冬の日 English

I

The season was close to the winter solstice.

From Takashi's window he could see the trees standing in the gardens and by the gates of the houses on lower ground, their leaves stripping away day by day.

The gongon sesame had come to look like an old woman's disheveled hair; the last leaves of the cherry, burnished beautifully by the frost, had vanished; and each time the zelkova trembled rustling in the wind, portions of the landscape that had been hidden came into view.

The shrikes that had come at dawn were gone now.

Then one day, when hundreds upon hundreds of lead-grey starlings descended on the rows of oak trees standing like folding screens, the frost began to grow sharper by degrees.

With winter's arrival, Takashi's lungs began to ache.

The phlegm he spat at the plastered wellside when he washed his face in the mornings began to show a dull blood-color from its yellow-green, and sometimes it gleamed a surprisingly vivid crimson.

By the time Takashi rose from his four-and-a-half-mat room on the second floor of a lodging house, the landlady's morning laundry was long since done and the plaster had already dried.

Phlegm that fell on it would not come away even when water was poured over it.

Takashi would pick it up as if pinching a baby goldfish and carry it to the mouth of the drainage pipe.

He had reached the point where bloody sputum no longer stirred anything in him.

Yet a single vivid mass of color, sharp and clear in the cold translucent air, was always something he could not help staring at fixedly.

These days Takashi felt no desire whatsoever to live.

Each day dragged him along.

And the soul within him, having nowhere to dwell, was always chafing to escape, escape into the outer world.—

By day he would open the window of his room and gaze at the outside scene with eyes like a blind man's.

By night he would strain his ears to the sounds outside — footsteps, the kettle's singing — with the attentiveness of a deaf man.

The fragile November sunlight drawing nearer to the winter solstice, however, was fading away outside the window before even an hour had passed since he left his bed, day after day without exception.

Even the shadow cast by the house where he lived had disappeared into the low ground that had grown dark.

At the sight of it, a remorse and vexation like black ink spread through Takashi's heart.

The sunlight lingered only on the gray Western-style wooden building across the low ground, and at that hour it seemed somehow to look sadly on, as though watching a setting sun fall toward a distant horizon.

The winter sun shone even into the inside of the mailbox.

Every small pebble on the road had its own shadow, and as he looked at them, they all seemed to carry a colossal sorrow, like the pyramids of Egypt.—

On the Western-style building across the low ground, at that hour, the ghostly shadows of the paulownia trees standing in a row were reflected.

Takashi's pale tendrils, like bean sprouts drawn toward the sun, reached without his knowing it toward that gray wooden building and stroked the strange traces of shadow that had seeped into it.

Each day he stood at the open window with an empty heart until those shadows had vanished entirely.

On certain days the row of oaks supporting the northern corner of the view would dance without bending, with a steely elasticity, shaking the wind down from above.

On the low ground, its aspect transformed, the dead leaves rustled a skeleton's dance.

At such times the shadow of the paulownia seemed ready to be extinguished at any moment.

In what could no longer be called sunlight, a shadow barely worth the name still remained.

And driven by the winter gale, it gradually erased itself into the distance of that world — a world like a desert where shadows are alive.

When Takashi had watched to the end, he would begin to close the window with something like despair.

Listening to the winter gale now calling in the night alone, he sometimes heard, from somewhere far away where the lights had not yet come on, the sound of a glass door shattering.

II

Takashi received a letter from his mother.

"Since we lost Nobuko, Father has grown entirely old. Your body is not an ordinary body, so please take care of yourself. We do not wish to suffer any more hardship than this.

Lately in the middle of the night I wake as if startled by something.

My mind is anxious about you.

No matter how I try not to think of it, it is no use.

I cannot sleep for hours."

Reading it, Takashi was struck with a chill at a certain thought.

Across the night when everyone was asleep, he and his mother were tormenting and suffering over each other.

At such moments, how could one say with certainty that the ominous pulsing in his heart did not wake his mother?

Takashi's younger brother had died of spinal caries.

And his sister Nobuko too had died of lumbar caries, passing away through a landscape that had lost its will.

There, many insects had gathered around one dying insect and grieved and wept.

And both of them, after lying for a year before returning to the earth, had been taken down from the white plaster beds of white clay.

— Why does a doctor say, "One year now is worth ten years later"—

why would he say such a thing?

Takashi thought, recalling the somehow uncomfortable feeling that had risen in him when he was told this.

