Pathway to Japanese Literature

*Joy*

I

………How many times can a person possibly fall in love?
Women would surely insist that one can only fall in love once.
Even men who remained trapped in antiquated romantic dreams might say the same.
It was only natural that anyone burning with passion in love's throes would feel this to be both the first and final romance of their life.
If, after succeeding in that romance, one were to go through life never experiencing a more fervent passion, I would simply envy such people as fortunate and have no intention of refuting the conclusions drawn from their personal trials.
In other words, because destiny had bestowed upon them such experiences of love as to compel them to make that very determination about it.
In return, I did not want others to deny my own conclusions drawn from my experiences simply based on their own single set of experiences.
The twentieth century was an age of chaos; there existed no truth beyond what the self perceived through experience.
You would not feel compelled to praise the child of a wealthy person as a moralist of our time simply because they never stole.
The children of the wealthy simply were not poor enough to steal.
Recognizing the fact that they never encountered either the necessity or opportunity to steal, one should have found it sufficient to consider them simply fortunate people.
I merely stated that those who had loved but once were simply fortunate.

While listening to such discussions one clear late April afternoon, I strolled along the young-leafed paths of Hibiya Park with the eminent novelist Mr. ○○○○, a senior figure in the literary world.
Having passed forty years of age, the grave facial expression indicative of that maturity of intellectual life seen only in scholars and poets was softened by his dazed, weary-looking eyes, rendering him inexpressibly gentle and nostalgic in appearance.
His ruddy forehead still bore not a single wrinkle, and the long locks cascading over it remained jet-black; yet with each gust of wind, as strong sunlight filtered through the leaves illuminated his thick mustache, innumerable white hairs shone like silver threads, striking to behold.
Though I had long been acquainted with him, I had not until this moment noticed the whiteness of his mustache at all; thus realizing with sudden sorrow and unease that this poet—who with his delicate brushwork and ardent emotions had for so long set our young blood leaping—had already aged thus, I found myself gazing at his face and asking almost involuntarily:

“Professor, then how many times have you experienced romantic love up to now?” I asked.

The professor replied in an utterly composed tone, "Exactly ten years ago—since I'm forty-two now, that event at thirty-two marked the third romantic love of my life. Looking back now, that occurrence signaled the final chapter of my youth's history, and what followed began in a hue entirely distinct from all preceding eras. In my teens, twenties, and thirties—three times in total—I loved. This third instance I consider to have been love's final visitation in my lifetime."

"But Professor,"
"You can't make such a blanket assertion."
"Until struck by something new, isn't it love's very nature to always feel like the final experience?"
"Didn't you yourself say as much?"

"That I did."
"I cannot state it definitively—but observe the reality of me that you witness."
"At my age..."
"Even while gripped by that violent passion, I felt—'This is the end, youth's final dream'—so unlike my twenty-year-old love that reveled in sweet momentary dreams without heed for tomorrow."
"By thirty it was already so; at forty today, love's ecstasy has in fact become impossible."
"No dream, however intense, can withstand Time's weight—that which we call old age."
"Do you know François Coppée's tragic poem 'Les Larmes'?"

J'aurai cinquante ans tout àl'heure;

Je m'y résigne, Dieu merci!

Mais j'ai ce très grave soucï

Plus je vieillis, et moinsje pleure.

…………………………………………

Oh!les cheveux blancs et les rides!

Je les accepte, j'y consens;

Mais au moins, jusqu'en mes vieux ans,

Que mesyeux ne soient pas arides!

The age of fifty has drawn near.

God, I shall not resign myself to anything.

Yet one disquiet remains alone:

That as I age, the occasions when I wish to weep grow ever rarer.

Ah, the white hair and the wrinkles of face—

One must not lament it as inevitable fate.

Only this do I wish—that until my life’s very end,

May the fountain of tears never dry up.

While reciting the original poem aloud, Mr. ○○○○—in a manner I could comprehend—labored over its translation as he made his already slow stroll grow ever slower.

The winding path through young leaves ended, and suddenly before us spread the early summer's blue sky and intense sunlight. Beneath it lay a vast athletic field, its gravel-mixed surface dried pale white. The figures of students running about and throwing balls appeared as small black shadows moving against the sun's brilliance and the expanse of the view. Suddenly a ball came rolling toward our feet like a meteor, scattering gravel as we strolled. A middle school student who had removed his uniform jacket and wore only his shirt came dashing recklessly to catch it; nearly colliding with the Professor, he tried to leap aside in surprise but lost his balance and pitched violently forward. Even Professor ○○○○—who typically remained indifferent to carriage collisions or people falling from trains—involuntarily cried "Careful!" at the violence of his fall and moved as if to personally help him up, but the energetic student rose immediately without waiting, snatched up the ball, and dashed back toward the athletic field.

I stood dumbfounded and watched his retreating figure.
The Professor was likewise watching his retreating figure when, after a moment, he suddenly—

“Anatole—it makes me recall a French vignette,” he said.

“In early October mornings when autumn-tinted leaves scattered one by one onto the snow-white shoulders of statues in Luxembourg Park—my thoughts upon seeing a child flitting sparrow-like to school…”
“Indeed, in all things endures eternally the soul of that moment when first perceived.”
“That soul makes men grieve yet also brings them joy.”
“I lost that lively boy’s vigor as early as sixteen.”
“Nothing ripens people so prematurely as literature.”

Thus we resumed our stroll, and in the evening on our return finished supper at a Western-style restaurant near Shimbashi—but then, drawn by the Professor’s reminiscences that began to flow as he grew intoxicated, I found myself unwittingly following him all the way to his bachelor lodgings within Shiba Park where he still continued his solitary life.

II

The Professor said.

“From my first awakening to consciousness until this very day, I may declare there has been nothing in my life save love and literature.”
“That love arises from natural passion unaided by intellect goes without saying—yet had I not studied Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare and Irving’s Sketchbook (particularly pieces like Broken Heart) as middle school texts, nor devoted summer holidays and Sundays to Chikamatsu’s jōruri dramas and late Tokugawa gesaku fiction, I doubt such precocious flowering of emotion would have occurred.”
At sixteen, I entered the Second University Hospital for surgery to treat scrofula inherited from my consumptive mother. There, through nights and days attended by a nurse at my bedside, I first encountered emotions unknown during my years under parental care.
The instant I recognized through book-born imaginings this novel sensation as love, joy pierced me like physical pain—yet simultaneously, from literary lessons that love ever ends in tragedy, an inexpressible melancholy overwhelmed me.
In truth, before comprehending how this nascent love might unfold, Chikamatsu’s teachings convinced me it must bring ruin and death’s summons; Shakespeare’s examples showed only life’s cruel fate. Any love escaping these dire patterns seemed unworthy of the name—this conviction took root in my sixteen-year-old breast, unbidden yet unshakable.
Thus though anguish kept me sleepless many nights, I departed hospital never confessing to that nurse.
To speak would mean not merely rejection—she’d withdraw from nursing me entirely.
Better silence and eternal tears of unrequited love.
Yet at discharge’s brink I desperately secured her photograph. Though resuming schoolwork upon returning home, memories of recent days tormented me—so lovesick I fixated on contracting some new illness to regain hospitalization. Soon vanished all ordinary student ambitions: competing for exam rankings, striving for sports day victories.
Whenever free—walking home from school or on Sundays—I circled hospital walls, days spent peering through shrubbery at gloomy windows hoping for her face. That autumn at Imperial University’s sports meet, amidst bustling crowds I met a nurse colleague who relayed news: my beloved had returned home a month prior and married.

