Pathway to Japanese Literature

Smokestack

Our middle school—whose wooden building in Mita had been completely burned down in the war—was made to temporarily share facilities with an elementary school under the same private educational organization after the war ended.
Starting October 1, 1945, I now had to commute over two hours each way from my evacuation site in Ninomiya to Tenkuji Elementary School—the same school I had once attended from my home in Gotanda—as a third-year middle school student.

But even though the middle school had been revived as a temporary dwelling, "studying" had yet to return there. All third-year students and above were mobilized en masse to handle the aftermath at the disaster-stricken factories in Oimachi, where they had to clean up the area by carrying burned cement and machine fragments in straw baskets. Sickly as I was, I remained at school; aside from occasionally being ordered to make contact by commuting to Oimachi, I spent each day in solitary idleness with four or five colleagues in the small room beside the entrance... Truth be told, my otitis media had already completely healed. Having been made to realize—through having the brocade banner of "Hundred Million Shattered Jewels" we'd been clutching for victory wrenched clean from our hands, through discovering that what we'd been gripping so tightly was in truth a transparent void—that ruining my health now would be utterly pointless, I had apathetically obeyed the teacher's command to "stay behind." Yet I understood from that very first day how much more unhealthy my interactions with the leftover group in this dim little room would prove to be.

The small room adjacent to the toilet beside the main entrance never received a single ray of sunlight from morning through evening. Before the lone northeast-facing window, cherry, zelkova, and camellia trees we who had graduated had planted spread their bone-like thin branches in every direction, making the gloomy room even dimmer. Of the five individuals gathered there, the other men besides myself all suffered from severe chest conditions as if by prior arrangement, persisting in their gloomy coughing fits. Moreover, with the exception of Yamaguchi—a fellow third-year student—they were all unfamiliar-faced upperclassmen and older students bearing faint beards. They were likely those who had kept repeating grades over two or three years due to non-participation in mobilization efforts—now ashamed to remain middle schoolers yet clinging to attendance records for higher school qualifications. They were all terrifyingly diligent and terrifyingly earnest. For them, this might have stemmed from having no friends.

I simply detested the manner of interaction they displayed—excessively deferential yet oddly insistent on flaunting their seniority, egotistic and grade-grubbing—from those who had kept their distance from school for some time.
I wasn’t impressed by those boisterous, humorous types who were overly accommodating—like some layabout—but the repeaters all behaved with the underhanded rudeness of bureaucrats.
In short, they were younger yet couldn’t frankly open up to us newcomers, while also being unable to assert authority as senior upperclassmen due to their two or three years of “absence”—this left them struggling to decide how to interact with us. The instability of that distance only heightened our mutual awkwardness, rendering the relationship peculiarly strained.
They addressed only Yamaguchi and me with "-san," while among themselves they maintained an icy formality, calling each other "...-kun."
They would ostentatiously circulate magazines like *Shinsei* and *Sekai* with imposing covers, desperately compete to prove their intellectual superiority through shogi matches (it was hardly something that could be called a game), and affect extreme feigned innocence, extreme curiosity, or extreme indifference when it came to matters of sex.
At that time, I didn’t drape women in some deliberate veil of boyish legend or fantasy.
Having welcomed and bid farewell to those dizzying days of mobilization, air raids, and evacuation, I had full confidence in both my ability—and my shamelessness—to confront and charge through any desire the moment it arose. And since I believed I still held no special interest in women, I remained utterly untouched by that particular brand of shame which manifests in such “extreme” forms.—Others were others; if my stomach growled, I’d charge at a sack of potatoes without hesitation.
To act with complete fidelity to one’s own concerns alone—disregarding others’ eyes, stomachs, justice, or happiness.
Such thoroughgoing frankness toward myself as an individual was the sole ethic that I, at fifteen years old, had managed to acquire in my own way amidst the chaotic society of that time.

The room must have teemed with germs of various diseases.
But amidst these pale-faced colleagues who coughed incessantly as if it were their occupation, I too hunched my back like an old man and spent entire days randomly reading and gazing at newspaper and magazine typefaces as if licking them repeatedly, or doodling pictures of Japanese, German, American, and British airplanes.
There was simply no other way to kill time.
Though Yamaguchi was in a different class, since he was in the same grade, I decided to try making him my conversation partner.

Yamaguchi was fair-skinned with a small face, his height and limbs alone growing spindly and haphazardly as he stood in that unstable, finless process of development from boyhood to adolescence.
That was probably the same for me too.
Yet he was terribly nervous, taciturn, and despite having a cute rabbit-like face, astonishingly unfriendly. …One day, as I was relieving myself in the restroom, heavy footsteps sounded, and he entered like a cold wind.
"It's a chance," I thought.

“This toilet’s for children. …Guess we’ve gotten so big that even something like this feels small now.”

With ulterior motives, I spoke in a friendly tone and forced a beaming smile as I laughed.
...but he didn’t bat an eye.
Glaring at the white wall with angry-looking eyes, he made no move to answer.

“Everyone’s such a gloomy bunch. …Sometimes I just want to start a debate and flip my tongue around nimbly for them. Haha.”

Enveloped from below by the yellowish steam of his urine, yet his expression remained utterly still.
I felt both exasperated and half-admiring, yet even as I fastened my buttons, I found myself pacing restlessly, unwilling to leave that spot.

“But don’t you feel the same way?”

At that moment came his answer—brusquest of all, like a defiant jerk of the chin.

“...I don’t think so.”

He glanced at me sideways with contemptuous eyes and snorted “Hmph.” Then, combatively hiking up his right shoulder, he left without so much as a glance in my direction.
...My sweet ulterior motive had died.

I felt a certain unpleasant indignation toward that exchange—as if I had confronted my own foolish, servile instability—and resolved never again to make the effort of speaking with him.
I regretted not having recruited any kindred spirits into the leftover group—but by then, everything was already too late.
Taking a break meant nothing but failing a grade.

The reinforced concrete school building at Tenkuji—once even called the “White Chalk Hall”—had not yet reached ten years since its completion.
Until before the war, it had been said to boast facilities unmatched in the Orient and an elegant beauty.
But through what they called anti-aircraft camouflage, more than half of its pure white concrete had been mercilessly daubed with black coal tar camouflage. Divided into black and white by geometric lines, its appearance now stood utterly grotesque.
It presented a miserable and pathetic sight—neither properly strange nor shameful, defying all description.
The smokestack rising twenty meters from its center had also been painted coal-black up to its midpoint.
Once it had stood vividly upright beneath open skies—this white giraffe’s neck elegantly surveying its surroundings while belching thick steam’s black smoke.
……

Swallowing a breakfast of two boiled potatoes and leaving the coastal house, I would head to the capital on the 6:29 train and board the city tram from Shinagawa to Yotsuya Shiomachi.
And always, from Furukawa Bridge along the Shibuya River near Kōrinji Temple, I would gaze at the grimy smokestack that now emitted no more smoke than a stain on the winter’s pallid white and faded cold sky—and with the sudden hunger that inevitably came, I would feel that chilled and desolate feeling, like the smokestack itself baring its naked skin to the bitter wind, deepen into something even more bleakly hopeless. …Each day’s life within those black-and-white square walls became precisely suited to the school building’s exterior—a gloomy, dim, miserly, melancholy, squalid prisoner-like existence.
Prisoners—come to think of it, that grimy square black-and-white school building also exuded an eerie, prison-like sinister gloom.

