Pathway to Japanese Literature

Laboratory

Realizing that his brother and he were once again repeating the same argument, both fell silent as if by prior agreement.

His brother wiped the sweat from his forehead with apparent displeasure and fanned himself frantically.
He looked with one eye at the faint layer of dust that had settled on the microscope cover and tearfully reflected on the events of the past ten days or so during which he had not entered the laboratory.

To put it simply, his wife had died the previous morning after a massive hemoptysis.
His wife had been receiving treatment at the hospital where he worked.
Regarding the cause of death, the Director and the majority of the medical staff had unanimously concluded it was likely the result of acute caseous pneumonia, but he alone had been unable to believe this.
While everyone acknowledged that the left lung had been ravaged by pulmonary tuberculosis with extensive decay, he firmly believed—when synthesizing the sudden auscultatory abnormalities in the right lung's middle lobe from about a week prior, the fever, and the peritoneal-pleural inflammations—that this undoubtedly indicated the onset of miliary tuberculosis.
The fact that hemoptysis had directly caused death also seemed to substantiate the characteristic of miliary tuberculosis where lesions rupture into blood vessels.
Even when the Director had written the death certificate in the hospital room with the corpse laid before them, he fervently discussed the course of his wife’s illness with the medical staff who had come to offer condolences and assistance, insisting that viewing it as an acute case of caseous pneumonia was most appropriate and that her demise had resulted from extreme exhaustion—yet he could not accept it.
Even regarding his wife’s cause of death, the fact that his own conviction was being dismissed felt like nothing short of an insult.
However, given the circumstances, he refrained from interfering there.
And then, beneath the white gown that had been hastily put on her, he gazed at his wife’s corpse—small, flattened, laid out supine—and remained silent.

As he sat in silence, his academic obsession toward this cause of death began to stir fiercely.
I am a physician and a student of pathology.
I must remain faithful to my academic pursuits in every possible circumstance.
Here lies a single corpse.
Regarding the determination of that cause of death, there exists one individual with a contrary view.
There exists no path other than confirming the truth through autopsy.
If the corpse made autopsy impossible, there would be no alternative—but that was his own wife.
For the elucidation of truth, one must calmly wield the blade mercilessly even upon the corpses of others.
Why should there be any hesitation in carrying the corpse of a wife who would wish for the success of his work onto the dissection table to determine the substance of a phenomenon?
Very well. I shall offer my wife to academic pursuit.
That was how he thought.
After pondering for a while, he added another thought to his initial consideration.
My wife—I will perform her autopsy.
If an autopsy must be performed regardless, then surely his wife would find some satisfaction in being dissected by her own husband.
As for me, to prove my own claim, it is most appropriate that I myself take up the scalpel.
In such cases, whether it be a parent or a wife lying on the dissection table, it is nothing more than an experimental object.
I must remain faithful to academic pursuit in every possible circumstance.

He meticulously reconsidered this matter once more. In his reasoning, there was not a single illogical point. Once he had thoroughly convinced himself of this, he informed the Director and obtained permission.

That evening, he declared his resolve where his relatives and siblings had gathered.
It was less a statement than a proclamation.
The relatives opposed him in various ways, but upon realizing it was futile, they said, “At least limit the autopsy to just the lungs.”
“If miliary tuberculosis were the cause of death,” he countered, “other organs would also be affected. We cannot settle for examining just the lungs.”
“Then have someone else perform it,” they insisted.
“It must be done by my own hand,” he replied.
A woman among them wept bitterly at this heartlessness.
He stood firm, declaring that a husband’s duty required him to perform his wife’s final rites himself.
Yoko’s parents and most relatives had shown open opposition from their very expressions alone.
Confronted with such vulgar prejudice against academic rigor, he felt compelled by sheer obstinacy to uphold his original conviction.
“Since my wife has been returned to me,” he concluded coldly, “her disposition requires no outsider’s interference.”
The assembly fell silent as if struck dumb.

Among those who had exhausted all capacity for love and hatred, only his brother persisted in trying to overturn his resolve.
That morning too, his brother had deliberately come to his laboratory and engaged him in repeated arguments.

“Which do you consider more precious—your own life or academic pursuit?”

When his brother folded his fan, he began to argue again in a persistent, calm manner.
He listlessly shifted his gaze from the dust on the microscope cover to his brother.

“I live through academic pursuit.
“My life’s worth exists solely in what makes academic pursuit noble…… No matter how much we argue about this, it remains unchanged—doesn’t it?”

