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At first he grasps it tremulously; then suddenly, with afirm grip.

Shot 60. Sebastian's hand, triumphantly holding the Crossaloft.

Shot 61. The sea-captain's back. He glances over his shoul-der. There is a look of disappointment, of discomfitureon his face. He strokes his goatee.

Shot 62. Early dawn. The sea-captain comes down themountain track. Two monkeys spring out from behinrhim. When he reaches the Camphor Tree he halts formoment and raises his hat, as though greeting srunseen person.

Shot 63. Sebastian lying on the floor of the cave, holdinfirmly to the Cross. Outside the cave there are alreadpatches oi sunlight.

Shot 64. Close-up of Sebastian's face, seen from above. ahe lies on the floor of the cave. Tears begin to trickl,slowly down his cheeks-in the feeble early sunlight.

Shot 65. The mountain parh in full sunlight. The black tabltsuddenly appears; on its left side l ie the ace and theface cards of Spades.

Shot 66. A l iving-room flooded with sunlight. The master othe house has his hand in the half-opened door and seemsto have just been seeing someone off. On a table in thecorner a wine-bottle, wine-glasses, piaying cards. Hecomes to the table, sits down and lights a cigarete. Thenhe leans back comfortably and stretches himself. He hasa goatee and his face is that of the Dutch sea_captain.

1927Translated bq Afthur Waleg

Cogwheels

1. Raincoat

From a summer resorl some distance away, taking my bagalong, I picked up a car to a station on the Tokaido Line,going to attend a wedding reception for an acquaintance ofmine. On either side of the road the car traveled therewere mainly only pine trees. I was rather doubtful about

---r-:-----::-*making the Tokyo-bound train in time. In the car with mewas a barber. He was as plump as a peach and with a shortbeard. With my mind on the time I spoke with him intermit-tently.

"Strange. I hear So-and-so's house is haunted even byday . "

"Even by day."Looking out at the far hills of pine bathed in the after-

noon sun of winter, I satisfied him with occasional responses."Not in good weather, though. I hear it appears mostly

on rainy days.""l'm surprised it bothers to appear .just to get wet on

rainy days.""No joke, I assure youl . . . And they say the ghost does

its haunting in a raincoat."With a honk of its horn the car pulled up to the station.

I took leave of the barber and went in. Just as l 'd imagined,the train had left onlv minutes before. On a bench in the

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waiting room one man in a raincoat stared vacantly out. Iremembered the tale I had just heard. But I let it go with afaint smile and decided to go into a caf6 in front of thestation to wait for the next train.

It was a caf6 that scarcely merited the name. I sat at atable in a corner and ordered a cup of cocoa. The oilclothcovering the table was a large crosswork of thin blue lineson a white ground. But at each edge it already showedfilthy canvas. I sipped the cocoa, which smelled l ike animalglue, and looked around the empty caf6. On the dirty wallwere pasted many strips of paper with the menu: ,,a bowl ofrice with egg-and-chicken topping," "beef cutlet, ' , etc."Fresh eggs. Cutlet."

The strips of paper made me realize I was out in thecountry around the Tokaido Line. Here electric locomotivesran through cabbage and wheat fields . . .

It was close to sunset by the time I boarded the nexttrain. I usually went second class, but decided it would besimpler to ride third class.

The train was rather crowded. ln front of me and behindme were primary school girls coming back from Oiso orsomewhere else on an excursion. While I l i t a cigarette Ilooked the group of students over. They were all in goodspirits and were generally chattering away."Hey, Mr. Cameraman, what's a love scene like?,,"Mr. Cameraman," in front of me, who seemed to bewith the excursion, managed to evade the issue. But onegirl of about fourteen or f ifteen kept f ir ing questions athim. And noticing she had an infected nose I couldn,t helpsmiling. Then there was a girl of twelve or thirteen sitt ingon the lap of a young woman teacher, holding her neckwith one hand and caressing her cheek with the other.Chatting with someone she turned to the teacher to sav.

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"You're pretty, teacher. You have pretty eyes, you know."They struck me more as grown-up women than as chil-

dren. Apart, that is, from their nibbling at the rinds of applesand unwrapping caramel after caramel. . . . But one wholooked like a senior must have inadvertently stepped onsomeone's foot in passing, near me, and said, "l 'm extremelysorry." She alone, more precocious than the others, seemedmore like a youngster. With the cigarette in my mouth, Icouldn't help ridiculing myself for f inding any contradictionin th is.

The train, with all its lights on, finally arrived at a stationin a certain suburb without my being aware of it. I got offand stood on the platform with a cold wind blowing, thencrossed an overpass and decided to wait for the local. ThenI saw Mr. T., a company man. We discussed the depres-sion, etc., while we waited. Mr. T. was naturally more famil-iar with this sort of problem than I was. But he wore aturquoise ring that had nothing to do with any depression.

"You have a treasure there. I see.""This? I had to buy it from a friend who'd been in Harbin

on business. He's having a hard go of it now. He split withthe cooperative. "

Fortunately our train was not very crowded. We satbeside each other and talked about various things. Mr. T.had just come back from his company's Paris office thisspring. So there was a tendency to speak of Paris. Storiesabout Mme. Cail laux, crab dishes, a certain prince touringabroad . . .

"lt isn't as bad in France as we think. The French are bynature not given to paying their taxes and it often leads toCabinet dismissals . . ."

"But the f ranc's in a s lump.""So the papers say. But once you're in France, you find

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Japan regarded as a country of f loods and earthquakes,other sources of trouble."

At just this moment a man in a raincoat took a seatopposite us. I began to feel somewhat weird and was aboutto tell Mr. T. of the ghost story r had heard earrier. Butturning the handre of his cane to the reft, keeping his headstraight, he whispered.

"You see the woman there? ln the gray shawl . . ."The one with the Western hairdo?;"Yes, the one with the bundle in cloth wrapping under

her arm. She was in Karuizawa this summer. ouite doiled-up in fancy Western style.,'

She certainly looked shabby now to anyone. I glancedat her while talking with Mr. T. There was something insanein her frowning face. And she had a sponge that rooked rikea leopard peeking out her bundle."At Karuizawa she was having a great time dancing witha young American. What you might call modern . . . i

By the time T. and I parred, the man in the raincoat hadvanished without my being aware of it. From the train sta-tion, bag still with me, I warked over to a hoter. There weremostly huge buildings on both sides of the street. whilewalking I suddenly thought of pine woods. And then toothere was something strange in my line of vision. Strange?There were incessa ntly revolvin g half-tra nsparent cogwheel s.I'd had such experiences before. The wheels increaied untilthey blocked all other vision, but it was only for a momentor so, and then they gave way and a headache com_menced-it was always the same. The eye doctor, notingthe blinding vision, had often told me ro go easy on thesmoking. But the wheels had begun appearing to me beforeI was twenty, before I'd taken to smoking. -ensing it wasbeginning again I tested my left eye by covering my right.

