I had been at a resort in the western hinterlands but now found myself in a taxi, a single satchel in hand, speeding toward a railway station along the Tōkaidō Line, on my way to an acquaintance’s wedding reception. On both sides of the road, dense, nearly unbroken rows of pine trees were sweeping by, as I pondered my doubtlessly meager chances of catching the Tōkyō-bound train. I was sharing the taxi with the owner of a barbershop. He was cylindrically plump, like a jujube, and sported a short beard. Even as I worried about the time, I engaged in occasional conversation with him.
“Strange things do occur, do they not,” he remarked. “Why, I’ve heard that at the X estate, a ghost appears even during daylight hours.”
“Even in daylight hours, you say?” I gave him a perfunctory reply, as I gazed at the distant pine-covered hills bathed in the westering winter sun.
“Mind you, it apparently doesn’t show itself when the weather is good. It seems to come out mostly on rainy days.”
“On rainy days it may be out for a wet wander.”
“Ah, you’re joking . . . But they say the ghost wears a raincoat.”
With its horn blaring, the taxi pulled up alongside a railway station. I took my leave from the barbershop owner and rushed in, but, just as I feared, the train for Tōkyō had left just two or three minutes before. Sitting alone on a bench in the waiting room, looking blankly outside, was a man in a raincoat. The story I had just heard about a ghost came back to me. I managed a wry smile and resigned myself to waiting for the next train in a café in front of the station.
“Café” . . . a dubious appellation. I took my place in a corner and ordered a cup of chocolate. The table was covered with a white oilcloth on which broad grids had been drawn in fine blue lines. The four corners were worn, revealing the drab canvas beneath.
The chocolate had the taste of animal glue. As I drank it, I gazed about the deserted room. Pasted on the dusty walls were paper strips, advertising such offerings as rice with chicken and egg, cutlets, local eggs, and omelettes; they reminded me that here along the Tōkaidō Line we were not far from rural life and that it was through barley and cabbage fields that the electric locomotives were passing . . .
My train did not pull in until near nightfall. I was accustomed to traveling second-class, but this time, as it happened, I had settled for third class.
In the already crowded carriage, I was surrounded by school-girls apparently on an excursion, perhaps returning from Ōiso. I lit a cigarette and observed the cheerful flock of virtually ceaseless chatterers.
“Please tell us what ravu shiin means,” said one of them to a man sitting in front of me; he was apparently accompanying them as a photographer. He attempted an evasive answer, but a girl of fourteen or fifteen persisted in peppering him with questions. I found myself smiling at her manner of speaking, reminding me vaguely of nasal empyema. Next to me was another pupil, aged twelve or thirteen, sitting on the knee of a young schoolmistress. With one hand curled around her neck, she stroked her cheek with the other. Babbling with fellow classmates, she would periodically pause and speak to her:
“Sensei, you are so lovely! What beautiful eyes you have!”
I had the feeling—were I to overlook how they munched on unpeeled apples and removed the paper from their caramels—that these were not schoolgirls but rather full-grown women. A pupil seemingly older than the others happened to step on someone’s toe as she was passing me. “Oh, I’m terribly sorry!” she exclaimed. It was precisely her relative maturity that made her the only one among them to typify a schoolgirl. The cigarette still hanging between my lips, I could not help ridiculing the contradictions in my own perceptions.
The electric lights in the train had already been illuminated when at last we pulled into a suburban station. A cold wind was blowing as I stepped out onto the platform. I crossed the overpass, intending to take the electric train, when quite by chance I encountered T, a company man of my acquaintance. As we were waiting, we discussed this and that, including the current recession, of which T naturally knew more than I. On one of his stout fingers he was wearing a splendid turquoise ring that seemed hardly congruent with our topic.
“That’s quite something you have on display there!”
“Oh, this? A friend who’d gone off to Harbin on business got me to buy it from him. Now that he can’t do business with the cooperatives, he’s in quite a bind.”
Fortunately, the train that arrived was not as crowded as the one before. We sat down next to each other and continued talking. T had just returned to Tōkyō in the spring from a position he had held in Paris, and so it was this that dominated our conversation: Madame Caillaux, crab cuisine, the sojourn of an imperial prince . . .1
“The situation in France is not as bad as it appears. It’s just that the French are stubbornly opposed to paying taxes, so the governments go on falling.”
“But the franc has plunged.”
“That’s what one reads in the newspapers. But what do the newspapers there say about Japan? One would think that we have nothing but massive earthquakes and flood disasters.”
Just then a man in a raincoat sat down in front of us. Feeling a bit uneasy at this, I thought about telling T about the ghost, but he was now turning the knob of his cane to the left. Looking straight ahead, he said to me in a low voice:
“The woman over there . . . in the gray woolen shawl . . .”
“Wearing her hair in European style?”
“Uh-huh, with the cloth-wrapped bundle on her lap . . . She was in Karuizawa this summer. She was dressed in quite fashionable Western clothes.”
Nevertheless, to anyone’s eye she would doubtlessly have appeared to be shabbily dressed. As I talked to T, I furtively looked at her. Something between her eyebrows suggested the expression of madness. Moreover, protruding from her bundle was a piece of sponge that somehow resembled a leopard.
“When I saw her in Karuizawa, she was dancing with a young American. How very—what should I say?—moderne!”
When I took my leave from T, the man in the raincoat was no longer there. I got off the train and walked to a hotel, satchel in hand. Nearly the entire way there were large buildings on both sides; I suddenly remembered the pine forest I had passed. At the same time, I saw coming into view objects quite strange. Strange? That is to say constantly turning, semitransparent cogwheels. More than once I had already had this experience, the number of such gears steadily increasing until they half blocked my field of vision. This did not last long. Soon they were gone, but then my head would begin to ache. Such was the invariable pattern. The ophthalmologist had repeatedly ordered me to give up cigarettes as a means for ridding myself of these optical illusions (were they?), but I had suffered such since when I was in my teens, well before I took up smoking. It’s started again! I thought to myself, covering my right eye to test my left, which showed no sign of the objects. But behind my other eyelid, there were many still turning. As I saw the buildings on my right disappearing one by one, I quickened my pace.
The cogwheels were gone by the time I entered the hotel lobby, but my head still ached. I checked my coat and hat at the desk and took the opportunity to reserve a room. I then called a magazine editor to discuss a question of payment.