And as I accumulated those prisoner-like frigid days, before I knew it, there had emerged within me the same sense of being an invalid as my colleagues—until even the mood of a lonely gravely ill patient, intensely introspective and pessimistic, had infected me.
...Among us patients (myself included), there was a uniform lack of vitality, and I would suddenly perceive the surplus energy of classmates doing manual labor—skipping work, fighting, watching movies, taking dance lessons—as something from another world, impossibly distant.
Moreover, each time I thought of that, I felt an out-of-reach frustration, a voracious craving, and despair—like gazing at a single plated dish displayed beyond a shop window.
In the midst of the leftover group—apathetic, each perpetually withdrawn into their silence like octopus traps—while repeating those same silent days, I continued almost ceaselessly to alternate between that abstract hunger and the kind that stabbed at my actual stomach.

And then, I came to think such things from time to time.
Why must I commute to school to this extent?
The meaning of continuing these days was, in short, nothing more than becoming a "university graduate."
But as for me—as for my future life—how exactly did I intend to proceed?

This was partly because I had witnessed countless times during my life at the evacuation site the tragedy of "university graduates" who lacked practical skills.
This was also due to personal family circumstances—having lost my father a year prior—that compelled me to quickly become a "university graduate" and properly earn my keep.
Yet even as I kept commuting—driven solely by graduation anxiety and fear of failing—I finally began feeling the first sprouts of unease and doubt toward this economically hemorrhaging commute: those daily round trips requiring nearly five hours from a fishing town at Sagami Bay's central coastline, and toward how I myself merely repeated these obligatory journeys day after day like empty freight trains—monotonous, meaningless voids devouring time.
Perhaps this was proof and self-awareness that I, like the leftover group's patients, lived through nothing but meaningless repetition—and that this repetition had already become utterly devoid of meaning to me.

But even so, I couldn't stop going to school. Without any joy or purpose in life, I had no choice but to repeat that daily routine whose meaninglessness had already become clear to me. Whether taking a break or quitting altogether, I possessed no alternative framework for living that could replace the commute to Tenkuji. In creating a new life with purpose, I was indolent, distrustful, considered my physical limitations, and had even despaired. And so I continued repeating only the same exact week with pendulum-like precision. Myself—who couldn't even imagine a clue to another way of living—I knew no other method to process this self. I realized I was precisely like them—a member indistinguishable from my other colleagues, akin to some insidious mold.

I resolved to isolate myself from the leftover group’s sickly patients in every possible way—I no longer wanted to be influenced by them, and above all, I intended to protect and nurture this self of mine that was different from theirs. I would focus myself on something as constructive as possible. Whether I converted this blank time into my own savings or recklessly squandered it again—that all depended on me. ……And so, using my late father’s old books as collateral, I went to the Ninomiya book rental shop every Sunday and borrowed seven books at a time. One book a day became my routine, and I forced myself to adhere to it. That was a regulation of my life by myself, a guideline, and so to speak, even a law. ……In any case, rather than sink into the masturbatory passive loneliness among my colleagues, I chose—out of a desire to create my own sense of fulfillment in being alive—to actively isolate myself from them. But perhaps that was, unexpectedly, nothing more than an effect of having lost the sense of fulfillment in living.

During the elementary school students' and middle school lowerclassmen's class hours, I would slip out from the small room beside the entrance and go up to the rooftop alone. There, I’d play by throwing a ball against the wall of the exitway—jutting out like an oversized matchstick from that white plane—a wall whose upper half remained painted black.
The school building during class hours stood in sepulchral silence. Occasionally, from beyond the wire mesh enclosing the rooftop, there would rise hollowly—like soap bubbles—the noises of several groups doing calisthenics in the yard, the barked commands and faint shouts, even the creaking-wheel clatter of a small city tram clattering over from Kasumicho.
On the desolate, flat rooftop—silent as a desert of white stone—the ball thudded against the wall and rolled back to my feet.

The resonant impact of the ball—repeating at the same pitch like a strange murmur—was precisely the echo that confirmed my solitude.
And it was a game I loved—one that could bring me a relatively clear and singular mood, like the blue sky.
Whenever the impulse to “break a sweat” struck, I would grip the ball and steal away to the rooftop alone.

On the wall, right around the strike zone, there was a black stain. I aimed for it and threw—"Take that! Swing away! Inside pitch!" Muttering "Left field," "Back up," and the like while keeping count alone, I staged the Six University League games this way. Whether I was unconsciously going easy or not, my alma mater Keio simply refused to lose. Even when earnestly pitching as the opposing team—something I found inexplicably strange—the feeling of locking down a shutout remained indescribably exhilarating.

The rooftop was usually battered by the domineering winds of early winter racing alone across it, but remained serene, bathed in sunlight on clear days. During class hours when no one else appeared, the time I spent there grew longer. That secret place became my home ground, where I would lean against the right-angled corner of the wall to read books or eat my lunch. While my colleagues typically spread out luxurious lunchboxes packed with polished white rice gleaming like burnished silver, mine usually contained either bran bread or clumps of millet rice formed into small balls to prevent scattering. I endured hunger until eating alone around fifth period's end—otherwise I'd grow so famished on the return train that my vision would swim.

However, I was in good health.
When I finished reading that day’s allotted book, I would succumb to this itchy restlessness toward health—a yearning that made me want to test some intense speed—and taking advantage of there being not a soul around, dash around the rooftop alone while screaming like a madman.
……Still, something felt unsatisfying.
Indeed, I was always parched for a sensation that could be perfectly described by the expression “putting my entire heart and soul into something.”

Even as the year changed, the mobilization of our classmates showed no signs of being lifted.
Naturally, I had to continue my days as a member of the leftover group, but this actually felt convenient for me.
The league games had about three left.

Around mid-January, the only remaining game was the final match against Waseda.
Both teams had earned four points each, and particularly for Keio, winning this match would make it a "remarkable feat" of a glorious undefeated championship.

It was a clear afternoon.
While engrossed in devising secret strategies for that day's Keio-Waseda matchup, I rushed up the stairs clutching my furoshiki-wrapped lunch and ball when the back of a prior visitor caught my eye—a solitary figure clinging to the rooftop wire mesh in ghostly posture, fingers dug into the metal as he stared fixedly at Hiroo's burned ruins below.
It was Yamaguchi.
Realizing how buoyantly I’d been whistling "Wakaki Chi" to myself, I froze with pursed lips, the shame of having my secret exposed striking my cheek like an open-handed slap.

The unpleasantness was extreme. But now that I'd come this far, I had no desire to return downstairs—to sit in that storage-like staffroom with its miasma of colleagues' unhealthy toxic breaths, their listless miserly laughter and empty coughs, their awkwardly churned-out 'coming-of-age' conversations—only to line up the same dull scowls in silence. Twisting the ball into my pocket, I deliberately blew the interrupted cheer song whistle loudly again and began walking toward the rooftop's center.

Just as I had done, Yamaguchi dismissed me with a single glance.
The black hand-knit turtleneck sweater protruded from the thin collar of his student uniform, making the pale, studious-looking boy’s neck appear all the more sickly delicate and fragile.
Beneath his court-style long, narrow trousers—untethered by gaiters—rested disproportionately massive red pigskin lace-up boots that evoked leg irons, arrayed like weights to keep him from being blown away by the wind.

I felt a certain antagonism toward Yamaguchi, who remained stubbornly turned away. Paying him no mind, I too turned toward the wall alone and commenced my own Keio-Waseda game. Feeling the blue-translucent wind blowing head-on, reviving in my ears the cheers and players' shouts from Jingu Stadium I once frequented, I kept throwing with all my might as if enraged.

The strength to ignore him—that was what I sought to gain. Yamaguchi, however, neither spoke nor looked my way nor strolled nor descended—merely continuing to gaze fixedly through the wire mesh at the world below. And gradually I forgot his presence, becoming engrossed in the imaginary Keio-Waseda game.