Cogwheels

The left eye, as anticipated, was all r ight. But behind theright eye when closed countless wheels continued revolvins.As the buildings to the right graduaily disappeared froirsight, I walked with difficulty.

By the time I reached the hotel entrance the cogs haogone. But not the headache. I checked my overcoit andhat and reserved a room. Then I rang up a certain maga_zine publisher and discussed money matters.

The wedding reception dinner seemed to have startedalready. I sat at the end of a table and dug in with knife andfork. The bride and bridegroom and some fifty or more oth-ers at the U-shaped main table all seemed cheerful. But Ibegan feeling more and more depressed under the brightlights. Trying to cut the feeling I chatted with the guest n6xtto me. He was an old man with white whiskers rike a rion's.In addition, he was a weil-known schorar of the chineseclassics, whose name was familiar to me. So our conversa-tion unconsciously drifted to the classics."fhe kglin is, in short, a sort of unicorn. And ho thephoenix . . . "

chattering on mechanicaily I graduaily fert the desire tobe destructive and not only pretended that yao and Shunwere fictitious figures, but claimed that the author of theChronicles of Lu was of the Han Dynasty. At this point thescholar of Chinese classics could not contain his unhappi-ness and, turning away from me altogether, cut off mvstorytelling with a grumble vaguely like that of a tiger."lf Yao and Shun didn't l ive, it would mean CLnfuciuswas a l iar. Saints cannot be l iars."

With that the small-talk ended. Once more I was backto dabbling with knife and fork at the meat before me.There I discovered a tiny creature wriggling at one edge ofthe meat. It brought to mind the English word worm. Surely,

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like the kglin and ho, this too was indicative of a legendarybeast. I set down knife and fork and gazed instead at thechampagne poured into my goblet.

After dinner was finally over, quite ready to lock myselfup in the room reserved for me, I walked along the emptycorridors. They made me feel more like I was in a prisonthan in a hotel. But fortunately, at the same time, withoutmy being aware of it the headache had largely subsided.

ln addition to the bag, my hat and overcoat had beendeposited in the room. My overcoat hanging on the walllooked too much like my upright self, and I at once tossed itinto the wardrobe in the corner. Then, over at the dressingtable I looked at my face in the mirror determinedly. Itrevealed the bone beneath the skin. The worm had reap-peared again.

I opened the door and went back out into the corridorand walked uncertain of where to turn. Then, in one corneron the way to the lobby a tall lamp with a green shade casta sharp reflection over a glazed door. Somehow or otherthis calmed my mind. I sat myself down on a chair before itand started brooding about various things. But five minuteswas just about it. Then I noticed on the back of the sofabeside me, again hanging loosely, a raincoat."And this is the coldest season now too."

My mind wandering in such a vein I went back down thecorridor. ln the waiters' room there was no waiter in sight.But some of their conversation fell into my ears in passing.It was in English: "All r ight," in answer to something. "All

right?" I tried to figure out what it was all about. "All right?""All right?" What on earth was all right?Of course, my room was quiet. But just to open the

door and go in, oddly enough, seemed weird to me. Aftersome hesitancy I f inally ventured in. Then, careful not to

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look into the mirror, I sat on a chair at the desk. The chairwas an armchair of l izardlike blue morocco. I opened mybag, pulled out a writ ing pad, and tried to resume a certainshort story. But the pen and ink hung eternal f ire. Andwhen finally they moved, or I thought they moved, only thesame words appeared, All right . . . AII right . . . All right,s i r . . . . A l l r i g h t . . .

Suddenly the telephone by the bed was ringing. StartledI rose and lifting the receiver to my ear answered."Who is it?"

" l t ' s me. Me . . . "On the other end was my older sister's daughter."What? What's the matter?""Yes. Well, something terrible has happened. So .

because something terrible's happened, I just called Auntietoo. "

"Something terrible?""Yes. So, please come quick. Ouick."And the telephone on the other end clicked off. I put

the receiver back and mechanically pushed the call button.But I was perfectly aware of my hand trembling. The boywas slow in coming. Feeling more pain than impatience, Ipushed the button again and again, sensing at last themeaning of the words "all r ight," which fate had been tryingto get through to me.

My older sister's husband had been run over and kil ledthat afternoon in the country not too far from Tokyo. Fur-thermore, unrelated to the weather completely, he had beenwearing a raincoat. l'm still writing the same short story inthis hotel room. There's no one out there going by in thecorridor. But from beyond the door I can sometimes hearthe flapping of wings. Someone may be keeping a bird.

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2. Vengeance

I woke about half past eight in this hotel room. But ongetting out of bed, I discovered, oddly enough, that one ofmy slippers was gone. lt was just the sort of thing thatwould rouse me to fear, anxiery, etc., this past year oi tro.And it reminded me also of some prince in Creek mythwearing only one sandal. pushing the bell, I rang for iheboy and had him look for the rost sripper. He searched theroom with a quizzical expression on his face."l 've found it, here. Here in the bathroom.""How'd it get there?""Maybe

a mouse."After the boy left I had a cup of coffee, without milk,

and set about finishing my story. A square window frame oftufa looked out upon a garden of snow. Whenever I stoppedwriting I would absent-mindedly gaze at the snow. Underthe fragrant bush of budding daphne the snow was dirtiedby the smoke and soot of the city. The sight of it painedm.e. I smoked a cigarette and thought of a host of thingswithout putting pen to paper. Of my wife, my children, andmost of all, my older sister's husband . . .

He was under suspicion, before committing suicide, ofarson. Actually it was inevitable. Before his house was burneddown it had been insured for twice its value. Even so, whileguilfy of perjury, he had been on probation. lt was not hissuicide, however, that made me uneasy, but that I couldnever return to Tokyo without seeing a fire. once there wasthe fire I saw in the hil ls from the train, and another timefrom a car (l was with my wife and children) near Tokiwabashi.Naturally I had a premonition of a fire before his house was,in fact, burned down.

"A fire may break out in our house this vear."

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"Don't talk l ike that . . . i f there were ever a fire, itwould bring a load of problems with it. There isn't enoughi n s u r a n c e a n d . . . "

So we spoke. But there hasn't been any fire and-tryingto shake the idea-l picked up my pen again. Not even asingle l ine would come. Finally abandoning my post at thedesk, I lay down on the bed and began reading Tolstoy'sPotihoushka. The hero of this novel is a complex personalityof vanity, morbidiry, and ambition all mixed up. And with afew minor changes, the tragicomedy of his life could pass asa caricature of my own. Particularly did I feel the derisive-ness of fate in the tragicomedy of it, and that graduallymade me feel weird. After no more than an hour of it Ijumped out of bed and threw the book at the window drap-ery in the corner of the room.