The wedding reception appeared to be already well underway. I sat down at the end of a table and began moving my knife and fork. There were more than fifty guests, sitting perpendicular to the bride and groom, our tables forming a white, rectangular U. They were all, of course, in the best of spirits. For my part, I became increasingly melancholy as I sat under the bright electric lights. In the hope of fleeing my oppressive state of mind, I turned to the gentleman sitting beside me and engaged him in conversation. He was an old man, with a white beard that made him look quite like a lion. I knew him to be a renowned scholar of the Chinese classics, to which our conversation consequently turned.
“The qílín is really a unicorn, you know. And the fènghuáng is the phoenix.”
The scholar seemed to take interest in these comments of mine, but as I was talking quite mechanically, I found myself steadily yielding to a pathologically destructive impulse. I said that the sage kings Yáo and Shùn were, of course, strictly legendary personages and that the author of the Spring and Autumn Annals had lived long after his purported time, the work having surely been compiled in the Han Dynasty.
At this, the scholar’s face took on an expression of undisguised displeasure; avoiding my gaze, he cut off remarks with a tigerish roar:
“If Yáo and Shùn did not exist, then we can only conclude that Confucius lied. But it is unimaginable that a great sage should lie.”
I did not reply, of course. Again, knife and fork in hand, I turned to the meat on my plate. At the edge of it, I saw a small maggot gently wriggling, making me think of the English word worm. Like qílín and fènghuáng, it could only refer to a mythical animal. I put down my utensils and gazed at the glass into which champagne was being poured.
When the banquet was finally over, I walked to the room I had reserved—down a deserted corridor that gave me the feeling of being in a prison rather than in a hotel. Fortunately, however, at least my headache had faded.
Along with my satchel, my hat and overcoat had been brought to the room. I looked at the latter, hanging on the wall, and had the impression of seeing myself standing there. I hastily threw it into the clothes closet in a corner of the room. I then went to the mirror; staring at my reflection, I could see my facial bones beneath the skin. Suddenly the vivid image of a maggot floated up into the mind of that man there, myself, standing in front of the mirror.
I opened the door, went out into the corridor, and set off aimlessly. At the far end, where the corridor turned toward the lobby, I suddenly saw a tall electric lamp-stand covered with a green shade, the light brightly reflected in the glass door. This gave a momentary feeling of peace. I sat down in a chair in front of it and thought of many things. Yet I was not meant to rest there for even five minutes: someone had with extraordinary carelessness tossed a raincoat onto the back of the adjacent sofa.
“But why a raincoat in this cold weather?” Brooding on the matter, I walked back down the corridor. At the other end was a personnel room. There was no one to be seen, but I could hear faint voices and a reply to something that was said in English: “All right.”
“All right”? I found myself straining to catch the exact meaning of this exchange. “Ōru-raito”? “Ōru-raito”? What in the world could be “Ōru-raito”?
In my room there would, of course, be utter stillness. Yet the thought of opening the door gave me a strange sense of loathing. After a moment’s hesitation, I went in. Trying not to look in the mirror, I sat down at the desk in an easy chair covered in blue Moroccan leather that looked quite like lizard skin. I opened my satchel and took out writing paper, intending to continue work on a short story. But the pen I had dipped in ink would not move, and when it finally did, it could only go on writing the same words over and over again: “All right . . . All right, sir . . . All right . . .”
Suddenly there was a sound next to my bed; it was the telephone. I bolted up in surprise and put the receiver to my ear.
“Yes? Who’s calling?”
“I . . . I . . .”
It was my elder sister’s daughter.
“What’s wrong? What’s happened?”
“Something dreadful . . . And so . . . It’s dreadful . . . I’ve also just called Auntie . . .”
“Something dreadful?”
“Yes, so please come quickly. Quickly!”
The line immediately went dead. I replaced the receiver and reflexively pressed the button to call for a bellboy. At the same time, I was fully aware that my hand was trembling. There was no immediate response. I felt more distress than irritation, as again and again I pressed the button. But now I finally understood the words that destiny had spoken to me: All right, all right.
That afternoon my sister’s husband had been struck and killed by a train in the open countryside, not far from Tōkyō. The body had been found dressed unseasonably in a raincoat. And now I was here in this hotel room, continuing to work on that same short story. In the wee hours, there was no sound in the corridor, though sometimes I could hear from outside the door the sound of wings. Perhaps someone somewhere was keeping birds.
I awakened in my hotel room at about eight. When I tried to get out of bed, I could only find one of my slippers. For two years now I had been constantly plagued by such fears, remembering, moreover, the one-sandaled prince of Greek mythology.
I called for a bellboy and asked him to look for the missing slipper. A dubious expression on his face, he went about searching the small room.
“It’s here,” he reported, “in the bathroom.”
“How could it have gone there?”
“I suppose it could have been a rat . . .”
After he left, I drank some coffee without cream and resumed my work. The square, tuff-framed window looked out on the snow-covered garden. Each time I set down my pen, my gaze would be lost in the snow, which, spread out under a budding winter daphne, was besmirched by the soot of the city. It was somehow a painful sight. While smoking a cigarette, my pen again motionless, I let my mind wander over this and that. I thought of my wife, my children, and especially my sister’s husband . . .
Just before committing suicide, he had been suspected of arson. The charge was hardly surprising in light of the fact that prior to the destruction of his house in a blaze, he had insured it for twice its value. He had also been given a suspended sentence for perjury. Yet a greater cause for my anxiety than his suicide was the awareness that whenever I returned to Tōkyō I was sure to see a fire. Once from a train window I had seen passing hills aflame; another time I was in a taxi (with my wife and children) when I saw one in the area around Tokiwabashi. Even well before my brother-in-law’s house had burned down, I thus had more than adequate reason for knowing myself to be possessed of pyric premonitions.
“Our house may burn down sometime this year.”
“Such ill-omened talk! It would be a catastrophe . . . We are so poorly insured . . .”
My wife and I had had such an exchange, but it was not our house that had burned . . . In an attempt to rid my mind of such obsessions, I picked up my pen once more and began to move it across the page, but I was at pains even to complete a single line. I finally stood up from the desk and lay down on the bed to read Tolstoy’s Polikoushka. The novella’s protagonist has a complex personality: a blend of vanity, morbidity, and ambition. Yet with but a few revisions, this tragicomedy struck me as a caricature of my own life. I had the eerie feeling that through this story I was hearing fate sardonically laugh at my own plight. Not an hour had passed before I abruptly sat up in bed and in the same motion threw the book with all my strength against the curtains in the corner of the room.
“Damn it all!”
At that moment I saw a large rat scampering diagonally from under the curtain to the bathroom. I bounded after it. Opening the door, I searched everywhere, but there was no sign of it, not even under the white tub. With a sudden sense of horror, I hurriedly threw off my slippers, donned my shoes, and ran out into the deserted corridor.
