Pathway to Japanese Literature

I

Brother.
How profoundly it grieves my heart that you no longer live in this world.
How that very sorrow diminishes even my passion for this single endeavor.
For this novel I attempt to write concerns you—or rather, concerns the crime you committed—and because I feel my sole motivation lies in telling how truly upright and good a person you were.
This stands not so much as a eulogy dedicated to my valiant brother, but rather as a whip of thorns that this foolish younger brother has lashed against his own heart.

It had been ten years since my family’s ruin.
The dense fog of the past stole unpleasant memories from my life.
I gathered the scattered fragments of a tarnished life, as if probing through my dreams.
Memories linked to older memories; older memories roused yet older ones, guiding my heart down into the valley depths of the deep past.
I saw my father’s life there.
I saw my brother’s life.
I saw my uncle’s life.
And the destinies that my father and brother demonstrated through their respective lives manifested in my own with an irresistible force.

A scene flashes through my mind—it was when I attended the village elementary school.
I cannot say whether it was morning or afternoon, but I remember only this: sunlight leaking through the window fell upon my uncle’s profile framed by a coarse beard, making his haggard pallor appear starkly from the shadows.
At that moment, he stood using an office chair as a stepping stool, tilting his head intently while listening to the pendulum’s swing from the wall clock.

“This won’t do.
Yoshi-san—hey, you’ve got to pull yourself together.
They’re speaking ill of you.”

Uncle let out a shrill voice and called out to my brother, who was fiddling with the travel bag he had just arrived with.
Uncle’s eyes were like those of someone who had sensed some dreadful omen.

“Tetsu!”
“What are you saying?”
“You—get out of this house!”

Suddenly, Father’s bespectacled face appeared as he grabbed Uncle by the neck and dragged him down from the chair.

Uncle had been employed as a clerk at the post office where his older brother—my father—served as postmaster, but his mind had gradually begun to change starting about half a year before.
By nature taciturn, he now spent days in sullen silence; then his grasp of numbers grew hazy.
I saw my father strike my uncle’s forehead with an abacus.
He had mistakenly given fifty postcards to a man who had come to buy twenty.

“Tetsu! Five sen and five sen—how much does that make?”
“Say it!”

Bathed in Father’s wrathful words, Uncle stood flustered, his lips trembling uncontrollably.
Father continued his berating before the thoroughly frightened Uncle.
Uncle’s condition continued to worsen, yet he never failed to report daily to the post office—a place that had become utterly devoid of purpose for him.
It was not long after that he began talking to the clock.
The octagonal clock was nailed to the pillar above the lintel marking the boundary between the office and Father’s living quarters (which had become the postmaster’s office), so Uncle had to use a chair as a stepping stool to converse with the clock.

Father grabbed Uncle by the neck and dragged him to the entrance.
Uncle wailed like a child.—
The reason this memory alone remains so vividly etched in my mind is likely because Uncle abruptly ceased appearing in this office starting the very next day.
Uncle died within half a year thereafter—but a few days before his death, he slipped away from his sickbed unseen by the aunt who was nursing him, and came stealthily to Father’s house.
It was night, but no one knew where Uncle had come in from.
When Uncle’s voice was heard in Father’s living quarters for the first time in ages, I entered to look and found his emaciated form—now completely transformed in appearance—crouching like a rat, chattering rapidly about something with his mouth pursed.

“What—you want this?”

I was glad to see Father’s uncharacteristically gentle expression.
Father took the red coral bead attached to his tobacco pouch and rolled it toward Uncle’s knees.
Uncle received it and bowed repeatedly to Father.
I do not know why the color red held such fascination for Uncle.
At that time, his pillow and futon were all covered with red cloth.—

A few days later, Uncle died.
The memories from around that time do not exist in my head.
This was likely because Uncle’s life and death held absolutely no connection to my existence at that time.
However, when I think of Father—or of Brother—I cannot help but recall this Uncle.
He had died during my childhood and thus bore no relation to my family’s ruin; yet I cannot help but feel that the memories entwined with him seemed to hint at something regarding our clan’s future.

Uncle was a haiku poet who went by the pen name Shōsei.
Two Japanese-bound books collecting his verses had been stacked atop the second-floor bookshelf in my house alongside old magazines; these too had likely been sold off to some scrap-paper dealer along with many discarded drafts unnoticed.
By the time I graduated middle school and resolved to search for them, they were already nowhere to be found.

After Uncle’s death, men from town would gather nightly at his house, surrounding a young widow.
When that rumor reached him, Father prohibited Aunt from visiting my house.
Aunt stopped coming to my house.
However, news of her whereabouts began circulating from unknown sources.
That she had fled to Okazaki with some man and worked as a maid at a small inn there; that she had eventually parted ways with that man and lived a life akin to that of a prostitute; that she had soon taken up with another man and opened a small confectionery shop in a Nagoya backstreet—with each new rumor that drifted in, Father would make a face as though touching something unclean.
However, several years later, Aunt returned to my town.

