富嶽百景 English

The apex angle of Mount Fuji: Hiroshige's Fuji is eighty-five degrees, Buncho's Fuji about eighty-four degrees; but if one makes cross-sections east-west and north-south from the Army's surveyed maps, the east-west vertical section gives an apex angle of one hundred twenty-four degrees, and the north-south, one hundred seventeen.

Not just Hiroshige and Buncho — the Fuji in most paintings is drawn at an acute angle.

The summit is drawn slender, tall, delicate.

Hokusai goes so far as to give it an apex angle of nearly thirty degrees, painting a Fuji almost like the Eiffel Tower.

But the actual Fuji is obtuse, thoroughly obtuse — spreading out sluggishly, one hundred twenty-four degrees east-west, one hundred seventeen north-south — by no means a mountain of soaring, slender height.

If, say, I had been suddenly snatched up by an eagle from India or some such country and dropped with a plop onto the coast near Numazu in Japan, and happened to catch sight of this mountain, I doubt I would find it so astonishing.

It is only because one has already been longing for Nippon's Fujiyama that it seems wonderful; strip away that vulgar advance publicity, and how much it could really appeal to a simple, pure, empty heart that knew nothing of it — on that score, it is a somewhat unreliable mountain.

Low.

Considering how far its skirts spread, it is low.

A mountain with skirts that wide ought, at the very least, to be one and a half times taller.

Only the Fuji seen from Jikkoku Pass was tall.

That one was good.

At first the summit was hidden by cloud, and I, judging from the slope of the skirts, marked a point in the cloud where I guessed the peak must be; then, after a while, the clouds broke, and when I looked, I was wrong.

Twice as high as the spot where I had marked it beforehand, the blue summit appeared, rising sheer.

Rather than being astonished, I felt oddly ticklish, and burst out laughing.

He's really got it going, I thought.

It seems that when people encounter something of perfect, reassuring grandeur, the first thing they do is laugh, helplessly, foolishly.

Every screw in the body loosens, artlessly — it's an odd way to put it, but it feels rather like laughing with one's sash untied.

If you, gentle reader, were to meet your beloved, and the moment you met, your beloved burst into helpless laughter, it would be cause for celebration.

You must never reproach your beloved for such rudeness.

Your beloved, on meeting you, is being bathed from head to foot in your perfect, reassuring grandeur.

The Fuji seen from the window of my apartment in Tokyo is a painful thing.

In winter it can be seen clearly, distinctly.

A small, pure white triangle sits perched on the horizon — that is Fuji.

Nothing more than a Christmas confection.

What's more, its shoulder tilts to the left, forlornly, so that it resembles a warship gradually sinking, stern first.

Three winters ago, someone confided in me a fact I had never expected, and I was at a loss.

That night, alone in my room at the apartment, I drank cup after cup of sake.

I didn't sleep a wink; I just drank.

At dawn, getting up to relieve myself, I saw Fuji through the square, wire-screened window of the apartment lavatory.

Small, pure white, tilted slightly to the left — I have not forgotten that Fuji.

Below the window, a fishmonger's bicycle went racing along the asphalt road, and I caught the muttered words trailing behind him — "Whoa, Fuji sure is clear this morning, ain't it — cold as hell" — while I stood rooted in the dark lavatory, stroking the wire screen of the window, weeping wretchedly; I never want to go through anything like that again.

In early autumn of Showa 13, resolved to make a fresh start, I set out on a journey with a single bag in hand.

Koshu.

The distinctive feature of the mountains here lies in the strangely empty, gentle sweep of their undulating lines.

In a certain man named Kojima Usui's Discourse on Japanese Landscape, too, it is written: "The sulking recluses of the mountains, it seems, come here to wander as immortals."

So it said.

The mountains of Koshu may perhaps be something of an oddity, as mountains go.

An hour, jolted along by bus from Kofu City.

I arrived at Misaka Pass.

Misaka Pass, thirteen hundred meters above sea level.

At the top of this pass stands a small teahouse called Tenka-jaya, and Mr. Ibuse Masuji had, since early summer, been shut up on its second floor, working.

I came here knowing this.

If I would not be disturbing Mr. Ibuse's work, I meant to take the room next to his and idle there myself for a while, like an immortal at play.

Mr. Ibuse was indeed at work.

With Mr. Ibuse's permission, I settled in at the teahouse for the time being, and from then on I had no choice but to face Fuji head-on, every single day, whether I liked it or not.

This pass lies at the junction of the old Kamakura road leading from Kofu out to the Tokaido, and is said to be the foremost vantage point for viewing Fuji from the north; the Fuji seen from here has, since ancient times, been counted among the Three Great Views of Fuji — or so I'm told — but I did not much care for it.

