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  “It’s all right, sure.” I forced a smile. “But let me get this straight. You came here on a sort of reconnaissance mission on behalf of your friends, summoning up every ounce of courage you could muster, is that it?”

  “A one-man suicide corps,” Nitta candidly replied. “I read Satō-sensei’s piece again last night and resigned myself to various possible fates.”

  I was looking at Fuji through the window. Fuji stood there impassive and silent. I was impressed.

  “Not bad, eh? There’s something to be said for Fuji after all. It knows what it’s doing.” It occurred to me that I was no match for Fuji. I was ashamed of my own fickle, constantly shifting feelings of love and hatred. Fuji was impressive. Fuji knew what it was doing.

  “It knows what it’s doing?” Nitta seemed to find my words odd. He smiled sagaciously.

  Whenever Nitta came to visit me from then on, he brought various other youths with him. They were all quiet types. They called me “Sensei,” and I accepted that with a straight face. I have nothing worth boasting about. No learning to speak of. No talent. My body’s a mess, my heart impoverished. Only the fact that I’ve known suffering, enough suffering to feel qualified to let these youths call me “Sensei” without protesting—that’s all I have, the only straw of pride I can cling to. But it’s one I’ll never let go of. A lot of people have written me off as a spoiled, selfish child, but how many really know how I’ve suffered inside?

  Nitta and a youth named Tanabe, who was skilled at composing tanka poems, were readers of Mr. Ibuse’s work, and perhaps because of this they were the ones I felt most comfortable with and became closest to. They took me to Yoshida once. It was an appallingly long and narrow town, dominated by the mountains that loomed above. Cut off from the sun and wind by Fuji, it was dark and chilly and not unlike the meandering, spindly stem of a light-starved plant. Streams flowed alongside the streets. This is characteristic, apparently, of towns at the foot of mountains; in Mishima, too, steadily flowing streams are everywhere, and people there sincerely believe that the water comes from the snows melting on Fuji. Yoshida’s streams are shallower and narrower than those in Mishima, and the water is dirtier. I was looking down at one of them as I spoke:

  “There’s a story by Maupassant about a maiden somewhere who swims across a river each night to meet some young scion of the nobility, but I wonder what she did about her clothes. Surely she wouldn’t have gone to meet him in the nude?”

  “No, surely not.” The young men thought it over. “Maybe she had a bathing suit.”

  “Do you suppose she might’ve piled her clothes on top of her head and tied them down before she started swimming?”

  The youths laughed.

  “Or maybe she swam in her clothes, and when she met the scion she’d be soaking wet, and they’d sit by the stove till she dried. But then what would she do on the way back? She’d have to get the clothes all wet again swimming home. I worry about her. I don’t see why the young nobleman doesn’t do the swimming. A man can swim in just a pair of shorts without looking too ridiculous. Do you suppose the scion was one of those people who swim like a stone?”

  “No,” Nitta said earnestly. “I think it was just that the maiden was more in love than he was.”

  “You may be right. The maidens in foreign stories are cute like that—very daring. I mean, if they love somebody, they’ll even swim across a river to meet him. You won’t see that in Japan. Just think of . . . what was the title of that play? In the middle there’s a river, and on one bank stands a man and on the other a princess, and they spend the whole play weeping and moaning. There’s no need for the princess to carry on like that. Why doesn’t she just swim to the other side? When you see it on stage, it’s a very narrow river—she could probably wade across. All that crying is pointless. She won’t get any sympathy from me. Now, in the Asagao Diary it’s the Ōi River—that’s a big river, and Asagao is blind, so you feel for her to some extent, but, even so, it’s not as if it’d be impossible for her to swim across. Hanging on to some piling beside the river, ranting and blaming it all on the sun—what good is that going to do? Ah, wait a minute. There was one daring maiden in Japan. She was something. You know who I mean?”

  “Who?” The young men’s eyes lit up.

  “Lady Kiyo. She swam the Hidaka River, chasing after the monk Anchin. Swam like hell. She was something, I tell you, and according to a book I read she was only fourteen at the time.”