Four to zero.
The third inning had ended with Keio in the lead.
Time to eat.

Turning around—buoyed by confirming my own strength and that refreshingly mindless mood from reaching a stopping point in my absorbed sport—I looked at Yamaguchi and laughed brightly.
Then unexpectedly, he formed a listless smile like faint cloud shadows drifting across a mountainside—as if ashamed of accidentally meeting my gaze……For me, such a smile from him was an entirely new experience.
That smile contained what you might call a tacit solidarity resembling secret sharing and the palpable emotion of acknowledging it while feeling ashamed—however weakly.

——We could become friends.
That innocent intuition brightened my spirits.
I stuffed the ball into my pocket and, clutching the retrieved lunchbox in one hand, began walking straight toward Yamaguchi.

At that moment, his eyes—having weakly lowered their gaze—brushed against my lunchbox before abruptly sliding away.
With a start, I realized something for the first time.
That's right—he never ate lunch. When the break approached, he always slipped silently from the room.
Though I'd unconsciously noted this habit, I'd never grasped its meaning until now—what a fool I was. ……But would I truly offer him half my lunch now?

To tell the truth, what made me hesitate then was not—of all things—the prospect of my own lunch being halved, nor any imagined hunger pangs.
Such things had never crossed my mind.—That was, embarrassing though it was, the awkwardness and peculiar guilt that came with doing a "good deed".

Then came the premonition of guilt toward my mother—who was skipping her own lunch to make my bento—beginning to stir.
Given my weak-willed nature, once I did that, I’d likely have no choice but to make it a habit.
Then, that aching hunger on the train ride home—resembling actual pain—came back to me with visceral clarity: how it would soon empty out until I couldn’t even tell if it hurt anymore, how a restless irritation with nowhere to direct its force would seep through my entire body, how distant things would grow hazy while nearby objects began to sway.
...But in the end, what made me decide to stop sharing my lunch was the judgment—and fear—that Yamaguchi, with his neurotic, solitary pride bordering on arrogance, would never sincerely reciprocate my pushy display of kindness.
I decided I’d had enough of having my weakness thrown back at me and being mocked.

I thought.
I'll eat my lunch alone, cheerfully.
It was a frank assertion of my rights and a frank respect for his pride.
When doing what's ordinary, I should do it with an ordinary attitude.
In human interactions, touching places that must never be touched is clearly discourteous, no matter how well-intentioned or kind the motive.
……However, my legs had already carried me right beside him—he who'd released his grip on the wire mesh.

"That spot gets good sunlight... Let's go."

Muttering to myself like a soliloquy, I walked to a rooftop corner where the clear winter sunlight gathered in quiet shimmer. There was no reply, but Yamaguchi followed me with uncharacteristic docility. Was this odd defiance his way of avoiding being read? I wondered, struck by his unexpected compliance.

Even after sitting down in that corner, I remained silent.
Seated in the same manner, Yamaguchi too kept quiet.
Still silent, when I finished unwrapping the cloth-bound lunch bundle, my stomach groaned with uncanny loudness—a deep, rumbling growl.
The taut atmosphere suddenly slackened, and I burst into loud laughter.
……That did it.
When I flipped open the anodized aluminum lid and saw the usual contents—two slender whole-simmered squid and six clumps of millet each barely filling a palm, all huddled timidly to one side—my tongue had naturally betrayed me.

“Eat if you want. Half.”

Yamaguchi fixed a strange smile and shook his head.
To my eyes, it appeared less like willful refusal and more like those meaningless shifts of balance—the reflexive movements of a baby who can’t yet hold up its head.

“Eat up. It’s fine.”

Yamaguchi shook his head again with a slightly wider motion.
The frozen smile disappeared, transforming into something vacant—a blankly vague expression—as his eyes cast toward the distant sky.
……Fury assailed me.
All my earlier prudence and premonitions of regret were utterly forgotten; blood rushed to my head and cheeks as if I’d been publicly shamed.

I repeated in a low, forceful voice:

“I’m speaking sincerely.”
“I know it’s meddlesome.”
“But if you’re hungry—no—you must eat, must eat... Just eat it, okay? If you want to.”

Left speechless, I finally realized I needed to extricate myself from the frenzy. I took one of the rice balls, crammed it into my mouth, and turned away. To hell with it all, I thought. Damn it all. I can't keep up this charade with this idiot anymore——At that moment, Yamaguchi's hand reached toward the lunchbox with simple honesty.

“—Thank you.”

He said without meeting my eyes.
Then tossed the rice ball straight into his mouth.

As if witnessing the impossible, I watched Yamaguchi eat from the corner of my eye.
He put it in his mouth all at once and seemed to chew deliberately slowly.

Out of some awkwardness, I too found myself avoiding eye contact.
In silence, we reached for the lunchbox with precise alternation.
As though by natural right, whenever I picked up a simmered squid, he would duly take the remaining one... Gradually, I began feeling a certain relief and trust—that he wasn’t wounded by this exchange, or perhaps that he was pretending not to be.
That feeling had grown into near-gratitude when I saw his emaciated, pallid hand reach unhesitatingly for the final portion meant for him.—I was unbearably glad he’d abandoned his stubbornly contrary air and responded to me with such unforced openness.

From then on, Yamaguchi and I designated the rooftop as our clandestine meeting spot and began splitting my lunch in half every day.

——Why did we go out of our way to designate this windswept, freezing rooftop as our clandestine meeting spot?
At that elementary school, there existed a rather expansive red-soil playground and classrooms left empty due to student mobilization; behind the playground lay a small hill cloaked in a dull, deep-green forest offering countless suitable spots for clandestine meetings, and beyond that stretched the gently sloping grounds of this private school’s founder—Mr. F’s estate, its grasses left to grow wild and almost perpetually devoid of human presence.

However, Yamaguchi and I—from then on every day without fail—would slip out from the small room beside the entrance when afternoon classes began, meet on the rooftop via separate staircases, and there, just as I had initially predicted from my own weakness of character, develop the habit of splitting my mother’s painstakingly prepared lunchbox between us.

The rooftop.
——Was it not because our dispositions coincided—mine and his, we who disdained earthly reality—that we never left that initial meeting place? Not merely from habit, but from that sensation of vantage where looking down upon the world below revealed only a desolate winter sky level with our eyes.
……In truth, we would occasionally gaze earthward, calling the humans squirming through endless scorched ruins mere insects, laughingly likening everything—even war and atomic bombs—to events in an ant's world, layering laugh upon laugh.
At least to me, humanity's world seemed nothing but a shoddy castle of lies built moment by moment—so pathetically fragile that one stomp from some invisible giant's foot would instantly obliterate every trace of order, justice, or beauty, leaving only rubble.
I also feel we were tacitly confirming to each other—so to speak—the necessity of something akin to cruel resolve for surviving within that world hereafter.
——

On rainy days, we would place our feet on the topmost step of the staircase to the rooftop and sit side by side facing downstairs.
Then from the cloth-wrapped lunchbox placed directly on the concrete between us, we would eat our own portions in silence.
I felt that between us—Yamaguchi and I sharing our meager meal like two boy beggars—there existed a furtive, wretched sort of friendship, like thieving mice avoiding notice.
Yamaguchi too must have felt the same—or perhaps something even more miserable.
To perceive all humans as squirming things beneath our feet—that may have been our emotions' paltry compensation.

However, I made no effort to make my relationship with Yamaguchi more intimate.
I consciously avoided that.

