alive.” “Now sit down there—you’ve been breaking about five things a month lately.” Holding the plate in her hands, she wasn’t thinking about it but was vaguely pondering other matters. “That’s why, in those moments, the plate grows angry and escapes your grasp.” “Slips right away.” “The root of it is—you’re always thinking of Tokyo. That’s what’s wrong.” “You haven’t discovered how to find life’s richness in this desolate countryside.” “Do try looking properly at how vibrant it is here.” “Even each kitchen tool you find so dull—if you’d only listen—could tell endless fascinating tales.” “To love life—to truly live joyfully—mustn’t it mean nothing but wholeheartedly taking full delight in such trivialities? In daily routines themselves…”

He continued grumbling like delirious ravings. For him—who had maintained near-total silence those days—this constituted an uncharacteristically protracted lecture. He kept piling word upon word in ceaseless chatter. As he spoke on, the words meant for his wife gradually shifted course, turning inward toward himself. Yet this fragment of unexpected thought—something he would never normally entertain—he recognized even as it spilled from his lips. At the very instant a new idea seemed within grasp, the words he sought no longer reached their mark. They merely skittered clumsily across thought's surface. The sacredness of daily life. The mystery of daily life. He understood he was attempting to articulate what lay beyond human language. And finally he fell silent.

The two of them fell silent and listened to the raging storm, but after a while, his wife spoke up resolutely. “You know, the three hundred yen we received from my father in March is down to less than ten yen now.” He made no attempt to answer and instead suddenly muttered to himself as if whispering into his own mouth. “I have no talent left... no confidence either...”

＊　　　　　＊　　　　　＊

Darkness seethed around him. It was a darkness of supreme oppressiveness, layered in a seamless accumulation of reds and greens and purples. He groped for a match in the darkness, lit the candle by his pillow, and rose from bed. Then he steadily held the candlestick over the face of his wife sleeping beside him. But sunk in deep sleep, she did not stir. He stared intently at his wife's unresponsive face in the flickering candlelight. At this moment, he gazed at her face with fresh curiosity and intense scrutiny, as though seeing it for the first time.

The candlelight cleaved all forms into two distinct realms—the world of light and the world of shadow. Human faces seen in that harsh sidelight, transformed by violent contrasts of red-tinged illumination, became utterly alien in their aspect. He couldn't help but wonder—were human faces, not just his wife's but all of them, truly this repulsive? What met his eyes was a single grotesque, eerie, and uncanny mass. Beside her pillow lay the false hairpiece from her coiffure, untied and rolled into a black sphere. Amidst this uncanny scene, only when he saw that hairpiece did he truly realize—the woman sleeping here was his wife.

He lifted the candlestick slightly higher, pressed it close beside her ear, and for a while gazed at it in various ways—as if experimentally playing with how the light shifted its effects. His wife slept on without noticing any of that. She didn’t even turn over. If a sword were pressed to her throat now, would this woman still sleep peacefully? No—in such circumstances, even this insensitive woman would surely open her eyes as a natural human instinct. It must be so. He thought such things. And then, he wondered if perhaps this woman wasn’t dreaming of being killed right now. Even so, from such bewitchment of light, humans do recall all manner of things. From such circumstances—hadn’t there always been men who resolved to actually kill…?

"Admittedly, I'm not actually trying to kill this woman right now, but..."

He involuntarily muttered in a low voice. He hurriedly made excuses to himself for his own shocking delusion.

"And so... What was I even doing this for again?" He came to his senses and suddenly shook his wife awake.

It was midnight.

His wife finally awoke, but as if dazzled, she avoided the flickering candlelight and averted her eyes. And then, moving her mouth sluggishly as people not yet fully awake often do, half-mumbling— “Are you checking the locks again? It’s fine.” With that, she turned over. “No, I’m going to the bathroom. Just come with me.” After emerging from the toilet, he slid the door halfway open to wash his hands. Then through the gap of the now-opened door, moonlight suddenly streamed in. The moonlight struck the engawa head-on, shining as a distorted rectangle upon the wooden planks. Strangely enough, he had just awoken from a dream showing this very engawa bathed in moonlight—exactly as it appeared before him now. What an uncanny coincidence this was. To him first and foremost, that proved unbearably eerie. And then—was even their standing here now a continuation of that dream? The suspicion suddenly gripped him.

“Hey, this isn’t a dream, is it?” “What do you mean? You’re still half-asleep.” The candle held in his wife’s hand, overlaid by moonlight from above, lost its own glow and burned faintly red. The flame’s tip swayed as if about to be extinguished by the wind, trembling violently in the shadow of her sleeve acting as a screen. The wind had imperceptibly stilled, while clouds raced southward with terrible force. Through a fantastical rift in the pitch-black clouds—a gaping maw that passed by while shedding light rain—the moon shone down on them coldly.

