Pathway to Japanese Literature

Muro!

When I reflected on my friendship with you, I felt tears of gloom welling up.
But it was not sentimentality; something of deeper meaning seemed to well up from the depths.
However it might be, I could not fully convey that meaning.
But to the extent of my strength, I resolved to create a meager expression.

Muro!

How I was enchanted by your poetry in the past.
When I first saw fragments from your *Lyric Pieces* and poems of *Furusato* in Mr. Kitahara Hakushū’s magazine, I tasted a poetic happiness unknown since my birth.
Whether walking through town or fields, I always carried your poems in my breast pocket and ceaselessly recited them aloud.
I had completely memorized your lyric pieces.
At that time, I too was writing poetry for that very same Mr. Kitahara’s magazine.
But I was utterly conquered by you and finally abandoned all thought of rivalry.
I became your disciple and resolved to learn poetry anew from the beginning.
One day, unable to endure my reverence and longing for you whom I had never met, I wrote a lengthy letter resembling a love missive.
In that letter, I observed every courtesy befitting a disciple.
I wrote that I was unworthy even to untie your shoelaces—merely one among countless pebbles.
So thoroughly had your art bewitched me, as though by sorcery.

When the following spring arrived, you journeyed forth from Kanazawa in the snow-laden north country, slender like a horsetail shoot.
We met for the first time.
And along the embankment of Maebashi Park where cherry buds were swelling, the two of us walked side by side, shivering in the cold.
You looked like some uncouth provincial literary student, your hair grown long and greasy, a walking stick in hand as you stiffly squared your shoulders.
Not merely in appearance—in every word and deed of yours lay a rustic crudity pushed to its utmost limits.
The shadow of your words and deeds carried the reek of provincial newspaper printing ink.
You kept saying:

“We are great masters.”

“Does a reporter come to your place?
“I gave a talk about poetry to the visiting reporter from the ×× Newspaper.”

At that time, when we—utterly unknown writers who were barely having our submissions published in that magazine through Mr. Kitahara Hakushū’s goodwill—had no conceivable reason for such a fact to exist, even I, unaccustomed to worldly matters, immediately understood that what you said was nonsense and fantastical exaggeration.
And the fact that your life in Kanazawa was constantly enveloped in such rustic literary youth conversations could be inferred from all your words and actions.

To confess plainly, at that time I received a most unpleasant impression from you.
From your poetic style, I had envisioned a youth of unworldly gentleness with a noble, pale countenance.
Yet when I met the actual person, my fantasy was betrayed from its very foundations in a way I never anticipated.
In every aspect, you were contrary to my imagination.
In terms of appearance, you were angular like a wild boar, and what’s more, you squared your shoulders like a rowdy student and walked about dragging high clogs while thrusting a walking stick.
Not only that, but your very character was precisely as such.
In other words, to put it in a single phrase, the term “roughness” encompassed everything about you.
However, that reeked of the vulgar unpleasantness and affectation typical of run-of-the-mill contributors to provincial magazines.

I was utterly disappointed.
And I secretly regretted having met you.
But having gone to the trouble of calling out to you—a close artistic friend who had come from afar as if summoned—I could not bear to treat you so heartlessly over such a matter.
I made an effort to conceal my emotions and visited the house on the banks of the Tone River where you were lodging.
You were using cigarette silver paper to fashion the shape of a Western cup, placing it on the small desk and gazing at it.

“What are you doing?”

“I made this for the housemaid at my house.”
“She’s a lovable girl, isn’t she?”
“This morning when she cleaned my room, she saw this Western cup and laughed.”
“I think I’ll just leave this as it is.”

The rough figure of this utterly provincial literary man now sitting before me—could he truly be the noble, gentle Murō Saisei who crafted those pale shell-like poems?
In the depths of my heart, a single perplexing question surfaced time and again.

“Isn’t this man a fake?”

"Aren’t you a fraudster who came to deceive me under the name of Murō Saisei?"

I stealthily stole a glance and looked at the letters beside your desk.
There were two or three letters inside, clearly addressed as "Mr. Murō Saisei."

Muro!

Now I confess all these matters plainly and without deception.
My first impression of you was indeed one of profound dissatisfaction.
Yet the cause of that dissatisfaction lay not in you but in myself.
To put it plainly, the fault was mine for having subjectively constructed an image of your actual person through willful imaginings and attempting to force reality to conform to it.
Through this experience, I learned that the person one envisions through art and the actual author are not always one and the same, and I privately contemplated that astute observation of Nietzsche’s.

