Pathway to Japanese Literature

I

“Did you know Nakai Tensei had died?”
“You claim ignorance? That sot Nakai Tensei – impossible you wouldn’t know him.”

Seven days and seven nights without drink
Not hearing Apollo’s lyre
Abstaining from meat, embracing no nymphs
(Tensei – your face)
Like some ruined Bacchus

“Wasn’t you wrote this doggerel? I’d always thought it yours.”

“What’s this? Kasutori this time? Just a single bottle of beer?”
“Tch, turns out you’re not much to speak of either, Shūgorō. And here I thought you at least had some fire in you.”
“…On average, how much does it come to monthly? About five thousand?”
“…Hmm, well, I suppose that’s right. That sounds about right.”
“…Yeah, fine. I’ll drink.”

“Now before I get soused—you don’t happen to have any short story ideas for about eighteen pages? Need an entertaining plot with a light motive. Some magazine roped me into it, but I can’t write that sort of drivel…… I didn’t slog through life just to churn out that garbage.”
“But there’s this… obligation of sorts to that magazine company. And there’s reasons behind it.”
“…Truth is, I do need some cash for it. But even saying that—it’s such a pittance. No reason for me to go hawking entertainment pieces around.”

“You and I are in different positions there.”

“As for me, I don’t want to stoop that low in character…… Yeah, pour me another.”

“Seems you’ve regained some scrap of humanity at last... Must be your stomach’s reeling after going so long without.”
“Not that I’m completely gone to ruin yet—just my kidneys acting up lately.”
“The wife’s popping out another kid next month, and last month my eldest got herself hospitalized—nothing grand, mind you.... We liberal-era brats spoil our rotten whelps something awful.”
“You... Even spouting hospital talk these days—why ain’t you playing the fool over it?”

“Do you really not know Nakai Tensei?”
“Hmm, I don’t think that’s possible... If you truly don’t know him, then you’re a pitiful soul.”
“Nakai Tensei... I’m getting teary-eyed.”

“Mr. Koyama was involved with Saturday Theater—or was it Free Theater? No, Saturday Theater, I believe—back then. You must know about that time. And opposing him, the one who ran something called Human Theater was Nakai Tensei.”
“He apparently wrote poetry too, but it was his Synge-style one-act plays that earned him considerable acclaim.”
“I still can’t forget that one-act play called ‘Who’s the Fool?’; the theater troupe was terrible when they performed it, so some critic wrote that he was ‘a hack writer’—”
“What vile things were written about him; there were even times he got drunk and stormed over to that bastard’s house.”
“Back then, we were all pure. We had no money or fame, but each of us wore laurel wreaths upon our heads.”
“You’re nothing like me—you’re nothing at all. Drink, Shūgorō—quit your moping.”

"My head lacks education, but it brims with poetry."
Tensei would often say this while tapping his forehead rhythmically with his right fingers, narrowing his eyes like so—"...brims with poetry."
And then he sank into some void.
Yeah—vanished, that head crammed full of poetry... The world has those types: clamored about while alive, forgotten the moment they die.
Then there's the other sort—go entirely unnoticed while breathing, yet suddenly gain stature when deceased.
...He belonged to neither camp, you understand—which is to say, he was Nakai Tensei.

But at that time, I had not yet known him directly.
It seems I had only read his plays and seen the criticism and gossip about him—then, as his name vanished from journalism, I too forgot him completely. Yes—completely. Clean forgotten.
Pathetic, really.
Apollo’s lyre, nymphs’ soft skin, meat and wine and dance—the Greeks were happy because they were free from intellectual shackles.
Enough with this nonsense—I’m not drunk yet. There’s nothing in this world that can get me drunk.
This is no joke—I may look like this, but... We all took pride in dying in nursing homes rather than entering the Hanlin Academy.
You’re just a philistine—haven’t become one yet. Go on, drink up. I’m starting to feel a bit cheerful.

II

I don’t want to talk about why I fled Tokyo back then.
If I were to explain the reasons, there were various complex matters involved—even if you called it a love affair, it couldn’t be simply explained.
……One could say I fled, but it wouldn’t be entirely wrong to claim I had been expelled.
So I tumbled into Mr. Ōmura’s house in Suma, where he had left for America as branch manager in Oregon, leaving the place empty.
This left me in a position that was part caretaker and part bodyguard to the wife—though I’d had no desire to debase myself to that extent.

“In any case, given our respective circumstances here, please feel free to make yourself at ease.”

The President’s wife also said this to me.

“Given that I too am of such a disposition, and with various circumstances being what they are here, please feel entirely free to pursue your literary pursuits as you wish.”

She told me this in a nasal voice, touching the back of her hair with one hand, but as for me, there was no such thing as feeling at ease—this wasn’t some trifling matter of literary pursuits. …And so I joined this dubious magazine company called Kobe Night Story Company.
A magazine that was dubious—or perhaps shady—or rather, one that seemed born of reckless abandon; a magazine company of that very nature.

The company was located on the second floor of a café in a narrow alley connecting Motomachi-dori and Sakaemachi’s tram street.
Naturally, it was an old wooden Japanese structure—two six-tatami rooms facing the street opened up into a single space, with desks and chairs arranged atop worn-out tatami mats forming the editorial room.
The windows bore the dense vertical latticework typical of the Kansai region, their deep-hanging eaves mirrored by identical two-story houses across the alley—all engineered to obstruct sunlight and airflow as thoroughly as possible, leaving no grounds to complain about either the gloom or the dampness.

I must have joined around September 20th; the President seemed to feel some sympathy for my circumstances.
He was a diminutive man barely reaching five feet tall, with a complexion that shifted between burnt brown and slate-gray, emaciated as a skeleton, and sporting a small mustache under his nose.
He might have been slightly buck-toothed... Always scurrying in and out, he spoke in a cloying voice that reeked of presidential airs.

“So seein’ as how it’s already November and all, we’ll be payin’ ya October’s salary proper startin’ now.”