It was as dispiriting a prison as it had been the day before. With drooping head, I walked up and down the stairs and then found myself in the culinary quarters, which were surprisingly bright and cheery. On one side, several stoves were burning. I felt the cold look of several white-capped cooks as I passed on through and simultaneously had the sensation of having fallen into hell. At the moment, a prayer rose spontaneously to my lips: “Chastise me, Lord, but spare me Thy wrath, lest I should come to naught . . .”2
I left the hotel. The blue sky was shining brightly on thawing snow and slush, as I plodded toward my sister’s house. The trees in the park along the way, their branches and foliage, were all black; like human beings, they each had both a front and a back. The realization brought more than uneasiness; I felt something closer to dread. Remembering the spirits in Dante’s Inferno transformed into trees, I decided to walk on that side of the streetcar tracks on which there was an almost unbroken line of buildings.3
Yet even then I found I could not walk one hundred meters in peace and tranquillity:
“Excuse me . . . ,” came a timid voice.
It was a young man of about twenty-two or twenty-three. He was wearing a school uniform with gold buttons. I saw a mole on the left side of his nose. He had taken off his cap. I stared at him without speaking.
“I believe I have the honor of addressing . . .”
“Yes . . .”
“Ah, I somehow thought so . . .”
“Have you some business with me?”
“No, I merely wanted to speak to you and say that I am one of your faithful readers.”
I raised my hat by way of acknowledgment and immediately set off.
“Sensei! Sensei!”
At the time, this had become for me a most unpleasant term. I thought myself guilty of all manner of crimes; yet, when the occasion arose, I would be addressed as “Sensei” all the same. I could not help sensing an element of disparagement—but what was it?
My affirmation of materialism forced me to deny any sort of mysticism. Several months before, I had written in a small coterie magazine: “I have no artistic conscience; I have no conscience whatsoever. I have only nerves.”
With her three children, my elder sister had taken refuge in a makeshift hut at the back of an alley, the interior walls papered brown. It was colder inside than outside; stretching our hands toward the brazier, we talked about this and that.
My brawny brother-in-law, who instinctively despised me all the more for my scrawniness, had openly denounced my writings as immoral. I in turn treated him with icy contempt; not once did we have a candid or cordial conversation.
Yet as I talked with my sister, I came to the realization that he too had been leading a hellish existence. In fact, I was told that he had seen a ghost on a sleeping car. Lighting a cigarette, I nonetheless endeavored to restrict my remarks to matters financial.
“Under the circumstances, I intend to sell everything.”
“Yes, you’re right. You could probably get something for the typewriter.”
“And then there are the paintings.”
“Do you want to sell the portrait of him? . . . Even that one?”
I looked at the unframed conté sketch on the wall and sensed that this was no time for lighthearted chatter. The train had turned him, even his face, into no more than a lump of flesh, the only recognizable feature, it was said, being his mustache. The entire story in itself was, of course, undoubtedly loathsome. Yet the portrait was a perfect rendition of his every feature—except for his mustache, which, strangely enough, struck me as blurred. Thinking that the problem was the balance of the light, I tried to look at it from different angles.
“What are you doing?”
“Nothing . . . The portrait . . . Something around the mouth . . .”
My sister turned her head and then, as though quite unaware, remarked:
“The mustache seems a bit faded, doesn’t it?”
What I had seen was not an illusion. But if not, then . . . ? I decided to leave, without accepting my sister’s invitation to stay for lunch.
“But surely you can stay a bit longer!”
“Perhaps I can come again tomorrow . . . Today I have an errand in Aoyama.”
“Aoyama? You are still feeling unwell?”
“I’m constantly taking medicine. The sleeping pills alone are more than enough trouble. Veronal, neuronal, trional, numal . . .”
Half an hour later I found myself entering a tall building and taking the elevator to the third-floor restaurant. I pushed on the glass door and, when it did not open, saw a lacquered sign announcing that on this day the restaurant was regularly closed. Feeling increasingly out of sorts, I gazed through the door at the arrangements of apples and bananas on the tables. I turned to go.
Two men, apparently company employees, were engaged in lively conversation as I left; they brushed my shoulder as they came through the entrance. I thought I heard one of them say: “. . . terribly irritating.”
I lingered on the pavement and then looked for a passing taxi. But such were rare, and the few that I saw were invariably yellow. (For some reason, yellow taxis make it a habit of involving me in accidents.) I was finally able to wave down an auspiciously green vehicle, determined after all to make my way to the psychiatric hospital near the cemetery in Aoyama.
“Terribly irritating . . . Tantalizing . . . Tantalus . . . Inferno.”
Tantalus was, in fact, myself, gazing through the glass door at the fruits on the restaurant table. I stared at the back of the driver, cursing the Dantesque vision of hell now twice brought before my eyes.
As I brooded, I thought of all that is no more than lies covered with multicolored enamel, concealing from me the true horror of human existence: politics, economics, art, science . . . A worsening shortness of breath drove me to roll down the window, but from the feeling that my heart was being squeezed I had no relief.
My green taxi had now finally brought me to Jingūmae, where, turning into an alleyway, one would come to a certain psychiatric hospital. Yet today I somehow could not remember the location. I had the driver follow the streetcar line up and down several times and then resigned myself to getting out and walking.
I was able at last to find the alleyway. I walked the muddy twists and turns and then at some point went in the wrong direction, finding myself in front of the Aoyama Funeral Pavilion.
Since the funeral of Natsume Sensei, I had not so much as passed by the gate. Then too, some ten years before, I was unhappy. But at least I had been at peace. I gazed at the gravel spread out inside and remembered the banana plant in his house, the Villa Sōseki. Irresistibly I felt that my life too had come to an end and it was no accident that destiny had brought me here—to this place and at this time, a decade later.
Leaving the hospital, I took a taxi to return to the hotel. As I was stepping out in front of the entrance, I saw a man in a raincoat engaged in a quarrel with what seemed to be a bellboy. No, instead it was an automobile attendant, dressed in green. I took this to be somehow a bad omen and, deciding not to go in, hastily turned around.
The day was waning as I came to Ginza-dōri. The shops lining both sides of the street and the dizzying bustle of people only worsened my sense of gloom. It was particularly distressing to see them passing blithely to and fro, as though oblivious to any concept of sin. I walked steadily onward, heading north, in a mélange of electrical illumination and fading sunlight.