— As if he himself had some ideal he must reach within those ten years.

Why does he not say instead, how many more years you have before you die?

In Takashi's mind rose the scene without will that frequently appeared before him.

A tram stop on a street lined with dark, cold stone government buildings.

He was waiting for a tram there.

He hesitated — should he go home or go out to the lively downtown?

He could not make up his mind either way.

And no matter how long he waited, the tram came from neither direction.

The oppressive dark shadows of the architecture, bare rows of trees, a perspective of sparse streetlamps.—

At the distant crossroads, trams passed from time to time like aquariums.

Suddenly the scene lost all order.

Within it he felt a violent dissolution of form.

As a child, Takashi had taken a mouse caught in a trap to be submerged in a river.

In the transparent water the mouse scrambled left and right along the wire mesh, and it looked as if moving through air.

At last the mouse pushed its nose through one of the mesh openings and stopped moving.

White bubbles rose for the last time from the mouse's mouth.…

Five or six years ago, Takashi had only passed through the death promised by his illness scattering nothing but sweet sorrow.

And when he had at last noticed it, the fondness for fine food, the indolence, and the timidity that nourishment and rest had instilled in him had gradually stripped away his will to go on living.

Yet time and again he steeled himself and turned back toward life.

But before he knew it his thoughts and actions had begun to ring false, and then, losing their smoothness, they congealed.

And then that scene would appear before him.

Many men had shown a certain sign, followed a certain course, and died.

The same signs are appearing in you.

When one of the apostles of modern science first told Takashi this — something he had no right to refuse — only the name of the thing, which he had long vaguely dreaded, lingered in his mind, and his mind could not take it in.

He refused it no longer.

The white plaster bed of white clay was being prepared for the years remaining until he returned to the black earth.

There, even turning over would no longer be permitted.

When the night deepened and the watchman's clapper began to be heard, Takashi murmured from the depths of his gloomy heart.

"Good night, Mother."

The sound of the watchman's clapper, as it made its way through the neighborhood of Takashi's house with its many slopes and estates, evoked in subtly shifting echoes the places it was passing through.

The distant howling of a dog, which he had thought was the creaking of his lungs.—

Takashi could see the night watchman.

He could see his mother lying asleep.

From an even deeper and more gloomy place in his heart he murmured again.

"Good night, Mother."

III

Takashi had finished cleaning his room and now lay resting on a rattan chaise longue with the window thrown open.

Then came the cry juu-juu, and a bush warbler singing its winter song appeared and disappeared among the shadows of the hops hedge.

Juu, juu — Takashi raised his head like a cobra's hood and watched the little bird, mimicking its call with his mouth.—

He had once kept a canary at home.

Beautiful morning light filtered through the leaves.

Though the warbler was confused by the sound from his mouth, it showed none of the subtle emotion a canary or the like would have displayed in such a situation.

Plump with appetite, it had the look of something wearing a stiff little waistcoat.—

When Takashi stopped mimicking, the bird, without so much as a glance, made its way among the lower branches and was gone.

Across the low ground, the well-lit garden of a nobleman's estate facing into a valley came into view.

A red quilt was hung out to air on the yellowed and withered Korean lawn grass.—

Takashi, who had risen unusually early, felt a pleasant languor in the morning.

After a while, glancing at the red berries of the climbing bittersweet gleaming on the roof where leaves had turned brown and fallen, he stepped out the gate of the house.

In the calm blue sky where no wind blew, the ginkgo, fully turned to gold, stood quietly folding its shadow in repose.

A long wall faced with white decorative brick reflected the clear winter air with grace.

Beneath it an old woman with a grandchild on her back came walking very, very slowly.

Takashi descended the long slope and went to the post office.

In the post office where sunlight poured in, the door was opening and closing constantly, and people scattered about them the fresh air of morning.

Takashi felt as if he had not breathed such air in a long, long time.

He climbed the narrow slope very, very slowly.

Sasanqua flowers and fatsia flowers were in bloom.

Takashi was surprised to find a butterfly even in December.

In the direction it flew, points of light from horseflies busy in the sunlight darted back and forth.

"A happiness like idiocy,"

he thought.

And he crouched drowsily in the warmth of the sunlit spot.—

A little apart from that warm patch of sun, small children were playing at something.

They were boys and girls of four or five years old.

"I hope they aren't watching,"

he thought, and spat phlegm into the gutter where shallow water ran.

