女生徒 English

Morning, the feeling when you open your eyes — it's interesting.

Playing hide-and-seek, crouching perfectly still in the pitch-dark of the closet, and then suddenly Deko-chan flings the sliding door open with a clatter, the light comes pouring in all at once, and Deko-chan shouts, "Found you!"

and the glare, and then that strange awkward pause, and then my heart starts pounding, and I straighten the front of my kimono, feeling a little embarrassed, coming out of the closet, and then suddenly I'm irritated, cross for no reason — that feeling, no, that's not it either, not quite that feeling — it's more that I just can't stand it, somehow.

You open a box, and inside there's another, smaller box, and you open that smaller box, and inside there's an even smaller box, and you open that one, and there's another, still smaller box, and you open that smaller box, and there's another box, and so on, opening seven, eight of them, and finally, at the very end, out comes a box the size of a die, and you open that one gently too, and there's nothing inside, empty — that feeling, that's a little closer.

That thing about waking up with a snap — that's a lie.

It's murky, murky, and then little by little the starch settles to the bottom, and bit by bit the clear part rises to the top, and finally, exhausted, your eyes open.

Morning has a kind of hollow, bald look to it, somehow.

So many sad things come flooding into my chest, one after another, and I can't stand it.

I hate it.

I hate it.

In the morning I'm at my ugliest.

Both my legs feel utterly worn out, exhausted, and I don't want to do anything anymore.

Maybe it's because I don't sleep deeply.

That thing about mornings being healthy — that's a lie too.

Mornings are gray.

Always, always the same.

The emptiest time of all.

Lying in bed in the morning, I'm always a pessimist.

It gets to be too much.

All sorts of shameful regrets pile up at once and clog my chest, and I writhe in agony.

Mornings are cruel.

"Father,"

I try calling out in a small voice.

Strangely bashful, strangely happy, I get up and quickly fold the bedding.

As I lift the futon, I let out a grunt — "heave-ho" — and it startled me.

Until now, I never thought of myself as the kind of woman who'd let out a coarse word like "heave-ho."

Heave-ho — it sounds like some old woman's grunt, disgusting.

Why did such a sound come out of me?

It's as if somewhere inside my body there's an old woman living there, and it makes me feel awful.

From now on, I'll be careful.

Just like when you're sneering at someone's vulgar way of walking, and then suddenly notice you're walking the exact same way yourself — I felt terribly deflated, like that.

In the morning I never have any confidence.

Still in my nightclothes, I sit down in front of the mirror stand.

Without my glasses on, when I peer into the mirror, my face looks a little blurred, soft and moist.

Of all the things about my face, I hate my glasses the most, but there's a certain goodness to being without them that other people can't understand.

I like taking off my glasses and looking at things far away.

Everything goes hazy, dreamlike, like a peep-show picture, wonderful.

None of the dirty things are visible at all.

Only the big things come into my eyes — only vivid, strong colors, only light.

I like looking at people without my glasses on too.

Everyone's face looks kind, pretty, smiling.

And when I've got my glasses off, I never feel like fighting with anyone, or saying anything spiteful.

I just stay quiet, blank.

And thinking that at times like that I must look good-natured to other people too, that only makes it worse — I go blank and relax, wanting to be babied, and my heart turns very gentle.

But still, I hate my glasses.

Once you put glasses on, the whole feeling of a face disappears.

All the feelings a face gives rise to — romance, beauty, intensity, weakness, innocence, sorrow — glasses block out every bit of it.

And besides, it's almost comical how impossible it becomes to speak with your eyes.

Glasses are a monster.

Maybe because I always hate my own glasses, I think having beautiful eyes must be the very best thing.

Even with no nose, even with the mouth hidden, if the eyes are the kind that, when you look into them, make you feel you must live more beautifully — that's the kind of eyes I want.

My eyes are only big, nothing more.

When I stare hard at my own eyes, I get discouraged.

Even Mother says they're dull, boring eyes.

Eyes like this must be what people mean by eyes with no light in them.

Lumps of coal, I think, and it's discouraging.

Because that's how it is, you see.

It's awful, really.

Every single time I face the mirror, I think hard about how I want moist, lovely eyes.

Eyes like a blue lake, eyes like lying in a blue meadow gazing up at the vast sky, with clouds drifting across and reflecting now and then.

Even the shadow of a bird reflected clearly.

I'd love to meet lots of people with beautiful eyes.

May, starting this morning — thinking that made me feel a little bit lighthearted.

I really am happy, after all.

I think summer must be near now.

Going out into the garden, the strawberry blossoms catch my eye.

The fact that Father died feels strange to me.

Dying, and being gone — that's a thing hard to understand.

It doesn't sit right in my chest.

My older sister, and people I've parted from, and people I haven't seen in a long while — I find myself missing them.

Somehow in the mornings, things that are past, people from long ago, come back to me with an unpleasant closeness, flat and stale like the smell of pickled radish, and I can't stand it.

Jappy and Kaa (he's such a pitiful dog that I call him Kaa) came running up together, the two of them tangled up with each other.

I lined the two of them up in front of me and made a great fuss over Jappy alone.

Jappy's pure white fur shines, beautiful.

Kaa is dirty.

While I'm making a fuss over Jappy, I know perfectly well that Kaa is standing beside us looking like he's about to cry.

I know too that Kaa is a cripple.

Kaa makes me sad, and I hate that.

He's so pitiful, so unbearably pitiful, that I go and treat him cruelly on purpose.

Kaa looks like a stray dog, so there's no telling when the dog-catcher might come for him.

With legs like that, Kaa must be slow to run away.

Kaa, hurry up and go off into the mountains or somewhere.

Nobody loves you, so you might as well hurry up and die.

It's not just Kaa — I'm the kind of child who does cruel things to people too.

I trouble people, provoke them.

I really am a hateful child.

Sitting on the veranda edge, stroking Jappy's head, gazing at the green leaves that soaked into my eyes, I felt a pang of misery, and something like a wish to sit down right on the bare earth came over me.

I wanted to cry.

I held my breath hard and made my eyes go bloodshot, thinking a little water might come out, and tried it, but it was no use.

Maybe I've become a woman without tears now.

Giving up, I start cleaning my room.

While cleaning, I find myself humming "Tojin Okichi" —

— humming it.

A feeling like glancing around me just a little.

It's funny, that I, who's supposed to be normally absorbed in Mozart or Bach, should unconsciously sing "Tojin Okichi" —

— of all things.

Grunting "heave-ho" when I lift the futon, humming Tojin Okichi while I clean — at this rate, I think, I'm done for.

At this rate, I can't help worrying what vulgar things I might blurt out in my sleep.

But somehow it strikes me as funny, and I stop sweeping and laugh to myself.

I put on the new undergarment I finished sewing yesterday.

At the chest I'd embroidered a small white rose.

Once I put my blouse on, this embroidery disappears from sight.

No one will ever know.

I feel rather pleased with myself.

Mother, in a great flurry over someone's marriage arrangements, went out early this morning.

Ever since I was small Mother has been devoting herself to other people, so I'm used to it, but truly it's astonishing how constantly she's in motion.

I admire her for it.

Because Father did nothing but study, Mother took on his share of things too.

Father was about as far from anything social as a person could be, but Mother truly creates gatherings of genuinely pleasant people.

The two of them had different natures, but it seems they respected each other.

A couple with nothing ugly about them, a beautiful, peaceful couple — that's how I might put it.

Oh, how conceited, how conceited of me.

While waiting for the miso soup to warm, I sat on the edge of the kitchen doorway and gazed absently at the copse of trees across the way.

Then it struck me that in the past, and again in times to come, I must have sat like this, in this very kitchen doorway, in exactly this posture, thinking exactly the same thoughts as I gazed at that same copse of trees — was gazing, will be gazing — and past, present, future all seemed to be felt at once, in a single instant, giving me a strange feeling.

This kind of thing happens to me sometimes.

I'm sitting in a room talking with someone.

My eyes drift to a corner of the table and stop there with a little click, unmoving.

Only my mouth keeps moving.

At times like that, a strange illusion comes over me.

I come to believe that once before, in this very same state, saying this very same thing, I was likewise looking at that corner of the table — and that this exact moment will come around to me again, just as it is, sometime in the future.

No matter how far into the countryside I'm walking, along some unfamiliar country path, I always think, this is a road I've walked before, sometime.

Walking along, if I pluck a bean leaf from the roadside with a quick snap, I think, right here on this road, in this very spot, I've plucked this same leaf before.

And then I come to believe that from now on too, again and again, countless times, I'll walk this road and pluck a bean leaf right here.

This kind of thing happens too.

Once, soaking in the bath, I happened to look at my hand.