One autumn night—I was then a second-year middle school student—since the town festival day fell on a Sunday, I had returned home the night before; I walked alone through the churning crowd. Group after group of frenzied dancers streamed past me. To my right along the street I traveled stood an old temple gate. In the vacant lot before it, isolated from the tidal surge of people, a ring of figures clamored within a pocket of twilight. A woman with cloth-wrapped cheeks danced to obscene songs bellowed by drunkards encircling her. Every time she affected exaggerated coquetry, base laughter exploded from the mob.

That was Aunt.
Ah, never have I witnessed humanity’s pitiful fate as I did at that moment.
Not hers—but Uncle’s fate, destroyed by her wicked passions—.
Poor Uncle.
The ill omens laid bare through Uncle’s half-life planted some terrible dread deep within my heart.

II

At that time, I was lodging in Okazaki to attend middle school, so apart from occasional returns home, I had almost no contact with my family home in my hometown. Precisely for this reason, every time I returned home during vacation, the changes that had appeared throughout every part of the house stood out starkly to me.

From Father’s living quarters beside the office, a long, winding corridor extended to the wraparound veranda of the main house. Enclosed by that long corridor lay a central courtyard where stepping stones of elegant form traced a cruciform path through garden trees around a central stone lantern. Beyond the courtyard’s rear storehouse stretched a thicket with branches interlaced left and right—standing before its low door felt akin to facing a cave entrance. From there extended a leaf-choked path reaching five or six hundred meters ahead to the bamboo grove bordering paddy fields. But when I returned home one summer, the thicket stood completely cleared; where bamboo once grew now lay leveled earth. Standing before the storehouse revealed vistas once obstructed—now opened wide and clear. Beyond the hazily stretched paddy fields, the mountain range encircling the town stood out distinctly, its peaks visible all the way to the farthest reaches. This was the greatest change that had manifested in my home. Compared to this change, neither the office’s altered structure—which had abruptly acquired the distinct appearance of an independent post office—nor Father’s increasingly noticeable decline saddened me in the slightest. However, that same winter brought an even greater transformation. The rows of pine trees that had stood towering on both sides of the estate gate had been cleared away, and in their place, a new black-painted fence now enclosed the house. Not only that; a straight bamboo fence connecting the edge of this wall to the storehouse continued diagonally across where the thicket had once stood. This showed that the area beyond this bamboo fence no longer belonged to my family. It was a winter-barren cold day. Listening to the rustling of fallen leaves at my feet, I wandered through my family’s gradually shrinking estate with a feeling akin to stroking the trunk of a decaying tree that withered with each passing year.

Though Father and Mother still lived—albeit diminished—and though Older Brother, having graduated from Nagoya’s Communications Officers’ Training School, now imposed his preferred bureaucratic flourishes upon an office too vast for a third-class post office while commanding several young clerks; though maids and farmhands welcomed me with smiles as they always had—despite all this, the air within our home seemed warped by a peculiar emptiness.
It felt as though our existence as a home was growing increasingly tenuous.

Father had by then been completely consumed by morphine addiction.
Around thirty years old, after receiving an emergency injection for stomach cramps, he became unable to let go of the syringe for twenty years.
Starting two or three years before his death, the dosage increased at a rapid pace - nearly every hour.

As the morphine's efficacy waned, his consciousness grew hazy.
Work requiring over an hour now lay beyond his capabilities.
I remember watching Father count halfway through bundles of several hundred ten-yen notes constituting public funds under his management - forgetting the tally, grimacing resentfully, repeating the process multiple times to restart his calculations.

At that time, one doubt I harbored was how our household finances were maintained.
Father always kept a small Chinese briefcase by his side containing official post office funds.
He also carried an elongated leather wallet whose contents covered minor household expenses.
Yet to my knowledge, that wallet had never held more than ten yen.
Once—when I had just entered middle school—I saw Father pay an antique dealer who frequented our house.
The sum was certainly twenty or thirty yen.
Father first opened the clothes chest drawer and retrieved his usual wallet.
He turned it upside down, caught several fifty-sen coins spilling into his palm, then poured them back inside.
No sooner had he swung around than his left hand opened the Chinese briefcase with official funds—for just an instant, a murky chill passed through my chest.
Father extracted bundled banknotes from within and handed them to the dealer.
Though executed with complete nonchalance, when I saw him catch those coins and stare fixedly at them, I detected deliberate artifice in his expression.
For that wallet had never contained more than ten yen after all.

However, it was a certain night.
I finally witnessed something I should never have seen.
That night, the house was eerily quiet.
Though it was past ten o'clock, I leaned against the brazier in the Buddhist room adjoining the kitchen, reading aloud the newspaper serial to Mother as she pressed my new kimono with a heated iron.

It was then.
Suddenly, Older Brother’s shrill, discordant voice reached my ears from Father’s living quarters, leaving multiple echoes along the long corridor.