“If you should come to love a certain book, you must never meet its author. For an author’s secrets are usually concealed in the deepest recesses of their character and have no opportunity to reveal themselves through one or two meetings. Readers who meet the author will discover only those aspects of his appearance and person that he himself had not anticipated, and return home feeling betrayed and dissatisfied.”

However, I soon came to fundamentally transform my previous view of you. For there was something mysteriously magical in your character that drew people in. Of course you remained crude, still bearing the unrefined air of a provincial contributor. And yet, there was something about your person that exuded a mysterious charm. And this charm resonated most strongly and clearly from your wild and rough character.

Muro!

To put it in a single phrase if I were to evaluate you, you were indeed "a child born as such," "a natural man born as such." In the essence of your character lay an indescribably naive quality. Among the poets I knew then, I sensed this same naturalness in Senge Motomaro. To put it plainly, Senge Motomaro was “a child born as such”—“a natural man born as such.” Yet between you and Senge, one could sense something profoundly and distinctly different in the nature of that naïveté. But this comparative discussion was an unnecessary matter.

Let me speak more about my impressions of you.

Muro!

How remarkably you have changed from who you once were to who you are today.
How impressively you now possess both dignified bearing and an artistically beautiful countenance.
And above all, how completely your character has transformed from its former self into what you term a 'cultured person' through and through.
Yet according to my observations, your true essential character has remained utterly consistent from past to present.
The only true change lies in the emotional disposition accompanying your altered lifestyle.
That is to say—this difference in your subjective 'way of feeling' toward nature and existence has shifted your tastes, transformed your mental states, altered your art, and ultimately recast the outward appearance of your personality.
Regarding your essential core, not the slightest change exists within you.
Still today you remain what I call 'a natural man born as such.'
Or more precisely—a naive child at your character's core, yet one endowed with deeply cultivated tastes and civilized decorum.

Muro!

Thus I would be considered the friend who understands your essential self more deeply than any other.
Therefore let me recount more of those past memories.
I have been thinking:
Should I fail to record these recollections of you today, posterity will never know your true nature, leaving instead a misunderstood Murō Saisei in literary history.
For precisely because you now appear utterly transformed from former days, I believe all will perceive only superficial aspects of your mindstate and never grasp the true person.

Muro!

You changed remarkably.
And gradually, your person was refined.
But unlike you, I remain as immature as ever, still today an old scholar wandering the backstreets.
That’s right!
I came to like the term “old scholar” very much lately.
You criticize me, saying I lack “the dignity of a master.”
However, things like a person’s dignity should develop hand in hand with the completion of their art.
In other words, when art is completed, a person naturally becomes fully formed.
However, I—as your astute friend Mr. Akutagawa Ryūnosuke remarked—am an unfinished person even in terms of art.
I suppose that for me, there will never be such a thing as completion throughout my entire life.
I am forever an old scholar, a man who cannot become a master.

Muro!

But you were quite a violent man in those days.
No—the word “violent” doesn’t quite fit.
You were an instinct-governed infant acting with “naturalness.”
Every action and aspect of your existence defied human society’s common sense.
Like a beast of the wilds, unshackled by any rational constraint, you lived purely by true instinct’s decree.
As with all wild creatures’ instincts, your jealousy burned fierce as flame.
At every interaction with women, you’d watch like a jailer and seethe in solitary envy.
The mere sight of some young woman bowing to an acquaintance on the street could make you feel world-overturning jealousy and unleash torrents of righteous fury.
Kōno Shingo—that poet who drank with us back then—provoked your vexatious envy simply for having a child fiancée; you’d tackle him to Hongō’s pavements time and again, splitting his skull with geta clogs for no reason.

Muro!

Your life at that time was, so to speak, “a wild beast released into the streets.”
You were an unfortunate, lonely wild beast who crawled out from the natural forest and strayed into the twentieth-century civilized city.
You destroyed everything.
Late at night, you smashed all the streetlights across Tokyo, threw stones at police officers, and were thrown into a detention cell.

You were always poor and without food, wearing a single layer under the December winter sky.
And while wrapping a rope belt picked up from the roadside, you calmly marched into the Yoshiwara pleasure quarters.

