Pathway to Japanese Literature

I Kakutarou, afflicted with lung disease, had once again been left behind by his wife today and was forced to vacantly keep watch over the empty house. At first, even someone as good-natured as he had felt intense anger and even considered using that as grounds for separation, but the weakness of his illness gradually made him grow resigned. When he considered his own short future and his beloved child’s well-being, he couldn’t bring himself to act rashly. In that regard, being a third party, his younger brother Kakujirou had more decisive thoughts. He would grow frustrated with his older brother’s timidity and sometimes speak in a critical manner.

“Why does Brother act that way?” “If it were me, I would’ve divorced her ages ago.” “Does he have any reason to show mercy to someone like that?”

But for Kakutarou, it wasn’t merely a matter of pity. He knew full well that divorcing Osei now would leave her and her lover—undoubtedly some destitute student—in immediate hardship that very day. Yet beyond pity, he had another reason. Of course he worried about his child’s future, and though shame prevented him from confiding even in his younger brother, he still couldn’t bring himself to abandon Osei despite her cruelty. Thus he feared her complete departure so deeply that he refrained from reproaching her infidelity altogether.

As for Osei, she understood Kakutarou’s feelings all too well. To state it grandly, something akin to an unspoken compromise had formed between them. In the intervals between her trysts with her secret lover, she never neglected to caress Kakutarou with whatever energy remained. From Kakutarou’s perspective, he could only feel helplessly gratified by these meager crumbs of affection she deigned to bestow.

“But when I think about the child…” “You can’t judge things so categorically.” “I might last another year or two—my days are numbered—and if the child lost his mother too on top of that, it’d be too pitiful.” “Well, I’ll try to endure a little longer.” “Ah well—Osei’s bound to come around before long.”

Kakutarou would answer in that manner, making it a habit to frustrate his younger brother all the more. But rather than being moved by Kakutarou’s benevolence to reconsider, Osei sank deeper day by day into her adulterous affair. For this purpose, her father—bedridden with a prolonged illness and in dire straits—was used as an excuse. She would leave the house at least every three days under the pretext of visiting her father. Verifying whether she had actually returned to her hometown was of course a simple matter, but Kakutarou did not even do that. It was a peculiar state of mind. He adopted a defensive attitude toward even himself, as if shielding Osei.

Today as well, Osei meticulously prepared her appearance from the morning and briskly headed out.

You don’t need makeup just to go back home.

Kakutarou silently endured the sarcastic remark that rose to his lips. Lately, he had even begun feeling a peculiar pleasure in this self-imposed restraint—this endearing pathos of withholding the very words he longed to speak.

When his wife had left, he would begin bonsai gardening out of restlessness—a hobby he had taken up. Going down to the garden barefoot and getting covered in dirt, he found his mood somewhat lightened even so. Moreover, feigning absorption in his hobby was necessary—both for others’ sake and his own.

When noon approached, the maid came to announce that the meal was ready. “Lunch is ready, but would you prefer to wait a little longer?” Even the maid looking at him with that overly reserved, heartrending gaze was painful for Kakutarou.

“Ah, is it already that time? Well then, shall we have lunch? You should go call the boy.” He put on a brave front and answered with forced cheerfulness. By now, putting on a brave front had become his habit in all things. On days like those especially, the maids’ thoughtful preparations meant the dining table was laid with more lavish dishes than usual. But for about this past month, Kakutarou had not eaten a single delicious meal. Even Shouichi, when subjected to the house’s icy atmosphere, would make even the brash neighborhood tough suddenly wilt dejectedly.

“Where did Mama go?”

He anticipated a certain answer, yet he couldn’t rest without asking. “She has gone to Grandfather’s place.” When the maid answered, he—with a sneer unbefitting a seven-year-old child—merely said “Hmph” and began shoveling his meal. Though just a child, he seemed to refrain from pressing further out of deference to his father. And he too had his own pretense to maintain.

“Papa, can I call my friends over?” When the meal ended, Shouichi peered sweetly into his father’s face. Kakutarou sensed in it a pitiable child’s desperate attempt to please, feeling both heartrending pathos and, simultaneously, an inescapable discomfort toward himself. But the reply that escaped his lips was nothing but his usual pretense.