I placed the newspaper on my lap and listened intently for a while.
A sinister delusion seized my heart—as if some murky entity had abruptly engulfed the entire house.

I impulsively stood up and stealthily approached Father’s living quarters through the dark corridor. Since the shoji at the far end of Father’s living quarters had been left half-open, I could observe the scene inside from the dimness. Father’s figure sat cross-legged with head bent, cast into the shadow of an elongated iron brazier; only his sharp head veiled by half-white hair swayed back and forth. Though the shoji blocked my view of Older Brother who must have been sitting before him, from that slightly trembling shrill voice I could vividly imagine his squared shoulders and the twitching of pallid cheeks flushed with agitation. With no one left in the office now, each time Older Brother’s words broke off, the sound of an over-boiling iron kettle’s seething water would stir up an irredeemable silence.

Before Father’s knees lay spread open a slightly thick ledger crisscrossed with fine lines across its front cover. When I sensed it was the post office’s cashbook, my legs froze as if turned to ice—

“You’re not the only one involved here!”
“Do you have any idea what will happen?”
“Disgraceful.”
“Disgraceful.”

At that voice, I startled. That was not Father’s voice—it was Older Brother’s voice. I could no longer suppress my increasingly labored breathing. Never before had I heard Older Brother address Father in such a tone. Nor had I ever seen Father—that man renowned for his obstinacy—standing frozen so spinelessly.

Father remained motionless for a time before finally extracting a tissue from his kimono breast and blowing his nose violently. In that instant, his profile flashed across my line of sight—eyes closed, lower lip bitten tight. He resembled a man desperately suppressing some overwhelming emotion.—

That scene still floats vividly before my eyes.
At that time, I had no idea at all what Older Brother’s words meant.
However, the scene I witnessed during those few minutes—through Older Brother’s muddled words—clearly imparted to my heart a single, irrefutable implication that could no longer be doubted.
Something that had never occurred before was beginning to unfold within this house.—

I stealthily returned to the Buddhist room and began reading the newspaper serial I had abandoned midway for Mother’s sake, but my voice trembled and I simply couldn’t continue.
After that, Older Brother’s voice was no longer heard from Father’s living quarters.
However, when the next morning came, both Father and Older Brother were talking in their usual manner.
In fact, Older Brother was in an even better mood toward Father than usual.

The winter vacation was drawing to a close.
As the year-end approached, the air in the office suddenly became lively.
The clerks had to stay late into the night sorting New Year’s mail; my older brother had a young clerk work the abacus as he read out numbers from the ledger.

The lively laughter continued until nearly twelve o'clock.
At times, my older brother’s poetry recitation could be heard all the way to the kitchen.

At night, I was sleeping in the six-tatami room connected to the Buddhist room.
It must have been around one o’clock when I suddenly jolted upright and found myself sitting atop the futon.
I heard a violent gunshot.
However, at that moment, hearing Mother’s gentle laughter from Father’s living quarters finally calmed my nerves.
When I entered Father’s living quarters, Mother was sitting there alone with a sleepy expression.
At that moment, Father returned with violent footsteps from the veranda facing the courtyard.
He had a pistol dangling from his right hand, but when he looked in my direction, he grinned slyly.

“I think there was some kickback.”

He muttered.
Smoke was rising from the pistol’s muzzle.
It was an old-fashioned six-shot revolver.
A carpenter who had gone to Taiwan for a contracting job had given it to him as a souvenir when he returned four or five years prior.
That pistol had been kept stored in a large leather bag inside the drawer of Father’s clothing cabinet for a long time.

“Getting the hang of it now.—This makes four times.”

“I’m getting the hang of it now.—This makes four times,” Father said.
He removed the pistol’s trigger guard and began wiping its blackened muzzle with a white cloth.
“At first I was startled,” Mother said, “but these days it doesn’t bother me at all.”

The next morning, when I went out into the garden, there was a dead kitten under the plant shelf in front of the shed.

III

Along the afternoon country road, I walked alongside Father.
Father wore a mantle over his kimono and was wearing boots.

“Something might happen.”
“And with this body of mine, I won’t last much longer anyway.”
“You should consider it a blessing while you’re still enrolled in school.”
“Oh, I’ll manage for another two or three years yet.”

While walking, Father said to me.

I, who had graduated from middle school, was supposed to go to Tokyo on that night’s train.

It was a blustery day.

A single path leading to the embankment cut across the rapeseed fields.
The carriage house stood at the entrance to N Town.
When we arrived at N Town, the carriage was just about to depart.
There were only two other passengers besides me.
I took a seat near the window and placed the bundle on my lap.
There was an interval of five or six minutes before the carriage began to move, but Father remained standing in silence.

When the driver finally raised the whip, Father suddenly drew close to the window,

“Is there anything else you’ll need sent later with your luggage?”

Father said.

“No.”

As I answered, the carriage began to move, so Father stepped back two or three steps with his mouth still open.