One day, you collided with a milkman on the road.

“Watch out! You beggar!” shouted the milkman.
Then you, enraged, squared your shoulders and shouted back.

“You idiot! Don’t you know Murō Saisei?!”

The milkman was startled and stared at your face for a while. Then suddenly turning his back, he immediately dashed away. You triumphantly strutted down the main street. But the next morning, you came with a pale face. And you explained that you couldn’t sleep due to fear and worry, thinking that the milkman from yesterday’s fight would come late at night for revenge.

When it became mealtime, you always made a point of coming to my place. And you would sit there silently and fidget endlessly.

“You there—is the meal not ready yet? Please do partake before leaving.”

Then you would always answer.

“Yeah! I’ve already eaten.”

Yet when I set out the meal, he would dive in as if he’d been waiting impatiently and then leave.

Muro!

All your "natural acts" transcended every custom of human society.
You once trembled completely naked in the attic room.
At that very moment, debt collectors from the rice shop and miso shop banded together and attacked you.
You suddenly stood up.
Sticking a broom into your naked waist and grabbing a fly swatter in your hand, you roared like a beast from upstairs.

“Try coming up here, even one of you! I’ll smash you to pieces!”

The debt collectors who had come to press for payment turned deathly pale and scrambled away in a panic.

Muro!

No matter what, our strongest memory was the friendship during that Ueno Exhibition in some year of the 1900s. It was summer. I would go to the Ikenohata venue almost daily, and when night fell, I would head out to drink at an outdoor bar shaped like the Dragon Palace by Shinobazu Pond, where the illuminations glittered.

A beautiful summer night.
All the sounds of the exhibition nightscape.
Gagaku could be heard in the sky.
Decorations studded with electric lights.
Illuminations everywhere.
Ah, even now, I have not forgotten the joy of that exhibition nightscape.

You were always drunk with sake, walking around teasing the shop stalls at Ikenohata. There was a girl there who sensed your love. She was a mixed-race girl of Russian descent with blonde hair and yellowish-toned skin.

One hot summer day, you went to visit the unpopulated shop stalls at Ikenohata to see that girl. In the scorching afternoon heat, the ground lay parched white. The sun was veiled beneath cumulus clouds, and above Ikenohata—where scattered figures drifted—the exhibition’s small balloon floated forlornly in the sky.

You firmly gripped a ten-sen silver coin and walked back and forth before the shop stall several times. And just as you were about to take the small cloth from the girl’s hand, your body suddenly collapsed as if crumbling. Suddenly! Along with the sound of something overturning, two embracing bodies rolled on the floor. Your body was lying on top of the girl.

“Kyaa!”

The terrifying woman’s scream and astonishingly abnormal commotion transformed the languid scene of a summer white day.
A policeman rushed over.
A crowd gathered.
But at that moment, your figure was scrambling up the slope like a rat while waving a stick.
Your behavior was truly agile.
Just like that bandit Tigris whom you had admired.

Muro!

Regarding your past anecdotes, I have many things I want to write.
All such actions and dispositions of yours made even me feel the first principle of anarchism.
You were my “hero.”
Above all else, you taught me how human naturalness transcends “rules.”
I felt a solitude that could not live even a single day without you.
There was never a time when life appeared brighter to me than when I was with you.
Just as those pages of old offered special devotion to their lord—not from any homosexual relationship—I loved and worshipped you.
You were my beloved and also my hero.

Muro!
But I shall speak no more.
Because I know all my words and memories would anger you as you are now.
Were you to read this manuscript, I can imagine how furiously you would shout.

“Outrageous bastard! Hagiwara’s writing gossip about me now!”

But Muro.
I am not writing your gossip at all.
If it were about the allure of gossip, it would be nothing more than slander against others, spite, or mere mischief born of amusement.
But my will lies precisely in the exact opposite of that.
It is precisely because I love you that I write this—to show the world the true personality behind your art.

Muro!

You were writing many novels.
And in those novels, the majority of your past life had been written down.
But that was merely one part of you that had been split in two.
You were picking up only certain special parts from your life.
And the more essential part—the true, inherent you—not only refused to write it but even detested touching upon such reminiscence.
You were thinking:
"The past is my nightmare."
That’s why when others’ words so much as brushed against that part, you flew into a crimson rage.
You shouted:
"You dare insult me?!"
Just as many ex-convicts feared having their past selves spoken of, you too pathologically feared this and tried to erase it from your autobiography.