He forgot to wash his hands and looked up at that unusual moon. It was a strange moon. What day's moon was this—round yet with its lower half faintly blurred as if about to vanish? Yet its upper half floated vividly between black clouds in the sky's deep basin, honed to crystalline clarity and sharply defined. The distinct roundness of its upper half strikingly resembled something, he thought. That's it. It resembled the dome of a skull. Now that he considered it, the moon's entire shape resembled a skull. A silver skull. Honed to a razor's edge, or perhaps a silver skull freshly drawn from a furnace. The workings of association suddenly made him recall something like a pirate ship. "Sacred pirate ship." For some reason, those words surfaced in his mind. He gazed unceasingly at the blue moon. Ah—this exact same thing had happened when he stood here like this before. The cloud formations and moon's shape were identical to now. From beginning to end, not a single detail differed. Not only that—he had thought the same thing then too. He had thought the very same thing as now. In some ancient past—like the depths of a faint distant hole—there had existed events wholly identical to the present, exact replicas overlapping without divergence... Blankly, he thought this in an instant... When could it have been... Where might it have occurred...

The scattered clouds racing across the sky were on the verge of swallowing the moon—the silver skull. “Can I close it now?” The wife said, shivering.

Perhaps it was her words that finally brought him back to himself, as he leaned forward to wash his hands. It was that moment. "Oh, disaster!" "Huh?" "A dog!" "Dog?" He immediately and deftly grabbed the bamboo rod used to secure the door, then hurled it with all his might toward the garden entrance. In his eyes appeared a white dog nimbly dodging the tumbling bamboo fragment—suddenly lunging at it, then fleeing headlong down the path with the bamboo piece clamped in its jaws. Tail firmly clamped between its legs, ears pinned back, white fangs bared from jaws gripping the bamboo fragment, drool streaming down as it raced along the road before his house. Bathed in moonlight, a large silver shaggy-coated dog with thick fur—its rapid weaving steps—danced dizzyingly before his eyes. That was the dog from Ozenji Temple—a solitary temple in the mountains. He could discern its form clearly and in detail within an instant.

“It’s a mad dog!” He frantically called his dogs’ names. He kept calling. Were they not there? The dogs didn’t respond to his voice. His wife had no understanding of what was occurring. Yet following her husband’s actions, she too raised her voice to call the dogs. Their shrill cries echoed across the hill. After seven or eight calls came the clank of heavy chains—both dogs appeared together at last, dragging themselves sluggishly. Clanking their chains as they moved about—perplexed by their master’s sudden summons yet wagging tails near to breaking and sniffing noisily with their noses—they came.

The moon was swallowed by the clouds.

He took the candlestick from his wife's hand and immediately held it out toward the dogs, but the flame was blown out by the wind in an instant. At once he tried relighting the lamp, but there appeared to be nothing amiss with his dogs.

“Ah, that terrified me. I thought our dogs had been bitten by a mad dog.” He got into bed but, facing his wife, explained in detail what he had just witnessed. His wife denied it from the very beginning. No matter how bright the moonlight was, there was no way one could see that clearly. Moreover, Ozenji Temple’s dog had indeed gone mad, but it had been slaughtered for that reason over a week or ten days ago. At that moment, Okinu—

"So you should take care with your dogs too."

Okinu had said. That matter should have been told to him by her own mouth at that time—his wife explained things in detail, as if to placate him. Yet he thought he had never heard any story about Ozenji Temple's dog having gone mad. "A ghost dog was racing across the field like that. "And such spiritual things are visible only to me..." ...A world of melancholy, a world of lamentation, a world where spirits wander. Were my eyes made for such a world?—The melancholy window of the melancholy room stared wide open toward the melancholy abandoned garden. He thought in that manner. The place where I now live—this is no longer part of the world of the living, yet neither does it belong to the world of the dead—is this not some twilight realm existing between the two? Am I wandering through the world of death while still alive... If Dante could traverse Heaven and Hell with his physical body intact... At least, at least, the place where I now stand is a steeply sloping path with extinction at its base, tilting decisively toward that abyss...