With that, he stroked his small mustache and, while stroking it, led me over to introduce me to three men writing something at their desks.
“This here’s our Editor-in-Chief Mr. Taguchi Shiro, this one’s Chief Editor Mr. Nakai Gorō, and this’s General Affairs Manager Mr. Fukuchi Rokurō—that’s how it is, you see.”
I was assigned to Mr. Gorō’s department with orders to assist the editorial bureau and general affairs division as needed, but I don’t care to go into details right now.

Mr. Taguchi Shiro was... Even now, I make a point of feeling no shame in still addressing him as "Mr." He was a handsome man with a beautiful mustache, an oval face, and fair skin. When he spoke, his lips twisted slightly, but his calm and gentle tone suited his character perfectly—he didn’t seem like someone who belonged in that sort of magazine company. To tell the truth—though I myself only heard this secondhand—Mr. Taguchi had apparently once served as a department head at Nagoya Newspaper, and even at that time, his actual position was reportedly as a certain department head at a Kobe newspaper. Somehow having some connection with the mustachioed president, he must have lent his name to that editorial department as well... Mr. Taguchi would come about once every three days, spend roughly two hours there, and then leave.

“Well then, Mr. Nakai, I leave this to you.”

He delivered this remark with practiced composure, holding a briefcase and slender rattan cane in one hand while clutching a black velvet hat in the other. His gait unfolded with deliberate precision—each step measured as though imprinting itself upon the earth—creating an impression of ineffable elegance pregnant with unspoken significance. ...I found myself yearning to walk with such bearing someday.

Fukuchi, the general affairs manager, was nobody special.
If you stepped outside, he was exactly the sort of man you grew tired of seeing everywhere.
He would undertake every menial task only to hand them all over to me, then sprawl across his desk to sleep.
...he slept so soundly that a puddle formed on the desk—whether from snoring breath or drool, who could say.
But... we later learned he had been the President’s spy all along.

Now, Nakai Gorō—this man truly shocked me.
When first introduced by the President, there he sat cross-legged on his chair with a twisted headband, a large sake bottle placed at his right side. He kept pouring its contents into a teacup and swigging them down while scribbling manuscripts.
...Honestly, how to describe it? He carried himself with such brazenness that it fit all too naturally within that editorial office—so perfectly it became unnatural.

“Hmph... So you’re another Tokyo exile too, hmm?”

At that moment, he said this and smirked.
He had a remarkable face, truly remarkable.
Perhaps if one were to make Satomi Ton’s recent visage slightly more somber and add a dash of agony and decadence, it might suffice.
It was a face with deep contours and piercing eyes—in short, an extraordinary face. "...So you're another exile from Tokyo too, hmm?"
He said this and smirked, but I cannot forget those piercing eyes and gleaming white teeth.

III

――I commuted to that company from my house in Suma every day.
You probably wouldn't believe it coming from me, but under such circumstances I maintained perfect attendance—every morning at eight-thirty sharp without fail.
This sort of punctuality fundamentally contradicted literary spirit......I'd push open the café's double doors bearing matatabi insignia and ornate lettering.
Reaching the uneven dirt floor lined with wobbly tables and chairs revealed a broad staircase.
I'd deposit my shoes in the geta box and ascend/descend those stairs—though truth be told,

On the left side of the hallway at the top of the stairs—that is, the side facing the front—was the editorial room, and opposite it on the right side of the hallway was the president's office. A Japanese-style room of about ten tatami mats where he conducted presidential duties during the day—though he was usually absent—and which he used as a bedroom at night. The couple’s living quarters were located in the back downstairs, and it seemed the wife made a habit of sleeping there. The President used to boast that this was a culturally respectful sleeping arrangement and, at the same time, a rational means to prevent marital fatigue. There was likely some truth to this—I seem to recall later reading an article somewhere that made a similar point—but be that as it may, the wife didn’t seem entirely in favor of the method.

――The story still had to address that point—the relationship between the President and his wife.……She was a hulking woman of forty-two or forty-three, her bulk and weight nearly double the President’s. Her receding hairline, sharp cheekbones, gaping mouth, and glittering eyes formed a vulpine visage so repulsive it seemed to concentrate all human greed, shamelessness, and cruelty into one hysterical monstrosity.……They said she’d once held middling status in the flower and willow world. She appeared to be the widow of a sergeant or some such rank. Five or six years prior—perhaps slightly earlier—she’d opened the current café, staffing it with typical waitresses to rake in money raucously.…She’d accumulated considerable savings—then came the mustachioed President.…For my part, I’d rather not linger on such squalid details. But…that mustachioed President deftly wielded his mustache along with various secret documents, ultimately destroying that hysterical mass of greed, shamelessness, and cruelty.

“For a woman of your unparalleled caliber to be engaged in such a base enterprise is utterly unbearable to me—truly, this represents no small loss, both for yourself and for society at large.”

He must have said such things as well.

"What if we were to collaborate in managing a magazine company—one that's cultural, sophisticated, yet profitable? Should that come to pass, not only would I exert every menial effort required for this enterprise's management, but I would devote both body and soul to serving you with absolute loyalty."

He must have said such things as well—no, in fact, there was clear evidence he had indeed said them.
……Ugh, how repulsive—I felt bile rising in my throat.
“Hey, pour me a stiff one.”

As I mentioned before, I would arrive at the company by eight-thirty.
Then completely alone, I’d sit on a wobbling chair in that dim, damp editorial room and face an equally unsteady desk—but that desolate, helpless feeling defied description.
……Yet now there was simply no way to put it into words.
Sometimes Chief Editor Nakai would be there too.
The Chief Editor would get too drunk to go home; he’d lie sprawled asleep wrapped in a threadbare blanket there—but even that brought me no solace.