And then I felt certain that, years from now, when I'm in the bath again, I'll surely remember this very moment — looking casually at my hand just now, and the little click of feeling I had while looking at it.

Thinking that gave me a somehow gloomy feeling.

And then one evening, transferring the rice into the rice tub, something ran through me all at once — calling it inspiration would be too grand, but something like it, something I want to call the tail-end of philosophy — and struck by that thing, my head and my chest went transparent right down to the corners, and I felt something like a soft settling into the business of living, a suppleness like tokoroten jelly being pushed out silently, without a sound, and I felt as if I could go on living just like that, beautifully, lightly, borne along however the waves happened to carry me.

At that moment, it was nothing so grand as philosophy at all.

A premonition of living on silently, soundlessly, like a thieving cat — that couldn't lead anywhere good, and it frightened me, if anything.

If that kind of state of mind went on for a long time, wouldn't a person end up becoming something like touched by God?

Christ.

But a female Christ — that's a horrid idea.

In the end, it's probably just because I have too much time on my hands, no hardships in life to speak of, and every day the hundreds, thousands of things I see and hear pile up faster than I can process them, and while I sit there dazed, they turn into something like ghost faces bobbing up around me.

I eat my meal alone in the dining room.

I eat cucumber for the first time this year.

From the greenness of the cucumber, summer comes.

In the green of a May cucumber there's a sadness that makes your chest go hollow, a kind of aching, ticklish sadness.

Eating alone in the dining room, I get a wild, senseless urge to go on a trip.

I want to ride a train.

I read the newspaper.

There's a photograph of Mr. Konoe in it.

Is Mr. Konoe supposed to be a handsome man?

I don't care for a face like that.

His forehead is no good.

In the newspaper, the book advertisements are the most fun of all.

Since they're probably charged a hundred yen, two hundred yen per line, per character, everyone works desperately hard at them.

Every single word, every phrase, groaned and squeezed out with all their might to wring the greatest possible effect — masterpieces of prose.

There can't be many kinds of writing in this world that cost so much money per word.

It gives me a rather satisfying feeling, somehow.

Delightful.

I finish my meal, lock up the house, and set off for school.

I don't think it's really going to rain, but even so, I couldn't help wanting to carry the nice umbrella Mother gave me yesterday, so I brought it along.

This umbrella is one Mother used long ago, back in her girlhood.

I found myself an interesting umbrella, and I feel a little proud of it.

I'd love to walk the back streets of Paris carrying an umbrella like this.

Surely, once this war we're in now is over, old-fashioned umbrellas like this, the kind that seem to carry a dream inside them, will come into fashion.

A bonnet-style hat would surely suit this umbrella perfectly.

A pink dress with a long hem and a wide-open collar, long gloves knitted of black silk lace, and on the wide-brimmed hat, beautiful purple violets pinned on.

And then, sometime in the deep green of summer, going to lunch at a restaurant in Paris.

Propping my chin idly, listlessly, watching the stream of people passing outside, someone gently taps me on the shoulder.

Suddenly music, a waltz of roses.

Ah, how absurd, how absurd.

Reality is this one shabby, oddly shaped umbrella with its spindly handle.

I feel pitiful, sorry for myself.

The little match girl.

Well then, let me go and pull some weeds on my way out.

On my way out, I pulled a few weeds in front of our gate, a little labor of devotion to Mother.

Maybe something good will happen today.

Even among weeds that are all the same, why is it that there are ones I want to pull up and ones I want to gently leave alone?

There are lovable weeds and unlovable ones, and their shapes aren't the least bit different, and yet somehow there are pitiable ones and hateful ones, so clearly divided — why is that?

There's no reason to it.

I think a woman's likes and dislikes are quite an irresponsible thing.

Finishing my ten minutes of labor, I hurry to the station.

Walking along the path through the fields, I suddenly feel a strong urge to paint.

On the way, I pass through the little path in the shrine's grove.

This is a shortcut I found all on my own.

Walking along the path through the grove, I happen to glance down and see wheat, about two inches tall, growing here and there in little clumps.

Looking at that green wheat, I understand — ah, the soldiers came again this year.

Last year too, many soldiers and horses came and rested here in this shrine's grove.

When I walked through here again some time later, the wheat was growing sturdily, just as it is today.

But that wheat never grew any further than that.

This year too, this wheat that sprouted and grew spindly, spilled from the soldiers' horse troughs — this grove is so dark, with no sunlight reaching it at all, that the poor thing will surely grow only this much and then die.

Passing out through the shrine grove path, near the station, I fall in alongside four or five laborers.

As always, those laborers hurl unspeakably foul words at me.

I found myself at a loss for what to do.

I wanted to overtake those laborers and hurry on far ahead, but to do that I'd have to thread my way between them, slip past and squeeze through.

It's frightening.

Then again, standing there silently, letting the laborers go on ahead and waiting until a good distance had opened up, would take even more nerve than that.

That would be rude, so the laborers might get angry.

My body grew hot all over, and I very nearly cried.

Ashamed of nearly crying, I smiled at those men instead.

And then I walked slowly along behind them.

That was the end of it at the time, but the bitterness of it didn't fade even after I got on the train.

I wanted, quickly, to become strong and pure enough to stay calm through such worthless things.

There was an empty seat right near the train's entrance, so I quietly set my things down there and straightened the pleats of my skirt a little, and just as I was about to sit down, a man with glasses calmly moved my things aside and sat down in the seat himself.

"Excuse me, that's the seat I found," I said,

and the man gave a wry smile and calmly went on reading his newspaper as if nothing had happened.

Thinking it over carefully, I can't tell which of us was more shameless.

Maybe it was me who was more shameless.

With no other choice, I put the umbrella and my things up on the luggage rack, hung from a strap, and while flipping through the pages of a magazine one-handed the way I usually do, meaning to read it, a strange thought crossed my mind.

If reading were taken away from me, I, who have no other experience to fall back on, would probably burst into tears.

That's how much I depend on what's written in books.

I read one book, and I fling myself into it completely, trust it, become one with it, resonate with it, and try to attach my own life onto it.

Then I read another book, and instantly, with a little turn, I switch over and act as if nothing had happened.

The talent for stealing other people's things and neatly remaking them into my own — that slyness — is my one and only special skill.

Truly, this slyness, this fraudulence, disgusts me.

If I piled up failure after failure, day after day, and did nothing but shame myself, maybe I'd grow a little more solid.

But it seems I'd manage to twist even those failures into some kind of excuse, patch things up neatly, work out a plausible-sounding theory, and put on quite a self-satisfied performance of a person struggling nobly.

(This phrase too, I've read somewhere in some book.)

Truly, I don't know which one is the real me.

When there are no more books to read, when I can't find a single model left to imitate, whatever will I do?

Maybe I'll be utterly helpless, hands and feet frozen, shriveled up, doing nothing but blowing my nose over and over for no reason.

At any rate, it's no good, going on like this every day on the train, thinking these vague, drifting thoughts.

An unpleasant warmth lingers in my body, and I can't stand it.

I think I have to do something, have to fix this somehow, but how am I supposed to get a clear grip on myself?

I think all my self-criticism up to now has been utterly meaningless.

I try criticizing myself, and the moment I notice something unpleasant, some weakness, I immediately go soft and indulgent toward it, coddle it, and conclude that you shouldn't kill the ox trying to straighten its horns — so there's no criticism left worth the name.

It would be more conscientious not to think about it at all.

In this magazine too, under the heading "The Faults of Young Women,"

various people have written pieces.

Reading along, I start to feel as though they're talking about me specifically, and it makes me a little ashamed.

And depending on who's writing, the ones I usually think of as foolish say exactly the kind of foolish-sounding things you'd expect, and the ones who look fashionable in their photographs write in fashionable turns of phrase, and it's so funny that I find myself giggling now and then as I read on.

The religious writer brings up faith right away, and the educator writes nothing but debt, debt, debt of gratitude, from beginning to end.

The politician quotes Chinese poetry.

The novelist puts on airs and uses fashionable words.

Showing off.

But still, all of them write things that are pretty solidly true, on the whole.

No individuality.

No depth.

Far removed from any proper hope, any proper ambition.

In other words, no ideals.

Plenty of criticism, but no drive to actually connect it to one's own life.

No self-reflection.

No real self-awareness, self-respect, self-restraint.

Even when they act with courage, no telling whether they could take responsibility for all the consequences.

They adapt themselves skillfully to the manner of life around them and handle it deftly, but hold no real, strong love for themselves or for the life around them.

No humility in the true sense.

Poor in originality.

Nothing but imitation.

The sense of "love" —

— that basic human feeling — is missing entirely.

Putting on refined airs, with no real refinement underneath.

And a great many other things besides, all written down there.