"Damn you!"And a big mouse appeared scuttl ing diagonally from

under the curtain toward the bathroom. ln a bound I was atthe bathroom and opened the door, looking for it. Behindthe white tub not a sign of it. I felt weird suddenly, andchanging into slippers quickly, I went out into the corridor,but not a living thing was in sight.

The corridor, as usual, was as gloomy as a prison. Withmy head down, going up and down stairs, quite unawares, Ifound myself suddenly in the kitchen. The room was brighterthan might have been expected. And over on one sideflames rose abundantly from the range. ln passing through Icould feel the cold eyes of the cooks in their white hatsstaring at me. At once I felt myself cast into hell. "Cod'

punish me. Please, don' t be of fended. I 'm going to beruined." Naturally at that moment such a prayer was boundto come from my liPs.

I left the hotel and walked with difficulty the slushy way

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to my older sister's. The trees in the park along the wayhad all had their reaves and branches brackened. And eachof them had, just rike us, a front and back side. rt was ressdispleasing to me than it was intimidating. I rememberedthe soul that had turned into a tree in Dante's Inferno anddecided to wark on the street across form the streetcartracks, where buirdings formed a sturdy row. But even thereone block was too much."Excuse

me for stopping you."It was a fellow of about twenty_two or twenty_three in a

uniform with gord buttons. r stared at him wordressry andnoted a mole on the Ieft side of his nose. He, with cap off,addressed me nervously."Aren't you Mr. A?""Yes, "

"l thought you were . . . ' ,"What do you want?""Nothing.

I just wanted to say heilo. r 'm an admirer ofy o u r s , s e n s e i . . . "

With that I fipped my hat to him and began to makespace between us as rapidry as possibre. senseJ'. A-sensei-the title had recentry begun to be most distastefur to me. Ihad come to feel I had committed every imaginable crime.Regardless, I was to be called sensei now; whenever pos*sible. t couldn't herp feering something shamefur in it. some-thing? But my materialism shouldn,i balk at mysticism. Afew months earrier I had written in a rittre magaiine, ,,r notonly have no artistic conscience, but no conscience at ail.All I have are nerves . . .',

My older sister had found refuge in a barracks up analley with her chirdren. rnside the barracks with its brownwallpaper, it rooked breaker than it did outside. warmingour hands over a charcoar brazier we spoke of various thinssl

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My sister's husband, a man of stocky build, had had nouse for me, instinctively, from the start. And he had openlyreferred to the immoraliry of my work. I 'd never had anyfriendly conversation with him, due to his looking askanceat someone with such ideas. Talking with my sister, I real-ized that he too had gradually been shot to hell. I heardhe actually saw a ghost in a sleeping compartment. But,l ight ing up a c igaret te, I careful ly kept the ta lk to thesubject of money.

"Anyhow, the way it is, I 'm just f iguring to sell as muchas I can."

"l've been figuring the same too. The typewriter shouldbring in some cash."

"And we have some paintings.""How about sell ing N-san's Imy sister's husband] por-

trait? But that's . . ."I looked up at the unframed Cont6 crayon porlrait on

the wall and felt I shouldn't joke so thoughtlessly. I 'd heardthat his face had been crushed by the train to a tatter offlesh, only his mustache had been left. The story had, infact, shaken me. His portrait was drawn perfectly in everydetail, but his mustache looked somehow unclear. I thoughtit might be because of the lighting and studied the picturefrom different angles.

"What're you doing?""Nothing . . . just around the mouth of that picture . . ."She turned to look too, for a moment, but said she

couldn't see anything amiss."Only the mustache, oddly enough, looks thin, doesn't it?"What I was seeing was no i l lusion. But if i t wasn't . . . I

decided it wiser to leave my sister's before she began fuss-ing about lunch.

"Why don't you stay a bit longer?"

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"Tomorrow maybe. . . today lhave to go to Aoyama.""Oh, there? Something sti l l wrong with your body?""l 'm taking sleeping drugs as usual. I 've got so many.Veronal, Muronal, Trional, Numal . . ."

About thirty minutes later, I entered the building, goton an elevator, and went up to the third floor. There, I triedpushing open the glass door to a restaurant. lt wouldn'tbudge. On it hung a sign inscribed: STORE HOLIDAy. I wasmore than a little peeved, but after a glance at the applesand bananas displayed on a table on the other side of thedoor, decided to go back on the street again. Two men,who seemed to be office-hands, brushed by me at theentrance, lost in conversation. At just that moment one ofthem, o r so i t seemed to me, sa id : " l t ' s tan ta l i z ing . "

I stood on the street, waiting for a taxi to come by. lttook some time. Usually, though, there never failed to be ayellow cab around. (These yellow cab for some reason alwaysinvolved me in accidents.) After a while, however, a luckygreen cab was found, and I decided anyway to go to themental hospital near the Aoyama Cemetery."Tantalizing-tantalizing-Tantalus-inferno

. ."Tantalus myself, in fact-gazing at fruit through the glass

door. Cursing the Dante's lnferno in my mind's eye, I staredat the driver's back. And the feeling came over me thateverything is a lie. Politics, business, art, science-all, in theface of what I am now, was nothing but so much camouflageof this horrible existence. I was beginning to feel stifled andopened a window. But the feeling wouldn't go away.

The green cab reached Jingu-mae eventually. Therewas an alleyway leading to the mental hospital. This day,though, of a l l days, I somehow couldn' t locate i t . Af tergetting the cab to scout around for it and then back alongthe streetcar tracks, I gave it up and decided to get out.

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Cogwheels

I found the way finally and found myself twisting right

and left on a road full of mud puddles. Then, unwittingly, I

must have taken a wrong turn, for there I was at the Aoyama

Funeral Parlor. It was a building whose gate I hadn't passed

since Natsume-sensei's funeral, about ten years before. Ten

years ago I wasn't very happy. But at least I was peaceful'

i noticeO the gravelwork beyond the gate and was reminded

of the plantain tree at the Soseki Retreat. I couldn't help

f e e l i n g t h a t m y l i f e h a d e n d e d . A n d l a l s o c o u l d n ' t h e l pfeeling that something had drawn me back to this place

after ten years' absence.After leaving the gate of the mental hospital, I took a

taxi again and decided to go back to the hotel l'd been at

before. But, on leaving the taxi at the hotel entrance, I

found a man in a raincoat arguing for some reason with a

waiter. With a waiter? No. Not a waiter, but a man in a

green uniform in charge of the taxis. The idea of entering

the hotel seemed ominous to me and I quickly turned away.