Along the way, my eye was caught by a bookshop with piles of magazines on display. I went in and, having looked absentmindedly at the contents of several tiers, pulled out from one of the shelves a volume: Girishia-shinwa. In this yellow-covered book of Greek mythological tales, intended for children, the first words I happened to read sent me instantly reeling: “Even Zeus, the grandest of the gods, is no match for the goddesses of vengeance.”
I left the shop and again made my way through the crowds, stooping as I went, as though sensing behind me those same Furies in relentless pursuit.
On the second floor of Maruzen, I found in a tier of books an edition of August Strindberg’s Legends and perused it, two or three pages at a time. The experiences described there did not vary significantly from my own; moreover, the cover was yellow. I returned the book to the shelf and now pulled out almost at random a thick volume. In one of the illustrations, there were cogwheels with eyes and noses no different from those of us, of human beings. (A German had compiled these sketches, drawn by mental patients.) In the midst of my depression, I felt my spirits revolting. In desperation, like a gambling addict, I began to leaf through book after book. Yet wherever I looked, there was invariably a sentence or an illustration that concealed more than a piercing needle or two. All of them? Even when I picked up Madame Bovary, which I had read and reread countless times, I found that in the final analysis I was myself but another bourgeois Monsieur Bovary.
I was almost the last customer there on the second floor, as the sun began to set. Wandering between the electrically illuminated tiers of books, I stopped in front of the religion section and perused a volume with a green cover. One of the chapters listed in the table of contents was entitled: “The Four Most Dreadful Foes: Doubt, Fear, Hubris, and Sensual Appetites.” No sooner had I seen these words than I sensed all the more strongly my inner revolt. For me, at least, these “foes” were nothing other than a matter of sensibility and reason. All the more unbearable was now the awareness that traditional ways of thinking contributed as much to my unhappiness as did modernity.
Yet as I held the book in my hand, I suddenly thought of the pen name I had once used: Juryō Yoshi, borrowed from the story told in Hán Fēizĭ of the lad who, before he had learned to walk like the people of Hándān, forgot how to walk in the manner of his own people in Shòulíng and thus went crawling home like a meandering reptile. Now I am surely seen in the eyes of all as that same Juryō Yoshi. Yet at least I had assumed the pen name before falling into hell . . . Endeavoring to drive away the demons that haunted me by putting this tier of books behind me, I walked to a poster exhibit directly ahead of me. One showed a knight, apparently St. George, slaying a winged dragon. Beneath the helmet I could see his half-exposed, grimacing face; it closely resembled that of an enemy of mine. Again I remembered Hán Fēizĭ and the story of the master dragon-slayer. Without moving on to the exhibition room, I descended the broad staircase.
Night had already fallen as I walked along Nihonbashi-dōri, still brooding about the proverbial slayer of dragons—surely a fitting inscription for my own inkstone. That very object had been given to me by a young man of business. Having failed in various undertakings, he had gone bankrupt at the end of the previous year.
I looked up to the towering heavens to remind myself of how tiny is the earth amidst the light of countless stars—as, by consequence, am I myself. But after a day of clear weather, the night sky was covered with clouds. I suddenly felt a vaguely hostile presence and decided to take refuge in a café on the other side of the streetcar tracks.
It was indeed a refuge. The rose-pink walls offered some sort of peace and comfort; I happily collapsed at a table in the rear. As luck would have it, there were only two or three other customers. I sipped my cocoa and puffed on my usual cigarette, sending bluish smoke up against the pale red wall. The harmony of the gentle colors was likewise cheering. A few moments later, however, I saw to my left a portrait of Napoleon and my anxiety was back with me all too soon. Napoleon as a student had written on the last page of his geography notebook: “Sainte Hélène . . . petite île.” It may have been, as we say, a coincidence, though the fact remains that it inspired fear in Napoleon himself.
Even as I continued staring at him, I thought about the works I had written. The first to float into my mind were the aphorisms included in Shuju no Kotoba—in particular, “Life is more hellish than hell.” And then, the protagonist of Jigokuhen, the painter Yoshihide, and his fate, and then . . . I puffed on my cigarette as I glanced about the café, trying to escape from such memories. I had sought asylum here a mere five minutes before, but in that brief time the café had quite altered its appearance. Particularly disturbing were the imitation mahogany tables and chairs and their utter lack of harmony with the color of the walls. Fearing that I would fall once again into anguish known only to myself, I threw down a silver coin and hastily started to leave.
“Hello, sir? That will be twenty sen . . .”
I had put down a copper coin. Feeling deeply humiliated, I made my way along the street, abruptly remembering the home I had once had in the middle of a distant pine forest—not the suburban house of my adoptive parents but rather the one I rented just for myself and my family. I had been living in that sort of arrangement some ten years before, until certain circumstances led me rashly to take up residence again with my parents. It was also then that I became a slave, a tyrant, a powerless egotist . . .
It was not until about ten o’clock that I returned to the hotel. I was so weary from my long walk that I lacked even the strength to go to my room. I threw myself into the chair in front of the fireplace full of burning logs. I thought about the novel that I had intended to write. It was to be an episodic work of some thirty chapters in chronological order, progressing from Empress Suiko to Emperor Meiji, with the ordinary people of each age in the fore. As I gazed at the dancing sparks ascending, I found myself thinking of a bronze statue in front of the Imperial Palace and the armored figure sitting grandly astride his horse,4 the very embodiment of loyalty. And yet his enemies . . .
“No, no, it cannot be true!”
I came slipping back down from the distant past to the immediate present, as I was fortuitously met at that moment by an upperclassman from university days, a sculptor. He was, as ever, dressed in velvet and was sporting a short goatee. I rose from my chair and shook his hand. (This was not my custom but rather his—the result of half a lifetime spent in Paris and Berlin.) His hand had a strangely reptilian dampness.
“Are you staying here?”
“Yes.”
“On business?”
“Yes, on business, among other things . . .”
He stared at me with what seemed to be a quasi-investigative expression in his eye.
“What about continuing this conversation in my room?” I issued the invitation as a challenge. (Though lacking in courage, I have the unfortunate habit of leaping at an opportunity to provoke.)
He replied with a smile: “Where is it, this room of yours?”
We walked shoulder to shoulder, as though the best of friends, passing through a group of softly speaking foreigners. Entering my room, he sat down with his back to the mirror and began talking about this and that—or at least of this or that woman, for such was his principal topic.
I was without doubt among those whose sins would send them to hell, but this sort of lascivious gossip only drove me further into depression. Momentarily assuming the role of a Puritan, I began deriding those women.
“Look at S’s lips. How many men do you suppose she has kissed to give them that appearance?”
I suddenly fell silent and looked at the back of his head in the reflection of the mirror. He had a yellow plaster bandage below one of his ears.