Having said that, he stood up.
And then, from the glass-paneled shelf by the wall, he took out the microtome blade and began honing it on a razor stone.
Dripping oil onto the smooth whetstone and gently drawing the blade across it, he listened intently to the faint sounds emerging between steel and stone.
The cold gleam of tempered steel—stretching from hilt to tip—chilled all who saw it with its menacing brilliance.
His brother narrowed his eyes, seeming to loathe both the blade being sharpened for his sister-in-law's flesh and the mind that could hone it so calmly.

“Are you going to use that?”

He stopped sharpening and, while gazing closely at the scalpel,

“It’s not used for autopsies. This blade cuts specimen sections.”
“When you’re accustomed to it, you can gauge the edge’s condition by the sharpening sound alone—strange, isn’t it?”
“Biologists face excessive manual labor—a persistent nuisance.”

“Even now, I still think there’s something unhinged about your state of mind. You claim to live for academic pursuit now, but natural science bases its very foundation solely on experiments—life isn’t an experiment.”
“This talk has grown too abstract—don’t you feel any reluctance wielding that blade against your wife’s flesh?”
“If there’s even a shred of such feeling…”

At that moment, the janitor entered and asked him how to handle his wife’s remains in the death chamber.
He ordered immediate preparations for the nine o’clock autopsy.
His brother flustered and pleaded, “Wait a little longer,” but he severed the words with near-hostile intensity, dispatching the janitor to the death chamber.

The older brother sighed and fell silent.
He too fell silent.

In the ceramic sink at the corner of the room, only the sound of water dripping from the faucet could be heard clearly.
The clamor of hospital patients and nurses did not intrude through the door of his laboratory in the research department.
He was busy making preparations necessary for the post-autopsy research.
As he put paraffin into the incubator, lit the alcohol lamp flame, arranged small bottles of hematoxylin, eosin, formalin, alcohol, chloroform, and petroleum benzine in orderly rows on a tray, adjusted the microtome to cut out eight-micron sections, and immersed preparat slides and glassware in alcohol, his long-abandoned habits fully returned, and he slipped into the pure mindset of a researcher.
Before him, there was no longer his wife.
The cross-sections and longitudinal sections of the affected areas of interest appeared vividly before his eyes through imagination.
He thought it would be satisfying if half-suppurated miliary tubercles were clearly visible on the cross-sections of her lungs and peritoneum.
The brother, who had been silent since earlier as if having lost the ability to think, kept his head bowed and continued fanning himself; he was pitied like a fragile sacrificial victim of misguided devotion.

When the hands of the jet-black, aged yet extremely precise wall clock pointed to 8:50, the janitor reappeared and reported that the autopsy room was ready.
He felt a surge of resolve.
Taking off his coat and slipping his arms into a pure white surgical gown,

“In any case, the preparations are complete, so I’m going.”
“After all, humans die someday.”
“Once someone dies, their body serves no purpose whatsoever except to be used for dissection.”
“Since Yoko died and gets to be autopsied by her husband, it’s quite an honor for her…… Brother, are you returning home right away?”
“If you’re returning home, please make the funeral arrangements…”

“I demand to witness this.”

This brother’s words took even him by surprise.
“Why?” he could not refrain from asking.

“You and I—the very foundation of our emotions has become fundamentally different.”
“However our bond made her my sister—I can’t possibly leave her with people like you who handle her with such icy detachment, as if she were mere cargo.”
“You may cling to your position—I’ll say no more about that—but at least acknowledge mine exists.”

“I certainly acknowledge that, but autopsies can appear unbearably cruel to those unaccustomed to them.”
“If that’s acceptable to you, then by all means come.”

Having said that, he handed a surgical gown to his brother as well.

Seeing the handwritten notice on Japanese paper that he himself had carelessly written fluttering in the morning breeze sweeping through the corridor, the two changed from their zori into autopsy room slippers at the corridor exit.
Leaving his brother waiting in the dimly lit, cold preparation room, he fastened a waterproof cloth chest protector and pulled a rubber glove onto his left hand.
The brothers looked at each other’s faces and mutually thought each other’s complexions looked terribly ghastly.

A strange shudder assailed him; he had grown intensely tense without realizing it. When he spread his hand and brought it before his eyes to look, it was trembling finer than ever before. He, strong-willed as he was, found this unpleasant. And then—as if admonishing himself—he shook his right hand sternly two or three times before entering the autopsy room with Brother.

The white walls of the spacious autopsy room—where two dissection tables stood—had been prepared with such freshness under midsummer morning sunlight and the emerald glow of verdant leaves that they intermingled with a blue hue.
About six assistants and observing colleagues had been poised and waiting for his arrival.
Some were calmly smoking tobacco, others were wandering aimlessly about the room, but upon seeing him enter, they straightened up slightly and greeted him.