If anything, I'm the type who gets easily engrossed—a clingy sort who'd overflow and lean my whole weight against someone if I loosened my guard even slightly.
I desperately wanted someone to talk openly with like that, but I hated how Yamaguchi took my attitude as some smug form of "coercion"—as if feeding him obligated reciprocation.
So I maintained an indifferent expression entirely unchanged from before at all other times, engaging only during lunchbox-splitting in intimate talks like different people.
...Apparently Yamaguchi had wanted this too.
With older colleagues I'd sometimes play lifeless ping-pong matches, but he absolutely refused to join or even approach such gatherings.
In the duty room's gloom he always sat apart alone—never meeting my eyes—wearing a face that seemed to have forgotten our daily lunch-sharing ritual.
Yet seeing him there—child-nimble eyes darting sharply under that perpetually pale-clear mask of silence—I'd sometimes wonder what he truly felt about our unspoken pact.
Was this face preserving humiliation too shameful to show others? Would he spend his life resenting me—hating me as his sworn enemy?
Or was he too bored with idle days here—secretly savoring our theatrical secret pact like some time-killing game?

In any case, neither answer could be discerned from Yamaguchi’s expression.
Whenever I lowered my eyes to the calculus textbook with its mold-blue cover, or observed Yamaguchi pretending to sleep behind a newspaper as if annoyed by others, I often found myself reminded of an old man who detested children.
His movements always carried such a stubborn, listless air.
Once, when I saw the cover of a paperback book he’d left on his desk (he rarely showed such carelessness), I found myself chuckling to myself—the title suited him so perfectly.
It was certainly titled *The Hermit's Dusk*.

He commuted to school from the barracks built after the Aoyama estate, walking a considerable distance.
But he never voiced that either, and said not a word about his own life or family.
However, after meals on the rooftop, he would speak in fragments about classmates who had been mobilized to factories—mainly during that period—as if bored by the silence.
To me—who had dodged that last-minute wartime mobilization due to otitis media—those stories from that time remained almost entirely uncharted territory.
It was from him, that same fifteen-year-old, that I first acquired a rudimentary knowledge of male homosexuality.

“……But,” Yamaguchi said.
“I somehow felt more driven day-to-day back during the war.—My body was stronger too.”

“That’s true,” I answered in heartfelt agreement.
“After all, back then we’d already determined we’d die soon enough.
We just lived each of those dwindling days that were certain to end at the ‘death’ right before our eyes.
……Every day felt like a tightly drawn string.”

“The certainty that we’d soon die—I suppose that’s what gave us fulfillment.”
“I feel that way.”

“That’s right—we were living full tilt with that finish line already in sight.”
“But then that very finish line vanished when the war ended.”
“What a nuisance.”
“Living just to keep living—this is pure contradiction.”

“Looking back now, I suppose things felt lighter then.”
“Thinking I’d die soon made everything turn strangely simple—my mind felt weightless.”

“Really. It did feel lighter.”
“It really did feel lighter, didn’t it?”

Yamaguchi liked cigarettes, but I hated them.
We of that time—unlike children of previous generations who had yearned for adults and felt compelled to imitate them by forcing themselves to smoke—had even been granted the adult-like right to reject those cigarettes distributed alongside rations matching factory workers during our mobilization.
We were substitutes without doubt, yet were properly treated as full-fledged "adults"—and consequently believed we had acquired the right to scorn those very "adults."
Yamaguchi—puffing with apparent relish on hand-rolled cigarettes he’d stealthily taken from home—and I spent our days exchanging such conclusions almost daily.
Looking back now, it may seem somewhat comical, but we were deadly serious.
——We were likely neither adults nor children, and we mutually recognized this.

He had begun growing out his hair about a month before I did.
The chest of his coarse black staple-fiber uniform lay flat, and his small, pallid face still unmistakably resembled that of a boy from "a photograph of youthful days remembered."
Without even the first signs of down that would become a beard, his waxen-pale smooth gaunt cheeks stood in contrast to lips alone—thick and vividly red as if painted.
And within that childish whole, only those eyes with thick lashes—like those of an adult who had done nothing but gaze upon life’s underbelly—would at times shine with an utterly distasteful gleam.
……I strangely hated these eyes.
Sinister, cunning, ironic, unrelenting—the eyes of one unloved by anyone and loving no one in turn, eyes that seemed to regard that misfortune as nothing but a weapon.
……Perhaps Yamaguchi himself was aware of the distasteful quality in those eyes, for even when speaking, he never seemed to try making proper eye contact with others.

By now, the hunger had become unbearable.—No matter how much I tried to reason with it, my starved stomach refused satisfaction—swelling only with pain as brittle as thin ice, offering no strength to my entire body.
At a rate of once every four days, my vision would blur, and I’d lose even the will to move.
In the mornings, I couldn’t climb the station stairs.
Finding myself faltering midway comical, I laughed—yet even that laughter died halfway—and before I knew it, I was staring fixedly while repeating short breaths……

I had no choice but to skip commuting to school one day each week—either Wednesday or Thursday—and spend it sleeping at home.
(If Yamaguchi hadn't been there, I would've skipped even more days.)
How painful must the disappearance of that habit—supplying half our lunches—have been for Yamaguchi?
Moreover, since this habit was one I had initiated—that sense of responsibility kept me from taking more days off afterward—I still never neglected my daily routine of reading one book.
I could almost say I became possessed by filling those densely packed titles of classics—both old and new—listed in the back of the Iwanami Bunko catalog with completion circles.
The number of books I read was nearing seventy volumes.

When I went to the back of the schoolyard, there was a sunlit hollow—where even midwinter's bitter winds refrained from their torment—that formed a gentle slope beginning where the woods ended. Over time I learned to occasionally visit this place, lying alone on the withered grass slope and rolling down with rumbling tumbles for amusement.

At the top, I first fell sideways and stiffened into the "attention" position. Then, giving my body momentum, I boldly rolled down the slope—and the sky spun. The world spun. The smell of sunbaked dead grass, the smell of coarse earth, crammed into my nostrils.—It was a strangely fascinating game that conserved energy to the utmost while still letting me savor a comfortable sense of speed......My rotation gradually accelerated, dizzyingly rapid—as if my consciousness were caught in a centrifuge and flung far away—until two or three times, a chillingly surreal sensation raced through me, and finally, powerless, my body halted like a single corpse. Just like that, I usually pressed my nose diagonally into the withered grass or ground and held my breath for a while.—Especially, I favored the final moment of "like a corpse"—I favored the sensation just before coming to a complete stop. At that moment, I became a single, complete "object" shaped like a human. I surrendered entirely to the mindless serenity unique to "objects," their unshakable immobility, their wordless yet finite dark plenitude—this irresponsible plenitude of matter alone......

So I climbed up the slope again—lay sideways while staring into the blue sky’s depths—assumed a posture like timber freshly hewn from mountains—and tumbled down once more. Lacking even the energy to play "baseball," I continued this until boredom set in, then often sat hugging my knees, bathing in tepid sunlight head-on as I slipped into trance-like hours.

It was during such moments that I felt toward Yamaguchi a warmth of friendship even deeper than when we were together. He didn't get in my way. I didn't get in his way either. Our ethical sensibilities, our understanding of others—they were in perfect alignment. I liked him. He must surely have liked me too. ……Abruptly, with piercing clarity, I found myself thinking this. Enduring my own hunger, I split my lunchbox with him every day—this solidarity between us two, who never spoke except during those moments—was precisely why it felt carefree and precious to me. No matter how hungry I got, that’s precisely why I didn’t want to change that habit. Like cradling a cup filled to the brim, I continued guarding that meager friendship—that exact relationship with Yamaguchi—with utmost care. On days I rested, my chest filled less with thoughts directed at Yamaguchi and more with anxiety over our friendship and a sense of guilt.

It must have been around early February.