Then he walked toward them.

There were girls running wild.

There were boys being quiet and gentle.

Childlike lines were drawn on the road in chalk.—

Takashi suddenly thought: this is a scene I have seen somewhere before.

All at once his heart swayed.

The horsefly, stirred awake, flew off into the vague expanse of Takashi's past.

Into that serene December morning.

Takashi's horsefly had found it.

The sasanqua.

The children playing where its petals fell.—

It was, for instance, the road one would take on a rare morning when he had forgotten his writing paper and gone to school without it, and had excused himself to the teacher and hurried home to fetch it — a road seen from an unusual morning while school was in session.

It was the aspect of a sacred hour permitted to be glimpsed only at such times as this.

Thinking this, Takashi smiled.

In the afternoon, when the sun tilted to its usual angle, this thought made Takashi sad.

A faint light like sunlight remaining in an old faded photograph from childhood illuminated the things around him.

How could one who could hold no hope cherish any memory with tenderness?

Had there been, in recent times, any moment when he had sensed the brightness of this morning in his future?

And was not this morning's passing fancy itself good proof that, like a Russian aristocrat, the late breakfast — around two in the afternoon — had simply become his established habit of living?—

He descended the long slope again and went to the post office.

"Regarding the postcard I sent this morning — I have changed my mind and decided against it, so please disregard my request."

That morning he had thought of spending the winter at a warm seaside location and had written to a friend who lived there asking him to look for a rental house.

He felt a violent fatigue as he gasped his way back up the slope.

The ginkgo that had quietly stood folding its shadow in the morning sunlight had, before a day had fully passed, already been stripped sparse by the winter gale.

Its fallen leaves brightened the road that had lost the sun.

He felt a faint and gentle attachment to those fallen leaves.

Takashi came back to the path alongside the house.

From his house that sloping path ran along the top of a bluff.

The landscape he always viewed from his room was now, before his eyes, being swept by the winter gale.

In the overcast sky clouds moved with a dark and heavy bleakness.

And beneath them Takashi saw that a certain house — one where the lights had not yet come on — already had its shutters closed on the second floor.

The bare grain of the wooden shutters was exposed outward.—

Moved by a certain feeling, Takashi lingered there.

Beside him was the room in which he himself lived.

Takashi began to gaze at it with a feeling he had never before felt in all the time he had lived there.

The second floor of a house already shuttered even before the lights came on — the bare grain of those shutters suddenly dyed Takashi's heart with a traveler's longing that had nowhere to rest.

— No food to eat.

Nowhere to spend the night.

And though evening is falling, this foreign town is already turning him away.—

A dark sorrow, as though this were reality, crept over his heart.

And a kind of strange, bittersweet feeling — as if he truly had once had such a memory — came over Takashi with a sharp, sweet ache.

Why did such a fantasy arise in him?

Why did that fantasy make him so sad, and yet call to him with such intimacy?

Takashi felt as if he dimly understood.

The savory smell of grilling meat mingled with the smell of the evening frost.

Someone who appeared to be a carpenter finished with the day's work walked past Takashi with quick steps up the slope, exhaling with a faint sound.

"My room is up there."

Thinking this, Takashi fixed his gaze on his own room.

Its figure, wrapped in the dim twilight, seemed to be of no power at all against the void now spreading through the landscape like ether.

"The room I loved. The room I rejoiced to live in. Inside it are all my possessions — perhaps even, in some stray moment, the feelings of each day's living are stored within it. If I called out from here, it seems as though that ghost might open that window and thrust out its head. And yet, is that not the same, not in the slightest way different, from the effect of an inn's padded robe, left behind and discarded, which gradually begins to evoke one's own body within it? As I stand here staring at those unfeeling roof tiles and windowpanes, I find myself becoming more and more like a passerby. That unfeeling exterior would look just the same even when a man on the verge of suicide was harbored within it. — And yet, I cannot simply walk away from here as that earlier fantasy was calling me to do.

If only the lights would come on soon.

If that frosted glass in the window were to glow yellow, the heart of this passerby might imagine inside the room a person satisfied with the life he has been given.

The strength to believe in that happiness might arise."

The sound of the grandfather clock on the ground floor reached Takashi standing on the road — bong, bong…

Thinking what a strange thing to hear, his feet carried him shuffling down the slope.