He was, in essence, a man of few words who rarely smiled—quite unlike a doctor.
When it was announced as the deputy chief physician of internal medicine’s rounds, the nurses and others grew tense.
He never did anything like scolding people, but he had no gaps anywhere that would allow others to slip in.
His face—with its high forehead, long prominent nose, and large single eye gazing intently from beneath narrowed brows—was especially tense that day.
His grave expression, filled with a profound loneliness, even seemed to darken this bright autopsy room.

He gave his brother a chair and then came to the autopsy table where the corpse lay.
The two young medical scholars threw their cigarettes out the window and sat at the desk to prepare for recording.
The observers also gathered one after another around the table.
He greeted the two assistants and two recorders with a firm “Thank you for your efforts today,” then cast a sharp eye over the autopsy table.
Behind him came the hysterical sobs of two nurses overcome by the image of him standing before his dead wife.

On the white gown casually draped over the corpse, three or four flies alighted like small black stains.
Beside the pillow, a small card was placed as per standard practice.
He picked it up and read it.

Yoko Mitani.
Twenty years old.
August 1st, 7:00 AM. Death.
Disease: Caseous pneumonia.

Yoko Mitani—her name seared into his retina as though gouging his chest.
Yet he loathed letting others discern his emotions.
He tore off the white gown from the corpse to banish surging feelings with unyielding facts.

His wife—who until yesterday had endlessly cried his name, thrashing in anguish while begging "I don't want to die—save me!"—now lay emaciated beneath his gaze as a lifeless husk, her struggles rendered futile.
Only her face and genitals remained veiled by gauze; her skin—that peculiar bluish-yellow hue exclusive to corpses, reminiscent of dull Chinese tung oil paper—lay exposed beneath morning light that spilled across the room.
Filth clung from soles to heels like scabs after prolonged neglect of bathing.
Where flesh had wasted away, limb joints protruded grotesquely like bony growths.
Her left chest—ravaged by pulmonary tuberculosis—appeared crushed and markedly shrunken compared to its counterpart.

The observers raised eyes filled with curiosity, attempting to surreptitiously discern the emotions surfacing on his face.
His single eye, while shining as sharply as ever, refused to betray any additional meaning.
He commenced his report about the corpse's external characteristics in composed, precise German.
His hand wandered across the cold cadaver's skin while brushing away flies.
The recorders scribbled furiously across their foolscap papers.
Only the scratching of their pens struck the ear with peculiar prominence.

“Scalpel.”

At this single word he uttered, the room briefly stirred with a small commotion.
When one of the assistants twisted the faucet attached to the dissection table, water fell soundlessly onto the porcelain table like suspended icicles, coursed through several small grooves, and flowed down through the central hole into the floor below.
One of the assistants placed a smooth black-lacquered examination table between the corpse’s legs.
The nurses brought a large enamel basin heaped with scalpels of various sizes, scissors, saws, chisels, hemostatic forceps, forceps, needle holders, and similar tools arranged in rows.
A brain knife resembling a butcher’s cleaver had also been prepared.
Pus basins were placed here and there around the corpse.
Amid the people’s bustling about, the recorder moved his desk closer to the autopsy table, rearranged his paper, and poised himself for the next moment.

He took advantage of this moment to look toward his brother.
His brother—his deathly pale forehead dripping with bead-like cold sweat—had risen from his chair without anyone noticing and stood with arms crossed, staring fixedly at the corpse.
"Why don't you return now?"
He tentatively tried saying this.
His brother did not reply.
He had not been able to hear his words.

He waited quietly for the preparations to be completed.
When the people had returned to their original positions, he had the nurse roll up the sleeves of his surgical gown high.

The time had come to conclusively determine the truth—whether it was caseous pneumonia or miliary tuberculosis.
The time had come to compare his own clinical skill and research acumen with those of the Director and others.
As he thought this, his single eye gleamed.
After all, he was just thirty—he couldn’t help but feel pressured by those who had amassed enough experience to pride themselves on being seasoned practitioners.
That no one knew his inner conflict proved convenient in a way, yet to prevent others from detecting his anxiety, he had to marshal his willpower to the utmost.

“Anatomical findings.”

After reporting this to the recorder, no sooner had he pressed the scalpel to the corpse’s throat than he demonstrated his accustomed surgical precision, drawing it straight down.
Even the two nurses, thoroughly accustomed to such things, reflexively covered their faces with both hands and looked down.
Brother staggered back a few steps and let out a dull groan that reverberated through the room.
Brother’s eyes, however, did not leave the corpse for even an instant.