  We walked along the road chattering drivel like this until we came to a quiet old inn on the outskirts of town that was run by an acquaintance of Tanabe’s.

  We drank there, and Fuji was good that night. At about ten o’clock, the youths left me at the inn and returned to their homes. Rather than going to sleep, I walked outside in my dotera. The moon was astonishingly bright. Fuji was good. Bathed in moonlight, it was a nearly translucent blue, and I felt as if I’d fallen under the spell of a sorcerer fox. Such a sparkling, vivid blue. Like phosphorus burning. Will-o’-the-wisp. Foxfire. Fireflies. Eulalia. Kuzu-no-Ha, the white fox in human form. I followed the road, walking a perfectly straight line, though I could have sworn I had no legs. There was only the sound of my geta clogs—a sound that had nothing to do with me but was, rather, like a separate living thing—reverberating with exceptional clarity: clatter, clop, clatter, clop. Stealthily I turned to look back. Fuji was there, burning blue and floating in space. I sighed. A valiant Meiji Royalist. Kurama Tengu. That’s how I saw myself. I rather cockily folded my arms and marched on, convinced I was an awfully dashing fellow. I walked quite a long way. I lost my coin purse. It held about twenty silver fifty-sen pieces—it was heavy and must have slipped from the folds of my dotera. I was strangely indifferent. If my money was gone, all I had to do was walk to Misaka Pass. I kept walking. At some point, though, it occurred to me that if I retraced my steps I’d find my purse. Arms folded, I ambled back the way I’d come. Fuji. The Meiji Royalist. A lost coin purse. It all made, I thought, for a fascinating romance. My purse lay glittering in the middle of the road. Of course; where else would it be? I picked it up, returned to the inn, and went to bed.

  I’d been bewitched by Fuji that night, transformed into a simpleton, a mooncalf, completely without a will of my own. Even now, recalling it all leaves me feeling peculiarly weary and languid.

  I stayed in Yoshida just one night. When I got back to Misaka Pass, the woman who ran the place was all knowing smiles, and her fifteen-year-old sister was standoffish. I found myself wanting to assure them I’d been up to nothing naughty, and, though they asked me no questions, I related in detail my experiences of the previous day. I told them everything—the name of the inn I’d stayed at, how Yoshida’s sake tasted, how Fuji looked in the moonlight, how I’d dropped my purse. The little sister seemed appeased.

  “Get up and look, sir!” One morning not long afterwards, this same girl stood outside the teahouse shouting up to me in a shrill voice, and I grudgingly got up and stepped out into the corridor.

  Her cheeks were flushed with excitement. She said nothing, only pointed toward the sky. I looked, and—ah!—snow. Snow had fallen on Fuji. The summit was a pure and radiant white. Not even the Fuji from Misaka Pass is to be scoffed at, I thought.

  “Looks good,” I said.

  “Isn’t it superb?” she said, triumphantly selecting a better word. She squatted down on her heels and said, “Do you still think Misaka’s Fuji is hopeless?”

  I’d often lectured the girl to the effect that this Fuji was hopelessly vulgar, and perhaps she’d taken it more to heart than I’d realized.

  “Let’s face it,” I said, amending my teaching with a grave countenance. “Fuji is just no good without snow.”

  In my dotera I walked about the mountainside filling both my hands with evening primrose seeds, which I brought back to the teahouse and scattered in the back yard.

  “Now, listen,” I said
to the girl, “these are my evening primroses, and I’m coming back next year to see them, so I don’t want you throwing out your laundry water and whatnot here.” She nodded.

  I’d chosen this particular flower because a certain incident had convinced me that Fuji goes well with evening primroses. The teahouse at Misaka Pass is what one might call remote, so much so that mail isn’t even delivered there. Thirty minutes’ bouncing and swaying on a bus brings you to the foot of the pass and Kawaguchi, a poor little village if ever there was one, on the shore of the lake; it was at the post office here that my mail was held for me, and once every three days or so I had to make the journey to pick it up. I tried to choose days when the weather was good. The girl conductors on the buses don’t offer the sightseers aboard much in the way of information about the scenery. But once in a while, almost as an afterthought, in listless near-mumble, one of them will come out with something dreadfully prosaic like: “That’s Mitsu Pass; over there is Lake Kawaguchi; freshwater smelt inhabit the lake.”