Not only did I dislike it — I even held it in contempt.

It was, altogether too much, a made-to-order Fuji.

Fuji stood dead center, with Lake Kawaguchi spreading out beneath it, white and bleak, while the nearer mountains crouched quietly on either side, as if cradling the lake in their arms.

At a single glance, I felt flustered, and my face flushed red.

This is nothing but a bathhouse mural.

A stage backdrop.

It was a landscape made utterly to order, and I could not help but feel ashamed of it.

Two or three days after I arrived at the teahouse on the pass, Mr. Ibuse's work reached a stopping point, and one clear afternoon, the two of us climbed Mitsu-toge.

Mitsu-toge, seventeen hundred meters above sea level.

A bit higher than Misaka Pass.

Crawling nearly on all fours up the steep slope, we reached the summit of Mitsu-toge in about an hour.

Pushing through the ivy and creepers, scrambling up the narrow mountain trail on all fours — my figure was, to say the least, not a pretty sight.

Mr. Ibuse wore proper mountaineering clothes and looked light and easy, but I had no such gear of my own and went in a padded kimono.

The padded kimono from the teahouse was short, leaving more than a foot of my hairy shins exposed, and on top of that I wore split-toe rubber-soled work shoes borrowed from the old man of the teahouse, so that even to my own eyes I looked a disreputable mess; I tried a little contrivance, tying on a stiff sash and putting on an old straw hat hanging on the teahouse wall, but this only made things odder still. Mr. Ibuse is a man who never looks down on how a person dresses, but even he, just this once, wore a somewhat pitying expression, and murmured under his breath, "Still, a man ought not to fuss over his appearance" — comforting me. I have not forgotten it.

We reached the summit somehow or other, but a thick fog came blowing in all at once, and even standing at the edge of the cliff called Panorama Terrace at the top, there was no view to be had at all.

Nothing could be seen.

Mr. Ibuse, at the bottom of the thick fog, sat down on a rock, and smoking his cigarette unhurriedly, broke wind.

He looked thoroughly bored.

Three teahouses stand in a row at Panorama Terrace.

We chose one of them, a modest place run by nothing but an old man and an old woman, and drank hot tea there.

The old woman of the teahouse was full of sympathy: truly unlucky fog, she said, but she thought it would clear before long, and Fuji was really right there, plain to see, just beyond — and with that she brought out a large photograph of Fuji from the back of the shop, stood at the edge of the cliff, held the photograph high with both hands, and earnestly explained, right about here, just like this, this big, this clear, this is exactly how it looks.

Sipping our coarse tea, we gazed at that Fuji, and laughed.

We saw a fine Fuji.

I did not think it a pity that the fog was so thick.

It must have been two days later that Mr. Ibuse withdrew from Misaka Pass, and I accompanied him as far as Kofu.

In Kofu, I was to meet a certain young woman for a formal marriage interview.

Led by Mr. Ibuse, I called at the young woman's house on the outskirts of Kofu.

Mr. Ibuse was dressed casually in his mountaineering clothes.

I wore a stiff sash and a summer haori.

In the garden of the young woman's house, many roses had been planted.

We were welcomed by her mother and shown into the drawing room; after exchanging greetings, the young woman herself presently appeared, but I did not look at her face.

Mr. Ibuse and the mother made small talk, one adult to another, and then, all at once, Mr. Ibuse said,

"Oh — Fuji."

— muttering it, and looking up at the lintel behind me.

I too twisted around and looked up at the lintel behind me.

A bird's-eye photograph of the great crater at Fuji's summit hung there, framed.

It looked like a pure white water-lily blossom.

Having taken this in, and turning my body slowly back, I caught a glimpse of the young woman.

I made up my mind.

Even if there were some difficulties, I thought, I wanted to marry this person.

That Fuji was a godsend.

Mr. Ibuse returned to Tokyo that same day, and I went back once more to Misaka.

After that, through September, October, and up to the fifteenth of November, I worked away little by little on the second floor of the teahouse at Misaka, and with this Fuji I did not much care for — one of the "Three Great Views" —

— I held conversation until I was worn out.

There was one time we all had a great laugh.

A friend of mine, a Romanticist who taught as a university lecturer or something of the sort, stopped by my lodgings in the course of a hike, and the two of us went out onto the second-floor corridor and, looking at Fuji, said—

"It really is vulgar, isn't it. Doesn't it feel just like some picture-postcard 'Honorable Mount Fuji'?"

"Looking at it, I find myself embarrassed instead."