Dusky black blood began to stain here and there across the pure white surface of the dissection table.
Flies, leaving behind the sweet-sour smell of the fly trap that hummed drowsily as it rotated by the window, increased in number as they flew toward the dissection table.
A kind of bloody stench, like that encountered when passing by a butcher’s shop, suddenly fouled the clean air.

His handling of the autopsy was flawless.
In no time, the organs from the chest to abdomen were individually removed, leaving nothing behind except remnants of lung tissue in the left chest—destroyed by pulmonary tuberculosis and engulfed in phlegm-like mucus—and cotton pads stuffed into the rectal region, now bloodstained and twistedly exposed in places.
The internal organs were arranged in round pus basins with high rims and placed at the corpse’s feet.
If a metaphor were permitted, they looked as though rare fruits were arranged there.
The heart, placed with its tip pointing upward, particularly evoked the image of a peach.

When the internal organs had been extracted and lay exposed, the observers forgot both the instinctive reserve they felt toward the corpse and the abnormal relationship that existed solely between this morning’s corpse and its surgeon, becoming wholly engrossed in academic curiosity. Some forcibly curled the rigid fingers of the corpse’s hand into a fist, took out the heart, and compared its size. And then,

“This heart is quite small, isn’t it?”

Having said this, they showed it to him.

“I wonder which it is—whether having a small heart makes the lungs more susceptible, or if the lungs being affected causes the heart to shrink.”

There were also people exchanging such remarks.

He placed each organ one by one on the smooth black-lacquered table, cutting them apart lengthwise and crosswise with a brain knife while delivering a meticulous report in composed words to the recorder. When he cut open the markedly enlarged spleen, he discovered millet-like nodules scattered throughout. He felt a soaring surge of courage within him. But he remained calm.

“Spleen.”
“Shape: Normal.”
“Markedly enlarged.”
“Color: Normal.”
“Miliary nodules present throughout the central region.”

He reported calmly.
He observed numerous nodules on both the peritoneum and pleura.
Though he considered proceeding to examine the crucial right lung, he became unbearably compelled to open the skull and inspect the meninges to determine how extensively the miliary nodules had formed.
He had initially resolved not to touch his wife's head and neck.
The thought of applying a scalpel to her face—which still retained traces of maidenly purity and innocence—and reducing it to disarray was utterly unbearable.
Even if it would eventually decay, he wanted to preserve her face intact for as long as possible.
For that reason alone, he had resolved against cremating her.
The memory remained vivid as if happening now—how she would wrap her arms around his neck with absolute trust, respect, and affection, smiling that bewitching smile she never showed others before his face.

While placing his hand on the lung resting in the large pus basin, he cast his eyes upon the corpse’s head like a ravenous creature.
The face was veiled by snow-white gauze and could not be seen, but the hair—though it had lost its luster—was so luxuriant with a lacquer-like blackness that it spilled over from the wooden pillow onto the dissection table.
When he saw that, he was seized by the impulse to thrust the sharp scalpel deep enough to pierce through to the skull and forcefully drag it across from the right temple to the left.
The impulse he felt was so intense that he wondered if some impure emotion other than scientific curiosity—one that would have to be expressed with a word like Sadistic—had welled up within him.
He was as calm as ever in appearance, but a hot kind of desire had begun to burn within his heart.
He finally instructed the assistant and began extracting the brain.

With another restless stir, the people shifted positions for a spell.
The assistant cut the hairtie that had been carelessly tied at the base and divided the hair of the frontal and occipital regions into two bundles, spanning from behind both ears to the edges of the whorl.
In the parting, a single strip of unexposed skin emerged with a cool bluish-white hue.

When the preparations were complete, he stood by the corpse’s pillow.
And then he thrust the scalpel into where the hair parted beneath the right ear.
Across the face, hair from the forehead lay tangled and savagely draped over.

Suddenly his scalpel-holding right hand was seized by something cold and clammy, losing all freedom of movement.
His nerves stretched to breaking by strange hallucinations, he even imagined his wife’s rigid hand powerfully blocking his recklessness.
As though cold water had been poured into his brain’s core, his entire body shuddered.

“Have you gone mad? There’s a limit to recklessness!”

A faint yet terrifyingly forceful voice struck his ears at the same moment. Before his very eyes was his brother’s face, deathly pale and convulsively trembling. His brother’s eyes stared wide at him without blinking, giving him a sensation of utter emptiness. To him, they appeared as two hollow cavities. Through those hollows, it seemed he could peer all the way to the brain itself if he tried.