“Ah—you can call them over,” “Just play quietly now.” Having received his father’s permission—though this too might have been part of the child’s act—Shouichi cried “I’m so happy! So happy!” and dashed outside with feigned cheerfulness, soon returning with three or four playmates in tow. As Kakutarou sat picking his teeth after the meal, the thunderous racket of stomping feet already began echoing from the children’s playroom.

II

The children didn’t stay cooped up in the playroom for long. It seemed they had started a game of tag or something—the clamor of them running from room to room and the maid’s voice trying to restrain them reached even Kakutarō’s room. Among them was even a child who, confused, slid open the fusuma door behind him. “Ah! There’s a man here!”

When they saw Kakutarou’s face, they shouted such things with awkward expressions and fled to the other side. In the end, even Shouichi burst into his room. And saying things like “I’ll hide here,” he crouched beneath his father’s desk.

As he watched these scenes, Kakutarou felt a heartening sensation well up within him. And then, abruptly, he felt like putting aside his bonsai gardening today and joining the children in their play. “Boy, stop making such a racket. Papa will tell you an interesting story, so go gather everyone.” “Yay! I’m so happy!” Hearing this, Shouichi suddenly shot out from under the desk and went running off.

“Papa is really good at telling stories, you know!” Before long, Shouichi entered Kakutarou’s room while making such a flustered introduction, dragging his companions along in tow. “Come on now—let’s have a story. A scary one would be best!” The children packed themselves together and sat there, eyes shining with curiosity—some bashful, others timid—as they stared at Kakutarou’s face. They knew nothing of Kakutarou’s illness, and even had they known—being children—they wouldn’t have shown the overly cautious manner typical of adult visitors. To Kakutarou, this too came as a relief.

There, more invigorated than he’d been in ages, he began—recalling the tales that never failed to delight the children—“Once upon a time in a certain land, there lived a greedy and deep king.” Even when one story ended, the children wouldn’t relent, clamoring, “More! More!” He obliged them, adding two or three more tales one after another. And as he wandered through the world of fairy tales with the children, he grew increasingly cheerful.

“Well then, let’s stop the stories and play hide-and-seek this time. Uncle will join in too.” In the end, he came out with such a suggestion. “Yeah, hide-and-seek sounds good!”

The children, as if to say they’d gotten exactly what they wanted, immediately agreed.

“So then, we’ll hide all over this house.” “Are you ready?” “Let’s do rock-paper-scissors!”

With a “Rock-paper-scissors!”, he began to frolic like a child. It might have been his illness’s doing. Or perhaps it was an unspoken front against his wife’s misconduct. In any case, his behavior undeniably carried a tinge of desperation. For the first two or three rounds, he deliberately played “it” and hunted for the children’s guileless hiding spots. When this grew stale, he switched sides and labored alongside them to cram his large frame into closets and under desks.

“Ready or not?” “Not yet!”—these shouts echoed madly throughout the house.

Kakutarou was hiding all alone in the dark closet of his room. The child who was “it” could be faintly heard calling “Gotcha, [Name]!” while roaming from room to room. Among them were children who would shout “Waaah!” and leap out from their hiding places. Before long, everyone had been found—leaving only him remaining—and the children seemed to join forces in energetically searching through every room. “I wonder where the mister hid.”

“Mister, come out now!” As their chattering voices reached him, they gradually drew closer to the closet. “Giggle, giggle. Papa’s definitely in the closet.”

A whisper in Shouichi’s voice was heard right by the door. As it seemed he was about to be found, Kakutarou—thinking to draw out their anticipation a little longer—quietly opened the lid of an old storage chest inside the closet, slipped within, shut the lid back in place, and held his breath. Inside lay fluffy bedding or something akin to it, and with its resemblance to lying on a proper bedstead, it wasn’t uncomfortable at all. Just as he closed the lid of the storage chest, the heavy wooden door clattered open.

“Uncle, found you!”

A cry of "Uncle, found you!" rang out.

“Huh? He’s not here!” “But there was a sound earlier! Hey, [Name]!” “That was definitely a rat.” The children kept repeating their innocent whispers—which within the sealed storage chest sounded as if coming from very far away—but no matter how much time passed, the dim closet remained silent and devoid of any human presence, so— “It’s a ghost!”