At that moment, I was not particularly surprised.
The event related to me seemed entirely natural—as though it had unfolded precisely as I had anticipated from the very beginning.
Then suddenly, I found myself unable to endure even a moment longer—the military band’s vigorous march echoing around me, voices madly cheering for red and white teams, and the scorching autumn sun beating down so harshly that I craved refuge in some quieter, dimmer, damper place. I walked toward the ancient pond deep within the grove behind the sports ground’s hill and silently gazed at its eerily calm stagnant water.
As dusk fell, I returned home, lit the lamp, and entered my room—only to notice afresh her photograph propped on the bookcase.
It stared as always toward my study desk.
Not only did I whisper her name several times, but overwhelmed by torment, I resolved to write down every anguish, joy, and sorrow I had endured—and from that instant cast aside tomorrow’s studies to begin meticulously documenting our first meeting during my hospitalization, wielding my pen until two in the morning.

However, come morning, I grew anxious that if she were to read it, she might become angry, and an awkward discomfort settled over me.
Moreover, if by some chance it were seen by her husband and became an obstacle to that person’s happiness, it would be disastrous—so thought I, being inherently timid by nature. Thus I spent several days in renewed torment, indecisive over whether to mail it or not.
In the end, I finally resolved to bury the letter—written in one breath across over ten sheets of Japanese writing paper—without showing it to anyone. Yet what could not be buried was the unrequited love dwelling in my heart.
During that winter vacation—though I’ve now forgotten the exact circumstances—when I read a newly published novel depicting love’s torments, I suddenly wanted to write such things myself, thinking that putting them to paper might bring some comfort to my heart. I re-read the secret letter I had kept and created a short story with myself as the protagonist.
This was, in fact, my first novel.

III

I once read in some book that romantic love not taking root deep within the flesh is as ephemeral as a flower plucked for a vase.
No matter how pure romantic love may be, for it to fully develop, there must inevitably be an element of tangible reality.
I do not regard nude art as sacred in the sense that a certain professor from the art school—one bearing titles like Junior Seventh Rank—proclaims it to be "sacred."
If one can feel rapturous beauty before lifeless nude paintings and sculptures, then they must surely also be capable of rapture before the nude form of a living woman.
One must be capable of such rapture.
Wherein lies the reason that one who composes poems about roses would not love real roses?
Whether love is sacred as the ancients claimed holds no interest for me.
I merely wish to acknowledge how much more deeply etched in memory remains that summer night when I was eighteen—two years after my first love where I neither held hands nor exchanged kisses—when I plucked forbidden fruit for the first time with an innkeeper’s daughter in a seaside pine grove.
How profoundly unforgettable that memory proved—this fact alone I wish recognized.
The first night, the second night, and on the third night we parted ways.
Compared to those summer night’s dreams, how infinitely more indelible grew the love I encountered in my twenty-second year of youth after several more years had passed.

At that time, the Meiji literary world was in the full bloom of demimonde novels.
Art flourished in a more tranquil era than seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe, where it had bloomed only in aristocratic banquet halls.
Writers not only extolled women’s fashion trends and obi color patterns through the most elegant prose they could muster, but many also prided themselves on inserting demimonde vernacular into everyday conversations to showcase their wit.
I was already enrolled in the university’s English department by then, my youthful ambition to gain renown through a single literary work proving irrepressible—and thus, unable to resist the zeitgeist, I frequently ventured into pleasure quarters.
What I then considered observations and dissections of life now strike me as mere leisurely diversions during those long, tranquil days.

There was no need to mention the place.
There was no need to mention the name.
There was no need to explain how or why it happened.
In any case, one night in a certain place, a certain geisha loved me, and I loved her in return.
Even when expelled from university on grounds of misconduct, I had been so engrossed that at the time I found no leisure for regret.
It was then I first confirmed the degree of sensitivity my body and spirit possessed toward pleasure evoked by external stimuli.
Moonlight and rain's sound only begin producing new hues and resonances through love.
The shamisen played late at night in a distant teahouse room vividly conjured visions of feudal-era love affairs meeting bloody ends.
On moonlit nights at seaside resorts, where piano melodies drifted indistinctly, I felt myself touching the essence of Keats' and Heine's poetry.
The fragrance of flowers.
The sound of music.
The color of lamplight enveloped by folding screens.
The scent of cosmetics mingling with sweat—a woman's scent.
The shape of a topknot crumbling about to fall.
The gleam of rings, fingernails' luster, intricate dyed patterns.
Struck by this bombardment of shapes, colors, sounds and scents—at times driven to flee their very intensity by sensation's pleasure—I would lose all self in infinite rapture. In truth, I pursued not love itself but this trail of rapturous intoxication unknowable except through loving. However much women might love me or I them, I could never bring myself to consider domestic happiness or progeny's prosperity.
Romantic love is a joy known only to youth.
Joy is a beautiful, beautiful dream.
For me, I couldn't help feeling that imposing purpose upon this beautiful dream—this thing already so beautiful—was unbearable.
"How profoundly must the proverb 'Marriage is love's grave' have resonated in my heart at that moment."

I did not harbor as much antipathy as Maupassant, who declared marriage to be "the ugly existence of two creatures," yet the monotonous and insipid state of the households around me—those of relatives and acquaintances—was already sufficient to instill in my twenty-year-old self a profoundly rooted sense of misanthropic sorrow toward human existence.
Expelled from school, stripped of my parents’ trust, cast out by friends—with nothing to console me but beautiful "forms" and beautiful "dreams" utterly at odds with the morals and religions that had shaped Japan through the ages... For one such as I, what could marriage be? What could family be? What could progeny be? I found myself nearly incapable of offering any enlightened interpretation.
At the time of my expulsion, my mother wept that she “couldn’t show her face in society,” and my father raged that I’d “sullied my parents’ honor”—but my skepticism only led me to wonder in shock: was progeny merely a plaything for parental vanity?

The geisha I loved one night told me she had to be redeemed by someone unforeseen.
I pressed her: "Will you flee with me or die for me?"

Sorrow is a beautiful thing.
There is nothing as powerfully seductive as sorrow.
I immediately vowed to die.
My heart brimmed with countless beautiful visions.
Scenes from poetry that had moved me until then—Chikamatsu’s tragic lovers, Mokuami’s kabuki dramas, Boccaccio’s tales, Shakespeare’s verses—all rose jumbled in my mind: a boatman casting night nets by bonfire light on dark waters where temple bells reverberated; moonbeams wandering azure along ancient castle walls starred with wild roses; nights when piano melodies at seaside resorts seemed to let me touch the essence of Keats and Heine.
Even in broad daylight, closing my eyes brought vivid visions—Umekawa’s delicate features, Chūbee’s disheveled hair, Okoyo’s trembling lips, Genzaburō’s anguished gaze, Romeo and Juliet’s final embrace, Paolo and Francesca’s whispered damnation. I seemed to hear their voices blending “Namu Amida Butsu” with “Pardonnez-nous, Seigneur.”
In such moments, I became enraptured by a sorrowful beauty beyond words—deeper than yesterday’s intoxication from women’s warm skin and silken robes—utterly forgetting my real self.
Then, startled back to awareness, I felt an irrepressible urge to sing forth this rapture with all my strength—a desire that surged like floodwaters breaching a dam.
Was this artistic ambition? Worldly attachment? Or mere human instinct?
At any rate, before dying—before vanishing completely from reality—I resolved to leave some trace of my existence behind.
Driven solely by this wish, I wandered aimlessly to an inn at Ōmiya Park and began writing with feverish intensity.