It was merely a momentary grotesque delusion. But at this moment, the brother reflected in his eyes did not look like himself. It seemed as though a mysterious beast possessed by his wife’s vengeful spirit had bared its fangs and lunged at him. He seemed like an audacious disruptor trying to overturn his crucial work from its very foundation. His nerves—strained to the limit and teetering on losing composure—erupted in fury like winter treetops battered by a gale, trembling violently and chaotically. He tried to shut even his brother out of his sight. While plotting the next violent action in his mind, he tried with all his might to shake off his brother’s gripping right hand.

In that instant, his hand was freed of its own accord. The brother fell like a log onto the cement floor with a heavy thud, eyes wide open.

By his order, his brother was escorted by nurses and carried to the ward while still unconscious.

“That is my brother.”
“His mind was already exhausted from nursing care when he witnessed such an unprecedented sight… I’ve caused you unnecessary concern… I’m somewhat fatigued.”
“Dr. Sekiguchi, I need you to handle this.”
“Since I want to examine the meninges, carefully peel them away as completely as possible.”

He said this to Dr. Sekiguchi.
He strove to return to his former composure, but he could not stop his hands from trembling.
He disliked people knowing it.

When he actually washed his hands and came to the window to look, he was considerably fatigued.
He took a cigarette from his coat pocket, lit it, and cast his eyes over the courtyard enclosed by buildings on all sides.

The August sun had risen high, imprinting small dense shadows of trees across the beautiful lawn. Along the building wall opposite—where eggshell-colored paint shone dazzlingly—a row of cannas thrust their flame-like red and yellow flowers vigorously toward the sun. Around the mochi tree swarmed winged insects that gathered only to disperse repeatedly. Through their midst dashed a large dragonfly as if launching an attack. Nurses left intermittent flashes of pure white while their wooden sandals tapped lightly down the hallway. The insects maintained their monotonous quiet drone. Blue smoke from his exhale drifted lazily through courtyard air until reaching the open corridor, where it suddenly quivered like something startled before vanishing completely. Everything lay steeped in sweltering heat. Above the burning roof tiles of the opposite building stretched a cloudless sky shining like sapphire flame. From there came the faint creak of a train speeding along its tracks.

He narrowed one eye as if shielding it from the glare rising from the garden and gazed at a small, vibrant territory of nature.

From the autopsy table came the grating sound of a saw cutting through something.
His wife’s skull had now been split into the shape of a bowl.
He did not attempt to look back.

In the window of the shaded building, the figures of two nurses appeared.
The two were unaware that he was watching from the autopsy room and clung to each other with apparent affection.
As if they had finally found respite from their busy work, the two youthful, healthy-looking faces were flushed and sweaty.
They were even beautiful.
Among them, one of the younger ones took out a small letter written on pink letter paper from her pocket, and the two pressed so close together that their faces nearly touched as they began reading intently.
They would sometimes smile charmingly and sometimes exchange joyful glances.
In the midsummer light, the figures of the two maidens—who seemed to be experiencing all passion for the first time—imparted to him an indescribable beauty and loveliness.

From the autopsy table came another dull sound, different from the saw's noise.
That was the sound of inserting an iron wedge into the saw's cut and lightly tapping it with a wooden mallet to separate the bowl-shaped skull.
He began to feel a pain as if that wedge had been driven into his own head.

While gazing at the vibrant midsummer scenery before him, he found himself utterly disconnected from it.
If he were to turn around just once, his world would be there.
In the chaotic yet utterly clear light of day, cutting open the belly and gouging out the head of his beloved... The world where he must believe such acts constituted the most faithful treatment of his vocation lay spread out immediately behind him.
"Which do you consider more precious—your own life or academic pursuit?" The words his brother had spoken that morning suddenly took on terrifying significance and came rushing into his mind.
I am a scholar who must devote all my strength to academic pursuit.
I had sufficient trust in my academic pursuit and sufficient interest in it.
However, what I as a human must demand—what I must demand—is to live.
It is not merely to live life as it is.
It is to experience.
It is not to experiment.
Yet the academic pursuit I serve is grounded entirely in experimentation from start to finish.
In essence, my entire life must be composed of minimal living and maximum observation.
Do I truly possess the satisfaction and resolve to so severely confine my living in service to academic pursuit?
Thus he severely interrogated himself.
Which is more precious—life or academic pursuit?
If I lose sight of myself, where is academic pursuit?
He did not know how to clearly defend his previous stance.