— saying such cheeky things, puffing at our cigarettes, when presently my friend, all at once,

"Oh — what's that, that figure in monk's robes?"

— said, jerking his chin toward it.

There was a small man of about fifty, clad in a tattered black robe, dragging a long staff, climbing the pass while gazing up again and again at Fuji.

"A regular Saigyo gazing at Fuji, wouldn't you say. He's got the pose down."

I felt a fondness for that monk.

"He might be some famous holy monk, after all."

"Don't be stupid, he's a beggar."

My friend was unmoved.

"No, no. There's something world-renouncing about him. The way he walks, even — he's got it down, hasn't he? Long ago, they say, the priest Noin composed a poem praising Fuji from this very pass, —"

Before I had finished speaking, my friend burst out laughing.

"Hey, look at that. He hasn't got it down at all."

The priest Noin, barked at by the teahouse's pet dog Hachi, was thrown into utter panic.

The sight of it was, to a sickening degree, unseemly.

"No good, is it. After all."

I was disappointed.

The beggar's panic was, if anything, pathetically extreme — he scurried this way and that, and in the end flung down his staff, all composure lost, lost entirely, and fled, beaten.

Truly, he hadn't got it down at all.

So it came to this: if Fuji was vulgar, the monk was vulgar too — and even recalling it now, it strikes me as absurd.

A mild-mannered young man of twenty-five named Nitta, who worked at the post office in a long, narrow town called Yoshida at the foot of the mountain below the pass, learned from the mail that I was staying here, so he said, and came calling at the teahouse on the pass.

We talked for a while in my room upstairs, and once we had grown a little easy with each other, Nitta said, laughing, that actually he had two or three companions, and they had all meant to come and impose on me together, but when it came down to it, they had all lost their nerve — Mr. Dazai, they said, is a terrible decadent, and what's more a moral bankrupt, so it was written in Mr. Sato Haruo's novel — and they had never imagined he would be such a serious, proper sort of person, so he hadn't been able to force them all to come along.

Next time, I'll bring them all.

Would that be all right?

"That would be fine, of course."

I gave a wry laugh.

"So then, you mustered up a desperate courage and came, as your friends' representative, to scout me out?"

"It was a suicide squad."

Nitta was frank about it.

"Last night, too, I read through Mr. Sato's novel once more, and came prepared for the worst, in various ways."

I was looking at Fuji through the glass door of the room.

Fuji stood there, hulking, silent.

What a fine fellow, I thought.

"Good, isn't it. Fuji really does have something going for it, after all. Doing a fine job of it."

I thought I could never match Fuji.

Ashamed of my own love and hatred flickering restlessly this way and that, I thought: Fuji really is a fine fellow, after all.

Doing a fine job of it, I thought.

"Doing a fine job of what?"

My words seemed to strike Nitta as funny, and he laughed with a knowing look.

After that, Nitta brought various young men along.

They were all quiet sorts.

They all called me sensei.

I took that seriously.

There is nothing about me to be proud of.

No learning.

No talent.

My body is soiled, and my heart, too, is poor.

But suffering, at least, I have been through enough of that I could be called sensei by these young men and receive it in silence.

That much, and no more.

A pride as slight as a single straw.

But that much pride, at least, I want to hold on to plainly.

I, who have been spoken of as a selfish, spoiled child — how many people, I wonder, have ever known the suffering hidden behind that?

Nitta, and another young man named Tanabe who was skilled at composing tanka — the two of them were readers of Mr. Ibuse's work, and with that reassurance, I grew closest of all with these two.

They took me to Yoshida once.

It was a dreadfully long, narrow town.

It had the feel of a place at the foot of the mountain.

Blocked from both sun and wind by Fuji, it seemed like a stalk stretched thin and spindly, a dark, chilly sort of town.

Clear water runs along the road.

This seems to be characteristic of towns at the mountain's foot; in Mishima, too, clear water flows briskly through the whole town in just this way.

The people of that region earnestly believe it is Fuji's melted snow, flowing down.

The water at Yoshida, compared with the water at Mishima, is both meager in volume and dirty.

Watching the water, I talked.

"In some Maupassant story, it says a certain young lady swam across a river every night to meet her noble lover — but what did she do about her clothes, I wonder? Surely she wasn't naked."

"I suppose not."

The young men thought it over too.

"Maybe a bathing suit?"

"Or did she put her clothes on top of her head, tie them on, and swim like that?"

The young men laughed.

"Or else, she went in wearing her clothes, and met the noble lover soaking wet, and the two of them dried her off by the stove? But then, what about when she went home? All that trouble drying her clothes, only to soak them through again and swim back. Worrying, isn't it. It would be easier if the noble lover came swimming over instead. A man can swim in nothing but his loincloth and it isn't so unseemly. Was the noble lover a hammer — couldn't swim a stroke?"