After about five days, with an essay titled *The Lingering Traces of Departing Spring*—something akin to an autobiography—tucked in my pocket, I wondered what exclamations of astonishment the Meiji literary world would voice after my death were I to publish this. Scattering flowers are poignant, and all things that never return are dear. The world will lament my talent. Convinced they would indeed lament, once again intoxicated by such fantasies, I left Ōmiya's pine groves and soon arrived at Ueno Station by train. But on that clear autumn evening, as I walked along Shinobazu Pond's shores toward my home in Hongō, with each step I took, I felt that the present me was no longer the me of even a moment before. The fiercely blazing sunset over Hongō's heights, its intense hues mirrored in the still pond waters; the rhythm of strollers' footsteps, voices, traffic's flow, birdsong, lotus leaves rustling, willows' sway—everything that met my eyes filled my chest to bursting with an irrepressible fascination for living, a visceral force of existence. My heart was too unruly to keep promises or honor obligations. The clear autumn sunlight was too beautiful. As for how I should explain breaching the suicide pact—ultimately finding myself at a loss for any method—I concluded there was no choice but to conceal my whereabouts from my lover.

I sought refuge at my uncle’s shop operating in a colonial port along the China coast, but there, just as it was, I ended up placing myself in the commercial world of the trading port as my uncle advised.
I had grown weary of love and somewhat tired of composing poetry.
Thus, even someone expelled midway through university—if they endured two or three years as they were—might somehow manage to get by in the world without hindrance; so much so that even my parents back home began sending delighted letters. But as one year, then two years passed, I gradually came to yearn once more for the poet’s life.
I do not know whether the past I had lived thus far truly constituted the life of a poet.
But in any case—bound by nothing in society—when flowers bloomed, rest beneath them; when the moon was fair, walk along the riverbank with the flowing water through the night.
Is this freedom, this wandering, not something that cannot be exchanged for wealth, honor, or anything else?
When I looked around me, all the hypocrisies of civilization—socializing, friendship, political maneuvering, order, class—surrounded me.
In contrast—how freely did the Yangtze River’s water flow?
How boundlessly must the plains outside the city walls have stretched?
The blue sky glistened even through shop windows.
White clouds drifted beyond the harbor.
My sole consolation lay in books glimpsed during my duties’ idle hours.
Without a poetry collection in my pocket, I could not have lived.
When I read poems that skillfully sang of what I thought, grieved over, rejoiced in—I felt as though I had found a lifelong friend.
My reading was no scholarly study.
It was no study.
It was entertainment.
It was solace.
It was a lover’s whisper………

IV

To question a poet about poetry's essence would be the height of folly.
What lover exists who could clearly articulate through what premises, motives, reasons or promises they fell?
If one could speak of it, it would be nothing but recollection after love's awakening.
I was simply moved by reading poetry.
This emotion—is this not the whole of a poet's life?
No purpose, no plan—I merely want to sing all that my eyes have seen and heart has felt in life and nature; there exists nothing beyond this passion, this desire………

Suddenly, just as when I had wandered there before, I abruptly left my uncle's house and returned to Tokyo.
I no longer heeded my parents' counsel.
I reveled in the solitude of boardinghouse living.
I felt supreme joy upon seeing my works embraced by the world.
Maupassant writes in *A Parisian Sunday* that praise alone constitutes the highest tribute to an artist.
Praise—truly nothing rivals its beauty.
Withered blades of grass revive when touched by dew.
God never cursed those who sang His glory.
Love and commerce, art and every virtue—they exist solely to hear this exquisite voice.
I vowed to spare no sacrifice for that voice's sake.
To craft true poetry demands loving solitude.
One must sever blood ties and societal bonds.
One must wander without end.
One must read voraciously.
One must weep freely.
One must drink to excess.
One must exult—until I became in my kin's eyes an irredeemable rogue.
There were evenings I deliberately dined at ramshackle taverns near pleasure quarters during endless rains.
There were dawns I watched break from Asakusa Temple's stone steps.
There were nights I startled awake beneath flophouse lamps to hunt lice; mornings ambushed near famed sake dens; escapes through reeking back alleys.

In the deep of a snowy night, on my way back from the teahouse, I listened to an old rickshaw driver’s life story.
I spent a summer afternoon at Ōgawara and talked with a retired gentleman.
I became friends with the ferryman at the crossing.
I walked alongside the box maker.
I even got into arguments with a brothel worker.
I listened to speeches, went to plays, attended church, and enrolled in night school language classes.
Some might say this was merely the curiosity of an idle person.
They might indignantly declare me a bystander in life—the sort that those with true tears could never bear to become.
But before such people condemn me, they should first strive to erase from modern literary history the names of Naturalist writers who devoted all their efforts solely to dissecting vice, and Symbolist poets who reveled exclusively in pure Hellenistic aestheticism.
No—rather than that, they should direct their arrows at someone like Tolstoy, who never abandoned his land and property.

I want to live merely as an artist who loves "form".
In my eyes, there is neither good nor evil.
I feel boundless emotion toward all things that move, all things that carry scent, all things with color, all things that resound in this world—and wish to sing of them with boundless joy.

What a beautiful, long-lingering night of lamplight this must have been.
My twenties passed almost without time to remember them, without time to agonize over each night’s fleeting loves—spent writing discarded verses—and dawned more fleetingly than a dream.
What startled me upon hearing it in the dawn following that vanished night was the voice called “thirty years old”—even more flavorless than a rooster’s shriveled cry.
In the blazing sun of late summer, a still-green leaf fluttered down—an unheard resonance.

V

In the poetry of Wang Yuyang, Qing dynasty poet, there is this line: "Ten days amid threads of rain and flakes of wind." There is a verse that says: 'The misty vistas of lush spring resemble lingering autumn.' Those sensitive to such impressions must have experienced this—in the height of spring when flowers still cling un-scattered, there come twilights that never quite become rain, lingering clouded until dusk brings a weary silence and chill seeming to beckon something forth, abruptly evoking the melancholy of his autumn evening. Exactly thus does thirty years old mark a man's prime—how sorrowful, how ominous must be that sudden sense of solitude felt unbidden in the depths of a heart fiercely proud in its awareness of vigor.

On a frozen bright morning in early winter—when one abruptly discovers white hair at their temples in the icy mirror surface—the shock and despair: these are terrors confronting reality, yet illusions born from one's own imagined dread. Once such visions surface without reason before one's eyes, they become phantasms no effort can dispel.

Until mere two or three years prior—when I would quote lines like "White hair before flowers—another ten years"—even toward that old age Chinese poets so joyfully sang of, I shared humanity's universal taste for decadence. Moonlight wandering over ruined palace courtyards still formed poetic scenes I could conjure. But now that age loomed before me, even the sound of a midnight clock by my pillow grew unbearable.