Irritated, he was about to fling the cigarette butt onto the lawn when it occurred to him that he mustn’t startle the girls still reading letters by the window, so he instead dropped it onto the floor inside and crushed it underfoot.
For in his present heart, those two girls appeared as beautiful beings beyond his reach.
“It’s done.”

The assistant called out to him.
The reverie was shattered.
He knew he had to follow the path ahead, dragged by the habits that had governed him until now.
And as he advanced once more toward the autopsy table, his face brimmed solely with the same composed and tense expression as before.
People wiped their faces and hands with handkerchiefs against the heat, yet not a single bead of sweat showed on his face.

However, he did not direct his eyes to the corpse’s head.
And then he took up the meninges that had been placed on the black-lacquered table.
Although not as prominent as those in the spleen, the nodules were observed quite clearly.
It seemed that the reason his wife had complained of severe headaches before death and experienced a kind of confusion in her thoughts could now also be explained.

There was no longer any room for doubt.
His diagnosis had triumphed over the findings of the Director and numerous physicians.
His one eye spontaneously gleamed.
The anxiety that had assailed him while resting by the window had now been forgotten, and he once again immersed himself in the task before him with fervor.

Next, he lifted the lungs from the large basin with the ferocity of storming an enemy’s main stronghold.
People also gathered around it with great interest.
The climax of today’s autopsy lay here.
When the external description was completed, he regripped the brain knife and plunged the blade vertically.
Just as he had diagnosed, on the somewhat coarse brownish-red surface of the affected area above the middle lobe, millet-like granules the color of sputum appeared so densely that it was overwhelming.

“This is horrific.”

And immediately, a voice exclaimed in astonishment.
He unintentionally flung his most beloved wife’s lungs before the eyes of the onlookers as though they were spoils of war.

“Cause of death.”
“It is deemed appropriate to conclude as the result of miliary tuberculosis.”

Proudly, he turned toward the recorder and spoke thus.

Not a single person among the attendees attempted to voice an objection to this.

“Stomach.”

With the momentum of splitting bamboo, he lifted what resembled a leather pouch crushed utterly flat and placed it on the table. When his objective had been attained, his fervor abruptly diminished, yearning to return to sorrowful solitude at once. He felt a pain akin to stifled weeping deep within his heart. Yet what required completion had to be finished in proper sequence. Among the observers were those who, while emitting weary groans, stowed glass bottles holding tissue slices from the affected area into their garment pockets and began making preparations to depart in orderly fashion.

He thought no results should be obtainable from dissecting the stomach, yet he took up the scissors as per protocol and made an incision on one side.
From its interior emerged a large amount of blood, already coagulated and blackened against the stomach wall.

“She must’ve swallowed her own coughed-up blood!”

As though having stumbled upon an intriguing discovery in an unexpected place, one of the medical staff members cried out like this, having forgotten that the corpse was his colleague’s wife.

Upon seeing this sight, he involuntarily covered his eyes with the back of his hand, recoiled two or three steps, and turned away.
The moment he saw this sight, the vision of his wife’s death throes—shattering like a bomb through the academic authority, the scholar’s dignity, the man’s composure, and all other obstacles he had envisioned—suddenly surged vividly in his chest.

It had been an event at yesterday's dawn, not yet thirty hours past. His wife's hospital room had been swarmed with doctors and nurses coming and going. Though her family had resigned themselves to her not surviving the day, they had never imagined such a sudden deterioration would occur. Just as the summer night was beginning to brighten in the east, Yoko—delirious from fever and muttering incoherently yet sleeping fitfully—suddenly opened her eyes wide and sat upright in bed.

“My head hurts so much it feels like I’m losing my mind.”
“My brain isn’t going to burst, is it?”
“I want to live longer—Doctor, please save me!”
“Don’t kill me.”
“Please… Ah, it hurts… it hurts… I don’t want to die… I don’t want to die…”

While saying this, she tried to cling to the doctor present there.
The doctor turned pale as if pursued by a malevolent spirit and leaped back.
In Yoko’s ghastly pale, emaciated face, only her two eyes appeared as though all life had been driven into them by death and trapped there.
With those eyes, she tried to draw in and consume any vestige of life.
He who had been sitting in the corner mourning her misfortune—yet still possessing enough composure to lament how her illness had interrupted his research—now beheld this sight and, regretting the callousness of having entertained such thoughts, felt a surge of earnest sympathy rise within him.
He became aware of his own life as if for the first time and trembled violently at death’s true terror.
Overcome with unbearable pity for his wife, he rushed to her sickbed.
The next instant, they were locked in a tight embrace.
His wife opened her blazing eyes wide and stared at his face as though even devouring him with her gaze would not suffice.