Muro!

But such feelings of yours, I understood well.
The starting point of your art had resided in “anti-character” from the very beginning.
Anti-character did not mean writing about “what is absent from character.” — How could one write about something absent from character?
Existence does not arise from nothingness. — What we called anti-character in expression referred to a personal ideal that, while existing within character itself, did not manifest its concepts in the manifestations of actions; thus, it smoldered subconsciously beneath life’s surface, constantly seeking opportunities to erupt.
Since most art arises from this yearning for a personal ideal, it could be said that anti-character was indeed the essential characteristic of all art.

Muro!
No—my apologies.
My pen had slipped into that reasoning you so despise.
You truly detest logic.
No—not logic itself, but abstract language and concepts.
You have always intuited through instinct alone.
Through this 'instinct,' you grasped profound philosophies beyond reason’s reach—contemplating truths hidden from nature and human life.
Even here, I perceived something bestial in your character.
No—let me retract 'bestial.'
Rather, through your unadorned nature detecting secrets concepts cannot touch—you possess sensory organs akin to wild beasts or birds.
"—This is what grants your novels their reputation as works of the 'Sensory School.'—"

This instinctive nature of yours despised all logic and innately detested it.
To you, all abstract things held no interest; only the concrete, only the real, were true.
Therefore, your artistic view had from the beginning opposed the idealist school and oriented itself toward the realist school.
As all wild beasts are realists, you too were an extreme realist, finding beauty only in the reality of life dominated by the senses.
And it was only natural that this disposition led you to today’s state-of-mind novels and gradually inclined you even toward the naturalistic realism I so detested.

However, regarding these matters, I shall discuss them in detail on another occasion and fully express my opposing opinions toward you. Here, I will return to the beginning and discuss the anti-character of your art.

Muro!

If I were to put it bluntly, all your lyric poetry and novels are a longing for a single ideal smoldering beneath the surface manifestations of your character.
Therefore, in this regard, your art is an idealist expression of yourself.
Indeed, I declare this with utmost clarity.
Every aspect of your life is consistently defined by self-loathing and overcoming it.
More than anything, you loathe your own appearance.
You reflect your face in the mirror and constantly rage at yourself.
In that mirror, I imagine, there is reflected the exact opposite of the countenance you idealize—that face of a gentle, beautiful youth one might associate with your lyric poetry and novels.

Muro!
Someone like you—such an extreme self-loather—hardly existed in the world you knew.
How much you loathed your own appearance—when once you pointed at a mirror and

“In all the world, the face I loathe most is right here.”

You were famously known for having said this.
But what you loathed was not limited to just your own appearance.
Fundamentally, you loathed the very disposition itself that was manifested in that appearance.

More than anything, you loathed the “roughness” inherent in your own disposition.
So to speak, that “beast-like naturalness” was the very object you yourself found most detestable.
Therefore, your ideal had always been what you habitually referred to as a so-called “cultured person.”

“How should one become a cultured person?”

This was everything your will aimed for in your conceptual life.
Therefore, your longing was in every instance directed toward civilized things, graceful things, things of propriety, elegant things, and cultured-gentlemanly things.
You blindly and unquestioningly deferred to words like “education” and “civilization.”
More than anything, you were ashamed of your lack of education, ashamed of your wildness, and ashamed of being unaccustomed to civic etiquette.
Just as a barbarian emerging from the forest feels ashamed of his own nakedness in the civilized world, you felt your own transcendent naturalness beyond customs to be supremely shameful.

Muro!

I could fully comprehend such a state of mind as yours.
For you truly harbored, within one aspect of your rough heart, a feminine delicacy of shame.
No—a conventional term like “sense of shame” did not apply to your case.
Not a sense of shame, but a certain bashfulness, purity, sensitivity—in a word, a “tender-heartedness.”
That’s right!
This “tender-heartedness” was precisely what gave birth to those lyric pieces and compelled you to write the novel *The Time of Sexual Awakening*.

Muro!
Are you aware of that?
The anti-character within you, the essence of the artist within you, is indeed this single "tender-heartedness."
That very tender-heartedness made you craft silver-foil Western cups for indifferent maids in distant inn rooms, made you sing sorrowful poems yearning for home beneath hungry city skies, and made you feel ashamed of your own nakedness in civilized society.
That’s right!
That is indeed the entirety of your artistic essence.