When I reached the Cinza, it was almost sundown' The

shops jammed on both sides of the street, the bewildering

throngs of people, all combined to depress me more' lt

disturbed me most that everyone on the street walked

nonchalantly, indifferently, as if they were unaware of sin. I

kept walking north amid the confusion of twilight and elec-

tric lights. Then my eye was caught by a bookstore with

magazines and books all piled up. I went in and absent-

mindedly browsed some shelves. There was a book titled

CreekMgth ldec idedto lookat 'GreekMgth ,w i thaye l lowcover. seemed written for children. But one line I read by

accident suddenlY shook me."Even might iest Zeus cannot vanquish the God of

Vengeance . ."it.ft tn. shop and went into the crowd. lcould feel the

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Cod of Vengeance hovering at my back and began wander_ing aimlessly.

3. Night

On one o f the she lves ups ta i rs a t Maruzen iT I foundStrindberg's Legends and read a few pages while standingthere. lt describes experiences not unlike my own. And ithad a yellow cover. I put it back and puiled out a thick bookmy hand happened to fall on. ln it what should there be butan i l lustration of cogs with eyes and noses not unlike humanbeings! lt was a collection of pictures by inmates of a lunaticasylum assembled by some Cerman. Even in my depression,my spirit could be fert rising in rebell ion and with the des-peration of an addicted gambler I kept opening book afterbook. Oddly enough, almost every book had clearly hiddenstings in its sentences and illustrations. Every booki Even inMadame Bovarg, which I had read many times before, I feltI was only the petty bourgeois Monsieur Bovary in the end.

Upstairs at Maruzen, almost nightfall, there seemed noother customer beside myserf. r browsed around the book-shelves in the electric light. I stopped at a shelf with the titleReligion on it and removed a book with a green cover. onechapter in the tabre of contents read: "FoJr Deadry Foes-Suspicion, Fear, Vaniry and Sensuality." With thesL words,at once, my spirit again rose rebellious. Those foes wereonly other names for Sensitivity and Inteil igence. rt wasunbearable to feel the traditional as depressing as the mod-ern. The book in my hand brought to mind the pen nameI'd once used, Juryo yoshi. lt was the name of the young

17 Maruzen. a bookstore in Tokyo, was the primary conduit for westernbooks into the country.

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man in Chuang-tse who had forgotten the boy from Juryowho had attempted to ape the stride of one from Kantanand could only end up crawling home. I must be Juryo Yoshinow to everybody. And l, when I hadn't yet been consignedto hetl, had used the name-I, with a shelfload of booksbehind me, tried to banish the conceit and went into aposter showroom just off to one side. There, in one of theposters, a knight who seemed to be St. George was stab-bing a winged dragon to death. On top of this, the half-revealed frowning face of the knight under the helmet resem-bled one of my enemies. I also recalled Toryu's art in theKanbishiand, without passing through the showroom, wentdown the broad staircase.

Walking along Nihonbashi now, in the dark, I kept think-ing of the word torgu.lt was the name of my inkstick too,I'm sure. The man who had given it to me was a certainentrepreneur. He failed in a variety of businesses and finallywent to wrack and ruin. I found myself looking up into thesky and thinking how small the earth is amongst all thestars-and so how much smaller I was. But the sky, whichhad been clear all day, had become cloudy without myrealizing it. At once I felt that things had taken a hostileturn toward me and decided to take asylum in a caf6.

"Asylum" was precisely what it was. I somehow felt some-thing soothing in the rosy tint of the wall and relaxed at atable. Fortunately there were only a few other customersthere. I sipped a cup of cocoa and started to drag on acigarette, as usual. The smoke rose in a faint blue streamup the rosy wall. The harmonious mingling of the soft colorswas agreeable to me. But after a time I discovered a por-trait of Napoleon on the wall to my left and began to feeluneasy again. When Napoleon was only a student, he hadwritten on the last page of his geography notebook: "Saint

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Helena, a small island." lt might have been, as we say, onlya coincidence. But it must have made even Napoleon shivereventually . . .

Gazing at Napoleon, I thought about my own work. Andthere burst upon me certain phrases in A Fool's Lde. (Espe_cially the words, "Life is more helrish than hell i tself.") Andalso the hero's fate in my Helt Screen-a painter calledYoshihide. Then . . smoking I looked around the cafetrying to escape such memories. I had taken shelter hereno more than five minutes earlier. Already the place hadundergone a complete change. What made me most uncom_fortable was the fact that the chairs and tables of imitationmahogany did not go with the rosy walls. Afraid I should fallinto an agony imperceptible to others, I tried to get out ofthe caf6 by quickly tossing down a silver coin."Sir, it 's twenty sen . . ."

I had tossed down a copper.Walking alone along the street, feeling humiliated, I sud_

denly recalled my house in the remote pine wood. lt wasn'tmy foster parents' place off in the suburbs, but a house Irented for my family, in which I was the master. I used tolive in such a house also about ten years before. But for onereason or another I'd thoughtlessly taken up again with myfolks. At the same time I started to become a slave. atyrant, an impotent egoist. . . .

When I reached the hotel again, it was almost ten. l,dbeen walking for so long a space that I hadn,t the strengthto go to my room and sat instead on a chair in front of thefireplace where a huge log was burning. I began to think ofthe long piece l 'd been planning. l t was a long piece inwhich common people from the Suiko to the Meiji Era wouldbe used as heroes, in a sequence of more than thirty chrono-logical short stories. Some sparks leapt up, and I remembered

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the bronze statue in front of the lmperial Palace. The statuewas in armor and helmet, high astride a steed-as if it wereFealty itself. But its enemy was-

"A l ie l"Again I sped from distant past to immediate present.

The man who luckily came over then was an older sculptor.He was wearing a velvet coat and pulling on a short goatee.I rose and shook the hand he ofiered. (This was not a habitof mine. I simply followed his, for he had spent half of his l i fein Paris and Berlin.) Oddly enough, however, his hand wasas slimy as repti l ian skin.

"Are you staying here?""Yes . . . ""To do your work?""Yes, I 'm doing my work too."He looked me straight in the face. I felt the scrutiny of a

detective in his eyes."Hey, how about coming to my room for some talk?"I spoke aggressively. (lt was one of my bad habits to

assume quickly an attitude of challenge, though I had nocourage.J He smiled and asked in return, "Where's yourroom?"

Shoulder to shoulder walking through softly speaking for-eigners, as if we were good friends, we returned to myroom. In my room he sat with the mirror behind him. Andhe started talking about many things. Many things?-mostly,in fact, stories about women. I was undoubtedly one ofthose condemned to hell because of the sins I had commit-ted. So the tales of vice made me all the gloomier. For amoment I felt puritanical and began to despise such women."Take a look at S-ko-san's l ips. Because of her kissingso many men, she . . . "

I shut my mouth suddenly and looked at his back in the

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glass. He had a yellow plaster pasted on just below his ear."Because of her kissing so many men?""She seems to be that Wpe."He smiled and nodded. I felt him always intent upon

trying to pry my secret open. But our talk was not off womenyet. I felt more embarrassed for my lack of courage thanthat I hated him, and could only become more depressed.