"No, I think it's because the young lady was the one deeply in love."

Nitta was in earnest.

"Maybe so. The young ladies in foreign stories are brave, and lovable. Once they fall in love, they'll swim a river just to meet him. In Japan, it doesn't go that way. There's some play or other, isn't there — a river runs down the middle of the stage, and on either bank a man and a princess carry on in grief. At a time like that, there's no need at all for the princess to grieve. What if she just swam across? Watching the play, it looks like an awfully narrow river. What if she'd just gone splashing across? That kind of grieving is meaningless. I have no sympathy. Asagao's Oi River, now, that was a real flood, and besides, Asagao was blind, so I have some sympathy for her — but even she could have swum, if it came to that. Clinging to a stake in the Oi River, resenting the heavens — what's the use in that. Oh, there's one. There's one brave soul in Japan too. That one's tremendous. Do you know her?"

"Is there one?"

The young men's eyes lit up too.

"Kiyohime. Chasing after Anchin, she swam the Hidaka River. Swam like mad. That one's tremendous. According to some book or other, Kiyohime was only fourteen at the time."

Walking along the road, talking such nonsense, we arrived at a quiet, old-fashioned inn on the outskirts of town that seemed to be an acquaintance of Tanabe's.

We drank there, and Fuji was fine that night.

Around ten at night, the young men left me alone at the inn and each went home.

Unable to sleep, I stepped outside in my padded kimono.

It was a dreadfully bright moonlit night.

Fuji was fine.

Bathed in moonlight, it seemed to turn translucent blue, and I felt as though I had been bewitched by a fox.

Fuji was so blue it seemed to drip.

It felt as though phosphorus were burning.

Will-o'-the-wisp.

Fox-fire.

Fireflies.

Plume grass.

Kudzu leaves.

Feeling as though I had no feet at all, I walked straight on down the night road.

Only the sound of my clogs, as if it belonged to some other creature and not to me, went clip-clop, clip-clop, ringing out impossibly clear.

Turning softly around, there was Fuji.

Burning blue, floating in the sky.

I let out a sigh.

A patriot of the Restoration.

The Tengu of Kurama.

I thought myself just that.

Affecting a bit of a pose, I walked with my hands tucked into my kimono.

I began to think myself quite a fine fellow indeed.

I walked a great distance.

I dropped my purse.

It held some twenty fifty-sen silver coins, so it must have grown too heavy and slipped smoothly out from my breast.

Strangely, I remained unconcerned.

If I had no money, I could simply walk back to Misaka on foot.

I walked straight on as I was.

Then, all at once, it occurred to me that if I walked back exactly the way I had come, the purse would still be there.

With my hands still tucked in my kimono, I strolled leisurely back the way I'd come.

Fuji.

Moonlit night.

A patriot of the Restoration.

I dropped my purse.

I thought it made for quite an interesting romance.

The purse lay gleaming in the middle of the road.

Of course it was there.

I picked it up, went back to the inn, and slept.

I had been bewitched by Fuji.

That night, I was a fool.

Utterly without will.

Even now, remembering that night, I feel a strange lassitude.

After spending the night in Yoshida, when I returned to Misaka the next day, the teahouse mistress smiled a knowing smile, while her fifteen-year-old daughter turned up her nose at me.

Wanting to let them know, without saying so outright, that I hadn't been off doing anything unseemly, I launched into a detailed account of the previous day's doings, unasked.

The name of the inn I'd stayed at, the taste of the sake in Yoshida, Fuji under the moon, dropping my purse — I told them everything.

The daughter's mood improved too.

"Mister! Get up and look!"

One morning, the daughter cried this out shrilly from outside the teahouse, so I got up reluctantly and went out onto the corridor to look.

The daughter's cheeks had flushed bright red with excitement.

Wordlessly, she pointed at the sky.

I looked, and there was snow.

I caught my breath.

Snow had fallen on Fuji.

The summit shone, dazzling white.

I thought: the Fuji of Misaka isn't something to be laughed off, after all.

"Good, isn't it."

When I praised it, the daughter said proudly,

"Splendid, isn't it?"

— using such fine language, and then, "Is the Fuji of Misaka still no good, even like this?"

— she said, crouching down.

Since I had all along been telling her that this kind of Fuji was vulgar and no good, she may have been secretly downcast about it.

"After all, Fuji is no good unless it has snow on it."

Putting on a knowing face, I revised my teaching accordingly.