＊　　　　　＊　　　　　＊

The next day—the day after that rainy moonlit night—dawned clear for the first time in ages. Sky and earth seemed to have come back to life that morning. All creation had transformed into deep autumn during the long rains without anyone noticing. The sunlight pouring onto rice ears, the gentle breeze, the sky, even the single thread-like cloud floating there—all had naturally changed from their summer forms. Everything appeared transparent to him, like a landscape constructed from panels of multicolored glass. He felt it through his entire body. He drew a deep breath. The cold, vivid air piercing straight into his chest felt sweeter than any drink. It made sense that his wife had failed to chain the dogs that morning as usual. That had been the right choice.

In the distant fields, his dogs—both Frate and Leo—could be seen frolicking about. A young farmer was patting Leo’s head. The gentle Leo was content to let this happen—he gazed in rapture for a time at the sun-blessed wild fields, the dogs, and the working farmers bent over their tasks. The sun was high. He wondered why he hadn’t woken sooner for this view. As he descended from the veranda and passed through the garden intending to wash his face, he found the bamboo fragment that the white dog should have carried off last night lying at the base of the bush clover. He involuntarily gave a wry smile. However, it was rather a cheerful laugh.

At the wellside, trying to gather spilled rice—he thought his wife might have intentionally scattered extra. Sparrows perched there in numbers never before seen hereabouts, thirty or forty flocked together. Startled by his footsteps, they took wing all at once and fled to nearby branches. There was no need for such panic. On that persimmon branch among the sparrows sat a small white-faced bird whose name he didn't know. In that moment he recalled Saint Francis preaching to birds. Morning smoke from his eaves clung to persimmon boughs like violet gauze filtering light. Roses that had stopped blooming after rain's battering now flowered here and there this morning. Spiderwebs glittered with sunlit dewdrops. Where rose leaves spilled their droplets, these momentary jewels beyond human grasp made webs sway grandly as they slid down silken threads—flashing once before falling to grass below—and he could view these ordinary beauties with fresh emotion.

He lifted the rope-bound well bucket to draw water, but peering suddenly into its depths, found there an endless azure sky circumscribed within a three-foot circle, a bottomless lapis lazuli spread serenely, the well water appearing as if glowing translucent from within. He could not help hesitating to drop the bucket. As he gazed into it, his mood settled like the well water. Though the drawn-up water remained clouded by days of rain, his tranquil state proved sufficient to pardon this imperfection.

When he sat at the table his wife had prepared, his mind was tranquil. On the table lay unusual foods she had brought from Tokyo days earlier. An iron kettle seethed atop the hibachi. And so this gloomy mood had indeed come from disagreeable weather as she'd said—he thought. He was about to take up his chopsticks when he suddenly remembered a certain rosebud he'd seen earlier by the wellside.

“Hey, didn’t you notice? There are some really nice flowers blooming this morning. My flowers. They’re about twenty percent open now, and this time the red has a very deep, settled color.” “Yes, I did see it. That one blooming high in the middle there?” “That’s right! ‘A single stem blooming splendidly in the garden’s heart’—that one.” He then muttered to himself: “New blossoms against the white sun? No, ‘white sun’ feels off. After all, they’re out of season…”

“They finally started blooming in September, you know.” “How about it? “Why don’t you go pick those and bring them here?” “Yes, I’ll go get them.” “So you’ll put them here, then?” He said as he tapped the center of the round dining table with his finger. The wife immediately stood up and reappeared holding a white tablecloth. “Then I’ll spread this out.” “This is nice. “Oh ho! “You’d washed it, hadn’t you?” “If it got dirty, I thought with all that rain I wouldn’t be able to launder it, so I’d kept it stored away.”

“This is pure simplicity! We’ll hold a banquet with flowers as our feast!” As his cheerful laughter lingered, his wife went out to gather blossoms. She returned at once bearing a cup overbrimming with flowers. With an air faintly theatrical and unnatural, she bustled in presenting it aloft. This struck him as peculiarly disagreeable. He felt himself cruelly parodied. He spoke in a voice drained of feeling.

“Oh, you’ve brought quite a lot, haven’t you?” “Yes, every last one! All of them!” “All of them!” His wife replied triumphantly. That irritated him. The meaning of her words failing to reach him. “Why? I would’ve been fine with just one.”

“But you didn’t tell me to do that.”

“Did I ever say to take a lot... Look what you’ve done. I would have been fine with just one.” “Shall I go throw away the others then?” “Fine. After going through all that trouble… Well, fine. Put them there. Oh… you—you didn’t pick the one I told you about, did you?” “But you never said anything about that! There’s barely even this much there! At that place—” “Is that right… I thought there was a red bud tinged with a sky-blue hue at the bottom, though. I only wanted that one.”