After he had finally gone, I lay down and began to readA Dark Night's Passing.rs Every spiritual struggle that itshero undergoes was moving to me. I felt how stupid I was,compared with him, and found myself weeping without real-izing it. At the same time the tears brought me peace. Butnot for long. Again my right eye began to sense those half-transparent cogs. The cogs, turning incessantly as always,gradually increased in number. Fearful of a headache I leftthe book beside the pil low, took 0.8 grams of Veronal, anddecided to try to get a good night's rest anyhow.

But in my dream I was gazing into a pool. Many boysand girls were swimming there or diving under water. I walkedinto the pine wood leaving the pool behind. Then someonespoke to me from behind, "Father." lturned round for amoment and found my wife standing by the pool. And feltan intense regret.

"Father, do you want a towel?""l don't need it. Keep an eye on the children."I walked on. But where I was walking had become a

platform before I knew it. It looked like a country stationwith a long hedge around the platform. A student from theuniversity, called H., and an old woman were standing there

18 A Dark Night's Passing (An'ga koro, 1912-37t is novelist Shiga Naoya'smost famous work, and involves the spiritual crisis a man undergoes after discov-ering that he was born from an illicit affair between his mother and his grandfather.

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too. They noticed me and came over and addressed meone at a time.

"A big fire, wasn't it?""l just managed to escape too."It seemed to me I had seen the old woman before. And

I felt exhilaration in talking to her. Then a train quietlypulled in puffing smoke. I got on the train alone and walkedon in between beds with white cloth hanging down on bothsides. I noticed a naked woman very like a cadaver lying onone bed facing me. lt must have been that of some madman'sdaughter-the Cod of my vengeance . . .

No sooner did I wake than I jumped out of bed, in spiteof myself. The electricity kept the room as bright as before.But somewhere there were sounds of wings flapping, micegnawing. I opened the door, went out into the corridor, andquickly made my way to the fireplace. I sat myself downand started gazing at the feeble glow. A boy in a whiteuniform came in to replenish the fire.

"What's the time?""About 3:30, s i r . "Way off in a corner of the lobby a woman, who looked

American, was busy reading a book alone. Even from whereI was it was clear that she was wearing a green dress.Somehow or other I felt relieved and decided to wait quietlyfor daybreak. Like an old man calmly awaiting death afterthe long suffering of an i l lness . . .

4. Srill?

Finally I finished the short story in the hotel room and de-cided to send it to a certain magazine. Actually the moneyto be earned from it was less than that needed to cover the

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bill at the hotel for a week. But I was content to have donethe work and decided to visit a certain bookshop on theGinza for some spiritual tonic.

On the asphalt pavement in the winter sun were manyscraps of wastepaper. They all looked exactly like roses. Ifelt somehow in good spirits and entered the bookshop. ltwas rather neater than usual. A young girl in glasses wasdiscussing something with a clerk, and the talk didn't alto-gether grate on my nerves. However, remembering thewastepaper roses on the street, I decided to buy The Col-lected Dialogues of Anatole France and The Collected Let-ters of Prosper Mdrimde.

With the two books under my arm, I went into a caf6.I decided to wait for a cup of coffee to be brought to atable at the far end of the room. On the other side sat acouple who seemed l ike mother and son. The son wasyounger than myself, but an exact copy of me. And theywere conversing as if they were lovers, intimately. Watch-ing them I began to sense that the son was aware ofproviding some sort of sexual satisfaction to his mother aswell. l t was a kind of relation I knew from experience.Also. it was the sort of instance of wil lfulness that makesthe world a hell. But I was fearful of fall ing prey to anxi-eties again and began to read The Collected Letters ofProsper Mdrimde, taking advantage of the coffee served.The letters revealed in their wit the same aphoristic bite asin the novels. Such sentences gave an iron edge to myfeelings. (One of my weak points was in being easily influ-enced by such twists.) I was soon done with the coffeeand, feeling relaxed and carefree, left the caf6.

Along the street I browsed the shop windows one byone. A frame shop displayed a portrait of Beethoven. The

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portrait was the image of genius, hair on end. I couldn'thelp feeling it r idiculous. . . .

Just then I caught sight of an old friend of mine fromhigh-school days. A university professor of applied chemis-try now, he held a big bulging bag and one of his eyes wasclotted red.

"What's the matter with your eye?""This? Just conjunctivit is. "

Then I remembered that I had often-fourteen or fif-teen years earlier-suffered the same disease out of a feel-ing of affinity. But I said nothing. He patted me on theshoulder and started talking about our friends. The talk ledhim to take me to a caf6.

"lt 's a long time since we last met. Maybe not since theceremony for the monument to Shu Shunsui."le

After l ighting a cigar he spoke across the marble table."Yes. That Shushun . . ."I don't know why, but I couldn't pronounce the name

Shu Shunsui correctly. Because it was Japanese it made mefeel all the more uneasy. But he chatted on about a host ofthings without noticing. About the novelist K., about a bull-dog he had bought, about the poison gas lucite . . .

"You don't seem to be writ ing much. I did read yourDeath Register, however . . . ls that one autobiographical?"

"Yes, that's autobiographical.""lt's rather morbid. Are you okay these days?""l 'm forced to take drugs always, as you know.""l suffer from insomnia these days too.""What do you mean 'too'?"

.....:.1 9 Shu Sh unsui t 1 600-82) was a Confucian scholar during the early Tokugawa

period who had originally crossed over from China.

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"Why I hear you also have insomniadangerous, you know. . . "

r ight? l t 's

There was something of a smile revealed in the left eyesuffering from conjunctivitis. Before answering I could sensethat I was going to have diff iculty pronouncing the finalsyllable of the word insomnia.

"lt 's natural for the son of someone mad."Less than ten minutes later I was again walking along

the street. Scraps of wastepaper on the asphalt did notquite resemble the faces of men. Then a woman with bobbedhair approached from the opposite direction. From a dis-tance she looked beautiful. But when she came near meshe revealed not only wrinkles, but ugliness. And she lookedpregnant. ln spite of myself I turned away from her andturned into a wide sidestreet. But now for some time I hadstarted to feel hemorrhoidal pains. lt was pain I could relieveonly by a hip-bath.

"A hip bath-Beethoven used to take hip baths too."lmmediately the smell of sulphur used in the baths struck

my nostri ls. Naturally, there was no sulphur apparent onthe street. I remembered the wastepaper roses again andwalked on as steadily as possible.