It was when I was writing characters on waxed paper with a stylus—preparing mimeographed test papers occasionally requested by teachers—in the small room assigned to us leftover group members.
My colleagues had each taken on separate tasks and were sluggishly assisting with the work collectively, yet Yamaguchi alone was nowhere to be seen.

“Where’d he go, I wonder.”

When I said this—meaning to have someone relieve me since I was tired—one of the oldest members pushing the roller remarked with a sarcastic look.

“Mr. Yamaguchi? He’s always off napping somewhere at times like this.”

“He isn’t being lazy—he’s just stingy,” another said with a gloomy face. “He begrudges even sticking out his tongue, begrudges using the slightest bit of energy…”

And the people laughed, mingling pitiful coughs.

“But you can’t blame him,” one of them said. “His family’s all saving up to build a proper house instead of barracks soon, I hear. That’s why he doesn’t take the train here and skips lunch altogether.”

“How do you know that?” I asked. “Such things...”

About Yamaguchi—I had never once considered that he might be cooperating with his family to skip lunches while saving construction funds.

“Me?” one of them replied. “I was classmates with his older brother, you know. The other day, I met him on the street and heard about it. By this summer, they’re apparently building quite a splendid house.”

One of them said.

“Mr. Yamaguchi’s family are major landowners somewhere in the downtown area... right?”
“They’ve probably saved up a considerable amount by now.”
“If they just sold a bit of land, they could manage… you know.”
“It’s not like the whole family needs to scrimp on their meals too…”

“But the more land you hold, the more the price goes up.”
“That’s so typical of Mr. Yamaguchi’s household, don’t you think?”

A colleague holding a roller said.
The people once again raised their voices in apathetic laughter.

I remained silent.
--After all, that was a shock.
My father had died, our house had no money, and to make matters worse, my aunt--my mother's younger sister awaiting her husband's return from the war--was living with us, bringing along her five-year-old and three-year-old sons.
The shabbiness of my lunchbox was therefore unavoidable.
But Yamaguchi's household seemed to have enough money that they could easily buy black market rice if they so chose.
Then, what on earth was this thing I'd been doing?
I thought that he was not the "comrade" I had arbitrarily believed him to be.
I, who had no money, split my already meager lunch to share with him, while he, who had money, sought to settle snugly into a "splendid house" by exploiting my goodwill.
While my meddling might indeed be absurd, wasn't his approach just as dishonest and excessive?

The reason that shock didn't transform into rage was perhaps, unexpectedly, because I myself no longer possessed even that much energy. Absurdly appalled at my own kindness and foolishness, I ultimately thought that my efforts might amount to contributing roughly one or two tatami mats' worth toward the new house Yamaguchi's family was building. Even so, I couldn't immediately grip the stylus and pull myself together to resume work.

The realization finally came to me that day—midway up the stairs to the rooftop, lunchbox in hand as usual—just as afternoon classes were beginning once more. Of course, I intended to confront Yamaguchi and end our habit if the rumors proved true. But as I prepared for this interrogation, I realized that against Yamaguchi, I myself had almost no justification.

First, regardless of Yamaguchi’s circumstances, I had almost forcibly pressed half of my lunchbox on him. Yamaguchi had simply complied with that. It’s all well and good to accuse him of dishonesty, but first and foremost, I never made sharing my meal conditional on him disclosing his family’s situation. Therefore, he was not at fault. Fault, blame, oversight—all these lay on my side. It wasn’t that he had deceived me, but rather that I had willfully deceived myself into being deceived by him.…

My anger had gradually transformed into self-loathing.
That’s how it was.
Everything was a farce I performed alone.
I abruptly told him to eat half, then suddenly demanded why he’d silently eaten half and angrily severed ties.
Such unreasonableness—my arbitrariness, my harmful selfishness—was precisely what Yamaguchi had every right to condemn.

—And then, I realized.
"In the first place—had I ever once truly believed him to be my real 'comrade'?"
Was it not precisely because I—being myself, and he being himself—were two "individuals" living separately in distant places, occasionally brushing against each other or fleetingly sensing solidarity, that I actively sought to formalize that rooftop meal-sharing as a ritual?
……Was it not precisely because I perceived Yamaguchi—this single other person, this one "individual"—as an incomprehensible "individual" that I came to value our mealtime connection as "precious," limiting our interaction to those rooftop hours like a water-filled cup carefully maintained, ensuring even my indulgence wouldn’t erode its fragile substance?
……Even if that sense of solidarity—that friendship—was nothing but my self-indulgent delusion, a phantom spun from that delusion, the fact remains that all solidarity and all friendship are established solely through each individual’s similar delusions—yet this truth does not invalidate them as lies.
Hadn’t I already learned this to the point of disgust through my wartime experiences?

Thinking, becoming confused, and wavering in thought, I had arrived at the usual corner of the rooftop.
And then Yamaguchi appeared there out of nowhere and sat down beside me as usual, his lunch bundle wrapped in cloth tucked under an arm.
—That’s right, I thought—he did indeed have the right to sit in this place and demand half of my lunchbox.
Because I was the one who had forced that right upon him.

In other words, there was no change at all in this real mutual relationship.
Even if the earlier rumor were true, it was merely one of those things I "didn’t know about."
Checking its veracity with him now would carry no meaning other than effeminate sarcasm.
……Then I had nothing to say.

It was a cold day.
Silently, as usual, Yamaguchi precisely ate half of my lunchbox.
Then, we talked about the day’s weather, and suddenly I said, “I make it a rule to kill twenty flies every day.”
His face was red, his eyes glassy—he clearly had a fever.

“...I’ve been sleeping in the infirmary until now,” he said.
“And I just thought of something—I think living things can’t survive without killing something every day. …Humans are living things too, right?”
“The Japanese should just kill each other off until the population’s down to about a third.”
“Especially the sick ones.”
“Anyway, the strong ones win.”

I did not know what he had been thinking.
But strangely, these words remained vividly impressed upon me.
And I remember feeling profoundly moved by Yamaguchi as he spoke them—staring at the rooftop stones with flushed cheeks.—

I forgot what I answered and exactly what I said.
But before I knew it, I grew excited and spoke fervently—as usual, with single-minded intensity—in agreement with his words: that indeed organisms can only survive by consuming other organisms; that beyond the principle of the strong prevailing, there existed no absolute law in the biological world. As for what I'd heard about his family that day—in the end, I said nothing.
There was no need to say it.
Once again, I found myself wholeheartedly wishing for this habit—which fostered the same illusion of solidarity and friendship as before—to continue.

Did Yamaguchi know I'd heard those rumors? I think he probably didn't know. In the end, we never exchanged a single word about it.

But even if building a house first was the family's policy, the notion of making even a fifteen-year-old boy with a chest ailment skip lunch lay entirely outside my "common sense." There might be some special circumstances at play there, and Yamaguchi himself might have been acting from entirely different considerations.

The reason I deliberately avoided addressing the matter was, to put it plainly, that I didn’t want to know or feel anything about this particular misfortune of Yamaguchi’s family—or of Yamaguchi himself.
The very fact that another person’s irremediable misfortune was irremediable to me plunged me into a heavy, unpleasant mood.
I wanted to see nothing in others except that wall of happiness that thrust me away.

Therefore, I concluded that Yamaguchi’s family customs must conceal a terrifying individuality far beyond anything someone like me could comprehend, and resolved not to dwell on the matter any further.
I carried it out.

And so, no change came to the secret habit I shared with Yamaguchi.
However, the midwinter train commute—a round trip taking nearly five hours, or rather, sometimes even longer—was by no means comfortable.