While my hair remained free of white and skin unmarked by wrinkles, I began yearning fiercely to experience once more that love which had pledged a lovers' suicide. This obsession that wrenched flesh and pierced heart drove me—whom society deems at an age of full discernment—to haunt beguiling alleyways more desperately than youths of nineteen or twenty.

What madness this was. Yet the more urgently I sought, the clearer it grew that I could no longer play with that carefree dreamlike abandon of twenty. Life's accumulated experiences now laid bare the core of all things at first glance, killing interest—while new popular songs heard roadside only made me mourn taste's decline through changing times. In those pleasure quarters I once reveled in, I now found myself assailed by solitude unknown elsewhere.

I recalled the former lover who once proposed we die together—where were they now? What did they do? How I longed to meet them once more. Why had I not died then? Was art truly lovelier than love? Had I not sung of lovers' suicide as beauty's pinnacle? Ah...

I have no choice but to dwell alone in solitude, reflecting on a past departed never to return.
That must be the fate of the poet—no, of all humankind—to accept with resigned satisfaction.
Walking through the park’s restful teahouse where I once clasped hands and conversed with a lover, through shrine precincts where I wandered, reading poems that captured my transient thoughts became once more an irreplaceable solace.
Back then, in that trading firm’s office, phrases like “Indestructible Form,” “Goddess of Beauty,” “Koto’s Murmurs,” “Art Eternal,” and “Poet’s Glory” from covertly read verse would ignite my blood beyond bearing—yet now, words such as “Remembrance,” “Dreams Dissolving,” and “Lingering Scent” seep through my heart’s depths as music………

VI

In this autumn garden steeped in endless sorrow, a beautiful little bird suddenly appeared from nowhere. It sang sweetly with a melodious voice. This occurred at the familiar teahouse by the pond where one evening, I encountered a young woman who seemed to be someone's wife, her hair styled in a traditional married woman's chignon. Beyond the window lay a cloudy March sky devoid of wind, where upon the surface of murky stagnant water floated motionless clusters of bright plum blossoms from riverside homes, mirrored alongside Ueno's dark forest depths.

The woman began making her exit upon my arrival. The household's mistress intervened, saying, “There’s no need to leave—we’re all friends here. Do stay awhile.” After exchanging greetings, I joined the mistress in conversation within the dimming parlor—where only the eaves lantern outside glowed—until a maid brought in a pedestal lamp.

The woman with the chignon, as she was called, was the mistress of a man from Negishi—so the mistress of the house explained after we returned. Even during our first casual conversation, she repeatedly let out feigned sighs—“I’m already twenty-three this year, just sick of it all”—and while boldly gazing at my face added, “Twenty-six or twenty-seven? You couldn’t possibly look twenty-eight.” “Men don’t have it so bad,” she said, and at that moment, those words struck my ears with genuine delight. Her build lacked striking elegance, yet she was a plump woman with radiant complexion and comforting warmth—though whenever her ring-laden fingertips crossed above the long brazier in the evening gloom, they appeared startlingly white and supple. She seemed unable to sit properly for long; at the end of each spoken phrase, she would laugh in a shrill, piercing voice without restraint, constantly shifting her body and adjusting her posture. What a resplendent laugh it was! Unbeknownst to herself, the joy overflowing her breast seemed to well up like a spring from deep within that beautiful throat, gushing forth between those pearly white teeth. What a coquettish way of sitting that was. It was undoubtedly due to that torment of hers—a twenty-three-year-old woman’s fully matured body, just as a ripe fruit cannot remain on the branch, seeking the strong arms of a man upon which to cast all her passions and lean. From the very first moment I laid eyes on her, I felt a temptation that made my body tremble.

Just like that exact time, on a dusk two or three days later when we fortuitously met for the second time, I could endure it no longer and, together with the teahouse mistress, forcibly took that woman to a nearby restaurant for dinner.

There was nothing that made me feel such pleasure as when I went to a restaurant with a young woman companion.
Stepping on the entrance’s stone pavement—immaculately cleaned and lightly sprinkled with water—with echoing footsteps, I took the hand of the woman who always seemed to hang back timidly on such occasions and led her straight up to the genkan, where a crowd of maids came out to greet us.
Their sharp female gazes pretended not to see, instead fixating—not so much on the woman I had brought as on her hair and clothes.
To my eyes as a bewildered man, it felt supremely gratifying yet inexplicably mortifying; I inevitably quickened my pace, entering the tatami room as we were led down the hallway polished like a mirror.
A scent—perhaps dust trapped in the tatami mats—hung in the air, a faintly damp odor one would never detect in an ordinary home. The cold Negishi-nuri lacquered walls exuded loneliness, while in the slightly dim alcove corner, a fresh flower bloomed as though awaiting someone’s arrival.
In short, I delighted in this new, somewhat anxiety-tinged moment’s sensory perception of having arrived at an unfamiliar place; once my heart was awakened by this wondrous stimulus, even the most trivial matters thereafter drew out my interest with vivid force.
The woman's rambling remarks instead left indelible memories.
That night, the voice of a man frequently playing Fujihachiken with a woman in the room across the garden—along with the usual town criers stopping at various points in back alleys to strike their wooden clappers—made these familiar reverberations vexingly stretch the hour, transforming the still-young night into something oppressively late.
Ah, to be tantalized by those elusive dreams of hope—to feel this sensation as a young woman not yet deeply known gradually softened her speech toward me with each circulating cup, her meeting eyes growing ever more unguarded—surely this was love’s sweetest moment of joy.
The mistress of the teahouse had long since discerned my feelings and excused herself several times.
At each of those moments, I attempted under various pretexts to have our hands meet.

Despite being quite drunk that night, when the hostess began rising from her seat, she made no move to stop her; yet upon facing me directly, she sat properly as if transformed from our first meeting, maintaining impeccable posture while strangely falling silent.
As if unable to endure the blazing desire in my unwavering gaze, she kept her face downcast, incapable of lifting it.
Time advancing through this silence seemed compelled to carry our fates to their inevitable conclusion without either noticing—like an incoming tide’s relentless flow now pressing upon us.
I fancied I could hear the intensely heightened resonance of her chest.
That resonance—now surrendered entirely to you—I discerned as a plaintive entreaty demanding response: "What will you do?"
Ah, unsolvable riddles! Indiscernible whispers! Formless shadows of words—what exquisite torment!
Suddenly it struck me: this unvoiced resolve of hers, this eloquent silence—might advancing here provoke some dreadful defense, like a cornered rat biting its feline pursuer?
In this moment, I resolved to observe dispassionately, free of preconceptions, and pierce her psyche.
Myself acutely aware of my intoxication.
Longing to sober completely.
At least must not grow drunker—I panicked.
Yet my urgency only heightened intoxication’s swirl—vision blurring, body gradually feeling alien... until consciousness slipped away.
Judgment had vanished.
The woman before me was simply Woman.
No social tethers.
No constraints.
She had become mere counterpart to desire—a sudden manifestation.