Muro!

How long had you continued this protracted struggle of self-betrayal to conquer yourself?
I knew that.
First and foremost, you abandoned alcohol.
You yourself had been most keenly aware that alcohol in all circumstances exposes humanity’s wildness and regresses us to our ancestral natural beasts.
For one to become a cultured gentleman, one must first and foremost abandon alcohol.
(Just like Americans today.) Therefore, you abandoned alcohol.
Then came all excess and indulgence.

Muro!
At that very moment, you discovered as your friend the ideal person you had been seeking.
It was Mr. Akutagawa Ryūnosuke.
I had never seen such a vivid contrast as that between you and Akutagawa from any cosmic juxtaposition.
One was a representative of the "natural man"; the other was a representative of the "urbanite."
One was the ringleader of the "instinct faction," and the other was the very emblem of the "reason faction."
And against your barbarism of unrestrained insolence that transcended social customs—how impeccably courteous a person Mr. Akutagawa was!

In my view, Akutagawa Ryūnosuke must indeed have been the very epitome—realized in reality—of the “cultured person” you had long held as your ideal. Having obtained this ideal person, it was not hard to imagine how delighted you were, how astonished, how satisfied. Regarding this new friend, you first spoke to me thus:

“He had cultivation, propriety, erudition—someone like him must have been a rare figure in our time.”

Then, at a certain time, he also directed the following criticism at me.

“A man like you hasn’t developed an ounce of character.”

Muro!

Thus, you gradually proceeded toward your own “completion.”
Over these past several years, how strikingly you transformed!
In your features, in your demeanor, in your very nature—nowhere at all could any trace of your former self be seen; such was the astonishing transformation you underwent.

I believe.
None of your recent visitors would be able to discover any 'beastliness' or 'naturalness' within you.
Truly, you killed it yourself with all your might.
No—rather, you trained it away through education.
The present you, in the eyes of anyone at all, are no longer a primitive emerging from the forest, but rather a person of high character and grace—one who possesses cultivation, propriety, and a love for elegant tastes.
You have been perfected.
Truly, toward your own 'ideal,' you overcame your own naturalness and through education transformed your character.
You have been perfected.
You have been perfected as a person.

Muro!

However, I found such completion of yours lonesome.
For my “hero” lay in that naturalness of old—the Pegasus soaring through the skies—which you yourself had overcome in shame.
The present-day “educated Murō Saisei” remained my beloved as of old, but he was no longer my hero.
I loved you.
But I did not intend to serve you as my lord, like a page of old.
Muro!
I was lonely!

I often admonished you.

“Muro! You are murdering the most precious life within yourself.”

“Muro!
The ‘person’ you speak of is nothing more than one in a worldly sense.
Art does not reside there.”

But you shook your head.
The meaning behind that attempted answer was, I believe, something along these lines:

“If you don’t become a person of society, how can you write novels?”

I inferred those words within your heart.
And considering the fundamental difference between “poetry” and “novels” within literature, I shuddered.
At the very least, I reflected on how the novels signified by Japan’s literary world of the past—realist novels inheriting the lineage of the late Naturalist school—were literary arts fundamentally incompatible with poetry in essence; vulgar materialistic arts that could not exist without killing poetry. For your sake, I felt a shuddering premonition of groundless fear.
For as long as you possessed that poetic transcendence, you could not possibly write novels in the literary world’s sense.
Conversely, I perceived that when you succeeded as a novelist and were hailed as a master in today’s literary world, it was precisely when the naturalness and purity within you were gradually being extinguished.

Muro!

I did not make such eccentric statements out of jealousy toward your literary fame.
My true anger was indeed directed at the literary world of today itself.
Toward all things naturalistic, I bared my fangs of loathing completely.
And that you had entered this literary world—this prose world, in truth—and were exposed to its unclean air was fatedly infuriating and accursed.
Truly, you had no choice but to enter that path out of the necessity of living and the necessity of supporting your wife and children.
Therefore, my pent-up resentment exploded toward the society that led you there and toward fate itself.

Muro!

However, you were always sighing and telling people:

“I am a novelist.
Writing things I don’t mean for my daily bread—a lowly scribbler of frivolous writings.
My true creative desire is felt only when I sit before a clean desk to write poetry.
That alone is my true life.”