When someone shouted, they exclaimed “Waaah!” and ran away. And then, in a distant room, “Uncle, come on out!”

Their voices calling in unison faintly reached him. They still seemed to be opening the closets in that area and searching.

III

Inside the pitch-dark, camphor-smelling storage chest, it was strangely comfortable. Kakutarou found himself suddenly overwhelmed by nostalgic memories of his boyhood, brought to the verge of tears. This old storage chest had been one of his deceased mother’s bridal trousseau items. He remembered how he would pretend it was a boat and often climb inside to play. As he did so, even the face of his kind mother seemed to materialize like an apparition in the darkness. But when he regained awareness, the children appeared to have abandoned their search and fallen silent. After listening intently for some time,

“This is so boring. Let’s go play outside instead.” The voice of some child—who it was remained unclear—saying such things in a disappointed tone reached him faintly. “Paaapa!” It was Shouichi’s voice. With that final call, he too seemed ready to head outside. Kakutarou, hearing this, finally resolved to emerge from the storage chest. He thought he would leap out and give the impatient children a good scare. Mustering his strength, he tried lifting the lid—yet somehow, the tightly sealed lid refused to budge. At first assuming it trivial, he pushed against it repeatedly, but gradually a horrifying truth dawned on him. He had accidentally been locked inside the storage chest.

The storage chest’s lid had butterfly-shaped metal fittings with holes that fit into protruding fixtures below, but when he closed the lid earlier, the raised fixture had accidentally fallen into place, effectively locking it as if with a padlock. Antique storage chests were formidable objects with iron plates riveted to every corner of their sturdy boards—so thoroughly reinforced as to feel oppressive—and their metal fixtures were equally robust; thus, for the ailing Kakutarō, breaching it proved utterly impossible.

He shouted Shouichi’s name at the top of his voice while rattling the underside of the lid. But whether the children had given up and gone out to play or not, there came no response. Thereupon, he now began shouting the maids’ names one after another, mustering all the strength he could, and thrashed about inside the storage chest. But in such ill-fated circumstances, there was nothing to be done—whether the maids were idling at the wellside again or simply unable to hear from their quarters, there came no reply to this either.

The room containing that closet was located in the deepest part of the house, and given that he was shouting from inside a tightly sealed box, it was questionable whether his voice would even carry two or three rooms away. Moreover, since the maids' quarters were situated farthest away by the kitchen area, unless they were deliberately straining their ears, there was virtually no chance of them hearing him. As his voice grew increasingly shrill, Kakutarou began to think that if no one came, he would end up dying inside the storage chest. How absurd—such a thing couldn’t possibly happen, he thought; on one hand, he felt it was so ludicrous he could almost burst out laughing, yet it also didn’t seem entirely laughable. When he came to his senses, he—with his illness that made him sensitive to air—felt that it had somehow grown scarce, and not just from his thrashing, a kind of suffocation began to take hold. Due to its meticulous construction from times past, there could be no doubt that the tightly sealed storage chest had not a single gap through which air could pass.

When he thought of that, he summoned what little strength remained after his earlier violent exertions and thrashed about desperately, hitting and kicking like a man possessed. If he had been in possession of a healthy body, perhaps thrashing about like that would have easily created a gap somewhere in the storage chest. But with his utterly weakened heart and emaciated limbs, not only was such exertion entirely beyond his capabilities, but the suffocating lack of air pressed in on him moment by moment. From fatigue and terror, his throat grew so parched that even breathing became painful. How should one describe his state of mind at that moment?

If this had been some slightly more consequential place to be trapped, Kakutarou—destined to die sooner or later from his illness—would surely have resigned himself to his fate. But to suffocate inside the storage chest in his own household closet—no matter how he considered it, such a thing was utterly inconceivable, an utterly farcical notion—and he loathed the idea of perishing in such a comedic manner. Even as this went on, it wasn’t impossible that a maid might come here. Then he could be saved as if by a miracle. This agony could be dismissed as nothing more than a laughable episode. The greater the possibility of rescue grew, the harder he found it to resign himself. And with that, his terror and agony only intensified.