Never before had I felt Father’s eyes staring so intently at my face as in that moment. The carriage turned right two or three blocks ahead. At the bend in the road, I felt an impulse—something indefinable—to see Father’s face once more. I stuck my face out the window. Father stood in the same position, unchanged in his posture. However, just as I frantically tried to raise my hand, the horse suddenly broke into a run along the sloping road, causing Father’s figure to vanish from my view. My chest began trembling from a profound emotion. Never before had I so directly received Father’s love into my heart as then. Countless times, Father’s figure flashed through my mind. The toes of his boots were hidden beneath the long hem of his mantle, his emaciated body looking ready to stagger forward at any moment. It appeared so precarious one could sense his flesh could no longer endure survival. And never had Father’s figure looked so lonely as then. His face—his eyes fixed upon me—symbolized the desolate twilight years of a man living solely for the faintest love toward a child.

This moment became a precious memory for me. For after that day, I was never able to see Father again.

——
Two years later.

Two years had passed.
I was sitting before Father’s corpse laid out in the six-tatami room next to the Buddhist altar.
His face was covered by a small white cloth, so I couldn’t clearly perceive his death.

At Father’s bedside sat Mother, Older Brother, and several other people.

“What a terrible shame.”
“In the end, you couldn’t be there to see him off.”

When I entered that room, the people sitting with bowed heads remained silent in the same posture, but I remember the person next to me whispering into my ear.
I couldn’t tell who it was.

As my heart began to calm, the anxiety about the upheavals in my life that Father’s death would likely bring spread through my chest, pushing aside all sorrow.
I raised my head and looked at Older Brother’s face where he sat facing me.
He wore a matching haori coat over his bluish serge summer kimono, and despite the tears pooling in his eyes, his face radiated a refreshed vitality.
The fact that his hair was neatly combed back and the blue shaving marks remaining on his cheeks both showed that a buoyant composure still lingered in Older Brother’s heart.
Older Brother even appeared to be reveling in his own new fate brought about by Father’s death.
I abruptly stood up and went out into the corridor.
Then tears came spilling out.

I was sitting on the veranda facing the courtyard when Older Brother approached from behind.

“Gensaku, don’t worry—this morning I received my official appointment as Post Office Chief.”
“Once the funeral’s over, you’re going straight back to Tokyo.”

Older Brother’s words trembled at their core, but their choked brightness of tone seemed to embody his own irrepressible joy.
Those words stirred a faint resistance within me.

I kept staring at the ground and did not respond.
The fierce early summer sunlight dissolved across my tears.

“It looks like things will sort themselves out without the mess I’d expected.”
“Father did what he could manage and died for us.—But there’s no telling what’s to come.”
“Don’t bother yourself with household matters—get yourself back to Tokyo.”
“And take that exam as soon as you can get it done.”

Older Brother’s words abruptly took on a somber tone.

“What exam?”

“The Higher Civil Service Exam.”

Older Brother's voice sounded shrill and piercing.
I fell completely silent.
Older Brother was attempting to realize through me the dream he himself had harbored four or five years prior.
Without conscious thought, my heart began feeling faint contempt toward him who remained utterly unaware of my Tokyo life.
I had deceived Father.
I had entered W University's law department but transferred to humanities within half a year.
My student life was beginning to lose all meaning for me.
At that time I had thrown myself into a socialist collective just taking root in Japan—though this left me with several loathsome memories—and had already neglected tuition payments for months; except when requesting funds from Father, I'd scarcely been conscious of being a W University student.
Yet by believing his younger brother's lies, Older Brother sought to reclaim within my impending half-life—that about to unfold—the fantasies he himself had lost.
Thus my student existence—that great obligation to him during Father's lifetime—was now being repurposed as a means to extract money from Older Brother.

The day after that, as soon as Father’s funeral was concluded, I departed for Tokyo.

IV

It was an autumn morning.
I was at the boarding house in Shimotsuzuka when I received a letter from Mother.
It reported the recent circumstances of Older Brother's life.
It detailed how Older Brother had begun dabbling in stock speculation—how after two or three successes at this, the dissipation Mother had most feared had taken hold; how nights when he did not return home grew frequent; how, to the limits of her imagination, he had become involved with a geisha in N Town, departing daily whenever calls came from her place; how his attitude toward Mother had gradually turned cold—all these petty complaints skillfully strung together in cursive script.
Yet that letter stirred nothing within me.
Older Brother had been punctually sending my tuition funds every month, and beyond that—what more could I have expected from him?—

I did not send a reply to Mother.
Because the fear that Older Brother might open the letter before Mother could read it aroused the suspicion that this would make Mother’s position even more difficult.

However, after one month had passed—I was nearing my winter break—the second letter from Mother reported a certain change that had occurred in the household: an event that was by no means unexpected to me, yet one that would render my relationship with Older Brother more tenuous still.