IV

After the wind had swept the dead leaves first from the street trees and then from the streets themselves, even the sound of the wind changed.

When night came, the asphalt of the town began to freeze, gleaming as if penciled bright.

On such a night Takashi ventured out from his quiet neighborhood to the Ginza.

There, the gaudy Christmas and year-end sales had begun.

Friends or lovers or family — almost everyone on the pavement had a companion.

Those without companions had the expectation of meeting a friend.

And for those who had money and health even if no companion, this market of material desire had no reason to turn a cold face.

"What am I coming to the Ginza for?"

Takashi often thought this when the pavement had already begun to give him nothing but fatigue.

At such times Takashi would find himself recalling the face of a girl he had once seen on a tram.

That girl had stood in front of his seat, clinging to the hanging strap, with a modest smile on her face.

From her kimono, which fit as loosely as a padded robe, rose a neck like an "elder sister"'s —

that kind of neck.

Her beautiful face made one sense at a glance what illness she had.

Fine soft hairs shadowing porcelain-white skin.

The grime around her nostrils.

"She has surely slipped out from her sickbed," —

Takashi thought this as he watched the smile rippling and fading ceaselessly across the girl's face like wavelets.

What was she wiping away, in the way one wipes one's nose?

Like a stove from which the ashes had been shaken, a vivid flush of blood rose to her face at such moments.

Carrying within him the image of that girl, growing more pitiful by the moment as his own fatigue increased, Takashi found it troublesome to spit his phlegm on the Ginza.

Like the girl in the Grimm fairy tale from whose mouth a frog leaped with every word she spoke.

He had once seen a man spit phlegm at such a time.

Suddenly a poor clog came out and ground it underfoot.

But it was not a clog being worn by a foot.

He watched as an old man who had laid a mat on the roadside and was selling tin tops, his face showing unmistakable anger, set that clog on top of another one at the edge of the mat.

"Did you see that?"

With that feeling Takashi looked back at the passersby.

But no one seemed to have seen it.

The old man's sitting place was too close for it to catch the eye of passersby.

Besides, the tin tops the old man was selling must have been outdated even at a country candy shop.

Takashi had never once seen any of those toys sold.

"What did I come here for?"

After buying coffee, butter, bread, and writing brushes as pretexts to himself, he would sometimes buy expensive French perfume with something like fury.

At other times he would sit in the corner restaurant until the street stalls folded up for the night.

On the ceiling of the restaurant, warmed by its stove, buoyed by the piano trio, with glasses clinking, sideways glances flashing, and smiling faces surging all around, several listless winter flies were circling.

At a loss, he would find himself watching even such things.

"What did I come here for?"

Once he was outside, the gusting dry wind had already thinned the flow of people.

Late at night, when the handbills people had grabbed in the early evening were somehow gathered and blown into one corner of the street, and the spit froze the moment it landed and vanished among the fallen metal fittings of clogs — he had no choice in the end but to go home.

"What did I come here for?"

It was nothing more than the lingering pleasure of an old way of living still remaining within him.

Before long he would stop coming.

Takashi felt this with a heavy fatigue.

The nights he experienced in his room were nights that stretched on without yesterday or the night before, or likely tomorrow either — like the corridor of a hospital.

There, his old life lay stopped in an air like death.

Thought was nothing more than the plaster filling the bookshelves.

The star chart hanging on the wall was gathering dust, its dial set to some late October date at three in the morning.

When he passed through to the toilet in the late night, frost lay on the roof tiles outside the small window like moonlight.

Only at the sight of it would his heart brighten faintly with a quiet glow.

When he left his hard bed, a day beginning in the afternoon was waiting.

It was a day in which the slanting winter sun projected like a magic lantern the immediate scene outside the window.

And that strange light would gradually lay bare more and more clearly the truth that all things were no more than appearances, and that being appearances, they were tinged with a spiritual beauty.

The loquat was putting out its blossoms, and from a distant patch of sunlight the color of mandarin oranges stabbed at the eye.

And the cold drizzle of early winter had already turned to hail rattling along the eaves.

The hail struck the black roof tiles one after another and rolled and tumbled.

The sound of it striking a tin roof.

The sound of it bouncing off the fatsia leaves.

The sound of it vanishing into dry grass.

Then one could hear the sound of it falling everywhere in a broad rushing hiss.

And then, breaking through the white winter veil, the cry of cranes rose from a nearby estate.