As he thrashed about, he cursed the blameless maids in a hoarse voice. He even cursed his own son Shouichi. Their indifference—devoid of malice though it was, despite being separated by no more than twenty ken—felt all the more bitter precisely because it held no ill will. In the darkness, the suffocation intensified moment by moment. He could no longer produce a sound. Only his drawn breaths continued with a strange noise, like a fish stranded on land. His mouth opened wider and wider. His skeleton-like upper and lower teeth appeared down to the roots of his gums. Though he knew it was futile, the nails of both hands clawed frantically at the underside of the lid with grating scrapes. He was no longer even aware of his nails tearing away. It was death throes. Yet even then, his circumstances—clinging to a threadlike hope of rescue while unable to relinquish life—were unspeakably cruel. It had to be called an agony beyond what any victim of terminal illness or even condemned criminal had ever tasted.

IV

The adulterous wife Osei returned from her tryst with her lover around three o'clock that afternoon—just as Kakutarō, clinging with desperate tenacity to his last shred of hope and now reduced to faint, insect-like breaths, writhed in his death throes within the storage chest.

When she had left the house, she had been too frantic to spare a thought for her husband’s feelings—but even she couldn’t help a twinge of guilt upon returning. Seeing the entrance left wide open—an unusual sight—her heart leapt at the thought that the collapse she’d nervously dreaded day after day might have finally arrived. “I’m home!” Though anticipating the maid’s response, her call went unanswered. The rooms thrown open held no trace of human presence. Most suspicious of all was the absence of her habitually reclusive husband.

“Is no one here?”

When she entered the tea room, she called out once more in a shrill voice. Then, from the direction of the maids’ quarters,

“Yes, yes!” A shrill reply came, and perhaps having dozed off, a single maid emerged with a puffy face.

“Are you alone here?”

Osei listened while steadfastly enduring the habitual irritation rising within her.

“Um, Miss Otake is doing the laundry in the back.” “And Master…?” “He would be in his room.” “But he isn’t here!” “Oh, is that so?” “What now? You were taking a nap, weren’t you? This is unacceptable! And the boy—” “Well, until just a moment ago, he was playing at home. Ah, Master was also with him, playing hide-and-seek.”

“Oh, Master, you’re simply impossible,” When she heard this and finally regained her usual composure, she said, “Then Master must be out front as well. You go look for him. If he’s there, that’s fine—no need to call for him.”

After issuing the harsh command and leaving it at that, she entered her parlor, stood before the mirror for a moment to examine herself, then proceeded to begin changing her clothes.

And it was just as she was about to begin untying her obi. Suddenly pricking up her ears, she heard a strange grating sound coming from her husband’s room next door. Some instinct warned her—it didn’t sound like rats or anything of that sort. Moreover, when she listened carefully, she felt it even sounded like a hoarse human voice. She stopped untying her obi and, enduring the eeriness, slid open the connecting door to look. Then she realized that the wooden door of the closet—which she hadn’t noticed before—was open. It seemed the noise was indeed coming from within.

“Help me. It’s me.” Though faint and barely perceptible—a muffled voice hovering between existence and nothingness—it struck Osei’s ears with unnatural clarity. Unmistakably her husband’s voice. “Oh my—what have you done getting yourself into that storage chest?” Even she could not suppress her shock as she rushed to the chest’s side. Working at the latch, “Ah, so you were playing hide-and-seek,” she said with feigned realization. “You always did indulge in such childish games... But however did this end up locked?”

If Osei was indeed a born villainess, perhaps her true nature lay not in her role as a wife keeping a secret lover, but rather in this very swiftness to conceive wicked acts—for having undone the latch and barely lifted the lid, she suddenly pressed it back down with all her might and refastened the clasp. At that moment, from inside, Kakutarō—perhaps mustering his last strength—exerted what felt to Osei like an utterly feeble force against the lid. As if to crush it, she closed the lid for good. In later years, whenever Osei recalled her merciless murder of her husband, what tormented her most—more than any other memory—was the sensation of his feeble resistance against the lid when she closed the storage chest. To her, that memory seemed many times more dreadful than any vision of blood-soaked thrashing in death throes.