Older Brother had taken a geisha as his wife.
Though Mother’s letter offered only a brief report on the matter, precisely because it lacked any resentful complaints, I felt this abrupt domestic shift had twisted her heart into some strange shape.
I imagined the young woman I would now have to call sister-in-law.
Something awkward and churning seemed to form in the pit of my chest.
Nor could I shake the sense that her presence was poised to permeate every corner of the house.
Then for the first time, my aged mother’s figure pressed upon my heart with an extraordinary loneliness.

Older Brother had not wanted my return home.
I sensed this in his letter.
For not only had he omitted any mention of his marriage, but the concluding words—"There’s no need to force yourself home during the short winter break"—made clear his wish to avoid me.

However, I could not help but feel a certain demand within my own heart. A powerful compulsion to define my own position within the new relationship taking shape between us had seized control of my heart. Moreover, advancing into the feelings Older Brother was avoiding seemed to bring to light as proof the resistance against him that had festered in my chest for so long.

The town had transformed beyond recognition in less than half a year.
That summer, the light railway—whose construction had only just begun—interrupted the plains as it extended from N Town.
When I stepped out to the back door, I could see a toy-like train puffing out small rings of smoke as it ran along the embankment raised slightly high amidst the rice paddies.

It was evening when I arrived home.
As I entered through the back gate, the kitchen door stood wide open, and under the electric light I saw my brother’s face as he sat cross-legged eating his meal.

“Oh.
“Gensaku—”

Older Brother peered at my face standing in the dim light as though trying to see through it, then abruptly floated an artificial smile on his lips and—

“You’re such a strange one.”

he said.

In front of Older Brother sat a young woman.
The moment Older Brother called out to me, I felt her shoulders hunch.
That gave the impression she feared my arrival.
Several hours later, even when we were first brought together in Older Brother’s room, she maintained the same posture as before.
The plump woman, appearing nervous, did not speak.
She was nineteen, the same age as me, but her innocent expression that seemed to shy away from others made her appear much younger.
The first thing in her face that caught the eye was that healthy-looking, resilient wheat-colored skin.
Her eyes, nose, and mouth held no distinguishing features beyond simply being eyes, a nose, and a mouth. Yet when regarding this face with deliberate attention, I found myself unable to resist being drawn in by some quiet force emanating from it.
That face contained not so much dignity as a kind of loneliness.
Had I passed her by on the street, I likely would not have noticed her presence.
In her there was no conscious gaudiness, nor did she retain the slightest trace of her past as a geisha—for she had been raised from birth to become one—.

The house was quiet.
The change I had imagined had not occurred anywhere.
Only my brother’s face appeared vividly alive.
The office filled with young clerks gave off the atmosphere of a lively club, while Mother’s face showed a composure I had never sensed before.
In the new chief’s office that had once been Father’s living room, an ornate gilt clock stood displayed atop the familiar document cabinet.

The domestic life within the house appeared uncannily opulent.

Because Older Brother remained perpetually restless, I found no opportunity to speak calmly with him.
His face transformed moment by moment.
One moment he would slump listlessly as if utterly spent; the next, a raw flush of blood would stain his gaunt cheeks. One moment he lay sprawled reading a book with fierce concentration; the next, before I knew it, he’d be propping his cheek on a hand and humming tunelessly.
He never stayed motionless indoors for even an hour.
While eating, he kept staring vacantly at one spot.
He would sometimes erupt into laughter as if struck by sudden recollection.
Yet his expression would immediately darken into gloom.

It felt as though his mind were being ceaselessly hounded by something in a subtly dizzying manner.
Even while working in the office, he would sing in a loud voice, improvising nonsensical melodies.
It seemed to me he was doing nothing but unnaturally spurring himself on—to such an extent.
——

The quiet, bright air within the house gradually began casting a dark shadow over my heart.
Older Brother had ceased saying anything to me regarding the higher civil service examination.
It seemed only his own affairs were packed tightly within his heart.

That winter vacation passed in a rush.
When I returned to Tokyo on that cold windy night, Mother，Older Brother，and Sister-in-law came to see me off at the newly built light railway station on the town’s outskirts.
In the deserted cold station，the four of us stood lined up when suddenly Older Brother，standing beside me，looked down and smirked.
Yet when he sensed my gaze fixed upon him，his face abruptly shifted to a solemn expression.
For but an instant，his eyes seemed to tremble with near-despairing anxiety，like those of a man whose deepest-hidden secret had been unearthed.

Five

Spring was approaching.
The letters from Mother conveyed that Older Brother’s physical condition had deteriorated significantly and he had recently begun ingesting small quantities of morphine.
The atmosphere inside my hometown home that flickered through my mind appeared somehow dim and damp.
About a month passed, and another letter came from Mother.
It reported the sister-in-law’s pregnancy.
However, around that time, my life was beginning to fall out of rhythm.
I could no longer calmly consider matters of the household or Older Brother.
It passed through my mind like a scene viewed through pale haze, occasionally revealing blurred outlines as it flashed by.
My heart was open only to the future, yet the lives of those in my hometown remained entrenched in a distant past.
Even the act of looking back at them had begun to become a source of pain for me.
——

June had arrived when one morning I received a registered sealed letter.
When I discovered Older Brother’s handwriting on the thick envelope’s surface—it had been nearly half a year since I last received any letter directly from him—I was suddenly seized by a premonition.
Since the tuition for that month had already been sent under Mother’s name, the fact that this envelope was registered made me feel it must contain something of grave importance.