Wearing my padded kimono, I wandered the mountainside and gathered a double handful of evening primrose seeds, then sowed them behind the teahouse, saying,

"Listen, these are my evening primroses, understand? I'm coming back next year to see them, so don't you go throwing your washing water here."

The daughter nodded.

The particular reason I chose evening primroses was that I had come to be convinced that evening primroses suit Fuji remarkably well.

That teahouse on Misaka Pass was, one might say, a lone house in the mountains, so mail was not delivered there.

From the top of the pass, jolted along by bus for some thirty minutes, one arrives at the foot of the pass, at a village on the shore of Lake Kawaguchi called Kawaguchi-mura, a literally impoverished hamlet; my mail was held at the post office there, in Kawaguchi-mura, and I had to go out to collect it about once every three days.

I chose fine days to go.

The woman conductor on this bus route did not offer any particular commentary on the scenery for the benefit of sightseers.

And yet, now and then, as if suddenly remembering, she would explain in a thoroughly prosaic tone — that's Mitsu-toge, over there is Lake Kawaguchi, there's a fish called wakasagi — a listless sort of commentary, more like muttering to herself, which she let the passengers overhear.

From the Kawaguchi post office I received my mail, and once more jolted by the bus back toward the teahouse on the pass, an old woman of about sixty sat properly beside me — pale, fine-featured, dressed in a deep brown hifu coat, closely resembling my own mother — when the conductor, as though suddenly remembering, called out — not quite an explanation, and not quite a solitary exclamation of her own — "Everyone, Fuji is showing itself well today, isn't it," and at that, young office workers with rucksacks on their backs, and women got up in elaborate traditional hairstyles, carefully covering their mouths with handkerchiefs, dressed in silk like geisha, all twisted their bodies around at once and thrust their heads out the windows, gazing anew, as if seeing it for the first time, at that utterly unremarkable triangular mountain, letting out fatuous little cries of 'ah' or 'oh,' and the inside of the bus, for a moment,

grew abuzz with chatter.

But the elderly lady beside me, perhaps harboring some deep anguish in her breast, unlike the other sightseers, did not so much as glance at Fuji, and instead sat gazing fixedly at the cliff along the mountain road on the side opposite Fuji; the sight of this struck me as pleasing to the point of numbing my whole body, and I too wanted to show this old woman a lofty, nihilistic heart, as if to say that I had no wish to look at a vulgar mountain like Fuji either — wanting, though no one had asked me to, to display some show of sympathy, as if to say I understood entirely her suffering, her loneliness — so I edged softly closer to her, as though nestling up to her, and, taking the same posture as the old woman, gazed vacantly toward the cliff along with her.

The old woman, too, must have felt some measure of ease with me, for she murmured, absently, a single remark:

"Oh — an evening primrose."

So saying, she pointed with a slender finger at a single spot beside the road.

The bus swept past in an instant, but in my eyes, the single golden evening primrose I had glimpsed for just that moment remained, its petals vivid, unfaded.

Standing in splendid confrontation with the 3,778-meter mass of Mount Fuji, not wavering in the slightest — what should I call it, I want to say a flower of adamantine strength — that evening primrose, standing so bravely upright, was fine.

The evening primrose suits Fuji remarkably well.

Even past the middle of October, my work crept along, making no progress.

I longed for people.

With the clouds beneath the wild geese burning red in the sunset, I stood alone on the second-floor corridor smoking a cigarette, deliberately paying no attention to Fuji, staring instead at the mountain's autumn leaves, red as if dripping with blood.

I called out to the teahouse mistress, who was sweeping up fallen leaves in front of the shop.

"Ma'am! It'll be good weather tomorrow, won't it."

My own voice came out so keyed-up it startled even me, nearly a shout of joy.

The woman paused her broom, raised her face, and frowned in puzzlement,

"Is something happening tomorrow?"

Asked this, I was at a loss.

"Nothing."

The woman burst out laughing.

"You must be lonely. Why not climb one of the mountains?"

"Climbing a mountain is pointless, since you only have to come right back down again. Whichever mountain you climb, all you see is the same Mount Fuji, and just thinking of that makes my spirits sink."

My remark must have struck her as odd.

The woman only gave a vague nod and went back to sweeping the dead leaves.

Before sleeping, I would quietly draw back the curtain in my room and look at Fuji through the glass window.

On nights when the moon was out, Fuji stood pale blue, like the figure of a water sprite.

I let out a sigh.

Ah, Fuji can be seen.

The stars are large.