The trip there was still manageable. If things went well, I could even get a seat starting from Ninomiya; also, if I boarded the front of the train and kept my eyes sharp, it was possible to find a seat after the laborers poured out at Hiratsuka and lose myself in reading all the way to Shinagawa. But the return trip was brutal. The student commuter pass was from Shinagawa, but first I had to brace myself for the possibility of not being able to board at all. Even so, if I went all the way to Tokyo Station to secure a seat, I would inevitably end up missing the third or fourth train, and the hunger—so intense it made me want to cry—would only grow worse. On top of literally murderous overcrowding (I once witnessed one person hanging from the deck strike their head against a utility pole beside the tracks and plummet to instant death), we’d further collide with rush hour around Yokohama, where Occupation forces laborers—eyes bloodshot from the same hunger complexes—would come surging in with war-like frenzy toward every possible entry point: windows, couplers, any crevice into the train cars. Therefore, the train I took home would arrive at Ninomiya sometime between 5:30 and 7:00, yet despite leaving school after three every day, it never settled into a fixed schedule.

Winter days grew dark early.
After parting ways with Yamaguchi in front of the school, as I waited alone for the Shinagawa-bound tram, the only thing occupying my thoughts was dinner.
The appetite-whetting air of dusk began settling over the area, and quick-acting houses started lighting their lamps one after another.
Reading at such times amounted to nothing more than a temporary distraction.
The tram that never seemed to arrive would inevitably be packed when it finally came.
In such cramped conditions, shoulders hunched as if in offering while forcing myself to keep reading that day’s portion of the book, I truly wondered—why must I go to such lengths to attend a school with no classes?
Or rather—must I strive to keep living?
Is living really something this troublesome and dull?
At times, I thought with a cold, hollow chill deep in my heart.
Then came a sharp, stabbing pain—as though my naked body were exposed to icy winds, as though that coldness were gnawing away at the hollow shell I was from the inside out. Or rather, something resembling that pain—a meaningless, unearned, directionless sadness—began drifting through me like smoke, permeating every part of my being.
For a moment, I forgot to think about the meaning of living.
I found the talent of people who lived joyfully, brightly, and fulfillingly to be something completely beyond my comprehension.
I thought of those people’s health, their energy, their vitality as things from another world……And before I knew it, my consciousness hurriedly returned to the “daily routine” book.

In short, I think what I desired was a bright, robust health—like the plump, elastic cheeks of youth—and that sense of fulfillment.
It always existed for me only in a distant foreign land, and to feel at least a homemade “fulfillment,” I wanted to immerse myself in something—always.
It also possessed the secondary effect of distracting my mind from the hunger that clung constantly and refused to leave.

I viewed with extreme wariness and detested anything other than that bright, radiant, healthy happiness—things like feeble, enervated sorrow; the girlish sentimentality of chasing stars and violets; grief and anguish—all those inclinations that ultimately plunge one into dark introspection.
Even if the present were dark, miserable, painful, and hard—why would there be any need to delve deeper into such things or examine them further?
Unconsciously, I was probably seeking some form of absorption that could distract me from my current reality.
Naturally, I didn’t question the content or type.
For me at that time, reading was an obsession with a feverish sense of fulfillment—meaningful merely in the act of reading itself.

But on the return trip, I couldn't even read that book. Due to the human rush, fatigue, moderate vibrations, and dimness inside the train car, I would doze off nearly every day. ……At Shinagawa Station, there was almost no space left to board the passenger cars. The train I rode was usually one of those covered freight cars converted into passenger cars—three of which were invariably included in every train back then. Though its slatted floor made footing precarious, there were no shriveling drafts from broken glass windows, and even in darkness, closing the doors trapped enough body heat to stay warm. Lacking seats, people packed themselves in standing like sardines—grunting as you pushed against the back of whoever stood ahead until somehow you found yourself boarded too—making it the car I exclusively preferred. However, since I hadn't yet reached my full height and stood only at shoulder level with those around me, remaining still would leave me struggling to breathe. So once inside the moving car, I desperately stretched upward like an inchworm over and over until my face rose above people's shoulders. Of course my shoes dangled midair, but this suited me perfectly. Even when dozing off or going completely limp, the tightly packed crowd inevitably supported me. Against the stifling human heat, I could at best point my nostrils ceilingward—under the crowd's relentless pressure, I couldn't turn my face let alone move properly. Yet for this same reason, cold couldn't creep in either. ……In short, it became my most comfortable passenger car.

――Once, in my father’s old overcoat I used to wear, there was a woman’s red leather pouch.
Of course its contents were empty, but I still cannot forget that strange fairy-tale-like thrill and shock I felt upon discovering it—when I casually slipped my hand into my pocket after leaving Ninomiya Station.
In secretly possessing stolen goods confiscated by the police, I felt a guilty thrill akin to that of an accomplice, and a strange joy in being party to covert misdeeds.
……So, to ensure no one would discover it, I quietly kept it warm in my pocket for about a week, and the day after that thrill had hollowed out, I sneaked off alone to discard it into the sea.

No matter how much I dozed off, strangely, I never once passed Ninomiya.
My days continued in that manner.

It was a certain morning as March was approaching.
When I rounded the entrance and opened the door to the usual small room, one of the older colleagues—

“Oh… Did you know? The mobilization’s ending,” he said brightly.

the older colleague called out cheerfully.
I was startled.

“Is that true?”
“So everyone’s coming back?”
“Here?”

The oldest colleague answered with his usual somewhat cynical smile.

“It’s true—starting on the first of next month. So everyone’s coming over here too, you know.”
“The teachers too, you know.”

I couldn’t comprehend at all how my colleagues had suddenly brightened up in unison, as though sunlight had broken through the clouds.
...Looking back now, they had likely been welcoming—alongside the mobilized middle schoolers—the return of studies to the school; or more concretely, the "exam system."
Their deficiency lay not in academics but in their physicality, and since they took pride in this—viewing it as a worker’s shortcoming rather than a student’s—

But I could feel no pleasure whatsoever in the disappearance of both this solitary, carefree vacation that had been granted to me and the personal order I’d constructed there—an order that had begun to stabilize.
...To me, these past several months now felt like a terribly half-baked preparation period—an utterly inadequate training in solitude for enduring both the crude, unspiritual commotion that would erupt when school reopened like poking a hornet’s nest, and the hectic season of their healthy vitality’s overflow that struck me as profoundly unhygienic. A period that had certainly lasted too long, yet now felt too short because of it.
But I could no longer immerse myself in carefree, leisurely solitude.
From now on, amid the dizzying whirlpool of countless acts of “health”—a violence wielded by classmates who had worked as day laborers—I would have to lament my own powerlessness and maladjustment, jostled by their vigor like a rickety cart stranded at a bustling city intersection.

……In that same dark mood as my first day in the duty room, I spent two gloomy hours without speaking to anyone, then hit upon an idea. Clutching a cold, hard rubber ball I hadn’t held in ages, I slowly climbed up to the rooftop.

Once again—should I start a league or something?
……Should I kick off my own Tokyo Six University baseball league—just me alone?

Of course, I was fully aware that this was nothing more than feeble bravado meant to mask my own anxiety.
The single ethic of "candor" I must have acquired during the war had now become nothing but a sharp dagger without its sheath within me.
It no longer had the power to support me; instead, it ceaselessly pierced my living flesh—my self-deception—from behind with its sharp tip.…“Candor” in action, I suddenly realized, was synonymous with health.
Now I had lost that.
Before I knew it, I had become a genuine invalid.