At such moments Takashi's heart too would feel something fresh and joyful.

Leaning at the window he thought of a bygone age when the spirit of poetic madness had existed.

But Takashi could not apply it to himself.

V

Before he knew it the winter solstice had passed.

On a certain day around that time, Takashi went to a pawnshop in the neighborhood where he had previously lived, a place he had long stopped visiting.

Some money had come and he had gone to retrieve his winter overcoat.

But when he arrived, it had already been forfeited.

"When was it, now, that one came in from Mr. So-and-so?"

"Let me see"—

the junior clerk, who had grown noticeably more adult in the time Takashi had not seen him, leafed through the ledger.

Takashi began to find the face of the head clerk, who produced his explanation with surprising smoothness, strangely difficult to read.

In one instant the man seemed to be saying it while concealing great reluctance; in the next instant he seemed to be saying it with complete indifference.

He could not remember ever being so lost in reading a person's expression.

The head clerk was one who usually made friendly small talk.

Through the man's words, Takashi for the first time vividly recalled having received notices from the pawnshop time and again.

With a feeling like being eaten by sulphuric acid at the bottom of his heart, even sensing a rueful smile at the thought of what if he told the head clerk such things, he put on a face of equal indifference and asked in a routine way what else had been disposed of along with it, and then he left the shop.

A thin and emaciated dog was on the side of a frost-thawed road, trembling its wretched haunches in an attempt to defecate.

Takashi, sensing a kind of cynical impulse pressing in on him more and more, watched the dog's unbearable posture to the very end.

On the long tram ride home, he continued to endure himself as he tried to yield to collapse.

And when he got off the tram, he found that the umbrella he had surely taken when leaving the house — he did not have it.

He reflexively averted his eyes from the impulse to chase uselessly after the tram.

Dragging a heavy fatigue, he made his way home along the evening road.

The red matter he had coughed up that day when he went out into town was still caught on the roots of the rose of Sharon by the roadside.

A faint shudder ran through Takashi.—

At that red color, which when he had coughed it up he had thought of only as a nuisance.—

The evening hour of fever had come.

Cold sweat ran unpleasantly down his armpits.

Still dressed in his outing clothes, without even removing his hakama, he sat motionless in his room.

Suddenly a grief like a dagger touched him.

Thinking of his mother's dazed expression, which came over her from time to time as she lost one beloved person after another, he began to weep quietly.

By the time he went downstairs for supper, his heart had already returned to calm.

There his friend Orita came to visit.

He had no appetite.

He went straight back upstairs.

Orita had taken down the star chart that had been hanging on the wall and was busily adjusting the dial.

"Hey."

Orita did not answer that, but said —

"What do you think. Magnificent, isn't it?"

And then he did not try to lift his face.

Takashi caught his breath.

He could believe how magnificent a view it was.

"Vacation has started so I came by on my way home to my hometown."

"Vacation already? I'm not going home this time."

"Why not?"

"I don't want to go."

"Your family—"

"I've written to say I won't be coming home."

"Are you going on a trip somewhere?"

"No, nothing like that."

Orita looked back sharply into Takashi's eyes and then asked nothing further.

But news of mutual friends, talk about school, accounts of what had happened since they last met — these gradually emerged.

"At school these days they're tearing down the burnt ruins of the lecture hall. The workers climb up onto the burnt brick wall with their pickaxes and —"

Orita described with gestures the figure of a worker swinging his pickax on the very brick wall he was standing on.

"When it's down to one more blow, he's still up there on top of it, working away with the pickax. Then he moves to a safe spot and gives it one good whack. And then the big one comes crashing down with a tremendous boom."

"Hmm. Quite interesting."

"It is. The thing's drawing huge crowds."

When Takashi and Orita talked, they drank tea endlessly.

But watching Orita drink tea again and again from the cup that Takashi ordinarily used, his mind kept wandering from the conversation.

That preoccupation weighed on Takashi more and more heavily.

"Doesn't it bother you to use the teacup of a consumptive? Every time I cough, germs fly everywhere. — If it doesn't bother you, it means your sense of hygiene is lacking; and if you're tolerating it out of friendship, I'd say it's nothing more than a childish sentimentalism — that's what I think."

Having said it, Takashi wondered why he had said such an unpleasant thing.

Orita looked up sharply once and then said nothing.

"Has no one come for a while?"

"No one has come for a while."

"Does it make you feel sorry for yourself?"