“You stayed with me, didn’t you.”
“I mustn’t die, must I?”
“I haven’t done anything like dying.”
“Please help me—won’t you? Please.”
“I truly don’t want to die!”
“It’s not that I’m scared.”
“I don’t want to.”
The chest tightened.
“What’s happening… It’s like fire has been lit… Ah… It’s painful…”

At that moment, he felt a sudden gush of unpleasantly warm liquid against the front of her garment.
When he looked, it was fresh blood like fire.
Her face had turned even paler; her pupils had rolled upwards and abruptly lost all vitality.
Her face leaned against his chest as if she were about to doze off.

“Yoko.”
“Hold on tight.”
“It’s nothing serious, really.”

He involuntarily shouted these half-hearted words into his wife’s ear.
Then he quietly laid her back down.

After a short while, she once again displayed that unnatural vigor and sat upright.
And again she coughed up a massive amount of blood.
This sequence repeated itself two or three times in succession.

Before anyone knew it, the world had become filled with a dazzling morning light.

“Like this… I’ll die just from losing blood… A glass… Please give me a glass.”

When the nurse poured water and brought a glass, she didn’t drink it but had it placed by her pillow.
While staring at the glass as though pondering something, she eventually sat up with a stiff motion and coughed up blood again.
However, unlike a dying patient, she swiftly poured the water from the glass onto the floor and brought it to her mouth.
The glass was about eighty percent full of blood.

Yoko stared resentfully at the glass for a while.
Then—suddenly pressing it to her lips—she began gulping her own blood.

Those present involuntarily gulped and recoiled backward as if slapped.
Not a single person attempted to take the glass from her.

By the time he regained his composure and wrested the cup from his wife, it had already been emptied.

This was her final, desperate effort to resist death.
Her consciousness gradually grew dimmer, yet each time she coughed up blood, she swallowed it instead of spitting it out.
Then she choked violently.
She clawed at her hair.

"Agh…"

Soon, gathering all her tenacity into a single, piercing shriek like ripping through silk—the moment she did so, she was dead.

The moment he opened the stomach with scissors, these memories assailed his heart simultaneously—each one falling into precise order with terrible clarity.
He thought he had distinctly heard that final scream once again.
His brain, having gone three days without sleep or rest, had developed mild anemia, and he even felt nausea rising in his chest.
The observers stared with astonished faces when they saw him suddenly stagger and turn away.

"When I recalled those trivial things," he thought, "I could no longer bear to continue the autopsy."
"Dr. Sekiguchi, Dr. Hanada—though this is abrupt, I must ask you to handle the remaining procedures."
"I'll come to retrieve them by evening."

In this manner, he spoke while keeping his back turned.
People indeed looked at him with what seemed genuine pity.

He discarded the rubber gloves with the feeling of a samurai abandoning his weapons to renounce the world.
After hastily washing his hands, he received the organ fragments placed in several glass bottles by the assistant without interest and left the dissection room.

Everything appeared empty before him.
Having confirmed that his wife’s cause of death was miliary tuberculosis, the unparalleled joy he had just savored to the fullest—one being the triumphant joy of securing victory over many seniors considered more skilled than himself, the other being the joy of definitively confirming the truth of his wife’s illness and somehow exacting revenge—that joy had vanished without a trace.
His heart was shaken from its very depths and tormented by self-destructive despair.

As he passed by the notice area, he saw today’s autopsy notice hanging on the bulletin board, flapping in the wind.
He ripped it off forcefully, then fiercely crumpled it and hurled it into the garden.

“Childishness, pretentiousness… And yet I had to treat them with solemnity—trampling my wife’s corpse and memories into ruin while secretly swelling with pride—such childishness! Such pretentiousness!”
“Die of shame.”

Although he had resolved to think things through properly once back in his room, his impetuous true self didn’t allow him a moment’s respite.
He walked briskly down the corridor, ceaselessly driven by such thoughts.

Just as he was about to enter his room, the janitor came and handed him a sealed letter that his brother had left behind, stating that his brother’s cerebral anemia had already subsided and that he had returned home earlier.