An hour later, confined to my room again, I sat at thedesk and started another short story. The pen moved flu-ently upon the paper to my own surprise. But after a fewhours it stopped, as if something invisible to me had inter-vened. I felt compelled to rise from the desk and walk backand forth around the room. The il lusion of expansivenesswas most unusual this time. With a sort of savage joy t felt Ihad neither parents nor wife nor children, that all I had wasthe life that flowed from my pen.

But after four or five minutes I was called to the tele-

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phone. I answered many times, but the telephone merely

i.p.ut.d its ambiguous words. lt sounded anyhow llke more.

F i n a l l y l a b a n d o n e d t h e t e l e p h o n e a n d s t a r t e d p a c i n g t h eroom again. But the word more, strangely enough' weighed

upon me."More-mole . . ."Mole is English for mogura. The association was not a

h a p p y o n e t o m e e i t h e r . A n d w i t h i n s e c o n d s l w a s f i g h t i n guguinrt mole as la mort. La mort-death in French-made

m - e t e e t u n e a s y . A s d e a t h h a d p r e s s e d u p o n m y S i S t e r ' Shusband, so did it seem now to be pressing on me' But

even in my uneasiness I felt something funny' And t found

myself smiting unwittingly. Why did it strike me as funny? t

*irn't sure. I stood before the mirror, which I hadn't done

f o r s o m e t i m e , a n d f a c e d m y r e f l e c t i o n . N a t u r a l l y m y f a c ewas smiling. while staring at it, I remembered the alter

ego. My seiond self-the Cerman Doppelganger-had for-

tunately never much resembled me' But K' 's wi fe ' who

had become an American movie star, happened to see my

alter ego in the corridor of the tmperial Theater. (l remem-

Oer my embarrassment at being addressed suddenly by

Mrs . K . : " l 'm sor ry Id idn ' t say he l lo to you the o ther

day . ' ' JThenaformerone- leggedt rans la to ra lsohappenedto see my alter ego in a tobacco shop on the Ginza' Death

might come to my alter ego rather than to me' Even if i t

occurreo to me-l turned away from the mirror and

returned to the desk before the window. A faded lawn and

a pool could be seen through the square frame of tufa'

Cazing at the garden I remembered some notebooks and

unfiniihed plays I had burned in a distant pine wood. Pick-

ing up ty p.n, I started writ ing at the new story again'

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5. Red Light

The sunlight began to torment me. Like a mole, I kept thecurtains drawn and, with the electricity on, kept pluggingaway at the story. Then, exhausted, I opened Taine's Hrs-torg of English Literature and read about the lives of thepoets. They had all been unhappy. Even the giants of theElizabethan Age-even Ben Jonson, the most distinguishedscholar of his day-would find himself so worn with anxietythat he started seeing Roman and Carthaginian armies bat-tl ing upon his big toe. I couldn't hetp feeling pleasure, notwithout a measure of malice, in such misfortunes.

One night when an east wind was blowing hard (for mea good omen), Iwent through the basement out into theslreet and decided to visit an old man I knew. He worked byhimself as a caretaker in the attic of a Bible company anddevoted most of his time to prayer and reading. Warmingour hands over a charcoal brazier we spoke of various thingsunder a cross on the wall. Why did my mother go insane?Why did my father fail in business? Why was I being pun-ished? He was familiar with these arcane issues and with astrange solemn smile would talk with me at length and atease. And at t imes in his pithy phrases he caught l i fe in alli ts car icature. I couldn' t help admir ing the hermit in hisattic. But in talking with him, I found him feeling certainaffinities-

"The gardener's daughter is lovely, good-natured-andso kind to me."

"How old is she?""Eighteen this year."It might be a sort of fatherliness in him. But it was hard

not to sense some passion in his eyes. And the apples heoffered me unwittingly on their yellowed rinds revealed

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unicorns. (l often found mythical creatures in wood grainand in the cracks in coffee cups.J The unicorns were, nodoubt, kUlin (The Chinese unicornsJ. I recalled that a hostilecritic had once called me a "prodigy" (hirinjiJ of the l9l0s"and suddenly felt that this attic with its cross was no safeplace either.

"How have you been lately?""Edgy, as usual .""Drugs won't cure it. Why don't you become a Christian?""lf even / could become . . .""There's nothing hard about it. lf you just believe in God,

in Christ the Son of Cod, and the miracles Christ did . . .""Devils I believe in . . .""Then why not believe in Cod? If you believe in shadow,

I don't see how you can help believing in l ight also.""But there's some darkness that has no l ight in it.""Darkness without l ight?"There was nothing more I could say. He was walking in

darkness too. But as long as there was darkness, he believedin a l ight that went with it. This was the only point of logicaldifference between us. But to me it was an unbridgeableabyss . . .

"But there is l ight really. We have miracles to prove it. . . Even nowadays miracles occur."

"Miracles are the doings of devils . . .""Where do your devils come in?"I was tempted to tell him of my experiences this past

year or two. However, I couldn't help fearing that he wouldtell my wife and children and that I might be sent back tothe asylum as my mother had been.

"What's that over there?"The plump old man turned around to the ancient book-

shelves and made a grimace rather l ike Pan.

:tl ;

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"That's a set of Dostoevski. Have you read Crime and

Punishment?"Naturally l'd had a penchant for DosLoevski some ten

years earlier and had read four or f ive books of his. Burmoved by his saying at random Crime and punishment. Iborrowed the book from him and decided to go back to thehotel. The street blazing electric lights ano so crammed withpeople oppressed me. At this point it would have beenunbearable to have met anyone r knew. r tried to movethrough darker sidestreets and progressed like a thief.

After a bit, however, I started to feel my stomach ache.only a glass of whisky courd cure this pain. r found a bar andtried to push my way through the door. At the tight bar thesmoke was rising thick, and some young people, who lookedlike they might be arrists, were drinkin gsaketogether. Amidstit all was also a girl, her hair over heiears, plucking away ata mandolin quite earnestly. At once I felt uncertain and turnedback.without having gone past the door. I found my shadowswaying to the right and to the left witlessly. And the lightshining upon me, strangely enough, was red. I stopped. Butmy shadow kept wavering from side to side just as before. rturned around timidry and finaily noticed a stained-grass ran-tern hanging from the eave of the bar. The raniern wasmoving slowly, moved by a strong wind . . .

The next place r went into was a basement restaurant. Istood at the bar and ordered a whiskv.

I poured the whisky into a gtass of soda and sipped itsilently. Next to me were two men of about thirty or so,who looked like journarists, tarking in a row voice. Thev werespeaking in French. r kept my back to them, but feri ttreireyes upon me. [n fact, they impinged upon me like anelectric current. They knew my name, definitely, and weregossiping about me.