“How many men she has kissed?”
“That’s the sort of person she strikes me as being.”
He smiled and nodded, and I felt him looking at me carefully as though to learn some secret buried within me. And yet we continued to dwell on women. I felt less loathing for him than shame at my own cowardice, and this only deepened my sense of utter gloom.
When at last he had left, I lay on my bed and started reading An’ya Kōro. One by one, I could keenly feel the struggles in which the protagonist was engaged within his own mind. The realization that, by comparison, I was an utter fool brought tears to my eyes, and these gave me a feeling of peace, though only momentarily. My right eye was now again seeing semitransparent cogwheels. As before, they steadily multiplied as they turned. Fearing that my headache would return, I put the book down next to the pillow and took 0.8 grams of Veronal, resolving in any case to sleep soundly.
I dreamt, however, that I was looking at a swimming pool, where children, boys and girls, were splashing above the water and diving below. I left the pool and walked into the pine forest on the other side. Someone called out to me from behind: “Otōsan!” Half turning around, I saw my wife standing in front of the pool and was immediately struck by a painful feeling of regret.
“Otōsan, don’t you want a towel?”
“No. Watch the children.”
I continued walking, but at some point my path turned into a platform—at a country railway station, it seemed—with a long hedge. There was a university student (H), together with an older woman. When they saw me, they approached and began talking at the same time.
“What a terrible fire!”
“I barely escaped myself,” said H.
I thought I had seen the woman before. I also felt a kind of euphoric excitement in talking to her. Now the train pulled in quietly next to the platform amidst a cloud of smoke. I was the only one to get on; I walked through the corridors of the sleeping compartments; inside, white sheets hung from the berths. On one was the reclining figure of a naked woman, much like a mummy, looking toward me. It was once again the goddess of vengeance—that daughter of a lunatic.
I woke up and, without thinking, immediately sprang out of bed. The room was still bright with the electric lights, but from somewhere I heard the sound of wings and the squeaking of a rat. I opened the door, went out into the corridor, and hurried to the fireplace. I sat down in a chair and gazed at the tenuous flames. A hotel attendant dressed in white came to add more wood.
“What time is it?” I asked.
“About three-thirty, sir,” he replied.
Even so, there was a woman who sat reading in a corner at the opposite end of the lobby. I took her to be an American and could see even from across the room that she was wearing a green dress.
Feeling that I had been rescued, I resolved to remain where I was to await the dawn—like an old man who, having gained a respite from years of a tormenting illness, now placidly waits for death . . .
In my hotel room, I managed at last to complete the short story I had been writing and prepared to send it to a certain magazine. The remuneration I would receive would not, of course, pay for a week’s lodging expenses. I nevertheless felt satisfied at having finished the project and wanted now to visit a bookstore in the Ginza for an intellectual stimulant.
Perhaps it was the fluctuating winter sun on the asphalt that gave the crumpled scraps of discarded paper the appearance of roses. I felt buoyed by a sense of benevolence as I entered the bookstore, which likewise seemed neater and tidier than usual. The only troubling presence was a girl in spectacles talking to a clerk. Remembering the roselike paper scraps that I had seen on my way, I purchased a collection of conversations with Anatole France and the collected correspondence of Prosper Mérimée.
I went into a café with my two books, took a seat at a table in the back, and waited for my coffee to come. A woman and a boy were sitting across the way—mother and son to all appearances. The son could have been my younger self, so strong was the resemblance. The two talked intimately, face-to-face, quite as lovers might. Indeed as I observed them, I had the feeling that at least he was well aware of providing consolation for her, even of a sexual nature. Such exemplified for me the sheer power of human affinities, something of which I too had some knowledge, providing yet another example of a certain will to transform this vale of tears into a veritable hell.
Nevertheless, fearing that I would fall into yet another round of anguish, I happily took the coffee brought to me at that moment and began reading Mérimée’s letters. As with his novels, they are full of brilliant and biting aphorisms. Reading them gave steely reinforcement to my disposition. (It has been a weakness of mine to be so easily susceptible to such influences.) After the coffee, feeling “ready for whatever comes,” I left the café.
As I passed along the streets, I looked into the various shop windows. A picture-framer had hung up a portrait of Beethoven, his bristling mane giving him the air of true genius. I could not help finding it quite comical . . .
On my way, I ran into an old friend from secondary school; a professor of applied chemistry, he was carrying a large folding satchel and had a bloodshot eye.
“What’s wrong with your eye?”
“Oh, it’s just conjunctivitis.”
I remembered that for the last fourteen or fifteen years, I have developed the same sort of eye infection whenever I find myself drawn to someone. But I said nothing about that to him. Slapping me on the shoulder, he began to tell me about our mutual friends and then, without pausing in his chatter, led me into a café.
“It’s been a long time. I haven’t seen you since the dedication of the Shu Shunsui monument.”
He was sitting across a marble table from me, having lit a cigar.
“Yes, not since Shu Shun . . .”
For some reason I stumbled over the pronunciation, and this was troubling, all the more so, as this was the Japanese form of the name. But my old school chum went on talking as though quite unaware—of K, the novelist, of the bulldog he had just purchased, of a poison gas known as Lewisite . . .
“You don’t seem to be writing anymore. I read Tenkibo. It’s autobiographical, isn’t it?”
“Yes, it is.”
“I found it a bit pathological. How is your health at the moment?”
“I’m still getting by with a constant supply of medicine.”
“I understand. I too am suffering from insomnia.”
“‘I too’? Why do you say ‘I too’?”
“Isn’t that what you said yourself? Insomnia’s a serious matter, you know!”
There was a trace of a smile in his left, bloodshot eye. Before replying, I had sensed that I would have difficulty in pronouncing the final syllable of the technical term.
“How could the son of a lunatic be expected to sleep?”
Within ten minutes I was again walking the street. The crumpled papers scattered on the asphalt were now sometimes taking on the appearance of human faces. A bob-haired woman was coming toward me. From a distance, she appeared to be quite beautiful, but as she passed, I could see a face that was lined, wrinkled, and indeed ugly. She also appeared to be pregnant. I instinctively turned my face away and turned into a broad side street. A few moments later I began to feel hemorrhoidal pain. For me, the only remedy was a Sitzbad. A Sitzbad . . . Beethoven too had resorted to such . . .
My nostrils were immediately assailed by the smell of the sulfur used in the therapy, though there was, of course, nothing of the sort to be seen on the street. Turning my mind again to the paper-scrap roses, I endeavored to walk with steady steps.
