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An ominous mass of indeterminate nature had been pressing down on my heart without cease.

Call it restlessness, call it revulsion — just as drinking leaves one with a hangover the next day, drinking every day brings on a period that corresponds to a chronic hangover.

That period had come.

This was rather bad.

It was not the apex pneumonia or the nervous exhaustion that had resulted that was bad.

Nor was it the debts that burned at my back that were bad.

What was bad was that ominous mass.

No music that had once delighted me, no passage of beautiful poetry, could any longer be borne.

Even when I went out of my way to hear someone's phonograph, I would feel a sudden urge to stand up and leave after the first two or three bars.

Something made it impossible for me to stay.

And so I was constantly drifting from street to street.

I remember that for some reason, around that time, I was strongly drawn to things that were shabby yet beautiful.

In scenery, I preferred crumbling towns; and within such towns, not the formal main streets but the back alleys — places somehow familiar, where dirty laundry hung drying, junk lay scattered about, and dingy rooms peered out at you.

Streets with the air of something being eaten away by rain and wind, destined eventually to return to earth — mud walls crumbling, rows of houses leaning to one side — where the only vigorous things were the plants, and sometimes a startling sunflower would loom up, or cannas would be in bloom.

At times, walking along such a lane, I would deliberately try to induce the illusion that I was not in Kyoto at all but had arrived in some distant city hundreds of leagues away — Sendai, or Nagasaki — somewhere like that.

If I could, I wanted to flee Kyoto altogether and go to a city where no one knew me.

First of all, quiet.

A room in an empty inn.

Clean bedding.

A pleasantly scented mosquito net and a well-starched cotton yukata.

There I would like to lie for a month, thinking nothing at all.

If only, without my noticing, this place had become that city. ——

When the illusion at last began to take hold, I would layer imaginary colors over it, one after another.

It amounted to nothing more than a double exposure of my illusion and the crumbling town.

And I took pleasure in losing my real self within it.

I had also grown fond of fireworks.

The fireworks themselves were a secondary matter; what I loved were the bundles of fireworks in their cheap paints — red and purple and yellow and blue, with all manner of striped patterns — the Nakadera-dera star-shower, the flower-war, the withered pampas grass.

And then there were the spinning fireworks, each one coiled into a ring and packed in a box.

Such things strangely tempted my heart.

And then I had grown fond of the glass toys called bidoro — the colored glass ones with fish and flowers pressed into them — those little flat glass pieces; and I had grown fond of glass beads.

Moreover, licking them was for me an indescribable pleasure.

Is there any flavor as faint and cool as the taste of those bidoro?

As a child I used to put them in my mouth and be scolded by my parents for it, and perhaps it is that sweet memory of childhood coming back to me now that I have fallen so low — for truly there lingers in that taste a faint, refreshing something that might be called poetic beauty.

As one might guess, I had absolutely no money.

And yet, to console that self of mine whenever my heart had been even slightly stirred by such things, a certain kind of luxury was necessary.

Things that cost two or three sen — and yet luxurious.

Beautiful things — and yet things that came coaxing my listless antennae. ——

Such things naturally consoled me.

A place I had loved before, when life had not yet gnawed me hollow, was Maruzen, for instance.

Eau de Cologne and eau de quinine, red and yellow.

Elegant cut-glass work and perfume bottles of amber and jade with graceful Rococo designs in relief.

Pipes, penknives, soap, tobacco.

I could spend nearly an hour just looking at such things.

And in the end I would allow myself the luxury of buying one good pencil.

But even this place, by that time, was nothing more than an oppressive spot for me.

Books, students, the cashier's counter — all of these appeared to me as ghosts of bill collectors.

One morning — at that period I was living by drifting from one friend's lodgings to another's — I was left behind, utterly alone, in the hollow air of the room after my friend had gone off to school.

I had to wander out again from there.

Something was driving me.

And so, from street to street — walking those back alleys I mentioned before, pausing in front of confectionery stalls, gazing at dried shrimp and salt-dried cod and yuba at the dried-goods shops — I finally made my way down Teramachi toward Nijo, where I stopped at a fruit shop.

I should like to describe that fruit shop briefly here: it was, within the range of what I knew, my favorite shop of all.

It was by no means a grand shop, but the beauty particular to fruit shops was there most nakedly felt.

The fruit was displayed on a stand set at a fairly steep angle, and the stand itself seemed to be an old blackened board lacquered in dark paint.

The fruit was arranged as if some brilliant and gorgeous musical allegro — a rushing current of sound — had been thrust at the viewer like the Gorgon's monstrous face that turned men to stone, and had then congealed into those colors and that volume.

The greens too were piled higher and higher the further back one went. ——

The beauty of the carrot tops there, in particular, was truly magnificent.

And then there were the beans soaking in water, and the arrowheads.

And that shop was also beautiful at night.

Teramachi-dori is in general a lively street — though its feeling is far more refined than Tokyo or Osaka — and the light from shop windows pours out abundantly into the road.

Yet for some reason the area immediately around that shop's storefront alone was strangely dark.

One side already met the dark Nijo-dori at a street corner, so the darkness there was natural; but it was not clear why the neighboring house, despite being on Teramachi-dori, was also dark.

Yet had the shop not been dark, I do not think it would have attracted me as powerfully as it did.

Another thing was the projecting eave of the shop, which hung low like the brim of a hat pulled down over the eyes — more than a mere simile, it made one think, "Look, that shop has its eave pulled down terribly low"

— so that above the eave, too, it was pitch dark.

Because the surroundings were so completely dark, the brilliance that the many electric lights installed at the storefront poured down like a driving rain fell on the beautiful display below without being stolen by anything around it, illuminating the scene to its heart's content.