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'Bien . . . tres mauvais. . . pourquoi?""Pourquoi? . . . le diable est mort! . . .""Oui, oui . . . d'enfer. . ."

Itossed a silver coin'on the bar (the last real money Ihad on me) and decided to get out of that basement. Onthe street with the night breeze blowing my nerve strength-ened and my stomach-ache eased of f . I rememberedRaskolnikov and felt a desire to confess everything. But, notonly to myself, but even to my family, it would surely havebeen a tragedy. And it was questionable whether the desirewas real or not. If only my nerves were as strong as those ofordinary men-but I needed to go somewhere for that tohappen. To Madrid, or Rio, or Samarkand . . .

Just then a small white sign at the eave of a shop mademe feel uneasy. lt bore the trade-mark of wings painted onan automobile tire. lt reminded me of lcarus with his artif i-cial wings. His attempt to fly high, his wings singed by thesun's heat, his finally being drowned in the sea. To Madrid,or Rio, or Samarkand-how could I help laughing at such asil ly dream? At the same time I couldn't help thinking ofOrestes pursued by the gods of vengeance.

I walked on a dark street by a canal. Then I remem-bered my foster parents' home in the suburbs. Of course,they must be waiting for me to return. Probably my childrentoo-but when I returned-l couldn't help fearing therewould be some force there to restrain me, naturally. Thelapping water of the canal lifted a junkboat beside me. Fromthe bottom of the boat a faint light shone. There too theremust be a family, men and women, l iving together. Hatingeach other and sti l l loving each other enough . . . but Iroused my mind to continue the struggle and decided toreturn to the hotel, feeling the whisky in me.

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Back at the desk I returned to my reading of M6rim6e,sLettTrs. rt quietry began to revive me. gut when r discov-ered that M6rim6e had in his rater fears become a protes-tant,. I suddenly sensed he was wearing a mask. He wasgroping in darkness just as *. *.r..-rn darkness ?_A DarhNight.'s passing began to assume fearful proportions forme. I turned to Anatole France,s Coltectdd Aiab,g;es toforget my depression' But nris pan of modern times arsob o r e a c r o s s . .

About an hour thereafter the boy brought me a batch ofletters. One of them was irom a noofsfrop in Leipzig askingme for an essay on ,,Modern Women in Japan.,,Why dothey look to me for such an article? There was a postscript(in EnglishJ, handwritten: "we *ouio'uppr.ciate arso aronowith it a portrait of a woman-nriir brack-and-wrrit. a, iiJapanese paintines." The wordt *rino.o me of *re w.is*yBlack & Whire, JnO I toru ti.r. fui., io shreds. I broke rheseal of one of the other letters, quite airandom, and scannedthe yellow letter paper. lt was from a youngster, someoneunknown to me. But after a few tines ttre words "your

Hetlscreen ' ' ." irritated me. *re trrirJ one ropened was frommy nephew. After a..good deep breath, I plungeO into ruuO_ing about the famiry prontems, .,.."gr, even this letterbowled me over at ifs close

,"1'm sending you a copy of the second edition of theRed Light Anthotogg . . .,,Red Lighil lt felt like someone was deriding me and Isought sherter outside the room. rn ir.'. corridor there was

ll,ol-._ I leaned against the wall wirh one hand for support

3n9. laOe my way ro rhe lobby. I took a chair and decidedto light a cigarene. Somehow il ** ln nionip .igur.tt.. 1ihad only smoked Star cigarettes sincecoming to this hoter.JArtificial wings loomed before ,V .V., again. I decided to

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call the boy over and have him get me two packs of Star.But if I could believe the boy, unfortunately all the Stars haobeen sold out.

"But we have Airships, sir . . ."I shook my head and looked around the vast lobbv.

over on the other side were some foreigners at a tabietalking. One of them, a woman in a red dress, seemed tobe looking at me and speaking to the others in a whisper." M r s . T o w n s h e a d . . . "

Something beyond my power to see came to me never_theless through the whispering. The name of Mrs. Townsheadwas, of course, unfamiliar to me. Even if i t were the nameof that woman there-r rose and, harf crazed with fear,decided to go back to my room.

Back in the room I thought of cailing a certain mentarhospital. But to go there meant death to me. After muchhesitancy I started reading Crime and punishment to dis-tract myself. The page I turned to, however, was from TheBrothers Karamazov. Assuming I had made a mistake in mvacquisition, I looked at the cover. crime and punishment:the book must be crime and punishment.ln the bookbinder'serror, in the fact that I had opened to this page wronglybound, I felt a fateful finger moving and inevitablv reao on.But before I had finished even one page I began io feel mybody trembling. It was a passage of rvan's being torm.nt.iby the Devil 's lnquisit ion. Ivan, Strindberg, de Maupassant,myself, in this room . . .

Only sleep could save me in this state. The sleepingdrugs were all gone through, before r rearized it. r couion tbear the torment without sreep. with a courage born ofdesperation I had a cup of coffee brought in and decided tokeep writing frantically. Two, five, seven, ten pages_themanuscrlpt was dashed off. I filled the story with supernatural

Akutagawa

creatures. One of the creatures depicted myself. But exhaus-tion finally made my head limp. I withdrew from the deskand lay on my back in the bed. I must have slept aboutforty or fifty minutes. I felt someone whispering in my ear,which awoke and brought me to my feet, the words:

"Le diable est mort."Outside the tufa window day was about to break

shiveringly. I stood at the door and looked around the emptyroom. ln the windowpane I noticed a small scene of the seabeyond a yellowish pine wood. I went to the window withsome timidity, to see that what had evoked the picture wasthe withered grass and pool in the garden. But the imagehad brought to mind a sorl of nostalgia for my house.

I decided I would go home after I had called one of themagazine companies and found some source of income, atnine o'clock. Books, papers, gear were stuffed back into mybag on the desk.

6. Airplane

I picked up a car from a station on the Tokaido Line to asummer resort some distance away. For some reason, despitethe chilly weather, the driver was wearing an old raincoat.Feeling something queer in this coincidence, I tr ied to keeplooking out the window so as not to see him, if possible.Just beyond a place where small pine trees were growing,probably along an old path, I saw a funeral procession pass-ing. There seemed to be no white lanterns or shrine lan-terns in the procession. But gold and silver artificial flowerswere silently swaying before and after the bier . . .

When I finally got home I had a few very peaceful days,thanks to my wife and children and opiates. The upstairscommanded a modest view of the sea beyond the pine

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woods. At the desk upstairs, hearing the pigeons cooing, Idecided to work only mornings. ln addition to pigeons andcrows, sparrows would also alight on the porch. It was a joy

to me. "A magpie enters the hall"-with pen in hand, when-ever they came, the words came to me too.