"That sort of thing... There aren't any with a sky-blue tinge at the bottom—nothing so particular to find. It must have just been reflecting the sky." "I see. So...?" "Oh my, there's no need to make such a frightening face. If I was wrong, then I'm sorry. I just thought having more would be better..." "There's no need to apologize so readily. What I want is for you to understand... Just one bud. That single bud—I wanted to keep it before my eyes, place it in sunlight, and watch intently until it bloomed. Just one! The rest could stay on their branches."

“But you never liked having things in abundance.” “A heap of worthless things can’t compare to a single truly good one. That is true abundance.” He said with deep relish, as though savoring his own words. “Come on, hurry up and cheer up. It’s such a lovely morning…”

“Exactly! That’s precisely why—since it’s such a fine morning—having this done to me is so unpleasant.” However, even as he spoke these words, he found his wife growing more pitiable. And thus he had become aware of his own selfishness. On his wife’s index finger, blood had oozed—probably pierced by a rose thorn. That caught his eye. However, the words to express such feelings to his wife—words that aligned with his very nature—would not come from his lips. Rather, he sought to conceal those feelings, determined not to let them be known. And he didn’t know where to stem the flow of unpleasant words. That only aggravated his irritation further. He forcibly kept his mouth shut. Then, he took up the cup filled with those flowers in his hand. At first, he took it up to eye level and looked through the glass. The green leaves, submerged in water, were vividly green. The undersides of the leaves glistened silver here and there. In their shadow, faintly red thorns could also be seen. The thick bottom of the cup glistened coldly like crystal. The small cup's small world was a clear and beautiful autumn of green and silver.

He placed the cup beneath his eyes. And he gazed intently at each flower in detail. The flowers there—both petals and blossoms—were all, unfortunately, being eaten away. Not a single one was perfect. That disturbed his heart, which had just begun to settle. “What do you think of these flowers?! You should have picked them more carefully. Hmph, they’re all infested.” He had unintentionally blurted out those words, but now he felt sorry for his wife. Suddenly plucking the most beautiful bud from among them, he softened his tone and—

"Ah, this is it. The bud I meant. There it is! Right here!" His words carried an intention—to calm himself through speech and placate his wife. Yet she didn't respond, silently scooping rice into her own bowl. Glaring sideways at her hands, he stole a look at her forehead. What if I smashed this cup here—against that forehead— No—mustn't—I'm being unreasonable from the start. Reluctantly, with aching loneliness, he thrust the plucked bud before his eyes. ...The still-unopened bud bore a needle-sized hole in its swollen side. Countless crimson petals lay folded upon folded—pierced white and deep through to the stamen by insect work. He kept staring at the bud, brows knit in revulsion.

The moment he realized—he dropped it. With that hand, he swiftly lowered the boiling iron kettle, then snatched up the bud again and immediately flung it into the fire.—The bud’s petals sizzled as they burned… The moment he saw the raging crimson charcoal fire, “Agh!” He nearly cried out. He was about to stand up. He barely managed to endure it—if I were to leap up now, I’d be a madman! Thinking this, he once again swiftly—yet as calmly as possible—picked up the flower bud burning in the brazier with the tip of the fire tongs and threw it into the nearby charcoal basket. Having done all this, he then cautiously peered into the ashes of the brazier—but there was nothing there. There was nothing now of what had been there. There was nothing to shock and make one cry out. He stirred through the ashes and looked. Nothing came up from the bottom either. Even faster than kerosene dripped into water, it spread across the surface of the ashes in a vivid blue flare! What he had seen must have been merely a momentary illusion.

He retrieved the bud once more from the bottom of the charcoal basket. The bud gripped by the fire tongs had faded in color from the burning flames and was now smothered in jet-black charcoal dust. Then, he examined the stem once more. There, just as he had first seen, upon the stem that trembled in response to his finger's movements—from the flower's calyx down to the undersides of its two ravaged leaves—what manner of insects were these? Insects so infinitesimal they matched the stem's bluish hue, piled as intricately as the stone walls of that miniature phantom city, swarming in countless numbers across its surface without a gap even as wide as a needle's tip, smothering it entirely. The vision of the ash surface spreading into a field of blue had been an illusion, but this swarm of insects smothering the stem was no illusion—spread across entirely, vivid blue, countless, countless...

“Oh Rose, Thou Art Sick!” Suddenly, at that moment, he heard it. It had come from his own mouth. But to his ears, it sounded like someone else’s voice. He could only think that something other than himself had compelled his mouth to speak. That line was a single verse from someone’s poem. He must have remembered seeing it quoted on a book’s frontispiece or somewhere.