O alcohol, I thank thee………

VII

That spring seemed as though it came solely to celebrate our romance.
The plum blossoms scattered, and though rain always threatened during cherry blossom season, that April saw only two or three showers—each a thoughtful rain that intentionally began late at night and unfailingly cleared by dawn, as if to wash away the dust defiling the flowers.
The cloudless sky deepened its pure azure hue daily, while relentless sunlight made the colors of blooming flowers and sprouting young grass stand out even more vividly.
The weather turned startlingly hot all at once, until afternoon passersby without parasols found themselves gazing at willow leaves already grown long and summer-like, instinctively steering their steps toward house-shaded sidewalks.
When such sweltering days ended windless, the twilight air—tinted murky—stagnated heavily just so, oppressing every breath. Scattered floral perfumes and grassy scents mingled with damp earth and ditch odors to induce swamp-fever headaches, from which young men could only escape through women—ah!—as if crying anguished pleas of abandon when spring nights of boundless allure arrived.
How many such nights must I have wandered freely with her hand in mine beneath cherry blossoms weighed down by their own profusion?

We would always secretly meet at appointed times beneath Ueno's forest shadows or along Negishi's hedgerow paths, then let our feet wander where they pleased—running all the way to Mukojima's outskirts to stay at a hot spring inn where croaking frogs echoed through the rice fields.
Unable to endure the lingering warmth after bathing—or perhaps driven by the stifling air of the tightly closed small room—I quietly opened a narrow window late at night. There in the low-hanging smoke-hazed sky floated stars here and there, monstrously large in form yet glowing with a blurred radiance as if their light had been smudged.
Exchanging meaningful glances at the notion that tomorrow we might not return—that tomorrow might bring rain—we then fell soundly asleep, only for me to startle awake at dawn, feeling the sudden chill of a changed climate.
The stomach’s unhealthiness, abetted by late-night eating, meant that startling upon seeing some forgotten dream—one that slips away upon waking—on a lover’s arm pillow was a frequent occurrence in such circumstances.
And then—though night had fully dawned into day, the sun did not shine, nor did rain fall—the long afternoon grew dim as evening, calmly overcast; birdsong lacked vigor, flowers mindlessly began to scatter, and across sunken water surfaces of ponds, rice paddies, and puddles, the shadows of drifting clouds dissolved into reflections of motionless groves and blossoms.
There were also days when such dream-like tranquility continued for several days.

With hands tucked into the sleeves of my soft silk nightgown lined with thin padding, I leaned against the veranda pillar and narrow window, gazing at the branching of trees, the color of flowers, the water’s surface, and the hazy sky’s light with a weary, heavy heart—when occasionally I would find a woman by my side.
Forgetting even the self-evident fact that this woman was the source of the wondrous stimulus that stirred my senses, I would drown in reveries deeper and vaster than what people call romance or love—uncertain, unbounded realms of free imagination.
This was precisely the ecstatic fairyland that poets especially yearned for—and in that moment, the woman ceased to be a woman.
Flesh was not flesh.
The world beyond morality’s defined boundaries unfolded, filled with beauty and harmony.
The resonance of kisses and the fierce breathing of embraces merged into nature’s chaotic, intoxicating music.
The progression of “time” had completely dissipated from my consciousness, and the moment became a thought that connected to eternity.
But suddenly, what thrust me back from this ecstatic heaven of self-annihilation at the peak of rapture to the earthly reality below was neither the sound of carriages nor the blast of steam whistles, neither human footsteps nor barking dogs, nor even the rustling wind.
That was none other than the very woman herself who had intoxicated my heart.
People often cited Maupassant’s stories, but I believed no one had felt a man’s despair and disgust toward women as profoundly as I had.
In the short story called “The Drowned Man’s Letter,” something closely resembling my own impressions was written.
When a young man rejoicing in ideals—having spent a summer night with a woman until dawn in a small boat—thought himself struck by her noble beauty as she frequently turned to smile at him, nay by awakening nature itself, and believed she had granted him understanding of love’s heart—how absurd! The woman had been laughing at a caterpillar crawling through his hair………To love was to begin knowing hatred.
At the very moment when I leaned against my beloved’s shoulder, lost in ecstatic reverie, the woman would invariably say, “A crow has defecated.”
“Oh—a frog jumped.”
“A peasant slipped,” she would say, erupting in startling laughter that shattered the profound harmony between human hearts and nature.

There were times when I recalled that it had been happier to walk in solitude as I once did, entrusting my unrelieved loneliness to poetry—free from any fear of others disrupting those exquisite reveries. Or even in meetings we’d arranged to meet tonight at such-and-such hour and place, I found that merely holding the hope of reunion before me left only emptiness, and I even came to think the bitterness of waiting through dawn would etch a far deeper memory. No—the true essence of secret trysts lies precisely in the torment of waiting, the suffering, the unease—it begins and ends there.

VIII

The cherry blossoms had long since scattered.
The peach blossoms had also scattered.
The kerria blossoms had also scattered.
The wisteria blossoms had also faded in color.
No longer did anyone go to see the peonies.
The soft green hue of young leaves grew darker and deeper with each passing day, already wearying eyes accustomed to their sight.
The rain began to fall.
Though it was not yet the rainy season, this ceaseless rain—falling yesterday and today with no sign of clearing—had summoned back a clammy chill that draped haori over hasty shoulders clad in silk unlined garments instead of lined ones, that reignited charcoal in hibachi whose ashes had long lain cold.
Spring had indeed departed without returning.
When I recall it now, that astonishingly beautiful spring—from plum blossoms to young leaves—had vanished like sunset clouds whose blinding radiance disappears with night, leaving my heart filled only with violently vivid chromatic phantoms while all other events and impressions grew hazy in consciousness.
The recent past now felt like some painted scroll I had unfurled a full decade earlier—I could no longer remember whether its figures wept or battled, retaining only memories of thickly daubed pigments.

The sound of rain, the sound of rain.
At that time I lived in Yanaka—in an amateur-run boarding house near cemeteries and temples where art students mainly lodged.
The sound of rain, the sound of rain.
The night stood truly still.
The lamp cast steady light across the desk covered in green woolen baize.
Gold lettering on well-thumbed books glimmered coldly.
Like snowdrifts in open fields.
Upon multiple quires of manuscript paper lying perfectly smooth without a single crease, a small Chinese lion paperweight threw sharp shadows.
Beside the black rectangular inkstone lay two or three delicate brushes—their slender yellow bamboo shafts and still-clean white bristle tips arranged haphazardly.
In the glossy ceramic water jar where lamplight seemed to pool directly, a purple Western flower—placed who knows when—had already withered.
Propped on one elbow with a hand tucked in my robe, I absently listened to the endless rain.
Rather than recent memories, distant recollections surfaced intermittently like eavesdripping—drop by disconnected drop.
In childhood I often went fishing with a square casting net after heavy rains cleared, catching minnows in suburban streams.
There were times I lingered on bridges over city-center canals during rainy twilights, watching persimmon-brown and navy snake-eye umbrellas overlap with oilpaper ones bearing thick round-lettered teahouse names—all swaying windblown across my view.
When visiting Chinese treaty ports, nights stretched terrifyingly vast and dark at harbors—only broken by fitful strains of mournful string music drifting from those quayside towns unique for hearing such sounds.
The relentless rain fell upon sleek tides where anchored ships' lights floated distant.
I once wept watching silent raindrops streak past a porthole's glow.........
These disparate memories from the past now rested in my heart's mirror—motionless and clear as sky colors reflected on stagnant water.
That singular moment of dignified solemnity known only to those who take up the brush—untasted, unguessed.
The sound of rain, the sound of rain.