  Having claimed my mail one day, I was riding the bus back to Misaka Pass, sitting next to a woman of about sixty who wore a dark brown coat over her kimono, whose face was pale and nicely featured, and who looked a lot like my mother, when the girl conductor suddenly said, as if it had just occurred to her, “Ladies and gentlemen, you can certainly see Fuji clearly today, can’t you?”—words that could be construed as neither information nor spontaneous exclamation. All the passengers—among them young salaried workers with rucksacks, and silk-clad geisha types with hair piled high in the traditional style and handkerchiefs pressed fastidiously to their lips—simultaneously twisted in their seats and craned their necks to gaze out the windows at that commonplace triangle of a mountain as if seeing it for the first time and to ooh and ah like idiots, briefly filling the bus with a buzzing commotion. Unlike all the other passengers, however, the elderly person next to me, looking as though she harbored some deep anguish in her heart, didn’t so much as glance at Fuji, but stared out the opposite window at the cliff that bordered the road. Observing this, I felt a sense of almost benumbing pleasure and a desire to show her that I, too, in my refined, nihilistic way, had no interest in ogling some vulgar mountain like Fuji, and that, though she wasn’t asking me to, I sympathized with her and well understood her suffering and misery. As if hoping to receive the old woman’s motherly affection and approval, I quietly sidled closer and sat gazing vacantly out at the cliff with her.

  Perhaps she felt somehow at ease with me. “Ah! Evening primroses,” she said absently, pointing a slender finger at a spot beside the road. The bus passed quickly on, but the petals of the single golden evening primrose I’d glimpsed remained vivid in my mind.

  Facing up admirably to all 3,778 meters of Mount Fuji, not wavering in the least, erect and heroic—I feel almost tempted to say Herculean—that evening primrose was good. Fuji goes well with evening primroses.

  Mid-October came and went, and I was still making very little progress with my work. I missed people. Sunset brought scarlet-rimmed clouds with undersides like the bellies of geese, and I stood alone in the corridor on the second floor smoking cigarettes, intentionally not looking at Fuji, my eyes fixed instead on the autumn leaves of the mountain forests, crimson as dripping blood. I called to the proprietress of the teahouse, who was sweeping up fallen leaves in front.

  “Good weather tomorrow, Missus!”

  Even I was surprised by the shrillness of my voice; it sounded almost like a cry of joy. She rested her hands on the broom a moment and looked up at me dubiously, knitting her brow.

  “Did you have something special planned for tomorrow?”

  She had me there.

  “No. Nothing.”

  She laughed. “You must be getting lonesome. Why don’t you go mountain climbing or something?”

  “Climb a mountain and you just have to come right back down again. It’s so pointless. And whatever mountain you climb, what is there to see but the same old Mount Fuji? The heart grows heavy just thinking about it.”

  I suppose it was a strange thing to say. The proprie­tress merely nodded ambiguously and carried on sweeping the fallen leaves.

  Before going to sleep I would quietly open the curtains in my room and look through the glass at Fuji. On moonlit nights it was a pale, bluish white, standing there like the spirit of the rivers and lakes. I’d sigh. Ah, I can see Fuji. How big the stars are. Fine weather tomorrow, no doubt. These were the only glimmerings I had of the joy of being alive, and after quietly closing the curtains again I’d go to bed and reflect that, yes, the weather would be fine tomorrow—but so what? What did that have to do with me? It would strike me as so absurd that I’d end up chuckling wryly to myself as I lay on my futon.

  It was excruciating. My work . . . Not so much the torment of simply dragging pen over paper (not that at all, in fact, since the writing itself is actually something I take pleasure in), but the interminable wavering and agonizing over my view of the world, and what we call art, and the literature of tomorrow, the search for something new, if you will—questions like these left me quite literally writhing in anguish.