Truly, reading it, there's a lot that makes me flinch.

I can't possibly deny it.

But somehow, all these words written here feel oddly optimistic, as if written apart from what these people actually feel day to day — as if they just wrote it because someone asked them to.

"In the true sense of the word" —

— or "properly speaking" —

— phrases like that come up a great deal, but what "true"

love, what "true"

self-awareness actually is — nowhere is it written clearly enough to take hold of.

Maybe these people do understand it themselves.

If so, I can't say how grateful I'd be if, instead, they'd just point with authority, in a single word — go right, go left — something concrete like that.

Since we've lost our way about how to express love, if instead of saying this is wrong, that is wrong, they'd just command us firmly — do this, do that — we'd all do exactly as told.

I wonder if nobody has any confidence at all.

Maybe even the people voicing these opinions here don't hold these views all the time, in every situation.

We're scolded for not having proper hopes, proper ambitions, but if we did go and act on some proper ideal, would these people watch over us and guide us all the way through, no matter what?

We do have, however dimly, some sense of the best place we ought to go, the beautiful place we long to reach, the place where we ought to grow into ourselves.

We want to live a good life.

That in itself is a proper hope, a proper ambition.

We're desperate to have some unshakable belief we can lean on too.

But how much effort would it take to actually give shape to all of this within a girl's everyday life, as a girl?

There's the way Mother thinks, Father, my older sister, my older brothers think too.

(In words alone we say things like, how old-fashioned, but we never actually look down on our elders in life — the old people, the married people.

Quite the opposite — we surely hold them in real regard, always.) And there are relatives too, forever tied up in our daily lives.

There are acquaintances.

There are friends.

And then there's that thing always sweeping us along with its enormous force — "the world" —

— that thing exists too.

When I think of, see, consider all these things, developing my own individuality is hardly the issue at hand.

I can't help but think, well, well, surely the wisest thing is just to keep quiet, not stand out, and go along the path most ordinary people walk.

It seems awfully cruel, too, to hand down an education meant for a select few and apply it to everyone.

As I've grown older, it's become clearer and clearer to me how far apart school ethics and the rules of the world actually are.

A person who absolutely obeys school ethics ends up the fool.

Called an eccentric.

Never gets ahead, stays poor forever.

Is there such a thing as a person who never lies?

If there is, that person is an eternal loser.

Among my own relatives there's one person who lives an upright life, holding firm beliefs, pursuing ideals — living, in the truest sense of the word — and yet all the other relatives speak ill of that person.

They treat that person like a fool.

As for me, knowing full well I'd be treated like a fool and beaten down for it, I can't bring myself to develop my own thinking so far as to go against Mother and everyone else.

It frightens me.

When I was small, whenever my own feelings turned out completely different from other people's, I used to ask Mother,

"Why?"

— that's what I'd ask.

At those times, Mother would settle it with some single phrase, and get angry doing it.

She'd say I was bad, like a delinquent, and she seemed genuinely saddened by it.

I've said it to Father too, once.

Father, at the time, just laughed and said nothing.

And afterward he apparently said to Mother, "She's a child whose center is off,"

or so I've heard.

As I've grown older, I've become more and more timid about it.

Even in making a single Western dress, I've come to worry about what people will think.

Something like my own individuality — I secretly do love it, really, and I want to keep on loving it, but to embody it clearly, openly, as my own — that frightens me.

I always end up thinking I should become the kind of girl people approve of.

When a lot of people gather together, how servile I become.

I chatter away lying through my teeth, saying things I don't even want to say, things completely apart from what I actually feel.

Because I think it's more advantageous, more advantageous to do it that way.

I think it's a hateful thing.

I wish the day would come soon when morality changes completely, once and for all.

Then this kind of servility, and living out my days drip by drip for other people's opinions instead of for my own sake, would disappear too.

Oh, there — a seat opened up over there.

I hurriedly took my things and umbrella down from the rack and squeezed my way in quickly.

On my right, a middle-school boy; on my left, a woman with a baby strapped to her back, wearing a padded baby-carrying coat.

The woman, old as she is, wears heavy makeup and has her hair set in the fashionable style.

Her face is pretty enough, but at her throat the wrinkles gather in dark folds, and it struck me as pathetic, so unpleasant I almost wanted to slap her.

A person's thoughts turn out completely different depending on whether they're standing or sitting.

When I'm sitting down, I think of nothing but weak, listless things, somehow.

On the seat facing me sit four or five office workers, all around the same age, sitting there blankly.

Around thirty, maybe.

I find them all hateful.

Their eyes are dull, clouded.

No spirit in them at all.

And yet, if I were to smile sweetly at just one of these men right now, that alone might be enough to drag me down, helplessly, into having to marry that very man.

For a woman, a single smile is enough to decide her whole fate.

It's terrifying.

Strange, almost, how terrifying.

I'll be careful.

This morning I really can't stop thinking the strangest things.

For the past two or three days, the face of the gardener who's come to tend our garden keeps flickering before my eyes, and I can't help it.

Every inch of him is a gardener, and yet the feel of his face is somehow different, all the same.

To put it grandly, he has the face of a thinker.

His skin looks all the more finely made for being dark.

His eyes are good.

His eyebrows are close together too.

His nose is a great lion's nose, but that too matches his dark skin, and makes him look strong-willed.

The shape of his lips is quite fine too.

His ears are a little dirty.

His hands, now, those really do bring him straight back to being a gardener, but his face in shadow, under a black felt hat pulled down low, seems a waste to leave as a gardener's.

I asked Mother three, four times over — was that gardener a gardener from the very start, I wonder — until finally she scolded me for it.

This furoshiki I wrapped my things in today, I got from Mother on the very day that gardener first came.

That day we were doing the big house cleaning, so the kitchen repairman and the tatami man were both in the house, and Mother was sorting through the chest of drawers too, and that's when this furoshiki turned up, and she gave it to me.

A pretty, womanly furoshiki.

It's so pretty it seems a shame to tie it up.

Sitting here like this, I set it on my knees and keep gently looking at it, again and again.

Stroking it.

I want everyone on the train to see it too, but no one looks.

If someone would only just gaze at this lovely furoshiki for a moment, even that alone, I'd be willing to decide to marry him.

When I run up against the word "instinct," I feel like crying.

The sheer size of instinct, that force our will can never move — when I come to understand things like that from my own scattered moments, I feel as though I might go mad.

I go blank, wondering what on earth I ought to do.

There's no denying it, no affirming it either — it's just as if something enormous, enormous, had come down and thrown itself over my head.

And it drags me around freely, however it pleases.

There's a feeling of satisfaction in being dragged along, and then there's another, separate feeling that looks on at that with sadness.

Why can't we ever be satisfied with just ourselves, love only ourselves, for our whole lives?

It's miserable to watch instinct devouring the feelings and reason I've had up until now.

Even after the smallest moment of forgetting myself, afterward I'm left only with disappointment.

Coming to know that instinct is clearly, undeniably there, in this self and that self alike, is enough to make me want to cry.

It makes me want to call out, Mother, Father.

But then again, truth itself might, disappointingly, lie precisely in the place I find hateful, and that makes it all the more miserable.

Already Ochanomizu.

The moment I stepped down onto the platform, somehow everything felt cleared away, as if nothing had happened.

I tried hurriedly to call back to mind what had just passed through me, but nothing at all came back.

I hurried to pick up the thread of it again, but there was nothing left to think.

Empty.

At the time, some of it must have struck deep at my feelings, and there must have been painful, shameful things too, and yet once it's past, it's exactly the same as if none of it had ever happened at all.

This moment, now, is interesting.

Now, now, now — even while I hold it down with my finger, saying now, it slips away far off, and a new "now" —

— has already arrived.

Climbing the bridge stairs with a clatter, I thought, well now, what's all this.

How silly.

Maybe I'm a little too happy.

Miss Kosugi looks lovely this morning.

Lovely, like my furoshiki.

A teacher who suits that beautiful blue color.

The crimson carnation at her chest stands out too.

If it weren't for the "putting on airs" part —

— I'd like this teacher so much more.

She strikes far too many poses.

There's something forced about it, somewhere.

It must be exhausting, carrying on like that.

There's something hard to fathom in her character too.

She has a great many sides I can't make sense of.

For someone with such a dark disposition by nature, I can see her forcing herself to look cheerful.

But still, whatever else you say, she's a woman I find myself drawn to.

It seems a shame to leave someone like her as a mere schoolteacher.

In class she's lost some of her old popularity, but I, at least, am still just as drawn to her as ever.

She has the air of some young lady living in an old castle by a mountain lake.

Well, I've gone and praised her rather too much.

Why is it Miss Kosugi's talks are always so stiff, so dry?

Maybe she isn't very bright.