I immediately took up my brush, and upon my wrist touching it—that indescribably pleasant sensation of smoothness and buoyancy—I wrote the title in bold, dark ink across the blank white paper: three large characters reading “The Sound of Rain.”
And without pausing,

The threads of rain now draw me back to ten years past.
Ten years past, the sound of rain was a harp.
I listened to this………

At that moment, suddenly from below the staircase came a woman’s voice calling my name in a high-pitched tone. Still gripping my brush, I had no time to turn in surprise before—accompanied by footsteps in the corridor—the damp sliding door with loosened paper patches was forcibly opened, and there in the lamplight’s faint glow at the room’s far corner appeared her figure, utterly unexpected. It was the Negishi Woman who had delighted my spring.

“What’s wrong?”
“At this hour…”

“They found out through the letter.”
“I’ve finally been cast out—nowhere left to stay.”
“If anything, it’s liberating.”

The woman laughed brightly in her crystalline voice and leaned against my lap with theatrical abandon—as though casting both body and soul upon me—her upturned face glancing toward the desk.

“‘The threads of rain now draw me back to ten years past...’ What’s this? Your novel?”
“All that studying finally bore fruit?”
“How terribly rude of me.”

I felt a truly unutterable despair.
The lamplight remained as tranquil as ever, the sound of rain as sorrowful as ever—yet I, suddenly cast down from his exquisite dream of reminiscence onto the wretched reality of soiled tatami, felt as though I had been forever stripped of a poet’s prerogative.

At the very moment when the weight of the woman on my knees felt like bearing stone or iron upon my back, she noticed a bit of scroll paper protruding from the desk drawer and—in a sudden fit of suspicion and jealousy—frantically demanded I show her everything inside.

Overwhelmed by this emotional storm, she now declared with theatrical flair: “Ah! It’s stifling—I need cold water!”
“Might as well toss this obi too.”
Disheveled and panting: “I’m utterly spent.”
“Raining buckets out there and not a single rickshaw puller to be found!”
With that pronouncement, she collapsed sideways onto the floor.

There is nothing as pitiful as a woman once obtained after striving to win her.
This weariness, despair, disgust—where does it arise from?
The spring wind that scatters blossoms is the spring wind that made them bloom.
Is not the warmth of sunlight ripening fruit the very sunlight that will rot it?
Ideals born from reality never walk in step with reality itself.
What mystery, what contradiction this must be.
The very traits I had admired in her until yesterday had all transformed into glaring flaws.
When first we met, her unreserved speech—once vivacious—now seemed imprudent; her posture sitting askew with tilted head and shrugged shoulders appeared not soft feminine beauty but vulgar repulsiveness itself.
The ceaseless agitation of my heart and love's torment could only stem from a woman's irrational jealousy.
I stood at a loss, blankly gazing at her form; even when pressed about her future plans, I could offer no immediate answer.
Then she began to cry at once.
Pressing her face against my knees, she choked through tears while repeating past joys we'd shared.
Her fragmented words and sobs' rhythm merged with endless rain dripping from leaves onto roofs, blending with gutter overflows to form mournful music resonating through serene lamplight.
The old hallway clock occasionally boomed its heavy pendulum's toll.
The narrow room's air—once damp and chill—grew thick with face powder and hair oil's muggy scent.
When her repeated words finally faded from hearing, I suddenly felt through thin summer silk the lukewarm dampness of her tears.
Then this tepid moisture seeped into my being—in an instant my blood seemed to boil—and like one wine-drunk I blurted without thought: "If we die, let us die together."
Try though I might not to utter words like "Even death won't part us," I found myself powerless to stop them………

9

I can scarcely bring myself to relate what followed thereafter.
Were I to objectively narrate myself as tragedy's protagonist, that drama's core would lie in love's collision with art.
What love truly is—all must surely know.
How art's passion resists containment—ah, none but artists understand this.
Each reading of Goethe's *Faust* draws tears from me.
Why did Claude—Zola's painter protagonist in *L'Œuvre*—forsake his beloved wife to hang alone at midnight before his unfinished canvas?
Why did Heinrich the bell-founder—hero of Hauptmann's *The Sunken Bell*—succumb to the Mountain Maiden's allure, abandoning wife and child?
Why was Rubek—sculptor protagonist of Ibsen’s *When We Dead Awaken*—reviled by his wounded model with "The work comes first—living humans second"?
Balzac’s *The Unknown Masterpiece* too portrays a painter’s grotesque suicide.
To worldly eyes, artists must appear as madmen.
Yet I would prefer not to be thus perceived.
No need exists to vehemently defend oneself or make the masses grasp art’s essence.
To reveal its true nature—art proves too refined, too sacred.
Even Christ’s most sublime teachings lost all dignity through Salvation Army pamphleteering.
Ideology’s propagation breeds only false expedients, hyperbole, and petty sectarianism.
Love art? Then never compel others to understand it.
Let those who seek comprehension find it unaided—that suffices.

I now give no thought whatsoever to my parents, relatives, and siblings' initial fury toward me, their subsequent ostracism, or even their eventual feelings of pity and terror.
I am a poet; they are ordinary people.
That is to say, we belong to tribes of mutually different nations.
I do not even resent the relationship between the state to which I belong and art.
I quarreled with my parents, rebelled against my teachers, and moreover, of my own volition have come to this day as a poet whom the state neither demands but rather seeks to suppress.
Could I have endured without such resolve?
Though the gambling bosses—relics from feudal times—may already be deemed useless idlers in the modern age, the state's administrative organs still recognize their raison d'être as a convenient means for apprehending criminals.
Poets are even more worthless than those—useless beings.
They are ruffians.
Is it not only natural that they are persecuted?
Yet what a wonder! Despite such humiliation, whenever I see birds singing, flowers blooming, women laughing, men running, I am instantly seized by poetic passion and cannot contain it.
Poets are indeed noxious weeds that, even when the state wields the sickle of law to mow them down until none remain, cannot be fully eradicated and sprout anew with each rainfall.
They are poisonous weeds.
They are weeds.
Unlike crops in the field, no one tends to them or gives them fertilizer.
Even in that distant France, Flaubert declared that artists must not seek to receive the happiness ordinary people ought to receive.
How then could we Japanese poets possibly entertain hopes such as taking a wife and building a home?
Non-citizens inferior even to gamblers, shiftless vagrants—this shall forever be the honorable title we must meekly accept.
It is for this reason that until today at thirty years of age, I have taken pleasure in lodging residences wherever I went.
I did not disdain associating with people from respectable households.

The red-light districts of shameful trades were my sole park.
Baudelaire’s poetry collection *Les Fleurs du Mal* was my supreme gospel.
And now—ah, what torment!—I had become one who possessed a wife who was not a wife.