Regardless of whether Chief Editor Nakai lay collapsed there or not, I would sit on the rickety chair for a while with a drawn face.
Then...strange voices would sometimes carry over from the president’s office—varying in quality each time, seeming consistent yet never quite the same.
On one occasion there was distinctly a woman’s voice crying “Nooo”—unmistakably nasally produced.
“……You there—try saying it without moving your tongue. Just through your nose.”
“No—make it short and nasal: ‘Nooo’.”
“Other times it might be a sharp ‘kik-kik’ sound, or something else entirely... All manner of voices.”

There were times when neither voices nor any sounds could be heard from the president’s office.
Whenever that happened, that repulsive President’s wife would invariably come to the editorial room.
Her face was bluish or whitish—or rather grayish—stiffened and contorted like hardened clay, with bloodshot eyes glaring fiercely beneath tangled strands of disheveled hair.
...Dragging the hem of her nightgown sloppily behind her, she would approach me with a tone poised to bite.

“Don’t you know where our President is?”

Her upper and lower teeth stood bared, clattering against each other.
Her lips had turned white—parched and dry—curled back in a snarl.
I wouldn’t call myself particularly timid, but even so, I had to swallow two or three times before managing a reply.

To put it plainly, the President had already taken up with another woman by then.
Those separate bedrooms—touted as some cultural innovation against marital fatigue—served chiefly to let him slip past his wife’s watch and bed his mistress. ……Thus began circumstances that placed me in an increasingly untenable position.
This came to head one morning—after those baffling noises resounded again from the president’s office. ……Yes, three sharp ripping sounds like thin silk being torn, then about ten minutes later—all at once, from that very room, erupted the wife’s scream.

“If you don’t like it, get out! Get out! Come on, get out!”

It was this shrieking kind of scream.

“This is my house! Everything here was bought with my money! You don’t own a single thing in this place! Get out without a fuss—get out now—just get out!”

The President’s voice was almost inaudible; he seemed to be saying something—or at least trying to.
His voice was mumbling, but I couldn’t make out what he was saying.
The wife seemed to erupt into a violent fit of hysteria, followed by the sound of her lunging and scratching.

“It’s infuriating—so infuriating! With your ‘cultural enterprise’ nonsense tricking me! What kind of filthy magazine is this? What ‘shady profits’? You sweet-talked me from the start planning to embezzle my savings, didn’t you? Get out! Go rot in bed with that thieving demon!”

“’Tis my fault—please forgive me, I beg ya—please!” This time, the President’s voice could be heard—“I won’t see that woman again—please forgive me—I beg ya!”

I stood up from the chair and descended the stairs, muffling my footsteps.
Then at the very bottom step of the staircase sat Chief Editor Nakai. He turned toward me with a faint grin and stood up while cradling a small cloth-wrapped bundle in one arm,

“If the President asks, tell him I left.”

He said this while looking off to the side. Right next to the staircase was a wooden floor leading to the back. There stood the maid named Hana-chan and the café waitress Soeko. They must have been listening to the commotion upstairs there as well. Nakai said “Let’s go” to me, slipped into his geta, and briskly headed outside. With one of his thin shoulders raised and the hem of his worn-out hakama trailing like a banner of decay, the figure that swiftly opened the door remains etched in my eyes with relative vividness even now.

The Chief Editor ushered me into a house nearby that resembled an izakaya.
He appeared to be a regular; though it was still early enough that the place hadn’t yet been cleaned, a dark-complexioned middle-aged woman with her hair coiled up emerged and prepared drinks for us.

“I’ve been meaning to drink leisurely with you—let’s make today enjoyable.”

“But what about work?”

“Days with such special performances are designated holidays. That goatee must spend all day placating Medusa—our presence would only hinder them.”

There we began drinking.
The Chief Editor drank from his cup with crisp gulps—forceful yet retaining unexpected grace.
His left elbow planted on the counter, fingertips pressing his temple, right shoulder slouched in a tilted pose—even these gestures held dignity.
As intoxication spread, those glinting eyes grew feverish, strengthening the sense of confronting something extraordinary.

“Hmm, I see. So you’re pursuing literature? Splendid then.”

“Oh, no—it’s not like that… Literature? That’s… I mean…”

“Don’t get bashful—how pathetic! Literature’s nothing worth blushing over. I’ll become a fishmonger, I’ll turn greengrocer—…same difference. No point squirming or feeling ashamed. Come now—let’s toast to your literary endeavors.”

After leaving that house, we must have bar-hopped around four or five establishments.
I was quite drunk—and had apparently made quite a spectacle of myself.
It was when we were drinking beer in some cramped, chaotic bar—I kept persistently criticizing the Chief Editor.
It was less criticism than something like flattery—there’s no reason someone of Mr. Nakai’s stature should be buried in a place like this—why are you hiding your light like this?
…Well, I went on and on about such things with what seemed like passionate fervor.
Then the Chief Editor raised his face—which had grown somewhat pale—and said while rubbing around his lips with his hand.

“Since when had you seen through me being who I am?”
“You? …To say I’ve seen through anything—”
“Since when had you figured out I’m Nakai Tensei?”

IV

――I was struck by bewilderment.
I couldn’t make sense of it.
Because I had absolutely no idea what the name Nakai Tensei even signified.
……That people maneuver cunningly cannot generally be called a virtue—this I believe in principle. ……Yet at that time I maneuvered cunningly myself. I won’t evade responsibility for it—I feel ashamed.
But in the end, I still secretly believe that I performed one good deed a day.

“I’m happy—so you remembered me after all. I’m happy—it seems I haven’t been completely forgotten yet.”

Chief Editor Nakai said this with tears falling—…truly falling in a steady trickle as he wept.
While watching several droplets fall into the half-finished beer in his glass, I grew increasingly bewildered—and precisely because of that, I found myself unable to avoid resorting to even greater cunning.