Tomorrow will be fine weather — that alone was, faintly, the whole of my joy at being alive, and then I would quietly draw the curtain shut again and go straight to sleep; but when I thought that fine weather tomorrow would make not the slightest difference to me one way or another, it struck me as absurd, and I gave a wry, private laugh alone under the covers.

It was a painful business.

My work — not so much the pain of the pure act of putting brush to paper, no, that act was, if anything, actually a pleasure to me; it wasn't that, but rather my view of the world, the thing called art, the literature of tomorrow, what one might call newness itself — about these things I was still fumbling, agonizing, and, without exaggeration, writhing in torment.

Something simple, something natural, and thus something concise and vivid — to seize hold of that in a single swift motion, and transfer it straight onto paper just as it was — there was nothing else for it, I thought, and when I thought this, the very shape of Fuji before my eyes took on another meaning as it met my sight.

This shape, this expression, was, after all, perhaps the very beauty of what I had in mind as "singular expression" —

— so I began, a little, to make my peace with Fuji, but still there was something about this Fuji's all-too-log-like simplicity that left me stumped; if this were good, then a Hotei figurine ought to be good too, and a Hotei figurine I simply cannot abide — that sort of thing strikes me as no good expression at all — and so this shape of Fuji, too, must be wrong somewhere, this isn't it, I found myself perplexed all over again.

Morning and evening, gazing at Fuji, I passed my days in gloom.

At the end of October, a party of prostitutes from the town of Yoshida at the foot of the mountain came up to Misaka Pass, packed into five automobiles — this must have been, I imagine, their one day of freedom granted perhaps once a year.

I watched the scene from the second floor.

Set down from the cars, the women, in all their various colors, at first, like a flock of carrier pigeons dumped out of a basket, had no notion which way to walk, and only huddled together, milling about, jostling and shoving each other in silence; but presently, little by little, that strange tension loosened, and they each began to wander off, each in her own direction.

Some quietly chose picture postcards laid out at the teahouse front, some stood gazing at Fuji — it was a dark, forlorn scene, one I could hardly bear to watch.

Even the reckless, life-risking sympathy of one man upstairs could add nothing at all to the happiness of these women.

I could only go on watching.

Let those who suffer, suffer.

Let those who fall, fall.

It is no concern of mine.

That is the way of the world.

So I forced myself to affect a cold indifference, looking down on them from above — but I was, in fact, in quite considerable pain.

I'll ask Fuji.

The thought struck me suddenly.

Hey, look after these women for me, will you — with that feeling I looked up, and Fuji, standing there hulking beneath the cold sky, looked to me just then like some great crime boss, arms folded inside a padded kimono, arrogantly at his ease; having thus entrusted the matter to Fuji, I felt greatly relieved, and, my heart lightened, I took the teahouse's six-year-old boy and the shaggy dog named Hachi, abandoned the party of women, and set off to play near the tunnel by the pass.

At the mouth of the tunnel, a thin woman of about thirty was gathering, in silence, alone, some sort of unremarkable wildflowers.

Even as we passed by her, she did not so much as turn around, but went on picking the flowers with real absorption.

This woman too, while I'm at it, please — I looked up and asked this of Fuji as well, and then, taking the child's hand, walked briskly into the tunnel.

Feeling the tunnel's cold groundwater drip onto my cheeks and the back of my neck, I walked with deliberately long strides, telling myself: none of my business.

Around that time, my marriage talk had also come to something of a stall.

It had become clear that no help whatsoever would be coming from my hometown, and I found myself at a loss.

I had made the self-serving assumption, all on my own, that I would at least get some hundred yen in support, and with that, I meant to hold a modest but solemn wedding, and earn the rest of the expenses of setting up a household through my own work.

But after two or three exchanges of letters, it became clear that no help at all would be coming from my family, and I was at my wit's end.

Resolved that if the match were refused after this, there would be nothing for it, I decided that in any case I would go and lay the whole matter out plainly before them, and, alone, I went down the pass to call at the young woman's house in Kofu.

Fortunately, the young woman too was at home.

I was shown into the drawing room, and, before the young woman and her mother, confessed the whole state of affairs.

At times I fell into a speechifying tone, and was embarrassed by it.

But I felt I had, on the whole, told it fairly honestly, through to the end.

The young woman, calmly, said,

"So then, is your family opposed to it?"

— tilting her head as she asked me.

"No, it's not that they're opposed, exactly,"

I said, pressing my right palm quietly against the table, "it seems to be more a matter of, do it on your own — that sort of thing."

"That will do quite well."

The mother said, laughing gracefully, "We too, as you can see, are not wealthy people, and an elaborate ceremony would only be an embarrassment to us in return; so long as you yourself have love, and zeal for your work, that alone will be quite enough for us."