That was right.
You were still no ordinary run-of-the-mill novelist.
You remained a poet.
A poet of heaven-born temperament.
How could those so-called novelists—those vulgar remnants of the Naturalist school—ever comprehend such sentiments of yours?
In our literary world, you alone were still writing true novels.

Muro!

But what lonely friends we were.
In your novels, I was always written as “an unworldly, indifferent-to-matters, docile and good-natured young master,” as if stamped from a mold.
That’s right.
You saw in my life only that portion which was reflected in your “tender-hearted disposition.”
And you saw only that alone.

Muro!
How I suffered in the past!
You do not know—truly, not in the slightest—how deeply I was plunged into hopeless despair beyond salvation, both ideologically and existentially, to the point of contemplating suicide multiple times.
Why is it that you never touch upon the life of the mind?
No matter what I say, no matter what I plead, to you it all becomes mere “logic.”

“Let’s cut out the logic.”

With this, all ideological anguish was brushed aside.
It was not merely ideological matters.
Even in matters of daily life and family, you gave no thought whatsoever to all my complex past sufferings—how I had endured my dark, despairing fate or fought against it.
This was because the greater part of my life consisted primarily of internal psychological processes, yet you were inherently averse to psychology and took no pleasure in touching upon such matters.
From a psychological perspective, there was no one who decided life as simplistically and single-mindedly as you.

Muro!

My lonely past had only you as a close friend.
The addressee for my letters, the friend to whom I could confide life's secrets—in all the world, there was only you.
Yet from the very beginning, you refused to see anything beyond my "pitiable aspects" and showed no desire to hear of anything else.

"This friend understands these parts of me.
But regarding other parts, it is better to remain silent from the start."

Just as people select topics when speaking of their friends, I too always selected topics when conversing with you.
Thus I was compelled to speak to you only of life's trivialities—inconsequential matters of little import.
The many significant life events I truly wished to convey found no listener for years on end.
That I endured such an anguish-filled existence so long—with none to confide in through letter or conversation, left grieving alone in the countryside—when I consider it now, becomes an infuriating irony of fate.
And Muro!
You remain utterly unaware of all this.

Friend!

Ah, how truly lonely we were!
For you were voicing precisely the opposite grievances toward me.
I had indeed heard from certain people that you were constantly making such complaints against me.

“Hagiwara is my close friend, yet he doesn’t read my novels at all.”
“No, he doesn’t understand my state of mind at all.”

“No matter what I say to Hagiwara, he doesn’t understand.”
“There’s no one as utterly devoid of taste as that man.”
“Even if I show him pots, gardens, ceramics—no matter what I show him—he remains indifferent, offering only his signature disinterested reply: ‘Is that so?’”

“Hagiwara doesn’t understand my life at all.”
“No, he doesn’t even try to understand.”
“There’s no one so utterly devoid of friendship, so selfish, and so incapable of understanding taste as that man.”

That’s right. I certainly did not understand you as you were then. No—I was straining to understand only to deliberately avoid it myself. For within your present life and mindset lay the naturalistic view of life that I confronted as an enemy—Oriental resignation, those damp and musty haiku sensibilities. Were I to forgive you, I would have to forgive all the uncleanliness I had battled against as an enemy since the days of *A New Desire*. And this meant nothing less than the bankruptcy of my ideological life.

Muro!

But there was no helping it—such ideological reasoning remained beyond your comprehension.
Let us cease all debate.
At any rate, we were unfortunate and lonely people.
Just as I made no effort to understand you, you in turn made no effort to understand me.

Friend!

Ah, I had to say once more at the end how lonely we were.
Until then, I deliberately avoided speaking of it, having averted my gaze from that loneliness.
But here I resolved to state it plainly.
Friend!
We now stood clearly facing each other as ideological foes.
You resented me.
And I resented you.
Therein lay reasons as clear as daylight, rooted in understanding.

Postscript.

I wrote this passage around May of this year.
At that time, when I showed the manuscript as it was to Mr. Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, I obtained his concurrence that it fully and accurately conveyed everything I had intended to express about Muro.
Therefore, I believe it will be understood that my words are not merely a personal or arbitrary assertion.
Due to certain circumstances, I had considered burning the manuscript as it was, but upon recent reconsideration, I decided to publish it.