That night I stayed at Nakai Tensei's house—a cluttered back-alley tenement in Itayado on the western outskirts.
How we'd managed to get there... When I awoke, we lay together under a single futon.
The storm shutters had been left open, letting sunlight pierce through the shoji screens in a foot-wide band.
A lone fly kept thudding insistently against the sunlit paper.
Somehow I recalled that line from a Russian novel about wanting to die by smashing one's head against a wall—though this memory bore no connection to anything—and scanned the room.
...Just the slovenly quarters of a middle-aged bachelor—nothing worth describing now—but my eyes soon caught fourteen or fifteen flimsy magazines wedged between cheap Seto-ware bookends on the wall-side desk.
These clearly weren't Kobe Night Story issues, yet their spine lettering felt familiar enough that I reached for five volumes.
...They were copies of New Theater, that once-notable amateur drama journal I'd read before.
No reason yet to suspect anything, I idly flipped through one table of contents before tossing it aside and checking another.
There I found it—a one-act play titled "Who's the Fool?"

――I must have been getting a bit drunk.

――I wonder if this rotgut is safe.
The stuff with methyl alcohol in it reeks so bad you shouldn’t be able to drink it unless your mind’s already gone to hell…… Well if that’s how it is, then this swill must be safe enough—pour me some.

――For the next four or five days, Nakai Tensei went around with a face like a crushed tin can.
He would pour sake from that familiar one-liter bottle into a teacup, sit cross-legged on his chair with a twisted headband tied around his forehead, scratching away at his manuscript with grating pen noises.
……Truth be told—though I’d rather not say it—no one could help blushing crimson at manuscripts so shameful they scarcely deserved the name.
Isn’t that right? …The very name Kobe Night Story tells you everything.
Parents hide it from their children, and children must hide it from their parents to read it—in other words, that’s where the goateed president spotted his chance for cultural profiteering.
Yet even that repulsive hysterical wife derided it as a filthy rag—though it hardly seemed profitable enough to warrant such contempt. In truth (though this too I only learned later), the President cleverly exploited the magazine to peddle overpriced sham documents, or sniff out people’s secrets for extortion articles… Ah, I feel like vomiting again.

Nakai Tensei wrote his manuscript with a fierce scratch-scratch-scrape.
For four or five days after that, he wouldn’t speak to me and seemed to hate even looking at my face.
……He must have been ashamed of how he’d gotten emotional and shed tears with me that night—and I too had felt much the same way. That’s why I’d been keeping my distance as much as possible.
……But as for our feelings—there was simply no way to put them into words.
Nakai Tensei……Nakai Tensei.
Of course I didn’t know what true worth his talent held—such things aren’t for anyone to truly grasp. ……After all, hadn’t there been that man hailed as a god of literature in his lifetime—only to have even his mentors and closest friends speak ill of him the moment he died?
……That person had still been that person—in that regard, nothing had changed at all. ……Tensei too had once been recognized for his works in central literary circles, and had even led a small theater troupe.
Regardless of his worth, Nakai Tensei was Nakai Tensei. ……But there you have it—there he was… sinking into that place, in the corner of that dim, damp editorial room like a trash heap, sitting cross-legged on a chair with a twisted headband, sipping sake from a teacup, scratching and scraping his pen across the page as he wrote those shameful manuscripts that would make anyone blush. ……I wouldn’t shed tears—don’t mock me—this wasn’t some trivial thing to snivel over.

――General Manager Fukuchi lay face down, sleeping while creating a puddle on the desk.

――Mr. Taguchi would come about once every three days, attend to this and that, say "Well then, Mr. Nakai, I leave it to you," and―holding a briefcase and walking stick in one hand and a black velvet hat in the other―leisurely make his way back home, step by step in his dignified manner.

――What I did cannot be summed up in a single word.
As for everything except writing manuscripts―why? Because fortunately I still lacked both the skill and insight to write such things―I didn't do that alone, but I suppose I did everything else.

――I also ran errands to the printing plant.
The printing plant was at a place called Ishiyagawa along the Hankyu Line, and whenever I went there, I’d eat lunch several times at a nearby restaurant.
The food was indescribable—and through the window across the way loomed Mount Rokko. The air was so clear it might as well have been a vacuum—the mountain’s whitish rock faces and patchy pine groves stood out with such painful clarity it was unbearable.
Speaking of autumn—though it seems abrupt—those serene, crystalline autumn mountains you hear about were something I couldn’t resonate with in my situation back then.
I don’t want to see those autumn mountains even now.

“How about we go all out tonight?”

One day as we were leaving, Nakai Tensei said with a look of fraying patience. It was an expression like that of a child wheedling a parent—furtively gauging my reaction. “I don’t have any pocket money today.” “Neither do I! But there’s a joint that’ll run us a tab—no sweat there. My treat—here.” Tensei pressed his right hand against the hollow of his stomach as he said this. ……That night marked our first drink together since the incident, though I can’t disentangle that evening’s events for isolated telling.

“Brutus, thou too?”

He would put on airs and deliver such pretentious lines—though this was no one-off occurrence—for afterwards we’d link arms and drink nearly every night…… Before I knew it, he’d even secured us a place that would let me drink on credit.

“What’s this ‘titan of letters’ nonsense? What exactly is Jun’ichirō Tanizaki supposed to be? Spare me your laughter—I don’t truck with Japan’s wretched literary establishment! E KE HOMO—I’ll have you know I remain Nakai Tensei!”

Tensei’s eyes gleamed feverishly, and with a shrug of either his right or left shoulder, he would say such things. High-spirited and resolute, indomitable, a solitary rock standing tall—it may have felt somewhat chaotic, but even I couldn’t remain indifferent.

“I admit defeat—that much I concede—but does anyone know that truth lies in defeat? Speak up! Our literary spirit is founded on believing in ruin. Mark my words—if you think I’ll stay defeated and do nothing, you’re gravely mistaken!”

After that, Tensei would often sing.

Wearing an ivy crown askew

Bacchus, you faun’s companion

They consisted of nonsensical ditties, deliberately vulgar lowbrow pop songs, and various other tunes.
And when I’d try to caution him about being too rowdy for the other customers, he would inevitably strike some bizarre pose and declare “Brutus, thou too?” with evident satisfaction.