The mistress of the man kept in Negishi, having been cast out by her provider, wandered to my place.
Since keeping a woman made boarding houses inhospitable, we pooled our meager funds to rent a dim cottage in Nezu Gongen's shadowy woods.
Sleeping or waking, there lived by my side a woman who relied on me as her world's sole anchor.
The weight of duty crushed my shoulders beyond endurance.
Blowing out the lamp and laying head to pillow, my final thought each night wrestled with creation's agony.
Awakening to sunlight brought renewed poetic torment—this artistic anguish that had been yesterday's boundless joy now seemed but a dream.
In those days, fragmentary essays for newspapers covered my scant rent. When inspiration fled, I wandered park shade with poetry collections; when it struck, I wrote through sleepless nights; at dawn's respite, I reveled in a beauty's song.
Not even sky-flying birds knew such licentious freedom.
I spared no thought for parents' welfare or siblings' survival—nay, not even for my own morrow.
Loneliness must sometimes ache.
Must sting.
Yet whether living or dying remained my own choosing—never snared by his cloying affection or camaraderie's tears.
Gradually the woman's form took shape in my eyes as an art-destroying specter.
Hearing midnight leaves whisper or cliff waters cascade near home, the Muse would materialize as in Musset's "Night"—reproaching my poetic betrayal while soothing with delicate words I almost heard.

How many times did I resolve, disregarding any cruelty, to decisively cast her away?
But—ah—a woman’s tears, the thunderous pounding of a chest, the warmth of flesh.
How many times was I moved by the fervent desire to protect this woman even if it meant abandoning art?

It was precisely the rainy season; the rain that had fallen day after day suddenly let up slightly that afternoon.
As if dawn had broken, the suddenly streaming sunlight’s intensity made it clear: summer had arrived in full.
The surfaces of the wet leaves on the trees surrounding the house shone like gold, each and every one with its dripping droplet.
Within the overlapping dim grove, the fiercely penetrating sunlight reached even there, and each time the wind came, swaying shadows and light wove an indescribably beautiful mesh pattern.
Across the road at the Sendagi cliff, the cicadas began their new summer song for this year.
Several white butterflies—when had they been born, where had they weathered the rain until today?—came fluttering through the sunlight as though they had emerged from a dream.

I could not remain in the house another instant.
I wanted to put as much distance as possible between myself and this stifling house, to breathe in the bracing rain-washed air with utter abandon.
Unable to answer the woman asking my destination, I simply stepped outside.

Passing through Nedzu's impoverished outskirts—a district where the ground sank unnaturally low—the wives in tenements were washing and hanging out tattered undergarments patched from long rains, soiled waist-wraps, infants' swaddling cloths, clogs and umbrellas, even kitchen sinks, all with frenzied intensity, loudly chattering and cursing.
Around them, a great number of children were crying, making noise, and fighting.
Through such narrow back alleys, several middle-aged men, carrying bundles and with their kimono hems tucked up, hurriedly made their way through the jostling crowd.
Not only was every ditch overflowing with muddy rainwater that no longer flowed, but countless puddles of stagnant water on the road—so deep one could scarcely step over them—now beautifully reflected the color of the clear blue sky where white clouds were beginning to surge violently.
From the high sky, the high-pitched cry of a kite fell from afar.
Though this backstreet life always weighed heavily on my heart, today I found myself somehow deeply intrigued—even feeling a sense almost akin to envy that such an existence could persist here—and as I walked between the low houses with scaled roofs, following the road's meandering course, suddenly the broad expanse of Shinobazu Pond opened before my eyes, where unobstructed sunlight and azure sky glimmered upon fresh lotus leaves, striking my vision.
After the rain, Ueno's forest had turned a verdant blue as though returned to the season of fresh greenery, and the willows along the bank fluttered most agreeably in the wind.
And on the sole railing of the two-story houses lining the distant shore, bathed in full sunlight, a flame-like red thing hung drying.
A woman's undergarment?
The lining of a futon?

In one of those two-story houses, on this spring’s still-chilly evening, I unexpectedly encountered and spoke with the woman I had left behind today.
When I recalled this, I felt I could not bear to take a single step closer in that direction and, as if fleeing, climbed the stone steps of Tōshōgū Shrine and wandered into a grove of cedar trees.

I thought it better not to torment myself with whether to abandon her or care for her.
To abandon her would be too heartless.
To spend a lifetime together watching each other grow old day by day seemed even more unbearable.
I must not forget those torments even for a single moment.
I suffered to the point where I couldn't continue living unless I forgot.
Rather than observe the quietly standing cedar grove and their dimly lit roots where rainwater pooled reflecting the azure sky, I resolved to go somewhere filled with the clamor of people and carriages instead, taking the railway tram straight to Asakusa as was my custom then.
The light clatter of geta sandals, the bustle of shrine market stalls, displays of goods in every hue—particularly the flower hairpins and half-collars filling shopfronts, adorned in dazzling flames of crimson, green, purple, and tie-dyed patterns—made my heart buoyant like a maiden's and drew me near, yet those extravagantly vivid colors rather evoked the precarious beauty of flowers at their glorious peak awaiting scattering.
Several shapely young women walked by wearing ornate medium-patterned yukata with red crushed chignons and loosely tied obis, revealing white foot soles with each step.
Yet even I found it strange how I could only gaze upon this scene with desolate emptiness.
What was happening?
I keenly felt an inexpressible pleasure from the cool post-rain breeze.
I knew how sunlight after rain made all colors strike the eye with startling vividness.
Nevertheless, an unknowable sorrow lurked in some hidden corner of my heart.
Why did things appearing beautiful and pleasant today immediately turn sad and lonely? My walking feet naturally led me along the long stone pavement until they brought me to the foot of Kannon Hall's stairs beneath its great lantern.

The fierce summer sun—blocked by wide eaves of tiled roofs that seemed to slide terrifyingly from the sky—reached halfway up the ceaselessly ascending/descending worshippers’ stairs, making the iron plates affixed to each step corner glare as if scorching.
Looking up from below, within the nearly pitch-dark main hall, only the polished metal fittings at the bottom of suspended great lanterns were visible; whenever wind blew through, one could clearly discern smoke from the front entrance’s large incense burner—appearing blue in sunlight—drifting down to the stair base.
I climbed the stairs.
The cool serenity of air and shadowed dimness distant from sunlight within any grand structure’s interior felt all the more keenly by me, having just passed through marketplace clamor.
Simultaneously, large lanterns making even the spacious hall feel cramped—alongside hanging lamps, thick pillars, shrines and idols in their shadows, high-hung votive paintings, numerous transom carvings, and dim antiquated colors encircling every side—all these inexpressibly gently calmed human hearts.
With an unexpected sensation of seeing this main hall anew today, I gazed ahead over countless bowed worshipper heads. Beyond the ship-like large offering box, deep within far recesses floated an altar lined with numerous snow lanterns—like a dream emerged from darkness—its dim flickering light faintly illuminating candelabra carvings and golden artificial flowers while bearing infinite mystery that rendered devotees utterly incapable of scrutinizing its interior.

From somewhere deep within the unfathomable recesses came a grating rasp—the sound of a bamboo tube for sacred lots being shaken.
The murmured prayers of the people intermingled with the cooing of pigeons from behind the votive paintings.
I, driven not only by an artist’s curiosity ever hungry for observational interest but also by a melancholic comfort found in the sudden sight of lamplight in daytime and the somber patina of antiquity, came to a standstill before a crimson idol enshrined in the shadow of a thick pillar, gazing without distraction at the ceaselessly flowing crowd of worshippers.
Just then, a woman who appeared to be a geisha—though no longer in eye-catching splendor, her subdued attire suggesting an age where she’d simply be called “elder sister” in these parts—stared at my face with suspicion from across the way, then suddenly exclaimed “Ah!” and began calmly approaching while calling my name,

“It’s truly been an age, hasn’t it? You haven’t changed at all. Are you alone?” she asked, glancing discreetly about.