  To take what is simple and natural—and therefore succinct and lucid—to snatch hold of that and transfer it directly to paper, was, it seemed to me, everything, and that thought sometimes allowed me to see the figure of Fuji in a different light. Perhaps, I would think, that shape was in fact a manifestation of the beauty of what I like to think of as “elemental expression.” Thus I’d find myself on the verge of coming to an understanding with this Fuji, only to reflect that, no, there was something about it, something in its exceedingly cylindrical simplicity that was too much for me, that if this Fuji was worthy of praise, then so were figurines of the Laughing Buddha—and I find figurines of the Laughing Buddha insufferable, certainly not what anyone could call expressive. And the figure of this Fuji, too, was somehow mistaken, somehow wrong, I would think, and once again I’d be back where I started, confused.

  Mornings and evenings gazing at Fuji: that’s how I spent the cheerless days. In late October, a group of prostitutes from Yoshida, on what, for all I knew, may have been their only day of freedom in the year, arrived at Misaka Pass in five automobiles. I watched them from the second floor. In a flurry of colors, the girls fluttered out of the cars like carrier pigeons dumped out of baskets, and, not knowing at first in which direction to head, flocked together, fidgeting and jostling one another in silence, until at last their curious nervousness began to dissipate, and one by one they wandered off their separate ways. Some meekly chose picture postcards from a rack at the front of the teahouse; others stood gazing at Fuji. It was a dismal and all but unwatchable scene. Though I, a solitary man on the second floor, might feel for those girls to the extent that I’d be willing to die for them, there was nothing I could offer them in the way of happiness. All I could do was look helplessly on. Those who suffer shall suffer. Those who fall shall fall. It had nothing to do with me, it was just the way the world was. Thus I forced myself to affect indifference as I gazed down at them, but it was still more than a little painful.

  Let’s appeal to Fuji. The idea came to me suddenly. Hey, look out for these girls, will you? Inwardly muttering the words, I turned my gaze toward the mountain, standing tall and impassive against the wintry sky and looking for all the world like the Big Boss, squared off in an arrogant pose, arms folded. Greatly relieved, I forsook the band of courtesans and set out in a lighthearted mood for the tunnel down the road with the six-year-old boy from the teahouse and the shaggy dog, Hachi. Near the entrance to the tunnel, a skinny prostitute of about thirty stood by herself silently gathering a bouquet of some dreary sort of wildflowers. She didn’t so much as turn to glance at us as we passed but continued picking the flowers intently. Look after this one, too, I prayed, casting an eye back at Fuji and pulling the little boy along by his hand as I walked briskly into the tunnel. Reminding myself it all ha
d nothing to do with me, I strode resolutely on as the cold water that seeped through the ceiling dripped down on my cheeks and the back of my neck.

  It was at about that time that my wedding plans met with a serious hitch. I was given to understand, in no uncertain terms, that my family back home was not going to lend their assistance. Once married, I fully intended to support my household with my writing, but I had been selfish and presumptuous enough to assume that my family would, at this juncture, come to my aid to the tune of at least a hundred yen or so, allowing me to have a dignified, if modest, wedding ceremony. After an exchange of two or three letters, however, it became clear that this would not be the case, and I was thoroughly at a loss as to what to do. Having come to terms with the fact that, as things stood, it was entirely possible that the young lady’s side would call the whole thing off, I decided there was nothing for it but to make a clean breast of everything, and came down from the mountain alone to call at the house in Kōfu. I was shown into the parlor, where I sat facing the girl and her mother and told them all. At times it sounded, disconcertingly enough, as if I were reciting a speech. But I thought I at least managed to describe the situation in a relatively straightforward and honest manner.

  The young lady remained calm. “Does that mean your family is opposed to the idea?” she asked, tilting her head to one side.

  “No, it’s not that they’re opposed.” I pressed softly down on the table with the palm of my right hand. “It just seems to be their way of telling me I’m on my own.”