――If I say this, you might think it contrived, but I can state without my conscience reproaching me that Nakai Tensei’s demeanor had gradually gained a certain dignity. He was rapidly becoming more himself; what needed to ripen within him had begun to do so. He had not only regained himself but now seemed to be attempting to climb atop the self he had regained.

“I have no scholarly learning,” Tensei declared while tapping his forehead with his right fingertips—then continued in a low whisper through a smirk that suggested he was divulging a secret:
“—but in here, poetry brims.”

He began scheming to launch a literary magazine.
He said it wasn’t too early to make a comeback.
Within him... within his brain... the concepts for several grand novels and dozens of plays had already reached completion.

“Let’s do it, you.
“I too have reached the time to commence my life’s work—it’s a sin to possess what must be done yet leave it undone. Let us raise our banner!”

Five

――During this time, I learned much about him.
After disappearing from journalism, Nakai Tensei had apparently served as literary director at a certain theater in Asakusa, become a repertoire advisor for other troupes, and even traveled with a comedy company.……Around that time he divorced his wife and was loved by a courtesan named Nanitaro from Asakusa—this woman daringly underwent the ordeal of buying out her contract to marry him, accompanying him on his travels. Now she waits for his summons while working as head maid at a high-class tea house in her original district of Asakusa.

"But I have no intention of calling her over—I'm not entertaining such easy comforts now."

Tensei insisted this to me time and again.

“My ambition isn’t some trifling thing like that—I’ve endured filth and despair and poverty for this ambition’s sake! I can’t afford human sentimentality—she remains as she is—…I’ve decided to title the magazine *Human Art*.”

When I got severely drunk, I would often stay at Tensei’s house. When the trains had stopped running, it was not uncommon for me to walk the late-night roads from Hyogo. Along this route existed a place where the rows of houses thinned into vacant lots—on both sides lay overgrown fields, with refuse like scraps of paper and empty cans filthily discarded in that distinctly outskirts-like manner. It was by no means a view that could lift one’s spirits—and yet there they were, rows of cosmos flowers blooming in profusion. They lay fallen sideways—some blooming while collapsed, others rising from their fallen state to bloom—presenting an utterly disorderly and chaotic spectacle, yet I surrendered to how these things kept blooming endlessly along the road……Here I was, numbed by drink and grown melancholic, which precisely drove me to belt out reckless songs and shout arrogant things with forced vigor. Wasn’t this precisely the mood of ruin? Then from the starlit gloom, faintly, dimly white, cosmos flowers came into view……Scattered trash and scraps of paper, then dimly white and utterly still, cosmos flowers blooming endlessly along the road……The blossoms themselves may bear no particular sin, but I simply cannot keep my cap on in their presence.

Tensei gradually began drinking himself into deeper stupors.

My first salary—that is, October’s salary—was a single calculation sheet.
The envelope contained nothing else; at the very bottom of that sheet was written an exact amount in red ink.
In short, the bars and lunch shops had come to collect their tabs, leaving only these red numbers spilling beyond my monthly earnings.
For my part, I felt both disappointment and dissatisfaction, but upon realizing this was what people meant by the so-called deficit business, I think I came away with at least some semblance of a lesson learned.

――Tensei’s circumstances in that regard were apparently more dire.
Accounting—though this meant the president’s wife—had rejected all his tabs at drinking establishments and elsewhere; in short, Tensei not only lacked surplus funds to settle these debts but had substantial outstanding advances, leaving Accounting unable to assume responsibility for them.
...Naturally, collectors from bars and other creditors came to the editorial room.
Following common practice in such situations, he too absented himself from the company for about five days.

――I simply could not help speaking once more about the President and his wife.

――About half a month of tranquil time must have passed since that day of special staging.
I at least maintained my diligence in attendance, still arriving at work by eight-thirty, but would often hear those peculiar voices leaking from the president’s office.
I remained naive for my age, yet had come to understand that those vocalizations—or sounds—signaled a state of marital harmony between them.
...To rephrase, the President had likely devoted his goatee and erudition gleaned from confidential documents entirely to his wife’s service.
But the President himself nursed separate designs.
This too I later learned—he had begun cultivating ambitions to run in the next city council election.
It appeared he’d formulated a scheme to extract necessary campaign funds from that avaricious and ruthless wife of his...…Regarding this endeavor, he maintained supreme confidence in both his trimmed beard and clandestine knowledge; having committed every nuance of his wife’s preferences to memory down to the last detail, he seemed reasonably assured of success.

――It’s a sad thing, I think, that humans are forever deceived by their own hand and tripped up by their own blunders.
The President hadn’t doubted his skills in the slightest—he’d been certain of them.
Yet he failed all the same.
That avaricious hysteric hadn’t hesitated to monopolize the President’s services, but she sneered at his proposal from the start and slammed the door right in his face.

“Ridiculous! Did you think I had money? Don’t be absurd! With collections coming in so poorly this month, we can’t manage at all. Ridiculous! Get a grip, will you?”

I heard this declaration with my own ears, but I was staggered by that unsparing sneer.
I had no direct involvement in any of it, yet I couldn’t help feeling a tenuous loneliness—as though the world itself were being planed down into something flat and dimensionless.

It was after November began that the President donated the unsold and returned magazines to the relevant department at city hall under the pretext of social welfare. This was likely part of his preparatory maneuvering for the upcoming city council election—a mere three thousand copies of old magazines, but fearing a confrontation with his wife, he donated them without her knowledge... I had been specially requested by the President to assist with transporting them from the distributor’s warehouse to city hall.

“Hey you, keep this from the wife, got it?”

The President then took me outside—probably intending to coax me over—and treated me to two cups of coffee at a stall café in a nearby alley.