It makes me sad.

She's been going on and on about patriotism for a while now, but isn't that the sort of thing everyone already understands perfectly well?

Anyone at all has some feeling of love for the place they were born.

How boring.

I prop my chin on my hand at the desk and stare absently out the window.

Maybe because the wind is strong, the clouds are beautiful.

In the corner of the garden, four roses are in bloom.

One yellow, two white, one pink.

Gazing blankly at the flowers, I thought, human beings really do have some good in them after all.

It was a human being who discovered the beauty of flowers, and it's human beings who love them too.

At lunchtime, ghost stories come up.

Everyone's already squealing over the story from Yasube's older sister, one of the Seven Wonders of First High School — "The Door That Never Opens."

— squealing and shrieking.

It's interesting because it's not the clanking-chain sort of ghost story, but a psychological one.

We made such a fuss over it that even though we'd only just eaten, we were already hungry again.

Right away Mrs. Anpan treats us to some caramels.

And then everyone gets absorbed all over again in a round of horror stories.

It seems like absolutely everyone finds these so-called ghost stories fascinating, no matter who they are.

Maybe it's a kind of thrill.

And then, this isn't a ghost story, but the tale of "Kuhara Fusanosuke" —

— that story is so funny, so funny.

In afternoon drawing class, everyone goes out to the schoolyard for sketching practice.

Why does Mr. Ito always go out of his way to give me a hard time over nothing?

Today too he ordered me to be the model for his own painting.

The old umbrella I'd brought along this morning got such a rousing welcome from the whole class, with everyone making such a fuss over it, that word finally reached Mr. Ito too, and he ordered me to stand holding that umbrella by the roses in the corner of the schoolyard.

He says he's going to paint me like this and enter it in the exhibition this time.

I agreed to be his model for just thirty minutes.

It's a nice feeling, being even the slightest bit useful to someone.

But being face to face with Mr. Ito, just the two of us, is terribly tiring.

His talk is sticky and full of long-winded reasoning, and maybe because he's so conscious of me, everything he says while sketching, absolutely everything, is about me.

Answering him is such a bother, so tiresome.

He's a man who never says anything clearly.

Laughing strangely, getting bashful for a teacher, never once being straightforward about anything — it's enough to make me feel sick.

"You remind me of my sister who died,"

he says, and it's unbearable.

He's probably a good person, but he has far too many mannerisms.

Speaking of mannerisms, I've got just as many myself, if not more.

Mine, what's worse, are sly, calculated to work things cleverly to my own advantage.

Truly so affected that it's hopeless.

"I'm a lying monster who strikes so many poses that I've ended up dragged along by my own poses" —

— but even saying that is just another pose, so there's no way out of it, no moving at all.

Standing here obediently as the teacher's model, all the while I'm earnestly praying, "I want to become natural, I want to become honest."

— that's what I keep praying.

I ought to give up reading books altogether.

A life made of nothing but ideas, meaningless, conceited, pretending to know things — contempt, pure contempt.

Going on and on about how I have no goal in life, how I ought to be more active about living, about life, how there are contradictions in me or whatever — you seem to think hard and agonize over all that, but really, all you've got is sentimentality.

You're just petting yourself, comforting yourself, that's all.

And besides, you think far too much of yourself — ah, using someone with a heart as filthy as mine for a model, the teacher's painting is surely going to be rejected.

There's no way it could turn out beautiful.

It's a bad thing to think, but I can't help it — Mr. Ito looks like an utter fool to me.

The teacher doesn't even know there's a rose embroidered on my underclothes.

Standing silently in the same pose, I find myself wanting money, desperately, for no particular reason.

If only I had ten yen.

"Madame Curie" —

— that's the book I want to read most.

And then, suddenly, I find myself hoping Mother lives a long, long life.

Being the teacher's model makes me strangely miserable.

I was worn out, exhausted.

After school, I went secretly with Kinko, the temple daughter, to the Hollywood salon, and had my hair done.

Looking at the finished result, it hadn't come out anything like what I'd asked for, and I was disappointed.

However I look at it, I'm not the least bit pretty.

It struck me as pathetic.

I was thoroughly deflated.

Coming to a place like this to secretly get my hair done, I even started to feel like some filthy hen, and I regretted it deeply, in that moment.

I thought that us coming to a place like this meant we were despising ourselves.

The temple girl was thrilled, all excitement.

"Should I just go straight to a marriage meeting like this?"

she said, all reckless, and somehow, before long, she seemed to have caught the illusion that she really was going to a marriage meeting after all, and started asking, quite seriously,

"What color flower should I put in hair like this?"

and, "If I wear a kimono, what kind of obi should I have?"

— going on about it in dead earnest.

Truly a sweet, thoughtless girl.

"Who are you meeting?"

I asked, laughing, and she answered,

"Well, they say leave the rice cakes to the rice-cake man,"

with a perfectly composed face.

When I asked, a little surprised, what she meant by that, she answered that the best thing for a temple's daughter is to marry into a temple, since then you never have to worry about food for the rest of your life — and that surprised me all over again.

Kinko seems to have almost no character of her own, and precisely because of that, she's brimming with femininity.

Just because our seats happen to sit next to each other at school, though I've never gone out of my way to be particularly close with her, the temple girl tells everyone I'm her very best friend.

A sweet girl.

She sends me letters every other day and looks after me in all sorts of small ways, which I appreciate, but today she was carrying on so extravagantly that even I, finally, got sick of it.

I parted ways with the temple girl and got on the bus.

Somehow, somehow I felt gloomy.

On the bus, I saw a woman I found repulsive.

She wore a kimono with a dirty collar, and her frizzy red hair was wound around a single comb.

Both her hands and feet were filthy.

And on top of that, she had a stifling, reddish-black face that made it hard to tell whether she was a man or a woman.

And then, oh, my stomach turned.

That woman had a big belly.

Now and then she'd grin to herself, all alone.

A hen.

Even me, sneaking off to a place like Hollywood to get my hair done, I'm not the least bit different from that woman.

It brings to mind again that heavily made-up woman I sat next to on the train this morning.

Ah, how filthy, how filthy.

I hate being a woman.

Precisely because I am one myself, I understand all too well the filthiness that lives inside women, and I hate it so much it makes me grind my teeth.

It's as if that unbearable fishy smell left over from handling goldfish were soaked into my whole body, and no matter how much I wash and wash it won't come off, and thinking that day by day I too am coming to give off the smell of a female body, and having reasons of my own to believe it's true, makes me want to die just as I am now, still a girl.

I suddenly find myself wishing I could fall ill.

If I fell terribly, seriously ill, and streamed sweat like a waterfall and wasted down thin, maybe I too could become clean, pure, all cleared out.

Is there simply no escaping this as long as one is alive?

I feel like I'm starting to grasp the meaning of true religion.

Getting off the bus, I felt a little relieved.

Vehicles really are no good.

The air inside is lukewarm, unbearable.

The earth is good.

Walking with my feet on the ground, I come to like myself.

I really am a bit of a scatterbrain.

A carefree fool.

Frog, go home, go home, what did you see to send you home, gazing at the onions in the field, go home, the frog cries so go home.

I tried humming it in a small voice, and thought, what a happy-go-lucky child this is, and felt exasperated with myself, and grew resentful of this gawky beanpole of a girl who does nothing but grow taller.

I resolved to become a good young lady.

This country road home, seen day after day, I've grown so used to it that I no longer know what kind of quiet countryside it really is.

It's just trees, road, fields — nothing more than that.

Today, let me try imitating someone visiting this countryside for the very first time, from somewhere far away.

I'm, say, the daughter of a clog shop in Kanda, setting foot on the soil of the countryside for the first time in my life.

Then how would this countryside look, I wonder?

A wonderful idea.

A pathetic idea.

I put on a solemn expression and made a show of looking around, deliberately, dramatically.

Going down the little tree-lined path, I tilted my head back to gaze at the fresh green branches, letting out a little cry of, oh my, and crossing the earthen bridge, I peered into the little stream for a while, reflected my face in the water-mirror, tried barking like a dog, woof, woof, and looking at the distant fields, I narrowed my eyes into a dreamy expression and murmured, how lovely, isn't it, with a sigh.

At the shrine, another little rest.

Inside the shrine grove it's dark, so I jumped up in alarm and said, oh, how frightening, drawing my shoulders in small, and hurried through the grove, and out in the brightness beyond the grove I put on a look of exaggerated surprise, and, striving all the while to see everything fresh, fresh and new, walked with such studied care along the country road, until somehow an unbearable loneliness came over me.

In the end I plopped myself right down in the grass by the roadside.

Once I sat down in the grass, that lighthearted mood of just a moment before vanished with a little click, and I went completely, tightly serious.