That’s right.
Having now lost such "health," I would inevitably be dragged into the active chaos and clamor stirred up by the returning crowd, and would constantly have to feel inferior to their vitality.
……In that terror—overwhelming, desperate, like suffocating to death—at the certain impending arrival of such days, I desperately thought: Alright then, should I flaunt the titles and quantity of books I’ve read to them? Make them revere me? Make them see me as something apart?
If I’m not saved even by that reading I made my "daily task," then what on earth will save me and become the power to oppose them?
Right, then—why don’t I make reading two books a day my new "daily task" from now on?

……But I was fully aware of how hollow these soliloquies were. It was, so to speak, nothing but a meaningless scream spewed out by my panic. Nothing but the excretion of hollow, illusory displeasure and fear—existing solely to avert one’s gaze from the approaching violence of countless “healths,” like bubbles blown by crabs on the seabed: the moment they leave one’s mouth, waver upward past one’s head, then vanish with a *pop* at the water’s surface.

――While thinking this, I kept hitting the ball against the wall.
Then suddenly I realized—this self mechanically swinging my arm out of inertia, repeating this exchange between ball and wall—felt like a fragile balloon being toyed with by the rooftop’s fierce winds.……At that moment, I truly was light as a paper balloon, cradling only the desolate wind-pierced hollow within me—a hollow filled with blank fullness—drifting wherever the wind willed: nothing but an empty sack of meaninglessness.

Foolishly, I could no longer muster even the drive to keep throwing the ball.
Without bothering to retrieve the ball that had rolled away, I trudged dejectedly to the corner where I always ate.
I had meant to rest awhile.
Despising this slovenly, wretched self that had lost all vitality, I lacked even the strength to rebel.

“Yamakawa.”

How much time had passed as I sat there, knees hugged to my chest, staring fixedly at the rooftop’s flat white stone surface, when suddenly Yamaguchi’s shrill voice curved toward me from the exit leading up to the roof. Toward me—who had listlessly raised my eyes—he walked straight over with heavy footsteps resounding, his coldly pale expression still perched atop that usual black turtleneck sweater.

The moment I saw his eyes, I realized a feeling common to us both was weighing heavily on him too. He must have felt the same disgust and terror toward the future revealed today—toward this new daily life set to begin on the first of next month. His desperate eyes stared straight at me, the plaster-like pallor of his cheeks making his lips’ redness stand out more vividly than usual.

He stopped before me as I sat hugging my knees.
Without a word, all I could see was his right wrist where he gripped his own fingers tightly.

“……Everyone’s coming back, I hear,” I said.

“Hmph.”
“Same thing.”

“No—it’s definitely not the same thing.”

“No—same thing.”

Maintaining his posture of looking down at me, Yamaguchi repeated this with an insolent, arrogant attitude—like a fanatic—as though flicking it off his shoulder.

The words I had expected to voice in agreement naturally became disordered, and I became flustered.

“Is that so? I feel like things will change completely—fundamentally—that our daily lives will get thrown into chaos somehow, I…”

“Hmph, I don’t think so. In the end, we’re just the same sick people as always. There’s no need to change a single thing at all.”

I blankly looked up at him. He kept his gaze fixed on the empty sky behind my right shoulder, lips pressed tight as if enduring humiliation, his expression petrified.—I couldn’t understand why he was getting so worked up. First of all, if "nothing will change," then why on earth did he go out of his way to come up to the rooftop now? There were still two hours until our usual mealtime. Wasn’t he the guy who never came to see me except at mealtimes? ...Looking up at his frail body—bearing the faded light of a cloudy day, shoulders stubbornly squared, eyes fixed on empty space—I suddenly recalled those wartime youth aviation corps recruitment posters. If he’d tied on a hachimaki headband, it would have perfectly matched the poster’s image of that stalwart boy’s “heroic figure.”

I laughed without restraint... Whether laughing had given me composure, or whether I'd finally discovered an equally earnest "boy" in him—that same him who'd felt somehow oppressive until now—my energy began returning.
Feeling completely unburdened, I said:
"So then—why'd you come up to the rooftop now?"

“...”

“If you really think that way, then why come all the way here to declare nothing needs changing?”

“...”

Yamaguchi remained silent.
But I didn’t miss it—how something faintly vulnerable slid across his pale, sharp-featured face, stopping short of actual agitation.
Was Yamaguchi here because he was hungry? The thought struck me reflexively before I suddenly made a connection.

Was Yamaguchi worried that our habit of splitting lunches from now on would disappear—had he come to see me to confirm this?
There was no need to change a single thing at all.
Was that his way of covertly saying "Don’t change that habit"?

While staring at Yamaguchi, I thought I should verify that clearly. Stretching my back, I slowly stood up.

“Yeah, nothing’ll change… Just like you said.”
“I’m not planning to change how things’ve always been between us… No need to worry.”

“...”

I couldn’t hear the answer.
I looked at Yamaguchi—before my eyes, his cheeks flushed crimson as if he’d stopped breathing, something fierce flooding his face and eyes.
However, it was clear this was less anger than shame—a bearing of humiliation—something not exploding outward in challenge but rather turning inward.

Glaring fiercely at the empty sky, his entire face crimson, he remained perfectly still.

So that’s how it is after all.
—A disillusioned acceptance had settled upon me.
Pretending not to notice, I started walking toward the rooftop exit.
For some reason, I didn’t want to talk to him anymore.

“...Yamakawa.”

It was when I had moved five or six steps away from him.
Yamaguchi's voice, unexpectedly cheerful, called out to me.

“Yamakawa.… What if we tried climbing this smokestack together?”

The reason I stopped, however, wasn't because I was struck by the content of his words.

In truth, it was simply that Yamaguchi—suddenly becoming approachable for the first time—seemed so unusual that I changed my attitude out of surprise.

When I turned around, he was grinning, twisting his upper body as he pointed at the smokestack with his right hand.

“Let’s climb it.”
“This smokestack. Okay?”

“Smokestack?”

But Yamaguchi was serious.
As if that outlandish idea had abruptly taken hold of him, he adopted a childishly single-minded expression unlike his usual self, innocently signaled with his finger, then without any hesitation smoothly and skillfully scaled the wire mesh and began climbing the smokestack’s narrow iron ladder.

“Whoa, it’s cold!”
He exhaled white breath onto each hand gripping the ladder, then twisted his neck to flash me a grin.
“Whoa, it’s so high...”
The wind billowed his black coat into a giant hump, and then he let out a shout as if exhilarated.…

What exactly that fierce desire I felt in that moment was, I didn't know.

In any case, when I saw him clinging to the smokestack like a sailor atop a mast—dashing and cheerful—an intense impulse suddenly welled up in my chest as if scrubbed with a wire brush: a fierce desire to expose myself to the freezing cold of high altitudes, to the harsh, cruel winds of winter.

“Alright. Let’s go.”

There was no room left to think.
I was drawn magnetically to the wire mesh and effortlessly vaulted over it.
Feeling a strange tightrope-walk sensation somewhere between thrill and elation, I shifted onto the smokestack with an acrobat’s footing, laughed in unison with Yamaguchi climbing about five meters above me, then began ascending the iron ladder in a rhythm that felt oddly comfortable.
The smokestack jutted against the square concrete box of the rooftop entrance, towering straight into the sky.

I quickly passed the blackened section and moved on to the white upper half—its weather-beaten, cracked surface brazenly exposing bare concrete.
At that moment, Yamaguchi had already reached the summit.

The summit had an area of just over one meter in diameter. Encircling the eerie cavernous maw that protruded ominously from the ground, the circumference measured about twenty centimeters in width. Covered in dust and soot, our palms were stained completely black except between the fingers, like a Black soldier's. ...but perhaps because it hadn't been fired in some time, the soot wasn't that bad. Yamaguchi and I sat side by side on the edge and, with the dangling heels of our shoes, kicked the outside of the smokestack two or three times.