Inside the envelope were a letter from Older Brother written on post office stationery and five or six sheets of the same stationery bound together like a ledger.

Omitted.
Since last autumn, my health has deteriorated significantly.
Lately I’ve been feeling an odd helplessness toward my fate.
You may think I write this because of my illness.
I can’t shake the feeling I might drop dead at any moment.
For that reason, I spent about a week compiling an inventory of household assets.
I’m sending this to you now.
Should I die, I implore you to dispose of everything here within a month.
The sooner the better.
I’ve transferred both house and land entirely to your name.
Sell them quickly for cash however cheaply.
See that Mother and Haruyo (your sister-in-law) are properly cared for.
If Haruyo wishes to remarry, give her only the house sale money and let her go free. I may write more details later, but you must promise me this.
Etc.
——

The inventory contained calligraphic works and antiques passed down from Father’s generation, meticulously categorized down to the finest details. Beneath each numbered entry, Older Brother had added prices he imagined for every item. Yet this letter left my heart utterly unmoved. If anything, it made the image of him I harbored in my mind appear even more wretchedly pathetic—a laughable figure. For at that time, trapped as I was in rigid materialism, I could not help interpreting even his fatalistic view of death as a warped extension of his pathological sentimentality—that compulsion to endlessly dramatize his circumstances into some grandiose tragedy.

I wrote a reply addressed to Older Brother.
That his letter had startled me; that I interpreted this as stemming from his illness; that even were Older Brother to die suddenly of disease, circumstances necessitating the house’s sale remained absolutely inconceivable; that I hoped for his soonest possible recovery—

In those simple words, I could not conceal my contempt for Older Brother.
However, after that, no reply ever came from Older Brother.

Six

A month passed.
I visited a friend convalescing from tuberculosis at a certain coast, and when I returned home after staying two or three days, there was a telegram placed on my desk.

BROTHER EMERGENCY COME IMMEDIATELY

The sender’s space bore Mother’s name, and the acceptance date was marked as nine o’clock the previous evening.

I stood blankly, the telegram still spread open in my hands.
At first, the haggard face of my older brother appeared in my mind.
Then it turned toward me and grinned slyly.
I felt my heart savagely crushed.
It was morning, with sunlight from a break in the rainy season streaming through the wide-open south-facing window, yet I felt my body standing in dim shadow.
All thoughts began shifting their positions within my mind.
I had no notion what to do.
An indescribable sort of anxiety—as though some mysterious delusion were permeating my head—pressed down upon me.
Still, even then I could not bring myself to believe in Older Brother’s death.
No—perhaps this telegram itself was merely another of his orchestrated schemes.
Such feelings dominated my heart in fragmented waves.
That doubt persisted until the following afternoon when I sat before his lifeless face.

Older Brother was dead.
The house was frighteningly quiet.
At Older Brother’s bedside, Mother sat alone, but when she saw my face, she burst into loud sobs.

In the futon laid out along the wall, Older Brother’s corpse lay with its back turned toward us.
Around his head was a white bandage tightly wrapped, but here and there on the bandage, the blood had left dark stains.
Facing the wall, his face retained a look of faint agony, mouth hanging agape.

When I saw the goosebumps rising on his grayed nape, I was jolted, but immediately this abnormal scene banished my sense of reality far away. My heart was cold. Several minutes devoid of any emotion passed, and I heard nothing but Mother’s sobbing voice.

“Did Brother commit suicide?”

My voice resonated with a strange harshness. As if responding to that voice, Mother raised her head,

“Ah, with a pistol—”

After saying that, she suddenly lowered her voice,

“Why did it come to this?”

she murmured while staring at the glass door reflecting the outside light.

“So it was true after all,” I thought. I felt as though the ill omen I had sensed years before were being thrust vividly before my eyes. Then my anxiety began spinning at a terrifying speed.

“On the contrary—it wasn’t that he embezzled public funds, was it?”

I impulsively hurled a suspicion that had flashed through my mind at Mother’s face.

“Don’t be absurd—such a thing…”

As she said this, Mother looked down as though avoiding my gaze.

“Wasn’t there something like a suicide note?”