An hour later I had shut myself away in my room, sitting at the desk at work on a new story. My pen raced across the paper at a speed that quite astounded me. After two or three hours, however, it stopped, as though held in check by an invisible presence. Having no other recourse, I stood up and paced the room. It was at such moments that my delusions of grandeur were most striking. Caught up in savage joy, I could only think that I had neither parents nor wife and children, that there was only the life now emanating from my pen.
Four or five minutes passed, and now I had to turn to the telephone. I spoke into the receiver again and again, but all I could hear in response was a vague mumbling, endlessly repeated, that nonetheless doubtlessly had the sound of mohru. I finally moved away from the telephone and again paced the room, still haunted by the word.
“Mohru—Mole . . .”
The English word for the burrowing rodent. The association was hardly a pleasant one, but then two or three seconds later, I respelled it as mort, la mort. The French word for “death” instantly filled me with anxiety. Death had pursued my sister’s husband and was now pursuing me. And yet in spite of my fear I found myself feeling strangely amused and even smiled. Why? I had no idea.
I stood in front of the mirror, something I had not done for a long time, and directly looked at myself. My reflection too was, of course, smiling. Staring at my own image, I remembered a second self, the Doppelgänger, as one is wont to call such in German, that I had, most fortunately, never encountered. On the other hand, the wife of K, who had become an actor in American films, had seen my double in a theater corridor. (I still remember my perplexity when she apologized to me for not having greeted “me” on that occasion.) So had a one-legged translator, now deceased, in a Ginza tobacconist’s shop.
Perhaps it was not I who was death’s prey but rather my double. But even if I were . . . Turning my back to the mirror, I returned to my writing desk in front of the window. The square, tuff-framed window looked out on withered grass and a pond. As I gazed at the garden, I thought about all the notebooks and uncompleted theater pieces that had gone up in smoke in that distant pine forest. Picking up my pen, I resumed work on the story.
Sunlight had begun to torment me. I was truly living the life of a mole, assiduously continuing to write, the window curtains closed and the electric lights burning even during the day. When I was too weary to go on, I read Taine’s Histoire de la littérature anglaise and perused his lives of the poets . . . They had all suffered misfortune . . . Even the giants of the Elizabethan age . . . even the era’s great scholar, Ben Jonson, having suffered nervous exhaustion, found himself imagining the Roman and Carthaginian armies going into battle on his big toe. I could not help feeling a cruel, spite-filled joy at their misfortunes.
One night when a strong east wind was blowing (which I took to be a good omen), I left the hotel from the basement and went out on the street, resolved to visit an old man of my acquaintance. He lived in an attic of a building housing a Bible publisher, where he worked as the lone caretaker. There he devoted himself to prayer and reading. Sitting under a cross, our hands stretched out toward the brazier, we conversed: Why had my mother gone insane? Why had my father failed in business? Why was I being punished? . . . He knew these secrets and would always listen to me, a strangely solemn smile on his face. Sometimes he would draw in a few short words a caricature of human life. I could not help feeling respect for this hermit in the attic. Yet as we talked, I discovered that he too was capable of being moved by human affinities.
“The daughter of the nurseryman is a beautiful girl, with a sweet disposition . . . She is very kind to me.”
“How old is she?”
“Eighteen this year.”
Perhaps for him it was a kind of paternal love. But I inevitably caught in his eyes a sign of passion. On the yellowed skin of the apple he offered me I saw the shape of a unicorn. (On occasion I would discover mythological animals in wood grains and finely fissured teacups.) The unicorn was indeed the qílín. Remembering that an unfriendly critic had once characterized me as “the qílín’s offspring of the 1910s,” I realized that even here in this attic, under the cross, I had no safe haven.
“How have you been these days?”
“As ever, at the edge of my nerves.”
“For that, no medicine will help you. Have you no desire to become a believer?”
“As if the likes of me could manage that . . .”
“It’s not in the least difficult. You need only to believe in God, in Christ His Son, and in the signs and wonders that He performed.”
“Well, what I can believe in is the devil.”
“Then why not believe in God? If you believe in shadows, you must necessarily believe in light.”
“There are shadows without light, are there not?”
“Shadows without light?”
I could only fall silent. He walked in shadows no less than did I. Yet he believed in a light beyond. It was, to be sure, the only point of difference between us, but it was, at least for me, an impassable gulf nonetheless.
“But the light necessarily exists. Evidence can be seen in the miracles, which occur again and again even in our own times . . .”
“Miracles that are the work of the devil . . .”
“Why do you dwell on the devil?”
I felt tempted to tell him everything I had experienced in the last year or two, but I was afraid that he might tell my wife and children, that I might follow my mother’s footsteps into a psychiatric hospital.
“What do you have over there?” I asked.
The vigorous old man turned toward his ancient bookshelves, with something of a Pan-like look on his face.
“The complete works of Dostoyevsky. Have you read Crime and Punishment?”
I had, of course, avidly read four or five of Dostoyevsky’s works a decade before. But I was struck by his incidental mention—or was it?—of Crime and Punishment. I borrowed his copy and returned to my hotel. The streets, with their electric lights and crowds of people, were as unpleasant as ever. Any chance encounters with acquaintances would be particularly unbearable, and so, like a thief, I carefully chose the darker paths.
But then a few moments later, I began to have stomach pains, for which the only remedy was a shot of whiskey. I found a bar, pushed on the door, and started to go in. The narrow confines were enveloped in cigarette smoke. A group of young people, apparently artists, were drinking, and in the very middle was a woman, her hair covering her ears in keeping with the latest Occidental fashion. She was energetically playing the mandolin.
Feeling instantly at a loss, I turned and left. Now, however, I found that my shadow was swaying from left to right, and that, ominously enough, I was being bathed in red light. I stopped in my tracks, but my shadow went on vacillating. I hesitantly looked around and saw at last a colored glass lantern hanging from the eaves of the bar and swinging slowly in the strong wind . . .
It was to a subterranean restaurant that I next made my way. I went to the bar and ordered whiskey.
“Whiskey? I’m afraid that Black and White is all there is.”
I poured the whiskey into the soda and began sipping it in silence. Next to me sat two men in their late twenties or early thirties, journalists, I assumed. They were speaking in low voices—and in French. With my entire body, I could feel the focus of their eyes on my back, indeed as though they were sending out electric waves. They clearly seemed to know my name and were clearly talking about me.
“Bien . . . très mauvais . . . pourquoi? . . .”
“Pourquoi?. . . le diable est mort! . . .”
“Oui, oui . . . d’enfer . . .”