The laboratory—which until yesterday he had considered his hermitage, his fortress, his palace—the laboratory where he had shut himself away for six years—he now surveyed intently.
It was a wilderness of machines and dust.
This morning, while debating with his brother whether to autopsy his wife, he had prepared the microtome, stains, and other items with unwavering confidence and fascination, arranging them neatly on a desk. Now they appeared to him like a pile of dead branches.
The microscope slides uniformly stacked in the shelves were nothing but useless grave mounds of aimless effort.
Among all that was there, not a single thing held life.
While unrelated substances jumbled together in chaotic disarray, only the water ceaselessly flowing from the faucet gave him a refreshing sensation, its sound light and cool.
To such an extent did the room appear loathsome and filthy to him.
The magician had lost his magical power.
The world of self-deception came crashing down before his eyes.

He took off his surgical gown and threw it on the floor; utterly exhausted like cotton and dazed, he collapsed into the chair as though he himself were dead. And he stared aimlessly at the wall.

After a while, hot tears of regret welled up in his eyes.
The life he had lived—into which he had thrown his entire being, body and soul, piling effort upon effort—was now uprooted without a trace, and he could not help but feel himself completely severed from the lives of all others.

All scientists devoted themselves to their respective research without a shadow of doubt.
They might not know how much awareness they held toward their own work, nor how much seriousness of self-reflection they lacked.
But in any case, they were diligently working away in their respective laboratories and research rooms.
They were they.
He was he.
Their hearts no longer reached him.
The thoughts he contemplated while gazing at the courtyard assailed him not as logical constructs, but as visceral realities he could not refuse.
From the moment he discovered the coagulated blood clot in his wife’s stomach, he had come to feel with stark clarity the emptiness of his life up to that point.
To tell the truth, even when he had proven his wife’s cause of death, beneath the arrogant pride and satisfaction, there had been a strange, inexplicable sense of incompleteness.
Even if he had proven it, merely stating that it couldn’t do anything to alter his sad relationship with his wife was insufficient to explain—but he couldn’t help feeling that some kind of dissatisfaction like that had immediately risen up.
Come to think of it, even during his most fervent experiments or when encountering the joy of announcing significant research findings, upon closer reflection, a distinct sense of dissatisfaction had always lingered there. Come to think of it further back, when he had resolved to devote his life to scientific research, he had felt the pain of having steeled himself to kill off a part of himself to some degree.
For six years, he had not lent a gentle ear to this discontent in the depths of his heart.
And he had striven to forcibly convince himself that this was how it ought to be.
He saw his futile past—blank as untouched paper—in the cold wall before him, soiled by dust.
The thirty-year edifice of futility erected on sand—now it had collapsed without a trace beneath a sudden storm.
His single eye, brimming with irrepressible tears of anguish, scanned the laboratory intently.

The needlessly precise wall clock relentlessly carved time with a sharp metallic clang.
The sound—of both clock and water cascading from the faucet—gently fractured the sweltering midsummer silence that hung thick and stagnant.
The Zeiss-manufactured microscope—unadorned yet meticulously crafted in every detail, achieving through unforced precision a synthesis of beautiful straight lines and arcs—now seemed to spurn his very touch.
He turned his gaze once more to the trees beyond the window.
Viewed from the second floor, only their crowns entered his vision from above.
It was an unfamiliar arboreal form he had never before noticed.
Not one leaf failed to face the light.
Innocent and carefree, they clasped hands and danced within the summer radiance.
With that same guileless joy, they would skip lightly through wind or rain.
Could such things truly exist in the world he inhabited?
Did he himself dwell in a realm where such wonders persisted?
Thus he pondered with a heart turned bitter.

After a short while, he rose from the chair with a long sigh.
And as he tried to take off the surgical gown, he heard a hard clinking sound inside its pocket.
When he absently thrust his hand into the gown’s pocket, grabbed what his fingertips had touched, and pulled it out to look, it was the four glass bottles he had brought from the dissection table.
At the bottom of those bottles—filled about two-thirds of the way up with thin alcohol clearer and lighter than water—small fragments of meat, their surfaces alone coagulated with protein, lay sunken one by one.
When he saw that, he jolted as if waking from a dream and recalled the scene of the dissection room.
His wife’s—who until yesterday had at least been alive, who had been human like him—all that remained of her as a memento had now been reduced to this.
Why were the two of them born into this world?
How had the two of them, from among a billion people, chosen each other and become husband and wife?
Why had his wife died before him?
Why had her flesh fragments met with such a fate—torn apart and soaked in alcohol?
Why did this seemingly accidental mystery keep making his heart sob quietly forever?

To live for science—what grandiose empty words he had shamelessly uttered.

He did not know how to think.
Yet he knew no way but to rethink.

Sunk deep in despair, he clung desperately to those bottles, lifting all four to press against his own forehead.
The tears he had dammed up through sheer will since his wife’s death now streamed down from his blinded eyes like fire.