“Your salary ain’t much, I know—but just hang in there a bit longer. I ain’t gonna keep doing these worthless jobs forever. Soon enough… Well, never mind that—can’t say more yet—but I’ve got your future in hand. Mark my words—I’ll let you bloom proper one day…”

But there too, the President met his downfall.
The city had accepted the donation but apparently paid no attention to the magazines' contents; it seemed they figured old magazines could just be distributed to places like nursing homes and orphanages.
However, they were dismayed upon seeing the actual received items—these were magazines that parents must hide from their children and children must hide from their parents; from the city authorities’ standpoint, there was no way they could distribute such things to affiliated institutions.
Whether there had been various meetings or none at all was beyond imagining, but after about a week, a messenger came to the company, stated that they could not accept such magazine donations, and furthermore demanded their immediate retrieval before leaving.
……The fact that the President was out when this happened and his wife had to receive the message—isn’t that a true tragedy of reality?
And immediately—to be precise, by the next morning when I arrived at the company, it had already—
...Hey—pour me one.

When I climbed the stairs and entered the editorial room, the President’s wife’s scolding voice could be heard from his office. It was a voice so vivid one could practically see before one’s eyes the contorted visage—those ashen lips curled back, the bared upper and lower teeth clattering. I shuddered; every hair on my body stood on end. Was this one of those special performances? If so, I should make myself scarce—I hesitated there with one hand on the chair,

“No no no get out!”

Following this scream came a cacophony of thuds, bangs, and slaps.

I might have smiled a little—I can admit to feeling considerable satisfaction.
Even if he was the goateed President, a man was still a man—that’s where he differed from a woman.
I had been thinking this, but…no sooner had the thought formed than the President came bursting through the sliding door—I saw several scratches across his forehead and cheeks, blood oozing from them.
He was half-naked in a nightgown with its belt undone; no sooner had he burst into the corridor than he sat down there, planting both hands on the floor.

“My fault! Forgive me! Look at this!”

Having said this, he frantically bobbed his head up and down.
I refrained from describing the speed and frequency of this motion lest it seem exaggerated, but the President’s wife shrieked shrilly, lunged at him, yanked his hair, slapped his head and cheeks repeatedly with open palms, then screamed in a voice that could split stone.

“Give back my money, you moron! Thief! How utterly humiliating—shamed by some errand boy! What’s high-class about that? Return the cash and get out! Thief! What in hell should I do now?!”

“Sorry! Forgive me! My fault—I’ll do right by ya from now on, I swearin’! Look here!”

I was dismayed and felt unsettled.
I sneered at my own rash thought that there had been some satisfaction in it and slipped past them to descend the stairs.
...There, as had happened before, Nakai Tensei was present, with Hana-chan the maid and Soeko from the café section standing there.
“Let’s get out of here, Mr. Nakai—another special staging.”

Having said this, I fled outside like some wretch who'd been caught being eavesdropped on in my own disgraceful state, jamming my feet into my shoes as I went.

VI

――Of course that day we took off work and drank.
Tensei appeared to have made arrangements somehow—he wasn’t refused at any drinking establishment, and to some extent they let him drink as they had before.

“Don’t you dare laugh at that goatee. He may be your ‘he,’ but there’s something uniquely his own.”

Tensei persistently defended the President that night.

"For a man to be stripped so bare isn't some haikai-esque poetic state. You averted your eyes from his form crawling along that corridor, but if you can't sense all humanity's original sin in that sight, you've no business dabbling in literature whatsoever."

"Ah, men are pitiable; men cannot be saved."

Tensei added this too.

“The goatee sweet-talked that harpy first—he bound her up tight and squeezed her dry. He believed it himself, everyone acknowledged it too. But it was all backwards! The one bound up was him! The one being squeezed dry is him!... That harpy’s savings ledger’s grown tenfold or more by now. What’s more, she’s planning to open a bar in Hanakuma soon—something only this Tensei knows about at present... The President knows nothing. He’s cleaned out now—real estate, savings, even the magazine’s registration are all under that woman’s name... He’s the one who got stripped bare! He’s the one who was swindled! That lowborn fox-faced she-devil... But you—ah, you—”

Tensei leaned both hands on my shoulders.

"This isn’t just about that goatee—more or less, all men are the same. Past, present, future… Men are all lambs sacrificed as burnt offerings by women."

I think I felt strength drain from my lower abdomen as if starving.
Isn’t this unbearable, you... What a contrivance. If this world’s such an elaborate mechanism, one might as well leap into the sea.
……I grew haggard.
But that wasn’t enough to sober me up significantly.

We started drinking together again as we did every night.
It was only natural.
No—it wasn’t entirely like that. Tensei grew twice as energetic and seemed to have plenty of money now. Where we could drink on credit, we drank on credit, but he also started frequenting places we’d never entered before—iron-grill joints and oden stalls with red lanterns dangling out front—and there he paid properly with cash. …I found myself growing more puzzled than suspicious, for such circumstances seemed impossible to fathom. This might well lead to some unpleasant outcome.
I ventured to say.

“Is it really all right to keep going on like this, Mr. Nakai? What are you even—”

“Petty intellect! You still fret over such trifles? Can’t you see Nakai Tensei towers above such squalor? …Shut that clever little mouth of yours and drink! I know the full scope of my ambitions—every scheme laid bare before me. You must believe in yourself! Drink!”

He ridiculed popular literary writers with dismissive contempt; he showered theater grandees with pitying sneers. He directed merciless verbal blades at poetry, painting, sculpture—across every Japanese art form imaginable.

“Raise your head! Though invisible to the eye, laurel wreaths crown our brows! What are they to us? Does not our age approach? Is it not already upon us? Hah!... Reach out thus and it shall be ours—let us raise our banners!”

He had even taken me to a brothel in Fukuhara once.
And though he’d grown somewhat plump—his once-sharp edges now softened into dishevelment—I couldn’t help feeling reassured.

Nakai Tensei wrote manuscripts during the day.
...And once again, the Company President seemed to have reconciled with his wife.

When evening came, we would go drinking around. We would start bar-hopping from Motomachi westward and wrap up around Hyogo—a precautionary measure in case we had to walk all the way back to Itayado.

“Round and round, round and round goes the whole wide world—ah, how glorious! Let’s shake hands, you! We must live—you hear? Live! You must live! Now—forward march!”