I put down a silver coin, my last, and fled the cavern. The night wind was gusting through the streets, soothing my nerves, as my stomach pains eased. I remembered Raskolnikov and felt the desire to confess all. And yet that could bring only tragedy, not just to me and to my family but also to others. Moreover, the sincerity of that desire was dubious. If my nerves could become as steady as that of a normal person . . . But for that I would have to flee somewhere: Madrid, Rio de Janeiro, Samarkand . . .
I was suddenly jolted by a small white advertising sign hanging down from the eaves of a shop: a winged automobile tire trademark. I remembered the story of the ancient Greek who, though able to fly by means of artificial wings, allowed them to be burned by the sun and so plunged into the sea and drowned . . . To Madrid, to Rio de Janeiro, to Samarkand . . . I had to laugh at such fantasies—and at the same time remind myself of Orestes being pursued by the Furies.
I followed the dark street along the canal. I found myself recalling the suburban house of my adopted parents. It was clear that they were spending their days waiting for me to return, as were perhaps my wife and children . . . But I feared the force that would inevitably bind me if I were, in fact, to do so.
Moored in the choppy water was a barge from whose hold a faint light was leaking. A family surely lived there, men and women hating one another out of love . . . But now, though still feeling the intoxicating effect of the whiskey, I summoned once more my combative strength and headed back to the hotel.
I sat again at the desk and continued reading Mérimée’s correspondence, which eventually revived me. When I learned that late in life he converted to Protestantism, I instantly felt that his mask had fallen away, that I was seeing his true face. Like us, he had walked in the darkness. In the darkness? Shiga’s An’ya Kōro was being transformed for me into a terrifying work. In an attempt to forget my depression, I began to read Anatole France’s conversations, but this modern Pan too, I could see, had borne a cross . . .
An hour later, a bellboy brought me a bundle of mail. Among the items was a letter from a publisher in Leipzig, asking me to write an essay on the modern Japanese woman. Why did he specifically want me for the project? The letter, written in English, included a handwritten postscript: “A simple black-and-white depiction, in the style of a Japanese painting, with no color, would also suit our purposes.” The words reminded me of the whiskey brand. I tore the letter to shreds. I opened another envelope, the one closest to hand, and read the enclosed missive, written on yellow stationery. It was from an unknown youth. I had not read more than two or three lines when I saw something that could only set me on edge: a reference to Jigokuhen.
I opened a third envelope, containing a message from a nephew. Now at last came a sigh of relief, as I read of domestic problems. But then I came to the line at the end and felt bowled over: “I am sending you a new edition of the poetry collection Shakkō.”
I heard taunting laughter in my ears—Shakkō!—and fled the room. There was no one in the corridor. Propping myself up with a hand against the wall, I managed to get to the lobby, where I sat down in a chair and thought that I should at least light a cigarette. Oddly enough, it was an Air Ship. (Since coming to the hotel, I had made it a habit of smoking only Star.) The two artificial wings appeared again before my eyes. I called over a bellboy and sent him to purchase two packs of Star, but as luck would have it, according to his report, there were none left.
“We still have Air Ship, sir . . .”
I shook my head and looked around the spacious lobby. At the far end were four or five foreigners sitting around a table. It seemed that one of them—a woman in a red dress—was sometimes glancing in my direction, while speaking in a low voice.
“Mrs. Townshead . . .”
An unseen presence was whispering Misesu-Taunzuheddo in my ear, a name I had, of course, never heard before. And even if it were indeed to be the name of the woman sitting over there . . . I got up from the chair and returned to my room, terrified at the thought that I was going mad.
It had been my intention to make an immediate call to the psychiatric hospital. But to have myself admitted as a patient there would be tantamount to dying. After agonizing hesitation, I tried to distract myself from my fears by reading Crime and Punishment. Randomly choosing a page, I found, however, that it was a passage from The Brothers Karamazov. Thinking I had confused the books, I looked at the cover, but there was no doubt about the title. I could see that it was to this binding error at the publishing house and to this very page that the finger of fate was pointing. Yet even as I was driven to continue reading, I had not finished a single page before my entire body began to tremble, for here was the passage that describes Ivan being tormented by the Devil. Ivan, Strindberg, Maupassant, and now I, here in this room . . .
My only salvation was sleep. But I had not a single packet of sleeping medicine left. The thought of more miserable insomnia was unbearable, but summoning up a desperate sort of courage, I had coffee brought and resolved to go on writing as frantically as any madman.
Two, five, seven, ten pages . . . The manuscript was burgeoning before my eyes. I was filling the world of my fictional work with supernatural animals, and one of them was a self-portrait. But now fatigue was gradually clouding my mind. At last I got up from the desk and lay flat on my back in bed. I may have slept for forty or fifty minutes when I thought I heard words being whispered in my ear and immediately bolted up:
Beyond the tuff-framed window, a pale, cold dawn was breaking. I was standing directly against the door, looking at the empty room, when I saw something in the mottled pattern of steam condensed on the window by the frigid air outside. It was an autumn-yellow pine forest facing the sea. I approached, my heart pounding. Though I realized that it was but a mirage, created by the garden’s withered grass and the pond, it evoked a longing akin to mal du pays.
I waited until nine and then called the magazine office to settle a question of payment. Putting everything on the desk into my satchel, books and manuscripts, I resolved to return home.
I had taken a taxi from a railway station on the Tōkaidō Line and headed for a summer resort in the western hinterlands. Despite the cold, the driver was oddly dressed in an old raincoat. To avoid thinking about the eerie coincidence, I fixed my gaze away from him and on the passing scenery. Behind the row of low-lying pines—perhaps on what had been the post-station road—I saw a funeral procession. There were neither white-paper nor dragon lanterns, but both before and behind the palanquin were artificial lotuses, gold and silver, gently swaying . . .
Having at last arrived home, I spent several rather peaceful days there, benefiting both from the company of my wife and children and from the efficacy of barbiturates. From my domain on the second floor, I could look out on the pine forest and faintly glimpse the sea beyond. I had decided to work at my desk only in the mornings, the cooing of the pigeons in my ears. There were other birds, pigeons and crows, as well as sparrows, which came flying down onto the veranda. This too gave me pleasure. The happy sparrow enters the temple, I would remember the phrase each time, pen in hand.
On a warm, cloudy afternoon, I had gone to a sundries shop to buy ink, but the only color on display was sepia, a tint that invariably unsettled me more than any other. Having no alternative, I left the shop and wandered aimlessly along the mostly deserted streets. Coming toward me from the opposite direction was a foreigner, fortyish and apparently myopic, swaggering along by himself. He was the Swede who lived nearby, a man suffering from paranoia. His name was Strindberg. As we passed, I felt a physical jolt.