I forgot even to bow, and for a while gazed at the garden in a daze.

I was aware of a heat behind my eyes.

I resolved to be a good son to this mother.

On my way back, the young woman saw me off as far as the bus stop.

As we walked, she said,

"Well then. Shall we get to know each other a little more?"

— which was a rather affected thing to say.

"No. That's quite enough already."

The young woman was laughing.

"Is there anything you'd like to ask?"

More and more foolish, this.

"There is."

I meant to answer honestly, whatever I was asked.

"Has it snowed on Mount Fuji yet, I wonder?"

I felt deflated by the question.

"It has. Near the summit, —"

— I began to say, and then, glancing ahead by chance, I saw Fuji, right there.

It struck me as strange.

"What's this. You can see Fuji from Kofu too, can't you. Making a fool of me."

— I ended up speaking in a rough, insolent tone, "That was a foolish question just now. Making a fool of me."

The young woman looked down and giggled,

"But you're staying at Misaka Pass, after all, and I thought it would be rude not to ask something about Fuji."

I thought her a funny sort of girl.

Coming back from Kofu, I found my shoulders so badly stiffened I could hardly breathe.

"It's good, isn't it, ma'am. Misaka really is good, after all. I even feel as though I've come home."

After dinner, the mistress and her daughter took turns pounding my shoulders for me.

The mistress's fists were hard and sharp.

The daughter's fists were soft, and not much use.

Told by me, harder, harder, the daughter fetched a piece of firewood and used that to pound my shoulders, thump, thump.

I had strained myself so hard in Kofu, exerted myself so single-mindedly, that nothing less would loosen my shoulders.

For two or three days after returning from Kofu, I was, as might be expected, in a daze, with no urge to work at all; I sat before my desk doing aimless scribbles, smoked through seven or eight boxes of Bat cigarettes, and lay down and sang, over and over, that song about how even a diamond must be polished, and could not get a single page of my novel written.

"Mister. You went to Kofu, and you've gotten worse, haven't you."

One morning, as I sat with my chin propped on my hand at the desk, eyes closed, thinking of this and that, the fifteen-year-old daughter, wiping the alcove behind me, said this in a tone genuinely vexed, somewhat sharp-edged.

I didn't even turn around, and said,

"Is that so. Have I gotten worse."

The daughter, not pausing her wiping,

"Yes, worse. These past two or three days, your work hasn't gone anywhere at all, has it. Every morning it's my greatest pleasure to gather up the manuscript sheets you've scattered about and put them in order by number. When you've written a lot, I'm happy. Last night too, I crept up to the second floor to check on you, did you know that? And there you were, mister, fast asleep with the covers pulled clean over your head."

I thought this a precious thing.

To put it in grand terms, this was pure, unmixed cheering for a human being's effort to live on.

Not thinking of any reward at all.

I thought the girl beautiful.

By the end of October, the autumn colors on the mountain had darkened and turned dingy, and then, all at once, one night there was a storm, and before my eyes the mountain transformed into stark black winter trees.

Sightseers now numbered scarcely more than a handful.

The teahouse too grew forlorn; from time to time the mistress would take her six-year-old boy and go off to shop in Funatsu or Yoshida at the foot of the pass, leaving the daughter alone behind, and with no sightseers about, there were days when the girl and I, just the two of us, spent the whole day quietly on the pass.

Growing bored upstairs, I would wander about outside, and, drawing near the girl doing the washing behind the teahouse,

"Boring, isn't it."

— I said loudly, and when I gave her a casual smile, the girl looked down, and peering at her face, I was startled.

She was on the verge of tears.

It was plainly a feeling of fear.

I see, I thought, bitterly, and turned sharply about, walking on and on, roughly, through a thoroughly unpleasant mood, along the narrow mountain path thick with fallen leaves.

After that, I was careful.

Whenever the girl was alone, I made a point of staying in my room upstairs as much as possible.

When guests happened to come to the teahouse, partly to keep watch over the girl, I would tramp downstairs and sit myself in a corner of the teahouse, drinking my tea slowly.

Once, a guest in bridal dress, accompanied by two old men in crested formal wear, arrived by automobile and rested a while at the teahouse on this pass.

That time too, only the girl was at the teahouse.

I, as usual, came down from upstairs, sat in a corner chair, and smoked a cigarette.

The bride wore a long kimono patterned along the hem, a gold brocade sash on her back, and a bridal headpiece — grand, formal wedding attire in every respect.

She was such an utterly extraordinary guest that the girl had no idea how to handle her, and after simply pouring tea for the bride and the two old men, stood quietly as if hiding behind me, watching the bride's appearance in silence.