“I too had certainly thought I wanted to meet at least once, but no matter what, I don’t have the face to meet you.”

I timidly peered at her expression.
She was the woman called Kogiku, whom I could never forget—the one with whom I had made a suicide pact when I was twenty-two.
Kogiku showed no sign of resenting me, yet her voice had taken on a composed quality, as though she were not the person of old,

“It’s truly a dream.”
“No matter what I say, it’s no use if it’s not from when we were young.”
“When it comes to that, men…” she smiled sadly.

“How old are you now?”

“Twenty-eight.”

“Then you’re still in your prime, aren’t you?”

“Oh, you must be joking.”

“Well, perhaps that’s true for young-spirited people, but I’ve grown completely weary of the world.”

Once more from deep within came the eerie rattle of a shaken tube; the cooing of pigeons.
On skin clad in thin summer garments that had long lingered in the hall's shade, the wind flowing through the corridor came to feel unpleasantly chill.
"What time is it, I wonder."

“Let’s get something to eat around here.”

“No, it’s not a bother at all.”

We descended the stairs side by side.

Ten

Compared to the dim, rainy days that had continued until yesterday, today’s clear weather lasted an astonishingly long time.
I took Kogiku around the base of the Five-story Pagoda and entered a small restaurant in the shadow of the bell tower; then, even after seeing off Kogiku as she boarded a rickshaw on the bustling street of Kaminarimon, the surroundings were still bright.
Of course, gas lamps were lit in the shops and restaurants around there, but the fierce evening sun set the entire western sky ablaze in crimson, charring the high roof of Honganji Temple visible at the edge of the bustling street to a terrifying jet-black.
The white, thin fragments of floating clouds shone entirely in golden hues, while the long, black clouds stretching across the sky had turned a deep purple.
Among them, there were some dyed rose-colored on just one side.
Yet when I stared, even this dazzling riot of colors that pierced the eyes began gradually fading toward pitch-dark night with each passing moment.
I casually recalled Kogiku's words.
Kogiku no longer held any ill will toward me, who broke our suicide pact and disappeared.
Rather, she was grateful.
She said that precisely because of that incident, even when seeing young people reveling joyously in happy love, she could avoid feeling lonely or sad regarding her own aging and declining self of today.
In a woman’s heart past twenty-five, there remains neither passion nor love.
She spoke of how, for the sake of this practical problem—how to sustain a lifetime not fated to end by her own hand without struggling for daily necessities—she had no choice but to rely on a man she found loathsome, grumbling through her days; yet looking back to when she was eighteen or nineteen, even the notion of “dying” had been nothing more than a careless joke in those days.
She said that sorrows and pains were ultimately a kind of wine that made one savor the joyful dreams of youth even more intensely and delightfully.
That must be so.
That must be so.
A woman’s eighteen and a man’s twenty are truly beautiful things.
Why could I not find the courage to decisively sever ties with that woman left behind at Negishi’s house—unlike my twenty-year-old self who would theatrically speak of breaking up or parting when there was no need, who would deliberately cry and embrace her over matters that need not have brought tears?
Why was it that I could not help but agonize unbearably over both the woman’s circumstances after being abandoned and even my own future of casting grief upon others—all without any discernible reason?

While being jostled in the horse-drawn tram, I continued dwelling on the woman at Negishi's house.
Were I to abandon her now, I feared she—with nowhere immediate to go—might fixate single-mindedly on ending her life.
Through her survival—as she eternally seemed to implore—she would likely never again dream of merry trysts with men.
Her ravaged heart would hasten to consign itself to ruinous old age at earliest chance.
Ah, how she had truly reveled in outings.
The mere sight of blue skies would send her walking endlessly.
"If there's no shared carriage," she'd say, "better walk hand-in-hand however far—however weary."
When clouds gathered and sparse rain fell—intercepted by cherry blossom canopies that spared our robes—we once trod Mukōjima's long embankment near Kibutsuji Temple past midnight.
Recalled now, those moments feel irreplaceably dear.
Why then did such cherished memories fail to rouse matching rapture toward her—this woman who should be called my wife?
I resent none—rage only at myself—lament my own heart...

When stars shimmered in Shinobazu Pond, strains of samisen-accompanied singing could be heard, and mosquito columns swirled through Nezu’s backstreets—I returned home utterly exhausted.
In the cool lamplight, she sat beautifully made up for evening with outdoor clothes donned, evidently having waited for my return.
“Welcome home,” came her unnervingly composed voice.
Transformed completely from her usual frenzy of fearing abandonment and suspecting male caprice, she turned toward me a face I found disquieting to behold, then explained matters when questioned.
That afternoon after my departure, the teahouse mistress had come—indignant over recent improprieties—to expel her from the residence; yet relayed that patience might restore former arrangements, detailing profit-and-loss calculations.
Thus through discussion’s course came an appointment she now must keep.

I momentarily forgot all my conflicting emotions and resolved to stop her at any cost.
Waiting through the night until her return near midnight, I pleaded with every ounce of my heart and every word I possessed—ah, but she could only sink deeper into tears, and when dawn broke, she finally declared our parting openly.
"I'll never forget you my whole life. To have known such happiness already fulfills a woman's fortune."
"The truth is I've a mother back home needing care, so I'll resign myself to being a bought plaything—whether flowers bloom or scatter, I'll live with sealed eyes."
"I want to age swiftly till I've no desire left even for theater."
With these final words, on that sweltering noon when even yukata clung like oppression, she vanished from my sight—her jet-black shadow gliding across bone-white parched sand until both dissolved from view.

I parted with her, and since then had known nothing of her whereabouts.
Were I to wish knowing, there would naturally be countless means.
Yet even were we to meet again, could we ever taste such a brilliant romance a second time?
The words she spoke—"I want to grow old quickly and lose all desire to watch even a single play"—resounded in my heart more sorrowfully than death's announcement.
I was already forty.
As for this woman who wished to age still faster—I found myself unable to bear seeing the woman I once knew grown old.
I thought I would still refuse to see it even if forced………

Eleven

After Sensei had narrated his past loves at length, he accompanied me to the tramway.

A quiet Shiba Park—on an early summer night when not only the leaves but even the stars in the sky seemed to play a nostalgic melody.
Sensei murmured as if to himself, “Nature never ages and consoles the poet, but the poet’s life wanes with each encounter with spring.”
“Nature always repeats the same spring, but poetry transforms with the times, never permitting yesterday’s old melodies to be repeated.”
“Herein lies a poignant contradiction,” he said.

From Shiba to the outskirts of Koishikawa, during the long tram ride, I found myself repeatedly recalling a certain passage from Jean Moréas’s poetry that Sensei often recited—
Goûtez tous les plaisirs etsouffrez tous les maux

Etdites: C'est beaucoup, etc'est l'ombre d'un rêve.

Savor every joy without reserve, taste every pain without exception.

And proclaim.
That alone is insufficient.
And proclaim: It is but the shadow of a dream.

I found myself sadly recalling that passage—"Savor every joy without reserve, taste every pain without exception. And proclaim: That alone is insufficient. It is but the shadow of a dream"—time and again for no particular reason.

Created in April of Meiji 42