Tensei was ablaze with passion. In the corner of a grimy little bar, he trampled the earthen floor with his geta, clutched the neck of a bloated waitress whose white powder flaked like peeling plaster, suddenly bellowed Othello’s lines in the style of Naniwa-bushi ballads, and gulped down beer in great draughts.

“Gentlemen, remove your hats! Behold—here I stand! I am Nakai Tensei!”

He planted his lips on the waitress’s cheek and toppled over with the chair to vomit.
……Viewed dispassionately, it wasn’t entirely devoid of bathos—though even I wouldn’t state it so bluntly.
But regardless, Tensei burned.

What drivel—who dares call this madness and laugh? The purer a man grows, the more absurd he appears to vulgar eyes. So be it! Tensei burned—not for fame or gain, not for any cause—he immolated his entire being in art’s crucible.
What drivel—speak up! What do any of you possess surpassing him? …Mankind holds treasures beyond peace and home and hale accomplished children and punctual paychecks. Some agonize till they waste away for such things—mock them not.

——It was the November payday.

——Kobe is a place where what they call the Mount Maya wind blows—a piercing cold that descends from the very onset of winter.
The house of Mr. Ōmura where I was staying—located at the foot of Rikyūzan in Suma with its south-facing, sunlit environment—was warm, but in the city, they said that by late November, no one could withstand the cold of morning and evening.

——It was payday.
I must say this much—when the President bluntly told me I was fired, I couldn't help being struck by disappointment and shock to some degree.

“You may have your complaints—mind you, I’ve got my own things I could say—but I’ll kindly keep my trap shut, so you’d best clear out quiet-like.”

“That’s odd. What do you mean by that?”

For my part, I was quite unwilling to be fired.
Since the President spoke as if laboring under some misunderstanding, I thought clarifying matters might yet keep my neck intact... But the goateed man briskly thrust out the pay envelope, smirking with an expression caught halfway between mockery and concession.

“Enough now—nothin’ more to say. But mouths bring trouble, eh? Best mind yours from here on.”

His tone perfectly resembled that of a stationmaster at some private railway company addressing a fare-evading passenger who'd been dragged in. He never once looked at me from beginning to end. His gaunt face—some hybrid of scorched tea and ashen black—along with that pretentious goatee and his puny, fidgeting frame, all suddenly reeked of loathsome cunning. Though part of me despaired at being fired, fury welled up until I nearly lashed out with violent words or actions... Acting high-and-mighty over buying me coffee? That wasn't even half of it. But I soothed myself by labeling him contemptible and retreated to the editorial office with what passed for calm.

When I finished packing my belongings, footsteps sounded from someone approaching down the hallway.
Then the President called out to Mr. Nakai—meaning Nakai Tensei. …He was likely there to collect his salary.
I sat on a chair and waited, sinking into a somewhat pessimistic mood, but at any rate thought I needed to explain things to Tensei.…Yet he didn’t arrive for some time.
A low voice kept mumbling something indistinctly.
There was no sign of it ending…I got up and went to stand by the hallway entrance.

Nakai Tensei sat rigidly before the President.
He had both hands on his knees and was bowing his head.
And he would bow his head low, then bow again and speak in an earnest tone.

"I’ll even accept a pay cut."
"I absolutely promise to curb my drinking—in fact, I was even considering giving it up entirely. Truly, even I can’t endure this state of affairs any longer."

“Do as ya like then. Once I’ve got you in here, whether ya drink yerself blind or stay dry ain’t none o’ my business.”

Oh no—Tensei had been fired too.

“I have a plan to double magazine sales—I’ll write more—I’ll write an entire issue myself—there’s this sensational article now—it’s bound to electrify readers—...President, I implore you—please—just let me stay a little longer—please!”

Ah, how pitiful—my heart was breaking. There Tensei was, bowing his head low—hadn't he even mustered that fervent resolve to write an entire magazine issue single-handedly? I wanted to direct my anger at something.

VII

“You’d best quit now. And I’ll have ya outta here by day’s end, see?”

“Wait, President—just one more word! Given the debt of gratitude I owe for your past kindnesses, it’s unbearable to part like this—I’ve yet to repay your favors—President, I beg you—please—like this—”

I could no longer stand by and watch.
I went over there.
And while saying, “Let’s go, Mr. Nakai,” I grabbed his arm and tried to pull him up.
Then the President smirked and said:

“What a pity—ain’t much gratitude here.”

Those words and that sly smirk were what incited me.
I was even surprised at myself, but I seemed to flare up in a heated rush,

“I’ll give you your damn gratitude!”
With that, I slapped the goateed man’s cheek until he’d had more than enough.
As for me, even now I think it wasn’t a bad line—what do you think?
In situations like that, you can’t just come up with a decent comeback through ordinary means.
However, then Tensei sprang up.
The sound of my slapping must have incited him this time—he suddenly leaped at the President, pinned him down, and straddled him.

“You bastard! What the—what the hell, you bastard!”

Stuttering and shouting wildly, he pounded away at the President’s chest from above. Too overexcited to produce any scathing insults, he seemed incapable even of conceiving a coherent attack. Just then—there she came... that hysterical harpy of a President’s wife, a living amalgam of greed, shamelessness, and cruelty, her face ashen and contorted as she flew into the fray. Predictably, her lips curled back to bare clenched teeth. She sank her fangs ferociously into Tensei’s back.

“What’re you flaunting, you rose-assed hag? Thieves!”

She let out a shrill scream.

“Someone come! Thieves! Thieves! Someone come! Call the police!”