“Well, that—I don’t understand any of it myself.”
“The morning of the day before yesterday, for instance, he was in such high spirits, frolicking about...”
“He didn’t seem particularly concerned about anything either, and at night he appeared to be reading a book alone here.”
“Yet as if some instinct warned me, that particular night I simply couldn’t fall asleep.”
“I think it was past one o’clock when I started calling Haruyo in a loud voice, but after two or three attempts, I gave up.”
“After some time had passed, he came to my room with stealthy footsteps and peered into the mosquito net. When I called out to him, he laughed and said, ‘You’re still awake? I need to stay up a bit longer tonight for some research, but I can’t find the teapot.’ I replied, ‘The teapot should’ve been in your room.’ ‘Ah, right—how careless of me,’ he said, and left.”
“I didn’t pay much attention at the time, but now that I think about it, his behavior back then was strange.”
“Then, within less than ten minutes, there was the dreadful sound of a pistol.”
“When I rushed in, he was collapsed before the desk.”
“Blood was gushing from his forehead, and even so, his breathing alone continued for a long time, but by then, no matter what you said to him, he couldn’t understand a thing.”
“I find even remembering terrifying—”

Mother’s voice turned tremulous again.

From the office partitioned off by a single wall came the hurried sound of stamps being pressed.
The sound spread through my head as though seeping through.
It was a sound I had grown accustomed to over time.
But now, that sound came through the hollow house with a menacing reverberation.

“Why don’t you get some sleep?”

Mother said with concern.

“Ah, maybe I should.”

I first felt the fatigue of my long journey around the back of my head.
As I sat motionless, it seemed like countless tangled voices were calling out from afar.
I could no longer escape vividly feeling my own heart facing an inescapable danger.
I abruptly stood up.
Then stepping into the hallway, I forcefully opened the door forming the boundary with the office.
It felt as though some force had driven my body there.

A tall man leaned against the office desk facing the street, stamping a bundle of postcards.
The man appeared utterly unaware of my entrance.
A small clerk who looked no more than fifteen or sixteen stood before the sorting shelves, wearing a striped cotton summer kimono with a shortened hem and hakama trousers.
He glanced at me but immediately averted his gaze sideways.
From the exchange room beyond the lattice door at the far end came the muffled laughter of a young woman.
Both desk and chair looked familiar.
Yet though every sight was known to me, I felt the air in this room had suddenly turned cold against me.

On my brother’s desk placed flush against the left wall were stacked five or six account books, atop which lay a black leather cigarette case left open.
There, cigarette butts that suggested someone had been there until just moments before lay scattered in the ashtray, emitting faint smoke.

The russet color of the tarnished ledger’s cover drew me in.
That scene from years past—of Father and Brother facing each other across a single open ledger through one long night—gradually took vivid shape in my mind, as though hauled forth with a thick rope.
It was an unforgettable moment.
At that moment, there was a large octagonal clock on the pillar directly before me.
The glass surface had yellowed and grown dull with dust.
The fact that it hung in exactly the same place now as it had since my childhood struck me as somehow profoundly strange.
In front of it, Uncle would stand on tiptoe every day and keep talking incessantly.
The clock made an eerie sound as it marked time.
The sound made me feel as though it were awakening each and every one of the anxieties from ten years ago that lay dormant in the depths of my heart.

At that moment, the front door opened, and a man in Western clothes entered.
For an instant, his body stiffened as though frozen in the sunset and did not move.

The man approached the tall clerk.
As he spoke with his head bent over the desk, I occasionally sensed a glaring gaze emanating from his sunburned face.
Though there was no more than six feet between us, his eyes seemed to belong to some distant place.
Yet he immediately turned toward me and offered a slight nod.

“You’re the younger brother, aren’t you?”

It was a low voice, but I had almost intuitively sensed he must be an inspector dispatched from the Nagoya Bureau.

"What a dreadful turn of events," he said. "I did meet your brother once myself, though this time I've been ordered into quite an odd role."

The man’s words, carrying a feigned calmness, reverberated through me as though each one were stabbing into my chest. Then he explained that another inspector would arrive within the hour, that they planned to work through the night completing their investigation, and that their mission held nothing endangering our lives. The man moved to my brother’s desk and indifferently lifted the black leather cigarette case left there.

Seven

In the kitchen, Mother and sister-in-law were mingling with neighbors preparing for tomorrow’s funeral.

Occasionally, the sound of quiet stifled laughter would reach the room where I lay.
When the laughter subsided, if I listened intently, the click-clack of an abacus being worked in the office would resound solemnly, as though being born from the deepening quiet of the night.

Though my body was utterly exhausted, my nerves remained numb yet sharpened, and my ears drew in even the faintest sounds like a magnet unwilling to release them.

From the kitchen’s direction, laughter persisted in waves.
When it ceased, abrupt silence fell, only to be broken by a thick, hoarse voice resounding fiercely from the office.
Drawn by that voice, I quietly rose.

Even as I planted my feet firmly along the corridor, my legs wavered perilously.
Yet before I could reach the door separating me from the office, the voice reached me with crystalline clarity.

“That’s truly awful. That seems awfully old, doesn’t it!”

It was the voice of the man I had met in the office that evening.

“There’s no helping it.”
“Let’s make inquiries immediately.”
“We can’t afford to keep dawdling around like this.”