On the one great day of her whole life — she must have been going from the far side of the pass to be married into Funatsu or Yoshida on this side, and on the way, to rest a moment here at the top of the pass and gaze at Fuji — even watching from the sidelines, it felt so romantic it was almost ticklish, and presently the bride slipped quietly out of the teahouse, stood at the edge of the cliff in front of it, and gazed at Fuji at her leisure.

She stood with her legs crossed in an X, a bold sort of pose.

What a self-possessed woman, I thought, and went on admiring the bride, the bride and Fuji together, when before long the bride, facing Fuji, gave a great yawn.

"Oh!"

— came a small cry from behind me.

The girl, too, it seemed, had caught that yawn instantly.

Presently the bridal party climbed back into the automobile that had been kept waiting, and went down the pass — but afterward, the bride was talked about mercilessly.

"She's used to it. That one, she's got to be on her second time, no, more like her third. With the groom waiting down at the foot of the pass, getting out of the car to gaze at Fuji — if it were really her first time as a bride, there's no way she could pull off something so brazen."

"She yawned."

The girl, too, expressed her agreement with real force.

"Opening her mouth that wide to yawn — how shameless. Mister, you mustn't ever take a bride like that."

I blushed, unbecomingly for my age.

My marriage talk, too, gradually turned for the better, and I ended up leaving everything in the hands of a certain senior friend.

It was arranged that the wedding, too, with only two or three family members in attendance, would be held, however modestly, with solemnity, at that senior friend's house, and I found myself moved by the kindness of people, as excited as a boy.

Once November came, the cold at Misaka grew unbearable.

The teahouse brought in a stove.

"Mister, it must be cold upstairs. Why not do your work by the stove?"

So the mistress said, but since I am the sort who cannot work with someone watching, I declined.

Worried, the mistress went down to Yoshida at the foot of the pass and bought a kotatsu.

I burrowed into it in my room upstairs, and truly wished to thank the people of this teahouse for their kindness from the bottom of my heart; but by now, looking at Fuji, some two-thirds of its whole form capped with snow, and confronted with the desolate winter trees of the nearby mountains, it seemed pointless to go on enduring the skin-piercing cold of this pass any longer, and I resolved to come down the mountain.

The day before I came down the mountain, I was sitting in a chair at the teahouse, wearing two padded kimonos layered one over the other, sipping hot coarse tea, when two young women, perhaps typists, intelligent-looking, dressed in winter coats, came walking from the direction of the tunnel, laughing and chattering about something, and, suddenly catching sight of the pure white Fuji before them, stopped short as if struck; then, with the air of consulting each other in whispers, one of them, a fair-skinned girl wearing glasses, came smiling toward me.

"Excuse me. Would you press the shutter for us?"

I was flustered.

I am not at all well versed in machinery, I have no interest whatsoever in photography, and on top of that, dressed as I was in two padded kimonos, so disreputable a sight that even the teahouse people laughed and said I looked like a mountain bandit — being asked such a fashionable favor by, presumably, some stylish young lady from Tokyo threw me into considerable inward confusion.

But then I reconsidered — even dressed like this, perhaps, to the eye of one who knew how to look, there was still, somewhere about me, a certain delicate refinement, and I might well appear to be a man deft enough to handle a camera shutter — with that thought lending me a slightly buoyant feeling, I feigned composure, took the camera the girl held out, asked, in a tone of studied nonchalance, just how the shutter worked, and then, trembling all the while, peered into the lens.

In the middle, a great Fuji; below it, two small poppy blossoms.

The two of them were wearing matching red coats.

The two of them drew close together, as if clinging tightly to one another, and their faces turned suddenly, sternly serious.

I found it unbearably funny.

My hand holding the camera shook, and there was nothing to be done about it.

Holding back my laughter, I looked into the lens again, and the poppy blossoms had grown ever more composed, stiff with seriousness.

It was simply too hard to get my aim right, so I banished the two of them from the lens altogether, and caught only Mount Fuji, filling the frame entirely — Mount Fuji, farewell, thank you for everything.

Click.

"There, it's taken."

"Thank you."

The two of them thanked me in unison.

When they got home and had it developed, they would be in for a surprise.

Only Mount Fuji would appear, looming large, with the two of them nowhere to be seen.

The following day, I came down the mountain.

First I stayed a night at a cheap inn in Kofu, and the next morning, leaning on the grimy railing of the inn's corridor, I looked at Fuji, and the Fuji of Kofu showed only about a third of its face, peeking out from behind the other mountains.

It resembled a ground cherry.

(February–March, Showa 14)