One warm cloudy afternoon I went to the store to buysome ink. The only ink they had was sepia. Sepia ink mademe more uncomfortable than any other. I had to get out ofthe shop and strolled along the busy street alone. A near-sighted foreigner of forry or so went strutting by. He wasSwedish and suffered from paranoia and lived nearby. Anchis name was Strindberg. When I passed him, the eventphysically weighed on me.

The street was only a few blocks long. But in walkingthat distance a dog, black on one side, passed me fourtimes. Turning the corner, I recalled Black & White whisky.And I remembered too that Strindberg's cravat was blackand white. lt couldn't be just a coincidence. And if i t wasn't-I felt as if only my head had been walking and paused for amoment. Behind a wire fence by the road a faint rainbow-colored glass bowl had been discarded. On the base of thebowl was stamped a design l ike a wing. A number of spar-rows flew down from the pine tops. But when lhey camenear it, each, as if in common accord, flew off together intot h e s k y . . .

I went to my wife's parents' house and sat on a rattanchair in the garden. ln a wire coop at one corner of thegarden many white Leghorns gadded quietly about. At myfeet lay a black dog. Trying to answer a question no onecould grasp, I was outwardly cool as I conversed with mywife's mother and younger brother.

"lt 's very quiet here.""Well, quieter than Tokyo anyhow."

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"ls it noisy here sometimes too?""This is part of the world too, you know.',And in saying so, my wife's mother laughed. True, this

summer resort was part of the world. Within the past yearor so I had completely come to know how many were thecrimes and tragedies that occurred even here. A doctorwho had slowly tried to kil l a patient with poison, an oldwoman who set fire to the house of an adopted couple, alawyer who tried to dispossess his younger sister of herlegacy-to look at their houses was only to see the hell ofl i fe, to me.

"There's a lunatic in this town, isn't there?',"Perhaps you mean H. He isn't a lunatic. He's become

an id iot .""What's

called dementia praecox. He always makes mefeel queer. I don't know why he was bowing before theHorse-headed Kannon."

"Feel queer . . . You have to get stronger than that.""You're stronger than I am, though . . ., '

My wife's younger brother, unshaven, up from sickbed,joined in, uncertainly, as always."[ 'm weak, but in a way strong . . .""Well, i t 's too bad."

Looking at my wife's mother I couldn't help smiling grimly.The broth€r, also smiling while gazing at the pine wooOsbeyond the fence, chattered on absent-mindedly. (The youngconvalescent brother sometimes seemed to me a spirit thaihad escaped its body.J

"l 'm strangely unworldly and yet at the same time havesuch intense human longing. . .""Sometimes

a good man, sometimes a bad one.,'"No, something quite different from good or evil.""Like a chi ld l iv ing inside an adul t . "

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"Not exactly l ike that. I can't say it clearly . . . Maybemore like the two poles in electricity. Anyhow I have twodifferent things going at once."

What startled me a[ that moment was the roar of anairplane. In spite of myself I looked up to find an airplaneflying low enough, it seemed, to graze the tops of the pines.It was an unusual monoplane with its wings painted yellow.The chickens and the dog were startled too and ran aboutin all directions. The dog flew in under the porch barking.

"Won't that airplane fall?""Never . . . Do you know of airplane disease?"Lighting a cigar I shook my head, instead of saying "no.""Since people riding those airplanes breathe the air of

the upper atmosphere all the time, it is said that they aregradually unable to l ive on the air down here . . ."

Walking amidst the pines whose branches never stirredeven once after I left my wife's mother's house, I foundmyself little by little depressed. Why did that airplane takethat course, just over me, and not another? Why did theyonly have Airship cigarettes at that hotel? I wrestled withthese various questions and walked on streets chosen forhaving no signs of l i fe on them.

The sea was gray and clouded over beyond a low sand-hill. On the sandy shore stood the frame of a swing withouta swing on it. Looking at it brought immediately to mind agallows. And a few crows lit upon it. They all looked at me,but showed no sign of taking wing. And one crow, in thecenter, lifted its beak to the sky and cawed four times.

Walking along the strand with i ts wi thered grass, Idecided to turn off along a path where many villas werelocated. To the right of the path was supposed to be a two-storied wooden Western-style house, standing white amonghigh pines. (A good friend of mine called it "The Abode of

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Spring.") But in passing i t lnot iced only a bathtub on a

.on.rit. base. A fire-the thought quickly came to mind

and I walked straight on, trying not to look in' A man on a

bicycle was coming straight on. Wearing a dark brown hunt-

ing cap, his eyes oddly fixed, hunched over the handles'

Uriexpectedly I felt my older sister's husband's face on his

face and decided to turn off up a lane before he reached

me. But in the center of the lane lay, on its back' the dead

body of a mole.ihut tot.thing was aiming at me began to make me

with each step more uneasy. Half-transparent cogs gradu-

ally began to block my view. Fearful that my last moment

was tinitty at hand, I walked on and kept my neck rigid' As

the cogs increased in number, they began also to turn' At

the same time the pine wood on my right began to seem as

if seen through fine cut glass with the branches quietly inter-

twining. I felt my heart throbbing and tried many times to

purr.in the path. But it wasn't easy even to pause' as if I

were being Pushed on bY someone ' ' 'After about thirty minutes I was upstairs resting on my

backandsuf fe r ing f romanacuteheadache,myeyes f i rm lyclosed. Then, from behind my eyelids a wing of overlapping

s i l v e r f e a t h e r s l i k e s c a l e s b e g a n t o a p p e a r . l t w a s c l e a r l yreflected upon my retina' Opening my eyes, I looked up at

the ceiling and having confirmed that there was no such

thing there, decided to close my eyes again' But the silver

w ingassure ly re tu rnedwi th thedarknessasbefore .Then lr e m e m b e r e d , t h e r e h a d b e e n a w i n g t o o o n t h e r a d i a t o rcap of the cab I took the other day ' ' '

Someone came up the stairs hurriedly and ran down

soon after with a clatter. Startled at realizing it was my wlte'

I immedia te lygotupandwentdownto thedark l i v ingroomthat the stairs led into. My wife, who seemed to be suffering

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lrom shortness of breath, resting upon her face, was trem-

bling at the shoulders."What's the matter?"" N o , n o t h i n g . . . "

Finally she lifted her face and forced a smile while talking'"Nothing-it just came into my mind, Father, thal you

were about to die . . ."It was the most frightening experience in my life-l haven't

the strength to go on writing. lt is inexpressibly painful to

live in such a frame of mind. lsn't there anyone to come

and strangle me quietlY in mY sleeP?

1927

Transtated bg Cid Corman and Susumu Kamaihe

.1".