This time it was Takashi who fell silent.

But for some reason Takashi found it pleasant to talk with him in this way.

"I don't feel sorry for myself. But lately I've begun to think a little differently."

"Is that so?"

Takashi told Orita about the events of that day.

"At times like those I cannot manage to be calm. For me, calmness is not the absence of feeling — it is feeling itself. It is pain. But the way I must live is to watch with that calmness as my body and my life are destroyed."

"……"

"When my life has crumbled entirely, I believe true calmness will come. 'A leaf settling to the rock on the river's bed …'"

"That's Joso. … Is that so — I haven't come for a while."

"It's nothing. … But thoughts like these make one lonely."

"I hope you'll feel like going somewhere for a change of air one of these days. Even if your family says come home for New Year's, you're still not going?"

"I'm still not going."

It was a rare windless and quiet evening.

On such a night there were no fires.

As the two of them talked, something outside would cry from time to time with a small voice like a whistle.

At eleven o'clock Orita went home.

As he left, he took two reduced-fare train tickets from his wallet,

"since going all the way to school to pick them up would be a bother for you,"

he said, and handed them to Takashi.

VI

A letter came from his mother.

— Something must have happened with you.

So I have asked Tsue, who is coming to Tokyo for New Year's, to visit and check on you.

Please expect him.

Since you say you are not coming home, I have sent your spring clothes.

This year I made a padded undershirt and put it in; a padded undershirt is to be worn between the kimono and the undergarment.

Do not wear it directly against your skin.—

Tsue was the son of the mother's teacher and was now working as a doctor after finishing university.

But there had been a time when Takashi had felt for him a devotion like that for an elder brother.

When Takashi went for a walk nearby, he had lately been encountering the hallucination of his mother with particular frequency.

Mother!

When he thought so and it turned out to be the face of a complete stranger, he often had a strange thought.—

It seemed to shift imperceptibly.

Or he would see a vision of his mother already come and sitting in his room, and turn back toward home.

But what had come was only a letter.

And the person who was to come was Tsue.

Takashi's hallucinations ceased.

When walking the streets, Takashi felt himself become a sensitive spirit level.

He would notice his breathing gradually growing more labored.

And when he looked back, the road had a slope he had not known was there.

He would stop and breathe hard from his shoulders.

Before a certain tightening in his chest had descended, he had always to pass through a suffocating moment of not knowing what to do.

When it had quieted, Takashi would start walking again.

What drove him on?

It was the figure of the sun falling toward a distant horizon.

His days — in which the winter sun faded away day after day on the gray Western-style wooden building across the low ground — had grown more than he could endure.

When the scene outside the window gradually disappeared into the pale air, the awareness that this was not merely shadow but the shadow that is called night would bring to his heart a strange and restless agitation.

"Oh, I want to see a great setting sun."

He left the house and searched for a place with a wide, open view.

In the year-end streets the sound of rice-cake pounding had begun.

In front of the flower shop, potted plants adorned with plum blossoms and pheasant's eye flowers stood in a row.

Such genre scenes became more and more beautiful as the town began to lose him and he could no longer tell which way to go home.

Streets he had never once walked before — there, a woman washing rice and children quarreling both made him stop in his tracks.

But wherever he went for a view, there were the silhouettes of great rooftops and treetops clear in the sunset sky.

Each time, the hidden figure of the sun falling toward a distant horizon was reflected in his aching heart.

The air filled with sunlight was scarcely any distance from the ground at all.

His unfulfilled longing at times imagined a man who had climbed to the top of a high roof and was stretching his hands up toward the sky.

The tips of the man's fingers were touching that air.—

He also imagined the moment when a soap bubble filled with hydrogen, lifting pale figures and streets in ascension, would burst into seven colors and float up into that air.

In the deep, clear blue sky, drifting clouds were burning one after another in beautiful succession.

Into the embers of Takashi's unfulfilled heart, that fire too finally spread its flame.

"Why, when moments like this are so beautiful, must they be so brief?"

At no other moment did he feel so keenly the fleetingness of things.

The burning clouds began one by one to turn to cold ash.

His feet would no longer carry him forward.

"What part of the earth does the shadow filling that sky belong to? Unless I can reach those clouds up there, I will not see the sun today either."

A sudden heavy weariness leaned its weight against him.

At an unknown corner of an unknown town, Takashi's heart would never grow bright again.