And then I thought quietly, slowly, about my recent self.

Why is it that this recent self of mine is no good?

Why am I so uneasy like this?

Always frightened of something or other.

Someone said to me the other day,

"You're getting more and more vulgar, aren't you."

Maybe that's true.

I've certainly gone bad.

Become worthless.

No good, no good.

Weak, weak.

Suddenly, a loud cry nearly burst out of me.

Tch, letting out some cry like that won't fool anyone about your own cowardice, it's no use.

Pull yourself together somehow.

Maybe I'm in love.

I lay flat on my back in the green meadow.

"Father,"

I try calling out.

Father, Father.

The sunset sky is beautiful.

And the evening haze is pink.

The light of the setting sun must be melting into the haze, bleeding through it, and that must be why the haze has turned this soft shade of pink.

That pink haze drifts and sways, sinking down between the groves of trees, walking along the road, stroking the meadow, and then wraps my whole body in a soft embrace.

Down to every single strand of my hair, the pink light shines gently, faintly, and strokes me softly.

But more than that, this sky is beautiful.

For the first time in my life, I want to bow my head to this sky.

Right now, I believe in God.

What color is this, this color of the sky, I wonder?

A rose.

A fire.

A rainbow.

An angel's wing.

A great cathedral.

No, it's none of those.

Something far, far more sacred.

"I want to love everyone,"

I thought, nearly to the point of tears.

Gazing steadily at the sky, I watch it change, little by little.

Little by little it takes on a bluer tinge.

All I could do was sigh, and I felt a wish to strip myself bare.

And never before have the leaves and grass looked so transparent, so beautiful, as they did just then.

I gently reached out and touched the grass.

I want to live beautifully, I thought.

When I got home, there was a guest.

Mother had already come home too.

As always, some lively burst of laughter.

When it's just the two of us, Mother, however much her face is smiling, never lets a sound out.

But when she's talking with a guest, her face doesn't smile in the least, while her voice alone laughs on, shrill and high.

I greeted them and went straight around to the back, washed my hands at the well, took off my socks, and while washing my feet, the fishmonger came and said, sorry to keep you waiting, thank you as always, and left a big fish there by the well.

I don't know what kind of fish it is, but from the fineness of its scales, it feels like something from the northern seas.

Moving the fish onto a plate and washing my hands again, I caught the smell of a Hokkaido summer.

It brings back memories of visiting my older sister's house in Hokkaido during summer vacation, the year before last.

My sister's house in Tomakomai, maybe because it was close to the coast, always smelled of fish.

I can picture it clearly too — my sister, alone in that great, echoing kitchen in the evening, deftly preparing fish with her pale, womanly hands.

I remember, too, how at that time, for some reason, I longed to be babied by my sister, ached for it unbearably, but by then little Toshi-chan had already been born, and my sister no longer belonged to me — and thinking of that, I felt a thin, cold draft blow through me, and I could never quite bring myself to throw my arms around her slender shoulders, and stood there in the dim corner of the kitchen with a loneliness fit to kill me, gazing, until I felt faint, at her white, gentle fingers moving deftly at their work.

Everything that's past is dear to me.

Blood family is a strange thing.

With people who aren't family, the farther apart you drift, the fainter they grow, until you forget them, but with family, it's the opposite — only the dear, beautiful memories come back to mind.

The elaeagnus berries by the well are turning a faint red.

In another two weeks or so, they might be ready to eat.

Last year was funny.

One evening I was picking and eating the elaeagnus berries alone, and Jappy sat there watching silently, so, feeling sorry for him, I gave him one.

He gobbled it right up.

I gave him two more, and he ate those too.

It was so funny that I shook the tree and let the berries drop pattering down, and Jappy went at it wildly, eating them up.

What a silly creature.

A dog who eats elaeagnus berries — I'd never seen the like.

I stretched up on my toes too, picking and eating the berries.

Jappy was eating down below.

It was funny.

Remembering that made me fond of Jappy, and I called out,

"Jappy!"

I called.

Jappy came running up from the direction of the entrance, all full of airs.

Suddenly I found him so dear I could have gritted my teeth over it, and when I grabbed his tail hard, Jappy bit my hand, gently.

Feeling almost tearful, I whacked him on the head.

Jappy paid no mind at all, and lapped noisily at the water by the well.

Going into my room, the light was already on, dim and glowing.

It was dead quiet.

Father isn't here.

Even now, when Father isn't here, I feel as though some great empty seat has been left hollow, gaping, somewhere in the house, and it makes me want to writhe with the ache of it.

I changed into a kimono, gave a pretty kiss to the rose on the underclothes I'd shed, and then, just as I sat down before the mirror stand, a burst of laughter rose up from the direction of the drawing room, Mother and the others, and I felt, somehow, a wave of irritation.

Mother is fine when it's just the two of us, but when guests come, she turns strangely distant from me, cold and reserved, and it's at times like that I miss Father most, and feel saddest.

Peering into the mirror, my face looks so lively it startles me, somehow.

My face is a stranger.

Utterly unconnected to my own sadness, my own suffering, that state of mind — it lives on its own, freely, separately.

Today, without even a touch of rouge, my cheeks are flushed so brightly, and my lips too are small and red and gleaming, lovely.

I take off my glasses and try a quiet smile.

My eyes are really quite lovely.

Blue, so blue, and clear.

Maybe they've become such fine eyes because I stared so long at that beautiful evening sky.

How wonderful.

A little lighthearted, I went to the kitchen, and while washing the rice, I grew sad all over again.

I find myself missing our old house in Koganei.

My chest aches with longing for it.

In that good house, Father was there, and my older sister too.

Even Mother was young then.

When I came home from school, Mother and my sister would be talking away, sounding like they were having such fun, in the kitchen or the sitting room.

I'd get a snack, be babied by the two of them for a while, pick a fight with my sister, get scolded for it as always, and then dash outside and ride my bicycle farther and farther away.

In the evening I'd come home, and then dinner would be a happy time.

It really was happy.

No staring into myself, no ugly, jangled tension — all I had to do was be babied.

What an enormous privilege I was enjoying back then.

And utterly unaware of it, too.

No worries, no loneliness, no suffering.

Father was a fine, good father.

My sister was gentle, and I was always hanging off her.

But bit by bit, as I grew older, first and foremost I myself grew hateful, and before I knew it my privilege had vanished, leaving me bare-skinned, ugly, ugly.

I lost the ability to be babied by anyone at all, fell into brooding over everything, and my share of suffering grew and grew.

My sister married and went away, and Father is gone now.

It's just Mother and me left.

Mother too must have nothing but lonely days now.

The other day Mother said to me, "There's no more joy left in living for me now, going forward. Even looking at you, honestly, I don't feel much joy in it. Forgive me. Happiness — without your father here, it's better if it doesn't come at all."

— that's what she said.

They say that when the mosquitoes come out she suddenly thinks of Father, and when she's unpicking a seam she thinks of Father, and when she's cutting her nails too she thinks of Father, and even when the tea tastes good, she surely thinks of Father.

However much I try to comfort Mother's feelings, to be her companion in talk, it's still not the same as Father.

The love between husband and wife must be the strongest thing in this world, surely something even more precious than the love between blood kin.

Struck by such a presumptuous thought, my face went red all on its own, and I pushed my hair back with a wet hand.

Washing the rice with a swish, swish, I found Mother dear to me, pitiable, and thought from the bottom of my heart that I must treasure her.

I should undo this waved hair of mine right away, and let it grow long again instead.

Mother has always disliked my hair being short, so if I let it grow long and show her a neatly done-up style, she'd surely be pleased.

But then, going so far as that just to comfort Mother feels distasteful too.

Disgusting, really.

Thinking it over, this irritability of mine lately has a great deal to do with Mother.

I want to be a good daughter who fits closely with Mother's feelings, and yet I also hate the idea of currying her favor in some artificial way.

It would be best of all if Mother, without my saying a word, simply understood my feelings properly and felt at ease.

However selfish I may be, I would never do anything to make myself a laughingstock before the world, and however painful or lonely it gets, I keep firm hold of what matters most, and I love, love, love Mother and this house — so if only Mother trusted me absolutely and stayed carefree, untroubled, that would be enough.

I'll surely manage things splendidly.

I'll work myself to the bone.

That's the greatest joy for me now, and the very way I mean to live, and yet Mother doesn't trust me in the least, still treats me like a child.

When I say something childish, Mother is delighted — the other day, feeling foolish, I deliberately took out the ukulele and strummed away, making a show of it, and Mother looked truly, genuinely pleased, and said, playing dumb,

"Oh my, is it raining? I can hear the sound of raindrops,"

teasing me, and it seemed she really believed I was seriously absorbed in something like the ukulele, and it struck me as so pathetic that I wanted to cry.