Standing in the street where naked bulbs drove their long spiral filaments piercingly into my eyes, or gazing through the glass window of the key shop on the second floor nearby — the view of that fruit shop was, among all of Teramachi, one of the rare sights that delighted me from moment to moment.

That day, unusually for me, I made a purchase at that shop.

The reason was that the shop happened to have a rare offering of lemons.

Lemons are commonplace enough.

But as that shop was nothing more than an ordinary greengrocer — not that it was shabby, but simply ordinary — I had rarely seen them there before.

I have always loved lemons.

That simple color, like lemon-yellow paint squeezed from the tube and hardened, and that compact, spindle-shaped form. ——

In the end I decided to buy just one.

Where did I wander after that?

I walked the streets for a long time.

The ominous mass that had been pressing down on my heart without cease seemed to have loosened somewhat from the moment I gripped that lemon, and I was profoundly happy out there on the streets.

That gloom, which had been so persistent, could be dispelled by a single such thing — that something paradoxical was a genuine truth, however strange it seemed.

Even so, what a mysterious thing the heart is.

The coldness of that lemon was indescribably good.

At that time I had a bad apex and was always running a fever.

I would actually show off my fever to this friend or that, clasping hands to let them feel it, but my palm was hotter than anyone else's.

Perhaps it was on account of that heat — the cold that seemed to seep from the gripped fruit through my palm and spread through my whole body was wonderfully pleasant.

Again and again I lifted the fruit to my nose and sniffed it.

California, said to be its place of origin, rose up in my imagination.

In that classical Chinese text I had studied, "The Citrus Seller's Words,"

the phrase "strikes the nose"

came floating up to me in fragments.

And when I breathed in a deep lungful of that fragrant air, a warm flush of blood rose through my body and face — a body that had scarcely been able to take a full breath in so long — and somehow a vital energy began to stir within me. ……

It seems remarkable to me now that such simple sensations of cold, touch, smell, and sight could have fitted me so perfectly that I wanted to say I had been searching for nothing else all along — but that was how things were in those days.

I was already walking the streets with a light, buoyant exhilaration, even feeling a kind of pride, letting my thoughts turn to poets who had dressed in fine aesthetic attire and strode through the city.

I tried resting the lemon on a dirty hand towel or holding it against my cloak, gauging the play of colors, and I thought such things as this:

— In the end it is this weight, isn't it. ——

This weight was exactly what I had always been searching for in vain, and without any doubt this weight is the weight of all good things and all beautiful things converted into mass — or so I told myself in a vain and foolish jest born of arrogant whimsy — but no matter: I was happy.

Where had I walked, where had I gone? — the last place I stopped was in front of Maruzen.

Maruzen, which I had normally avoided so assiduously, seemed at that moment as if I could enter it with ease.

"Today I think I'll go in."

And I strode right in.

But what had happened? The happy feeling that had filled my heart was gradually slipping away.

My heart could not rest upon the perfume bottles or the pipes.

A gloom was closing in; I supposed the fatigue of all that walking had caught up with me.

I walked over to the shelves of art books.

Even pulling out one of the heavy art volumes seemed to require more effort than usual!

I thought.

Still, I pulled them out one by one and opened them, but no inclination to leaf through them carefully arose in me at all.

Yet, as if under a curse, I went on drawing out the next volume.

It was the same.

And yet I could not be at peace without rifling through it at least once.

Then I could bear no more and left it there where it was.

I could not even put it back in its original place.

I repeated this many times over.

In the end I even set down the heavy orange-colored Ingres volume that I had always loved so dearly, out of still greater unbearableness. ——

What a damned thing.

Fatigue lingered in the muscles of my hands.

I fell into a gloom and stood staring at the pile of books I had pulled out and left stacked there.

Those art books that had once so captivated me — what had become of them?

Going through each page one by one, and then looking up afterward at the all-too-ordinary surroundings and feeling that strange sense of incongruity — this was something I had formerly savored with pleasure. ……

"Ah, that's right."

Just then I remembered the lemon in my sleeve pocket.

What if I piled up the books in a jumble of colors and tried the lemon on top of it once?

"Yes."

The light exhilaration of a moment before returned to me.

I grabbed whatever came to hand and stacked them up, then hurriedly knocked them down, then hurriedly built them up again.

I pulled out new ones to add, and removed others.

The fantastical, strange castle turned red and then blue with each change.

At last it was finished.

Suppressing the heart that leaped lightly within me, I set the lemon cautiously atop the battlements of the castle.

And it turned out splendidly.

Looking at it, I saw that the lemon's color had quietly absorbed the clamoring tonal gradations all around it into its compact spindle-shaped body, and rang out with a piercing clarity.

I felt as if the air in the dusty interior of Maruzen had grown strangely taut around that lemon alone.

I stood and looked at it for a while.

Suddenly a second idea struck me.

That strange scheme startled even me.

— I would leave it just as it was and walk out, as if nothing had happened. ——

I felt a strange, ticklish sensation.

"Shall I go? Yes, let's go."

And I walked briskly out.

That strange, ticklish feeling made me smile as I stood out on the street.

I — the bizarre villain who had planted a fearful bomb glowing golden on the shelves of Maruzen — and in ten minutes' time that Maruzen, centered on the art shelves, would erupt in a great explosion: wouldn't that be something.

I pursued this fantasy with great enthusiasm.

"If that happened, that stifling Maruzen would be blown to smithereens."

And I walked down Kawaramachi, where the billboard paintings for moving pictures were coloring the street in their peculiar fashion.