In any case, after restoring the storage chest to its original state and firmly closing the wooden door, she hurried back to her room. And yet, she lacked the boldness to change clothes; turning deathly pale, she sat before the chest of drawers and began needlessly opening and closing its drawers—as if to drown out the noises from the neighboring room.

“If I do this… will I truly be safe?”

That thought consumed her to the point of madness. But in that moment, there was no possibility of having the leisure to think things through slowly; at times, even as she keenly felt how impossible it was to form a coherent thought, she could only alternate between standing and sitting. That being said, even when she later reflected on it, there had been no oversight in her spur-of-the-moment reasoning. It was understood that the latch could be closed with one hand; that Kakutarō, having been playing hide-and-seek with the children, must have accidentally become confined within the storage chest; that the children and maids would surely testify amply to this fact; and as for the failure to hear any sounds or cries from within the chest—one could simply attribute it to the spaciousness of the house, and leave it at that. After all, hadn’t even the maids remained completely unaware?

Though she hadn't thought it through so deeply, Osei's wicked intuition whispered without need for reasoning: It's fine, it's fine. The maid sent to search for the child had not returned. The maid doing laundry in the back showed no sign of entering the house. If only her husband's groans and noises would stop now—this single wish filled her mind. Yet the closet's persistent sounds continued like malicious clockwork, faint yet unceasing. Pressing her ear against its door—she couldn't bring herself to open it—she heard scraping unabated. Worse still came his mutterings through a tongue parched rigid beyond sense. No doubt these formed dreadful curses against her. Terror nearly made her unclasp the chest—but doing so would doom her position irredeemably. Now that he'd perceived her murderous intent, how could she save him?

Even so, what must Kakutarō’s state of mind have been like inside that storage chest? Even she, the perpetrator, had hesitated to the point of nearly reversing her decision. Yet her imaginings must have amounted to no more than a thousandth—no, a ten-thousandth—of the man’s own extraordinary torment when compared to his truly rare agony. Just as he had nearly given up, his own wife—though an adulteress—had unexpectedly appeared and even begun undoing the latch. At that moment, Kakutarō’s exultation must have been beyond compare. Even if Osei—whom he had long resented—were to commit twofold or threefold infidelity beyond this, it would still have seemed to him a mercy so profound he would have felt indebted beyond measure. However frail one’s body may be, life remains that precious to those who have tasted death’s brink. But from that fleeting joy, he was cast down into an infinite hell beyond what words like despair could express. Had no saving hand come and he died as he was, that pain would never have been of this world; yet layer upon layer, tens upon tens of layers of unspeakable agony were piled upon him by the adulteress’s hand.

Osei could not have imagined such torment, yet even within the limits of her comprehension, she could not help but pity her husband’s death throes and regret her own cruelty. But the fateful adulterous feelings of a villainess were beyond even the villainess herself to control. She stood before the storage chest that had fallen silent without her noticing and, instead of mourning the victim’s death, was envisioning the visage of her beloved lover. A lifetime of leisure funded by her husband’s inheritance, a carefree life with her lover that no one would censure—merely envisioning these was more than enough to make her forget the meager pity she felt for the deceased.

Thus, with a composure unimaginable to ordinary people—one she had now regained—she retreated to the adjoining room. Even forming a cold, wry smile at the corner of her lips, she then began to untie her obi.

V

Around eight o'clock that night, the scene of the corpse’s discovery—skillfully orchestrated by Osei—was enacted, and the Kitamura household was thrown into utter chaos. The large drawing room filled with relatives, regular visitors, doctors, police officers—all those who had rushed over upon hearing the emergency. They could not omit the formalities of the inquest. Around Kakutarō’s corpse—left deliberately within the storage chest—the officials soon stood assembled. To any outsider, how identically grief-stricken these two must have appeared—Kakujirō, mourning from the depths of his soul, and Osei, her face smeared with counterfeit tears—as they stood among the officials at that scene.