Mother, I'm already an adult, you know.

I already know everything there is to know about the world.

So please, relax and talk anything over with me.

Even about the household finances, if you told me everything, said things are like this, so you'll have to manage too, I'd never ask you for shoes or anything like that.

I'll become a steady, frugal, thoroughly frugal daughter.

Truly, that much is certain.

And yet.

I remembered there was a song that went, ah, and yet, and yet, and I found myself giggling to myself.

When I came to my senses, I realized I'd been standing there vacantly with both hands stuck in the pot, mulling over all sorts of things like a fool.

No good, no good.

I have to get dinner out to the guest quickly.

What should I do with that big fish from before?

Anyway, I'll fillet it into three pieces and let it soak in miso for now.

Eaten that way it's sure to be delicious.

Cooking, above all, has to run on instinct.

There's a little cucumber left, so I'll make sanbaizu vinegar dressing with that.

And then my prized rolled omelet.

And then one more dish.

Ah, that's it.

I'll make rococo cuisine.

This is something I devised myself.

On each and every plate, I arrange ham, egg, parsley, cabbage, spinach, absolutely everything left over in the kitchen, in a beautiful medley of colors, laid out skillfully — it takes no real effort, it's economical, and it isn't the least bit delicious, but the table ends up looking wonderfully lively and splendid, as if it were, somehow, quite the luxurious feast.

Behind the egg, the green grass of parsley, and beside it, the red coral reef of ham peeking out, and the yellow leaves of cabbage spread on the plate like peony petals, like a fan of bird feathers, and the dripping green of the spinach — a meadow, or a lake?

When two or three plates like this are set out on the table, the guest can't help but be reminded, out of nowhere, of the court of Louis.

Not really to that extent, of course, but since I can't make truly delicious food anyway, I at least dress it up beautifully in appearance, and dazzle the guest, and fool them that way.

In cooking, appearance is everything.

You can fool people with that, most of the time.

But this rococo cuisine of mine requires quite an eye for painting.

Unless you're unusually sensitive to color combinations, it fails.

You need at least as much delicacy as I have, you know.

I looked up the word "rococo" in the dictionary the other day, and it was defined as a decorative style, splendid but empty of content, and I burst out laughing.

What a perfect answer.

As if beauty could ever have content to begin with.

Pure beauty is always meaningless, always amoral.

Obviously.

That's why I love rococo.

As always, while I'm cooking, tasting this and that, I get struck by a terrible sense of emptiness.

I grow tired to the point of death, gloomy.

I fall into a state of total saturation with every kind of effort.

Everything, absolutely everything, starts to feel like it doesn't matter anymore, however it goes.

And finally, ugh!

— seized by a fit of despair, I fling both taste and appearance into a jumbled mess, throw it all together in a rush, and serve it up to the guests with a thoroughly sullen face.

Today's guests are especially depressing.

The Imaidas from Omori, husband and wife, along with little Yoshio, seven years old this year.

Mr. Imaida, already nearly forty, has fair skin like some handsome young man, and it's disgusting.

Why on earth does he smoke Shikishima cigarettes?

Unless it's a straight cut, unfiltered cigarette, it feels somehow filthy to me.

Cigarettes should always be plain cut, nothing else.

When a man smokes something like Shikishima, it makes me suspicious of his whole character.

He keeps tilting his face up to the ceiling to blow smoke, going, hah, hah, I see, I see.

They say he's a night-school teacher now.

His wife is small, timid, and vulgar.

Over the most trivial things, she presses her face nearly to the tatami, writhing her whole body, choking with laughter.

As if there were anything funny about it at all.

And she seems to be under the mistaken impression that collapsing into such exaggerated laughter is somehow refined.

In this world as it is now, isn't it people of this exact class who are the worst of all?

The filthiest of all.

Petite bourgeoisie, I suppose you'd call it.

Petty officialdom, maybe.

Even the child is oddly precocious and smug, without a trace of honest, healthy spirit in him.

Even thinking all this, I hold every bit of it down, bow, smile, chat, coo over how sweet little Yoshio is and stroke his head — utterly lying, deceiving everyone — so honestly, the Imaidas might well be more pure and honest than I am.

Everyone ate my rococo cuisine and praised my skill, and I felt some mixture of misery and fury and an urge to cry, but even so I forced myself to look pleased, and eventually joined them and ate along too, but Mrs. Imaida's persistent, ignorant flattery finally turned my stomach so much that I firmly resolved not to lie anymore, and said,

"This food isn't the least bit delicious. There was nothing in the house, so it's just my desperate last resort."

— I meant that as a plain statement of fact, but the Imaidas, husband and wife, only laughed all the harder, delighted, saying what a clever way to put it, a desperate last resort, nearly clapping their hands over it.

Furious, I thought about flinging down my chopsticks and rice bowl and bursting into loud tears.

I held it in and forced a strained smile instead, and even Mother said,

"This child's really becoming useful, bit by bit."

Mother, who surely understood exactly how sad I felt, said that worthless thing anyway, just to please Mr. Imaida, and gave a little laugh.

Mother, you don't have to go so far as that, currying favor with someone like the Imaidas.

When Mother is facing a guest, she isn't Mother at all.

Just a weak woman.

Does losing Father really have to make her this servile?

It made me so miserable I couldn't say another word.

Please leave, please leave.

My father was a splendid man.

Kind, and of the highest character.

If you're going to look down on us just because Father isn't here, then please leave right now.

I very nearly said exactly that to Mr. Imaida.

And yet, weak as ever, I still went and cut ham for little Yoshio, served pickles to his wife, waiting on them all the same.

Once the meal was over, I retreated straight to the kitchen and began cleaning up.

I wanted to be alone, quickly.

It's not that I'm putting on airs, but it just seems like there's no need to keep forcing myself to fall in with people like that, or to laugh along with them, any more than I already have.

There's absolutely no need to show people like that any courtesy at all — no, let's say it plainly, any flattery.

I hate it.

I can't stand any more of this.

I did as much as I could possibly do.

Didn't even Mother look pleased, watching me hold myself together and act sweet today?

Was even that much all right to do?

I don't know which is better — to draw a firm line, keeping society's dealings as society's dealings and myself as myself, handling things briskly and pleasantly that way, or else to never lose myself no matter how badly people speak of me, refusing to hide behind a false face.

I envy people whose whole lives can be spent surrounded only by others as weak and gentle and warm as themselves.

If you can get through a whole life without hardship, there's no need to go looking for hardship on purpose.

That would be the better way.

Killing your own feelings to serve others must surely be a good thing, without question, but if I have to go on forcing smiles and nodding along at people like the Imaidas every single day from now on, I might well go out of my mind.

I found myself suddenly thinking, absurdly, that I could never survive prison.

Forget prison — I couldn't even manage being a maid.

I couldn't manage being a wife, either.

No, wait, being a wife is different.

If I once made up my mind, firmly resolved, that I would devote my whole life to this one person, then however hard it was, I'd work myself black with effort, and it would be worth living for, fully, because there'd be hope in it, and I could manage that splendidly too.

That much is obvious.

I'd work from morning to night, spinning round and round like a little wheel-mouse.

I'd do the laundry endlessly, on and on.

There's nothing more unpleasant than a huge pile of dirty laundry built up.

It makes me fretful, restless, almost hysterical.

It feels like I couldn't die in peace even if I died.

When I've washed every single dirty thing, not one left over, and hung it all on the drying pole, I feel like I could die that very moment and it would be fine.

The Imaidas are leaving now.

Apparently they had some business or other, and they took Mother out with them.

Mother, going along obediently, yes, yes, is bad enough herself, and this isn't the first time the Imaidas have used her for something or other, but their sheer shamelessness disgusts me so much I could hit them.

I saw everyone off as far as the gate, and standing there alone, staring absently at the road in the dusk, I felt like crying.

In the mailbox, the evening paper, and two letters.

One was for Mother, a summer sale notice from Matsuzakaya.

The other was for me, from my cousin Junji.

He's being transferred to the regiment in Maebashi, it said.

Give my regards to your mother — a brief notice, nothing more.

I can't expect officers to have some wonderfully splendid life or anything, but still, I envy that discipline of theirs, living out every single day strictly, without an ounce of waste.

With everything about their lives fixed so neatly, so precisely, it must be a relief, mentally, in its own way.

For someone like me, if I don't feel like doing anything, I can simply do nothing at all, and I'm free to do just about any bad thing I please, and if I want to study I have practically unlimited time for it, and if I'm greedy about it, I feel like just about any wish of mine could be granted — so if someone would just hand me a fixed limit, from here to here, this far and no further, I can't say how much of a relief that would be to my mind.