The street was no more than three hundred meters long, but in the time it took me to walk it, a dog, its face black on one side and white on the other, passed me four times. I turned down a side street, thinking of Black and White, and then remembered that Strindberg’s tie was likewise black and white. I could not imagine this a mere coincidence. And if it were not . . . I had the feeling that only my head was moving along; I stopped for a moment in the middle of the pavement. Behind the wire fence along the street lay a discarded glass bowl faintly radiating the colors of the rainbow. There appeared to be along the sides at the bottom a winglike pattern. Sparrows now came fluttering down from the top of the pines, but when they came close to the bowl, they all took flight, as though by common accord, rising again into the sky . . .
I arrived at my wife’s family home and sat in a rattan chair—in the garden, next to the veranda. Inside a wire netting situated in a corner at the other end, leghorn chickens were quietly walking about. A black dog lay at my feet. Even as I painfully endeavored to resolve questions comprehensible to no one, I chatted with my wife’s mother and younger brother in a strictly superficial tone of sobriety.
“Ah, coming here . . . It is so quiet!”
“Yes, as compared to Tōkyō . . .”
“Is it sometimes noisy here too?”
“Well, after all, we still inhabit the same human world!”
My mother-in-law said this with a laugh. In fact, even this refuge from the summer heat was indisputably situated within that “human world.” I knew all too well just how many crimes and tragedies had taken place here within the last year: the physician who had attempted to subject a patient to slow poisoning; the old woman who had set fire to the house of an adopted couple; the lawyer who had sought to deprive his younger sister of her assets . . . The mere sight of their homes was for me none other than a vision of the hell that lies at the heart of human existence.
“You have a local madman, don’t you?”
“Do you mean young H?” asked my mother-in-law. “He’s not insane; he’s merely become imbecilic.”
“Dementia praecox, as they say. Whenever I see him, I feel horror. I saw him recently bowing—for whatever reason—in front of the statue of Batō Kannon.
“‘Horror’ you say? You need to be of stronger disposition.”
“Well, my brother-in-law is of much stronger than the likes of me.”
He was sitting up in his bed, his face unshaven, entering into the conversation with his usual sense of reserve.
“But in strength there is also weakness,” I replied.
“Well, well, whatever are we to say to that?”
I looked at my mother-in-law as she said this and could not help a wry smile. My brother-in-law too smiled, and continued to speak as though in a trance, gazing at the distant pine forest beyond the hedge. (The young convalescent sometimes seemed to me to be a pure, disembodied spirit.)
“Oddly enough, it is just when we think we have cast off our mere humanity that our all too human desires become all the more intense . . .”
“A man thought virtuous may also be a man of vice.”
“No, an opposition more striking than that between good and evil . . .”
“Well then, the child found in the adult.”
“That’s not it either. I cannot express the idea clearly . . . Perhaps it is like two electric poles. They are antipodes that form a whole.”
At that moment we were startled by the rumbling of an airplane. Without thinking, I glanced at the sky and saw the machine as it barely cleared the tops of the pine trees. It was an unusual mono-plane, with yellow wings. The chickens and the dog, alarmed at the sound, ran about in all directions, the dog in particular, its tail between its legs, baying and barking, before crawling beneath the veranda.
“Won’t the airplane crash?”
“No . . . By the way, do you know what ‘flying sickness’ is?”
Instead of responding with a verbal “no,” I shook my head, as I lit a cigarette.
“It seems,” he explained, “that those who fly such airplanes become so accustomed to breathing the air at high altitudes that gradually they find themselves unable to tolerate ordinary terrestrial air . . .”
I had put the house of my wife’s mother behind me and now walked through the pine forest. Not a branch was stirring, as I went on, steadily falling into depression. Why had the airplane flown above my head rather than elsewhere? Why was only the Air Ship brand of cigarette on sale at the hotel? Tormented by such questions, I wandered the least trodden paths.
Beyond a low dune lay the sea, covered by a gray sheet of fog. Atop the dune was the frame of a children’s swing, with neither seat nor ropes. I looked at it and immediately thought of a gallows. And indeed several crows were perched on it. They stared at me, with no sign of flight. The one in the middle, its beak pointed to the sky, cawed—I am certain—four times.
I had been walking along an embankment of withered grass and sand but now turned down a narrow street lined with villas. On the right, I expected to see, despite the tall pines in front of it, a whitish, two-storied wooden structure of Occidental style. (A close friend had called it “The House of Spring.”) But when I came to where it was supposed to be, there was only a bathtub, sitting on the cement foundation. Fire! was my immediate thought. I walked on, averting my eyes. A man on a bicycle was coming directly toward me. He was wearing a burnt umber fowling cap and had a strangely fixed expression, his body bent over the handlebars. I sensed that the face resembled that of my elder sister’s husband and so took another small side street before we came eye to eye. But there I encountered, right in the middle of the road, lying belly up, the decaying body of a mole.
In the knowledge that something was stalking me, I felt renewed anxiety with each step I took. One by one, semitransparent cogwheels were beginning to block my vision. I walked stiff-necked, fearing that my last hour might well be nigh. The cogwheels were turning ever more rapidly, even as their number was increasing. At the same time, I was seeing the intertwining branches to my right as if through finely cut glass. I felt the palpitations of my heart growing more intense. Again and again I tried to stop along the way, but even that was no easy task, as I felt myself being pushed forward . . .
Thirty minutes later I was home again, lying on my back upstairs, my eyes tightly closed, as I endeavored to endure my throbbing headache. Behind my eyelids I began to see a wing, its silver feathers enfolded like fish scales. The image was clearly printed on my retinas. I opened my eyes and looked up to the ceiling, and having ascertained that, of course, nothing of the kind could be there, I closed them again, only to find the silver wing still there in the dark. I suddenly remembered that I had seen a wing on the radiator cap of a taxi I had recently taken . . .
I thought I heard hurried footsteps coming up the stairs and then clattering back down again. I knew them to be those of my wife. Startled, I got up and went down into the semidarkness of the sitting room directly below the stairs. She was lying prostrate, taking short, shallow breaths, it seemed, her shoulders constantly shaking.
“What is it?”
“Oh, nothing, my dear.” she replied. Raising her head and giving me a forced smile, she continued. “It was really nothing at all—only that I had the feeling that you were about to die . . .”
This was the most terrifying experience of my life . . . I have no strength to go on writing. To go on living in this frame of mind would be unspeakable torment. Oh, if only someone would gently and kindly strangle me in my sleep.