I pushed her away.
It struck me that dawdling any longer would only lead to greater harm.
I pushed aside the hysterical President’s wife, wrested Tensei away from the President, and when she stood back up to come at us again, pushed her down once more.
I might have even shoved the President aside too……I’d say I put on quite the show.
Then I picked up Tensei’s pay envelope from the tatami, dragged Tensei along, and well—attended to various other matters. With that, I grabbed my shoes and Tensei his geta as we bolted outside——but that vile President’s wife kept screeching “Thieves! Thieves!” behind us, her voice clinging to our backs like some relentless curse. We ran nonstop all the way to the railroad tracks.
And then, having confirmed that no one was chasing us, we sat down for the moment on what looked like a piece of lumber by the roadside.
As the two of us faced each other, Tensei was panting heavily,

“Haa... haa... You... You really did it.”
This is what he said.

“We did it.”

“We did it... You... you really did it.”
“You... you really did it.”

Then he started cackling.
I may have laughed myself, but he laughed so uncontrollably that in the end, he pressed his fist against his stomach and shed tears as he cackled.
And when he finally calmed down, wiping his tears with the back of his hand, he began to speak in a serious tone.

“In the end, this is better for us, you know. When a person must make a clean break—you must make it! Staying in that vile, rotten air would only drag us down into depravity... This was the right path. If anything, we should celebrate.”
Tensei narrowed his eyes slightly at that but abruptly stood up and shouted while thrusting his fist forward.

“Let’s drink, you. I’ll see that not a single penny of this filthy money remains unspent!”

“Let’s drink—to your new departure, Mr. Nakai.”

We went on a drinking spree.
That said, my salary wasn’t much after various deductions, and Tensei’s was likely much the same.
So at first, we drank on credit as much as possible, but even so, it wasn’t mere reckless drinking—as we got drunk, our spirits soared.

The final blow came when we were driven out of a small bar called Anraku in Hyogo.
I think it was close to 2 a.m.

We drank to our hearts’ content, you see.

We were walking along a dark road dimly lit by starlight. Every now and then, we sang. Tensei kept staggering. I think he retched about twice... I walked on unsteadily, half-holding him as we staggered along. A terrifyingly cold wind came blowing in from behind. The power lines howled as scraps of paper came tumbling along the asphalt road, overtaking us before rolling onward into the distance.

VIII

“You there... just... let me rest a moment.”

Having said this, Tensei stopped just as the house had come into view and sat down on the withered grass by the roadside.

“It’s just up ahead, Mr. Nakai. That’s already the crossroads.”

“No—it’s no use. I can’t go back.”
Tensei hung his head unsteadily and groaned.

“I’ll carry you on my back. If we stay here like this, you’ll catch a cold. Come on, Mr. Nakai—get up.”

“You go on ahead without me. I can’t go back—can’t go back home, you.”

“Why? Why can’t you go back, Mr. Nakai?”

“――My wife must be here.”

“――Your wife?”

“That’s right—she must be here by now.”

I wondered if Tensei was drunkenly rambling nonsense.
But he made a strange gurgling sound in his throat and seemed about to burst into tears.

"The President—that bastard—told me he'd increase my salary by twenty percent starting this month. I wrote those underground manuscripts for him too—took the money and drank it all away, yes—but I believed him……With that much, we could scrape by—at least keep a married couple fed……That's why I sent for my wife."

The wind blew incessantly, then like waves surging ashore, clumps of withered grass came rustling noisily from afar toward them, swirling around the two men before clamoring off into the darkness beyond.

“I’ve caused my wife so much hardship and worry all this time—this time I thought we’d finally set up a household together and let her live a little easier……So I sent her a letter. She wrote back joyfully—said she’d quit her job by month’s end. The bedding and such arrived two or three days ago……Then this morning after that mess came a telegram—she’s arriving in Kobe tonight at nine.”

“So that was while we were drinking.”

“That’s right—while we were drinking, she arrived in Kobe... No one came to meet her. All alone in a place she’d never been... She carried her own luggage, relying on the address as she walked this freezing night path...”

He choked up again, his throat tightening.
Then for a while he shook his head unsteadily, waved his hands about, and writhed in pain.

"You saw me earlier—crawling on my belly before the President, begging pathetically for mercy. You must have despised me... But I tell you—had he ordered it, I would've done anything. Played dead like a dog, rolled over—anything at all... I couldn't bear being fired. I had to keep that job—no matter what."

What could I say? I stood with my arms folded, feeling disconcerted and vaguely perplexed.

“I’m ashamed before you—this cold sweat won’t stop.”

“——”

“Art and ambition—condemning others’ works, mocking people, brushing them aside with laughter, hoisting banners for ‘our era’... Lies. I know this truth in my bones—all of it’s empty nonsense. I’ve fallen exactly where my talent was meant to take me... Forgive me—you must understand—I’ve carried this shame always. This... this is what I am.”

As for me, there was simply no way to offer comfort. But I couldn't bear to listen any longer. I lifted him up—I suppose there was no other recourse but to mutter "Well, anyway"—...I accompanied him to the entrance of the alley where his house stood. And I couldn’t help but peer into the alley—though I must say it was an unpleasant feeling—and there, in the darkened tenement row, only one house remained: a window where bright electric light streamed through its paper panes. To me, it appeared from there—a middle-aged woman sitting under a bare bulb, some cloth bundle or the like beside her, her face weary—the figure of a woman sitting perfectly still...

“You should take this opportunity to go back to Tokyo—and apply yourself properly there.”

Tensei gripped my hand tightly when we parted.

“Never settle for comfort or resign yourself to despair—whichever path you take, life is bound to be harsh. If you must suffer, let it be through your true calling… Well then, goodbye—goodbye. I beg you—forget all about me.”

And so I parted ways with Tensei, you see.

I learned about Nakai Tensei’s death about a week ago.
Mr. Taguchi Shiro—that magnanimous soul—was kind enough to inform me by letter, but… What’s this—even the dregs are gone now? Damn.… As for me, I’ve no intention of feasting on Shūgorō’s leavings.
Life is painful either way—if one must suffer, let it be through one's true calling...... From Tensei's lips, it ended up sounding like some preachy little lecture.

By the way—don't I have any seeds for an entertaining novel with a light motif? Something around eighteen pages? My wife's labor being labor—well that's one thing—but... Damn—no alcohol left either.