While trying to calm his mind as best he could, he took the still-inverted bowl before him and, as a means to that end, quietly offered it toward his wife. At the instant he thrust his hand forward,

"Oh Rose, Thou Art Sick!" Suddenly, without meaning to, that line again escaped his lips.

He finally finished his morning meal with just one bowl.

His wife was sobbing quietly. “Alas! Has it started again?” she murmured inwardly about her husband while clearing the table. As she picked up the flower cup, she found herself at a loss over what to do with it. That gnawed and charred bud must have been crushed by him unconsciously—splintered into fragments and scattered crimson across the hearth’s edge. Pretending not to see them even as he looked on, he stepped one foot down from the veranda into the garden. And in that instant—

"Oh Rose, Thou Art Sick!"

Fairyland Hill today etched into the deep blue sky a line like a woman's flank with sharp clarity, while beautiful clouds floated out with utmost lightness from where trees with fanning foliage stood tall on the hill's elevated part. The yellowish-brown russet color was so beautiful it made one want to weep. The earth's hue, which had turned purple sometime during the day, accentuated those green vertical stripes all the more. Moreover, today threads of black shadow were woven into those stripes. The hill compelled his eyes twice as strongly today.

"In the end, won't I hang myself there? There, something is calling to me."

“Don’t be absurd. Don’t make such morbid suggestions out of idle curiosity.”

“I pray you don’t meet some dismal end.”

His fantasy jerked one of his hands upward. As if he were now trying to cast an invisible sash over an invisible branch atop that hill... "Oh Rose, Thou Art Sick!" The water in the well rippled quietly in circular patterns, just as it had been that morning. In it, his face was reflected. A single diseased persimmon leaf fluttered down and came to rest floating there. From that light touch, circular ripples spread quietly across the surface, and the well water shimmered. And then it returned to its original calm once more. It was calm, utterly calm. It was infinitely calm.

"Oh Rose, Thou Art Sick!"

In the rose thicket, there were now no flowers—not a single one remained. Only leaves were left. Even those leaves were all infested. When his eyes chanced to notice it and he looked without truly intending to, his wife had placed the cup containing that morning's flower in a dark corner of the kitchen—beside a shelf, compact yet desolate, crimson—as if concealing it. It stabbed at his eyes.

“Why do you get angry over such trivial things? “You treat life as a plaything.” “It’s monstrous……” “You understand nothing of endurance.”

“Oh Rose, Thou Art Sick!” On a certain branch of a certain bamboo in the backyard thicket, a kudzu leaf had entwined itself, and though there was no particular wind, that single leaf alone swayed back and forth with uncanny vigor. And each time, the leaf’s underside flashed white—even as he stared fixedly at it… The dogs, having spotted him, came eagerly flying back from the field and leaped at him from both sides. Even as he twisted his body to avoid them... Even when a shrike began its piercing shrill cry from some branch of some tree……; even when he looked up to see flocks of migratory birds scattering like falling leaves across the dazzling sunset sky……; even when he gazed at the deep blue of the bright evening firmament……; even when he observed wisps of supper smoke rising motionless and quiet from a house at the foot of the opposite hill……

“Oh Rose, Thou Art Sick!” The words chased him endlessly. It was his mouth that uttered them, but it was not his voice. His ears heard someone’s voice. If not that, his mouth instantly mimicked the voice his ears had heard—even though he was supposed to have not spoken a word all day.

The dogs barked in unison. Frightened by their own echoes, they barked even more fiercely. The echoes grew more intense. Their barking redoubled... until his mental state became their voices, their voices his mental state. In the dark kitchen, his wife fed flames into the hearth. Her wish to return to Tokyo was surely being nourished there at such moments. A cat returned from somewhere cried insistently for supper. When the fire suddenly flared, half his wife's face glowed crimson and grotesque. In that kitchen corner emerged the rose cup—a faint crimson bloom in the shadows. That rose—the blighted rose smoldered!

He tried to light the lamp, struck a match—and in that instant when the space around his hands flared bright— "Oh Rose, Thou Art Sick!" He forgot to bring the match to the lamp's wick, listening intently to that voice. When the match's slender stem finished burning, it first became a red line, then promptly and drearily went out. The blackened match head dropped softly onto the tatami mat. The air in this house had grown gloomy, damp, and rotten—could it be that this was why the lamp wouldn't light? He struck another match.

“Oh Rose, Thou Art Sick!” No matter how many he struck, no matter how many.

“Oh Rose, Thou Art Sick!” Where on earth could that voice be coming from? Could it be a divine revelation? Could it be a prophecy?

In any case, the words pursued him. On and on and on...

(September 1918)