I stopped in my tracks.
I could no longer doubt my own ears.
But what stillness of heart this was.
My ears had only just vividly received those fragments of words.
It was like a voice coming from old memories over a decade ago.

"I can't afford to keep dawdling around like this!"—I shouted to my own heart.
I felt that my fate was now beginning to turn dramatically before my very eyes.
All anxieties vanished.
I was now fighting against a mysterious force that cursed the fate of my clan.
A new excitement welled up in my chest.

The next morning was cloudy, but once the ritual washing was completed and the sutra chanting was completed, and when my brother’s funeral procession in due form headed through town toward the crematorium, the sky gradually brightened until eventually the midsummer sun began seeping into my weary head. I could see nothing at all. Under the eaves of the houses lined on both sides, the faces of townspeople had gathered, but to my ears came only their murmuring voices that sounded like accusations. Occasionally, within the white sand dust, the profile of my sister-in-law walking ahead would flash. She was constantly looking down. Only the pallor of her cheeks slid through my daze.

An hour later, my brother’s corpse was thrown into the crematorium furnace.
Smoke immediately rose from the triangular brick chimney jutting into the sky and disappeared high above, but in my heart there remained not even the slightest sorrow.

Brother. How powerfully those words from your letter—where you told me to dispose of the assets within a month—were breathing within my chest.
Yet I could not even fulfill your meticulously prepared will.
For it was the evening of that very day.

A man entered through the house’s front entrance. He was an old man around fifty years old wearing a white linen high-collared coat. Through his glasses, he glared up at my face. Then, in an extremely unhurried voice,

“I am a court bailiff. I’ve come from the court—is your mother here?”

he said.
When Mother came out, he handed her two or three sheets of ruled paper.
Still clutching what she had received, Mother sank down onto the veranda’s edge.
How could I ever describe her face in that moment?
Her throat convulsed as if something were surging upward—she couldn’t speak, could only press her lips together.
To me, it seemed she might collapse then and there.

“I’m terribly sorry.”

said the man.

“Your son has done something truly outrageous—the crimes began around Meiji 42 (1909), you see.—”

But he suddenly laughed forlornly and,

“How dreadful this is. He didn’t have to go this far, you know—but there’s no helping it now. We’ll have everything wrapped up by tonight.”

he said.

Then, after removing his shoes and stepping up into the house, he took out a notebook and a bundle of sealed documents from a large briefcase. His face now bore a thoroughly dutiful expression as he meticulously examined each of the cluttered items in the room, recording them one by one in his notebook. After finishing the kitchen, he immediately entered the Buddhist altar room, but since there was nothing there besides the altar, he passed straight through into the inner room.

At that moment, in the dimly lit room, I saw my sister-in-law's strained face appear. She was standing before the chest where her belongings were stored.

In the corner of the room stood a large cabinet storing heirlooms passed down through generations.
The elderly bailiff approached it and opened the heavy door.
Inside, various objects were divided into several rows and arranged orderly.
In both the jar and incense burner right before my eyes, my old memories lurked.
He would lightly touch each item, methodically jotting them down in his notebook while affixing small numbered tags.

My sister-in-law never moved from before the chest until the very end.
However, the elderly bailiff merely glanced in that direction and exited into the corridor.
When he had finished with my brother’s living room, he prowled from the front second floor to the back second floor, illuminating his path with the flashlight he had brought as though invading the space.

Nearly three hours passed before everything was completed.

“It has gotten quite late—depending on how things go, I may come to visit again tomorrow.”

He turned to me and said this, but upon noticing my mother behind me, he hurriedly approached and whispered in her ear in a low, hoarse voice.

“I’ve made some allowances here and there, you see.—You should dispose of it somewhere by tonight.”

Brother—the crime you should have buried deep beneath the earth was dug up within two days of your death and exposed to the light. Yet despite this, Brother, your plan succeeded magnificently. For no one would ever suspect Father because of your crime. Because you died without leaving any explanation about your wrongdoing—no, not even the slightest hint—a bright light has begun to shine once more upon our clan’s future. Oh, how deeply we are moved now knowing suicide alone remained your path! Have mercy upon your foolish younger brother who failed to comprehend your lonely fate. Father’s crime—now at last I can declare it plainly—could anything be more sorrowful and pitiable than your life that perished in its shadow? A life compelled to deceive God—so sorrowful and pitiable—

Brother,

A few days after that, we set out for Tokyo to open a new destiny. That kind elderly bailiff’s discreet leniency alone became, by chance, the sustenance that supported our survival for several months. My sister-in-law soon gave birth to a boy, but a year later, she left the child behind and returned to a place befitting the unfortunate upbringing she had long endured, seeking to forge new bonds for her life. And now, a new day is dawning upon Mother, me, and your child. Yet, Brother—though my love for the child deepens with each passing day, and the joy of his growth fills me so completely that I feel no need to take a wife—why does the memory of your tragic death try daily to call my heart back into the anxieties of a fate already gone by?