“Tch.”
“I thought I’d see the ocean though.”

“Can’t we see it?”

“Tch.”
“What a filthy city.”
“In war—you don’t lose.”

“Yeah.”

In the terror of losing my balance, I turned my head only to find I couldn’t even face toward distant Shinagawa or Shibaura.
Only Hiroo directly ahead remained in my vision.
Mechanically returning prompt replies all the while, my head held nothing but an excitement like silver bells ringing clear and continuous.

“...Dreary view.”
“Absolutely.”

After a period of silence, Yamaguchi spoke.
Already he had returned to his usual gloomy voice.
Suddenly I too felt a coldness at the back of my head—perhaps unexpectedly, the difference in how quickly that intoxication faded might have been due to the five-meter gap between him and me.
By precisely that margin I reached the summit—that same bright, rhythmic smokestack peak—the place that had been the apex of inexplicable desire now transformed from where anticipated happiness resided into a desolate endpoint of fulfillment.
A cold wind whistled past earlobes.

With both hands gripping the left and right edges, gazing out at the bone-chillingly desolate scenery—the barracks, flimsy buildings, and uncleared burned ruins filling my entire field of vision shrouded in whitish winter haze—I thought: Why had I crawled up to such dangerous heights? Even now, I didn’t understand. Couldn’t fathom it.
...Yet along with an instinctive terror that I might fall at any moment, there persisted within me a strangely refreshing sense of distance from the world below—as if I had dissolved into part of that murky, overcast winter sky. Or rather, perhaps what truly lived inside me in that moment were precisely those two sensations.
I felt that piercing sensation of existing in a world apart from the earth below—like gazing at a forgotten jewel, like a sharp, dazzling arrow of light—piercing through my chest.

And now, I have taken up residence in heaven.
If leaving the earth below is what they call "death," then without a doubt, I am now in the world of "death."
From the world of "death," I gaze upon the world of "life."

But suddenly, I intuited that this was the same as that nostalgic "being alive" sensation I had keenly felt during the war—experiencing machine-gun fire from U.S. carrier-based planes.
In other words, wasn’t this the same as those past experiences—the tension of brushing against death, that exhilarating shudder?
Wasn’t this the fullness of life one feels when faced with death?
…And I thought about how back then, I had been viewing everything from within a single ‘death’—and how even now, I remained unable to fully grasp ‘life’ without positioning myself within that ‘death’.

But in any case, that sensation atop the smokestack was undeniably the visceral proof that I was alive.

“It’s cold.”
“The wind’s freezing.”
“Yeah, it’s cold.”

Answering, I finally turned only my eyes toward Yamaguchi. Yamaguchi's nose was slightly tinged red from the cold.—he said.

“...When you look at it like this, the ground’s got no appeal at all.”

Of course—what we were seeing was indeed “the ground”—and I became elated at this discovery that our conversation using such abstract words occupied an utterly natural position.

“The ground” spread moss-like sooty green stains across the red earth behind the school building, creating uneven shadows here and there as it continued a barren empty lot stretching from below our eyes toward Shibuya River. Beyond that lay burnt ruins of rubble revealing scorched earth, while from afar beetle-like cars and streetcars approached, and here and there, finger-puppet-sized people plodded along with weary steps.

“Absolutely. No appeal at all.”

“How can humans love living on this ground? …Those who can must be blissfully stupid fools.”

“Absolutely.”
“I despise that ground.”

“Hmph.…Should I jump down?”

“So you want to jump down and cling to the earth?”
“I don’t feel any such attachment to this world below at all.”

“Do you want to live?”
“After all.”

“Well…I don’t particularly think so either.”

After he said this, I realized for the first time that our seemingly casual, calm conversation held grave significance.

“If we jump down, we’d get flattened right?”
“In any case, it’s a single decisive act.”

“In any case, it’s a single decisive act,” Yamaguchi repeated.
I asked.
“…You’re going to jump down?”
“If I’m going to jump—what will you do?”

In a teasing tone, yet the lingering resonance of Yamaguchi’s words betrayed his genuine intent.
He gazed at me.

Yamaguchi intends to jump, I thought.

I was perplexed.

“...Can’t be helped.”
“I won’t do anything.”

Eventually, I answered in all seriousness.
At that moment, Yamaguchi was to me nothing but a substance—a red mass of meat hanging in a butcher’s stall, one of those “others” I could do nothing about.
No matter how much I tried to stop him, I couldn’t.
If things went wrong, I might even crash down with him.
……I thought.
Whether he lives or dies is his own affair, and there’s no room for me to meddle officiously.
Even if I devoted all my capabilities, Yamaguchi—being another person—was ultimately someone I could do nothing about.

Even if I were to love him—this covert relationship between just the two of us, the solidarity we shared in that moment—ultimately, that would be my own doing.
Whether Yamaguchi lived or died was ultimately his own choice.

“Hey. If you want to jump down, then go ahead and jump.”

With deadly seriousness, I repeated those words to him once more.
Yamaguchi formed a stiffened smile on his cheeks, and that smile was already beyond my reach.
I remembered his family’s “policy” that defied my comprehension.
Just as there must surely be reasons for it, no matter how incomprehensible they were to me, he must have had his own reasons.
So, if he truly wanted to jump down, I possessed neither the ability nor the right to stop him.
Just as I had no reason or need to help push him off even if he asked me to.
...The only thing I could do was not interfere with Yamaguchi—that single act.
Whether he lived or died—all I could do was respect his own choice.

It wasn't that I feared his suicide.
As I tediously dwelled on these thoughts, an understanding came suddenly—unrelated to them—that tightened through my entire body.
That's it.
Wasn't loneliness the recognition that no one would lay hands to kill me?
……And then I felt only my own loneliness.

At that moment, terror finally came to me.
It was a terror that held no connection to Yamaguchi—a mere stranger—but belonged solely to me.
It was a terror of that coldly severe and absolute human fate—the realization that I alone would have to dispose of my own life entirely by my own hands until the very end.

A stretch of time that could have been ten minutes or thirty passed, and throughout it, we remained motionless atop the smokestack, silent as fossils. Eventually, I shifted my hips slowly, and Yamaguchi immediately followed suit. Fingers froze and stiffened; when we grabbed the iron ladder with them—clutching as if grasping bare rods of ice—the bars grew colder still.…

Upon reaching the rooftop, we—faces drained of laughter—raised our heads in unison and gazed up at the smokestack we had just descended.

The smokestack, retaining its black-and-white appearance, towered impassively and boundlessly as always within the opaque, milky winter sky.

The white clouds in the background drifted slowly, and for an instant, the smokestack’s form—resembling a warship’s command tower—seemed to move somewhere together with us.

But at that moment, perhaps neither Yamaguchi nor I felt the defeatism of would-be suicides, nor did we retain any memory of being moved by having vividly experienced life while separated from the world below.

All we had was that particular fatigue which follows earnestly completing each of our own self-directed pursuits.

For a while, I remained in the same position, gazing at that celestial fish of the leaden winter sky—its overcast expanse baring the whitened eyeballs of dead fish.
Beyond the low-hanging clouds, a faint B29-like engine roar lingered endlessly.
When I finally noticed, Yamaguchi was no longer on the rooftop.
I was alone.
The wind turned abruptly cold—a terrifying, numbing chill that stung like pain yet blurred into something akin to sorrow, this melancholic coldness—and I felt it about my cheeks where the wind played cruelly.
What on earth was I doing?
"What am I trying to do?" I thought.
That's it.
Anyway, I had to start something.—

I picked up the wobbling fallen ball, turned toward the usual wall, and suddenly shouted “Play ball!” in an intentionally bright, loud voice.