If someone bound me up tight and firm, I'd actually be grateful for it.

I read somewhere in some book that soldiers fighting at the front have only a single desire, which is simply to sleep deeply, soundly, and while I felt sorry for the hardship of those soldiers, I also, honestly, found myself terribly envious.

Cleanly cutting yourself off from that hateful, endlessly circling flood of baseless, tangled thoughts, and simply thirsting for sleep, sleep and nothing else — that state seems truly clean, truly simple, and just imagining it, I feel a kind of exhilaration.

Maybe someone like me, if I went and put myself through military life, got thoroughly disciplined by it, might come out a somewhat clearer, more beautiful young woman.

Even without military life, there are people like Shin-chan who are naturally honest and good, and here I am, truly a hopeless woman.

A bad child.

Shin-chan is Junji's younger brother, the same age as me, and I don't know how he manages to be such a good child.

Of all my relatives — no, of everyone in the whole world — Shin-chan is the one I love most.

Shin-chan can't see.

Losing your sight so young — what a thing to happen to him.

On a quiet night like this, alone in his room, I wonder how he must feel.

For the rest of us, even when we're lonely, we can distract ourselves a little by reading a book or looking at the scenery, but Shin-chan can't do that.

He just has to sit there in silence.

He used to study harder than anyone, and he was good at tennis, good at swimming too — how lonely, how painful it must be for him now.

Last night too, thinking of Shin-chan, I lay in bed and closed my eyes for five minutes.

Even for me, lying in bed with my eyes closed, five minutes already feels long, oppressive to my chest — and Shin-chan sees nothing at all, morning, noon, and night, day after day, month after month.

If he'd only complain, or throw a fit, or act selfish, I'd almost be glad, but Shin-chan says nothing at all.

I've never once heard him complain, or speak ill of anyone.

On top of that, his way of speaking is always cheerful, his expression always innocent.

And that's exactly what strikes straight through my chest, all the more.

Turning all this over in my mind, I sweep the sitting room, and then heat the bath.

While tending the bath fire, I sit on an orange crate, and by the flickering light of the burning coal, I finish all my school homework.

Even so, the bath still isn't ready, so I go back and reread Bokuto Kitan.

What's written there isn't anything hateful or dirty, not at all.

But here and there, the author's affectations catch my eye, and somehow that gives off a certain old-fashioned, uncertain feeling.

Maybe it's because of his age.

But foreign writers, however old they get, love their subjects far more boldly, more tenderly.

And, if anything, come across with less bitterness for it.

Still, this work is probably among the better ones in Japan.

There's a fairly honest, quiet resignation felt underneath the work, and it's refreshing.

Of everything by this author, this is the most spare, the most weathered, and I like it best.

This author strikes me as someone with a very strong sense of responsibility.

He seems so terribly, terribly hung up on Japanese morality that it seems to provoke a backlash in him, and I feel like a lot of his works turn oddly harsh because of it.

The taste for feigned wickedness that people with too much depth of feeling often fall into.

Deliberately putting on a garish devil's mask, which only ends up weakening the work.

But in this Bokuto Kitan, there's an unmoving strength within its loneliness.

I like it.

The bath is ready.

I turn on the light in the bathroom, undress, throw the window wide open, and quietly sink into the bath.

The green leaves of the coral tree peer in through the window, each leaf catching the light and shining brightly.

The stars glitter in the sky.

However many times I look again, glittering still.

Lying back, gazing up in a daze, I deliberately avoid looking at my own body, but even so, I sense its faint whiteness vaguely, somewhere in my field of vision, without fail.

Staying silent longer, it starts to seem different from the whiteness I remember from childhood.

I can't bear it.

It's unbearable, this confusion — my body growing all on its own, with no regard for how I feel about it.

There's nothing I can do about becoming an adult so rapidly, and it makes me sad.

Is there nothing left for me but to let it run its course, sitting still, just watching myself grow into an adult?

I want to keep this body of mine like a doll's, forever.

Splashing the bathwater around and pretending to be a child, I still feel weighed down, somehow.

It starts to feel as though I have no reason left to go on living, and it becomes painful.

In the field beyond the garden, some stranger's child called out, half in tears, big sister! —

— and I felt my chest struck through with a jolt.

They weren't calling for me, of course, but I found myself envying that "big sister" —

— being adored, in tears, by that child just now.

If I too had even one little brother who adored me like that, wanted to be babied by me like that, I wouldn't be living out my days so shamefully, so bewildered, day after day, the way I am now.

There would be real purpose in living, and I could make up my mind to devote my whole life to him, to serve him completely.

I really would endure any hardship at all, gladly.

Working myself up alone like that, I felt, deeply, sorry for myself.

Getting out of the bath, the stars were on my mind for some reason tonight, and I went out into the garden.

The stars look as if they're falling.

Ah, summer is near now.

Frogs are croaking here and there.

The wheat rustles, whispering.

However many times I tilt my head back and look, the stars shine on, countless.

Something from last year — no, not last year, it's already the year before now.

When I unreasonably insisted on going for a walk, Father, sick as he was, went out walking with me anyway.

Father, who always seemed young.

He taught me a little German song, something meaning "you to a hundred, and I to ninety-nine," —

— and told me stories about the stars, and made up poems on the spot, and walked along with his cane, spitting little bursts now and then, blinking that habitual blink of his — a good father.

Gazing silently up at the stars, I remember Father clearly.

One year, two years have passed since then, and I've become more and more of a hopeless daughter.

I've come to carry so many, so many secrets of my own, all alone.

Back in my room, I sit at my desk, prop my chin on my hand, and gaze at the lily on the desk.

It smells lovely.

Breathing in the lily's scent, even sitting here alone, bored, no dirty feeling ever rises up in me.

I bought this lily from a flower shop yesterday evening, on my way back from a walk toward the station, and ever since then, this room of mine feels like a completely different room, so fresh and clean, and the moment I slide the door open, the lily's scent comes drifting to me at once, and I can't say how much it helps.

Gazing at it steadily like this, I truly feel, in my body, as a physical certainty, that this surpasses even Solomon in all his glory.

I suddenly recall Yamagata last summer.

When we went up into the mountains, there were so many lilies blooming wild on the hillside partway up a cliff that I was astonished, utterly entranced.

But I knew there was no way I could ever climb that steep cliff, so however much it drew me, all I could do was stand and look.

At that moment, a miner I didn't know, who happened to be nearby, silently climbed straight up the cliff, and in no time at all came back down with an armful of lilies, more than his two arms could hold.

And without so much as a smile, he handed them all over to me.

It really was an armful, a whole overflowing armful.

Not even on the grandest stage, or at a wedding hall, could anyone have ever received so many flowers as that.

I tasted, for the first time in my life, what it's like to feel dizzy from flowers.

When I spread both arms and finally managed to hold that huge, pure white bouquet, I couldn't see a thing in front of me at all.

I wonder what that kind, truly admirable, young, serious miner is doing now.

He just went to a dangerous spot and picked flowers for me, that's all it was, but whenever I see lilies, I always think of that miner.

Opening my desk drawer and rummaging through it, I came across last summer's folding fan.

On white paper, a woman from the Genroku era sits sprawled with poor posture, and beside her, two green ground-cherries are drawn in.

From this fan, last summer rises up like a wisp of smoke.

Life in Yamagata, inside the train, yukata, watermelon, the river, cicadas, wind chimes.

Suddenly I felt a longing to take this fan and get on a train.

The feeling of opening a fan is a lovely thing.

The ribs unfold with a little rustle, and it goes suddenly light, all at once.

While I was twirling it around, playing with it, Mother came home.

In good spirits.

"Ah, what a tiring day, what a tiring day,"

she said, but her face didn't look the least bit displeased.

There's no helping it — she loves doing things for other people.

"It was such a complicated business, honestly,"

she said, changing her clothes and getting into the bath.

Coming out of the bath, the two of us sat drinking tea, and Mother smiled at me oddly, and I wondered what she was going to say, and then,

"You've been saying for a while now you want to see 'Barefoot Girl,' haven't you? If you want to go so badly, you may go. But in exchange, rub my shoulders for me a little tonight. It's more fun going out if you've earned it first, isn't it?"

I was so happy I couldn't stand it.

"Barefoot Girl" —

— was a film I really wanted to see, but lately I'd been doing nothing but playing around, so I'd been holding back, out of a sense of restraint.

Mother had seen through that exactly, and gave me a task to do, arranging things so I could go to the movies with a clear conscience, head held high.

Truly happy, truly fond of Mother, I found myself smiling without meaning to.

It felt like it had been a long, long time since Mother and I had spent an evening together, just the two of us, like this.

Mother has such a great many social obligations, after all.