The storage chest was carried out to the center of the drawing room, and its lid was casually opened by a police officer. The fifty-candlepower electric light illuminated the grotesquely contorted, anguished figure of Kakutarō. The hair he had always kept neatly combed now stood on end in disarray; limbs contorted as if in death throes; eyeballs bulging; a mouth stretched open beyond any natural capacity—had Osei not housed a demon within her very flesh, anyone who glimpsed this sight would have been compelled to confess their sins on the spot. Despite this, she couldn’t bring herself to look directly at it, yet not only did she make no confession—she tearfully spouted shameless lies. Even she herself could not fathom how she remained so composed; though it might be chalked up to the sheer audacity of having killed a person, it was strange enough to give even her pause. Several hours earlier, when she had returned from her illicit outing and approached the entrance—though even then she had undoubtedly been a full-fledged villainess—she now seemed to herself like an entirely different person. Upon seeing this, one might wonder if a demon terrifying to the world had dwelt within her from birth, now beginning to reveal its true form. This, judging from the unimaginable composure she later displayed during a certain crisis, appears to leave no room for alternative interpretation.

Before long, the inquest procedures concluded without any particular complications, and the corpse was transferred from the storage chest to another location by relatives. And then, having somewhat regained their composure, they were finally able to direct their attention to the scratches on the underside of the storage chest’s lid. Even if someone wholly unaware of the circumstances—who had not witnessed Kakutarō’s gruesome corpse—were to look at them, those scratches would undoubtedly appear grotesquely terrifying. There, the dead man’s dreadful obsession was carved with a vividness that no masterpiece could match. So much so that anyone who caught a glance would avert their eyes, never to look upon it again.

Among them, only Osei and Kakujirō had discovered something astonishing from the scratched surface. They remained behind after those who had departed to another room with the corpse, and from both ends of the storage chest continued their uncanny staring at the shadow-like thing that had appeared on the underside of the lid. Oh, what on earth had been there?

It was shadow-like and indistinct, clumsy as a madman’s brushstrokes—yet upon closer inspection, overlaying countless scratches, one character large, another small—some slanted, others twisted nearly beyond recognition—the three characters “Osei” stood out vividly. “It concerns Sister-In-Law… doesn’t it?”

Kakujirou directed his fixed gaze toward Osei and spoke in a low voice.

“Yes, that’s correct.” Ah, that such composed words had escaped Osei’s lips at that moment—what an astonishing fact it was! Of course, she could not possibly be unaware of those characters’ meaning. Kakutarō, in his death throes, had finally managed to carve out a curse against Osei with his last strength—the character “I” marking both the completion of that line and the moment of his agonizing demise through all-consuming obsession. He must have desperately wished to continue writing how Osei herself was the perpetrator, but Kakutarō—a man indistinguishable from misfortune itself—could not even achieve this. Thus did he petrify for eternity, clutching an undying grudge.

However, being a good man himself, Kakujirou could not harbor suspicions to that extent. What the mere three characters “Osei” signified—that they might indicate the perpetrator—lay beyond his imagination. The impression he derived from it was nothing but a vague suspicion toward Osei and his brother’s remorseless feelings—how pitifully, even in his death throes, he had been unable to forget her, carving her name with his agonized fingertips.

“My, my, did you deign to worry about me so much?”

After a while, Osei sighed profoundly, laden with regret for the infidelity that the other party must have already sensed beyond words. And then, abruptly pressing a handkerchief to her face—(no great actor could have produced such artful tears)—she wept bitterly.

VI

Once Kakutarō’s funeral was concluded, the first act Osei performed—albeit only superficially—was to cut off her illicit lover. Then, with unparalleled artifice, she devoted herself to dispelling Kakujirō’s suspicions. Moreover, this succeeded to some extent. Even if only temporarily, Kakujirō had fallen neatly into the femme fatale’s deception.

Thus Osei—having received an inheritance far exceeding expectations—sold the family estate she had long inhabited and, together with her son Shōichi, moved from one residence to another. With the aid of her practiced theatrical artifices, she gradually slipped away from her relatives' surveillance, vanishing without a trace. The storage chest in question had been forcibly claimed by Osei and was then secretly sold off by her to an antique dealer. Into how many hands has that storage chest now passed? Could those scratches and eerie kana characters have failed to pique their new owners' curiosity? Did he not suddenly shudder at the terrifying obsession dwelling within those claw marks? And faced with those enigmatic three characters "Osei"—what sort of woman might he have imagined? If anything, it might have been the form of an innocent maiden yet to know the world's ugliness—but.