Even Mother must be working hard, in all sorts of ways, not to be looked down on by the world.

Rubbing her shoulders like this, Mother's exhaustion comes through so clearly it seems to pass straight into my own body.

I must treasure her, I thought.

I felt ashamed, remembering how I'd secretly resented Mother earlier, while the Imaidas were here.

I'm sorry, I murmured quietly to myself.

I'm always thinking, always dwelling only on myself, and toward Mother I always end up leaning on her from the bottom of my heart while treating her roughly.

I'm the kind of person who completely brushes off any thought of how much pain, how much suffering that causes Mother every single time.

Ever since Father died, Mother has truly grown weaker.

I myself go on saying it's painful, unbearable, and lean on Mother completely, and yet the moment Mother leans on me even slightly, I feel a kind of disgust, as if I'd seen something filthy — that's truly, unforgivably selfish of me.

Mother and I are both just the same weak women, after all.

From now on, I want to find satisfaction in a life with just the two of us, Mother and me, always putting myself in her feelings, talking about the old days, talking about Father, and make even a single day, if that's all I can manage, a day centered entirely on Mother.

And I want to feel, truly, that my life is worth living.

In my heart I worry about Mother and mean to become a good daughter, but in my actions, in my words, I'm nothing but a selfish child.

And lately I don't even have the one clean, pure thing a child has.

Nothing but filth, nothing but shameful things.

Suffering, agonizing, loneliness, sadness — what is all that supposed to mean, really?

If I said it plainly, I think I'd die.

Knowing it perfectly well, and yet I can't bring myself to utter even one word close to it, not one noun, not one adjective.

I just get flustered, and in the end fly into a temper, acting like some kind of creature or other.

Women of the past get called slaves, self-effacing worms, dolls — but they had a womanliness far, far better than anything I have now, in the good sense of the word, and a real spaciousness of heart, and enough wisdom to bear endurance gracefully, and they knew the beauty of pure self-sacrifice, and understood the joy of service given with absolutely no expectation of reward.

"Ah, what a fine masseuse. A genius, really."

Mother teased me, as always.

"I bet, right? Because I put my heart into it. But my good points aren't just my massage skills, you know. That would be a bit sad, wouldn't it. I have other good points too."

Saying honestly what I actually thought, even to my own ears it rang wonderfully clear and refreshing, and these past two or three years, I couldn't remember ever having spoken up so innocently, so briskly, about anything.

Maybe it's only once you know your own limits clearly and accept them that a calm, new self is truly born, I thought, feeling glad.

Tonight, owing Mother thanks in all sorts of ways, once the massage was done, I read a little of Cuore to her as an extra treat.

Mother always looks somehow relieved when she sees me reading a book like that, but the other day, when I was reading Kessel's Belle de Jour, she quietly took the book from me, glanced at the cover, made a very dark face, and then, without saying a word, handed it right back to me — and after that I somehow lost the heart to keep reading it myself.

Mother has surely never read Belle de Jour herself, and yet she seems to understand it anyway, by instinct.

Reading Cuore aloud, alone, in the quiet of the night, my own voice sounds unexpectedly loud and hollow in my ears, and as I read on I sometimes feel foolish about it, and embarrassed in front of Mother.

With everything around so quiet, the absurdity of it stands out all the more.

However many times I read Cuore, I feel exactly the same stirring I felt reading it as a child, and my own heart feels honest and clean again, and I think, it really is good, but reading aloud and reading with your eyes feel so different that it takes me by surprise, leaves me at a loss, every time.

But Mother, at the part about Enrico, and at the part about Garrone, sat with her head bowed, crying.

My own mother is a splendid, beautiful mother too, just like Enrico's mother.

Mother went to bed first.

She'd been out since early this morning, so she must be quite tired.

I straightened her futon for her, patting the hem of the covers smooth.

Mother always closes her eyes the moment she gets into bed.

After that, I did the laundry in the bathroom.

Lately I have a strange habit of starting the laundry close to midnight.

It feels like a waste to spend the daytime hours splashing away at laundry, but maybe it's really the other way around.

The moon is visible through the window.

Crouching down, scrubbing away with a shh, shh, I try smiling quietly up at the moon.

The moon wore a face of not knowing anything about it.

Suddenly I became convinced that, at this very same moment, some other lonely, pitiable girl somewhere was doing her laundry just like this, and had smiled quietly up at this very same moon, had definitely smiled up at it, and I pictured it vividly, in sharp, clear color, as though I'd actually seen it through a telescope, without a shred of doubt — a suffering girl in a lone house at the top of some mountain in a distant countryside, silently doing her laundry at the back door in the dead of night, and then, in a filthy apartment corridor in some back street of Paris, a girl exactly my own age, secretly doing her laundry all alone, smiling up at this same moon.

Because truly, no one really knows the suffering any of us carry.

Once we've all grown up, this suffering, this loneliness of ours might come to seem like something faintly ridiculous, something we can look back on without a second thought, but until then, until we've fully become adults, how are we supposed to get through this long, hateful stretch of time?

No one ever teaches us that.

Is it some kind of sickness, like the measles, that you can only just leave alone and wait out?

But people die of the measles too, and people go blind from the measles.

Leaving it alone is a bad thing to do.

With all of us going on like this every day, sunk in gloom one moment, flying into a temper the next, some of us are bound, sooner or later, to stumble, to fall into ruin so completely that our bodies can never be set right again, and drag out a whole life wrecked beyond repair.

And there are people, too, who simply decide, on impulse, to kill themselves.

And after it's happened, however bitterly people in the world say, ah, if only she'd lived a little longer she'd have understood, if only she'd grown up a little more she'd have come to understand it naturally — as far as the person herself is concerned, she suffered and suffered, and even after enduring that far, straining her ears desperately to hear something, anything, from the world, all she ever got in return was some harmless lesson repeated over and over, some there, there, meant only to soothe her, and so all of us are left, endlessly, humiliatingly stood up.

We're by no means creatures of the moment, living only for now, but when someone points at some distant mountain and says, once you get up there the view is wonderful — and I know perfectly well that's true, not a shred of a lie in it — meanwhile I'm doubled over with this violent stomachache right here, right now, and they just look right past it, pretending not to see, and teach me nothing but, come now, come now, just a little more patience, once you reach the top of that mountain it'll all be worth it, that's all they ever teach.

Somebody, surely, is getting this wrong.

It's you who's wrong.

Finishing the laundry, cleaning the bathroom, and then quietly sliding open my door, the scent of lily.

It cleared my mind at once.

My heart went transparent down to the very bottom, and I settled into something like a lofty, sublime nihilism.

As I quietly changed into my nightclothes, Mother, whom I'd assumed was fast asleep all this while, suddenly spoke up with her eyes still closed, and it startled me.

Mother does this sometimes, catching me off guard.

"You said you wanted summer shoes, so while I was out in Shibuya today I stopped to look at some. Shoes have gotten expensive too, haven't they."

"It's all right, I don't really want them so much anymore."

"But you'll be in trouble without them, won't you."

"Mm."

Tomorrow, too, the same day will probably come around again.

Happiness will never come, not for my whole life.

I know that already.

But surely it's better to fall asleep believing it will come, believing tomorrow it will come.

I deliberately threw myself onto the futon with a big thud.

Ah, what a good feeling.

The futon is cold, and my back grows pleasantly, gently chilled, and before I know it I'm lost in a daze.

Happiness arrives a night late.

Vaguely, I find myself remembering those words.

Waiting and waiting for happiness, finally unable to bear it any longer, she runs away from home, and the very next day, wonderful news of happiness comes calling at the house she abandoned — but by then it was already too late.

Happiness arrives a night late.

Happiness is —

I hear the sound of Kaa's footsteps in the garden.

Pit-pat, pit-pat — Kaa's footsteps have a distinctive sound.

His right front leg is a little short, and both front legs are bowed, so his footsteps carry a lonely little irregularity all their own.

He often wanders the garden at an hour like this, dead of night — I wonder what he's doing.

Poor Kaa.

I was cruel to him this morning, but tomorrow I'll be good to him.

It's a sad habit of mine — I can't fall asleep unless I cover my face tightly with both hands.

Covering my face, I lie there quite still.

The feeling of drifting off to sleep is a strange thing.

Like a carp or an eel tugging hard at a fishing line, some heavy, leaden force pulls at my head through a thread, and just as I start to drowse off, it lets the thread go slack again.

And then I snap back to alertness with a start.

Then it tugs hard again.

I drowse off again.

Then it lets the thread go slack again, just a little.

That repeats three times, four times, and only then, at last, does it give one great, final pull, and this time it holds until morning.

Good night.

I am Cinderella, with no prince.

Do you know where I am, somewhere in Tokyo?

I will never see you again.