トカトントン English

Dear Sir.

There is just one thing I wish you to tell me.

I am in distress.

I am twenty-six years old this year.

I was born in Teramachi, in the city of Aomori.

You probably do not know it, but next to the Seika Temple in Teramachi there was a small flower shop called Tomoya.

I was born the second son of that Tomoya.

After finishing middle school in Aomori, I became a clerk at a certain munitions factory in Yokohama, worked there for three years, then spent four years in the military, and upon the unconditional surrender I returned to the land of my birth, only to find that our house had already been burned down, and my father, my elder brother, and my sister-in-law were living in a pitiable little shack they had built on the ruins.

My mother had died when I was in my fourth year of middle school.

I naturally felt sorry for my father and my brother and his wife if I were to crowd into that small dwelling on the burned-out lot, and after consulting with my father and brother I came to be employed at a third-class post office in a coastal hamlet called A, about two ri from the city of Aomori.

This post office had been my late mother's family home, and the postmaster was her elder brother.

I have been working here now for nearly more than a year, and every day I feel as though I am becoming more and more worthless — it is truly a distress.

It was when I was working as a clerk at the munitions factory in Yokohama that I first began to read your fiction.

"Buntai"

— after reading your short story published in that magazine, I developed the habit of seeking out your works to read, and in the course of reading various things I learned that you were a senior alumnus of my middle school, and also that during your middle-school years you had stayed at the Toyoda household in Teramachi in Aomori; my heart nearly stopped.

The Toyoda drapery — since they were in the same neighborhood as my family, I knew them well.

The previous Tazaemon had been a portly man, and the name Tazaemon suited him admirably, but the current Tazaemon was slender and had a certain elegance about him, so that one felt almost like calling him Uzaemon.

But they all seemed to be such fine people.

The Toyodas lost everything in the recent air raids — even their storehouse burned to the ground, I hear — how dreadful for them.

When I learned that you had once lived in that Toyoda house, I very nearly summoned the courage to ask the current Tazaemon to write me a letter of introduction so that I might come to call on you, but being a timid sort, I merely entertained the fantasy and never had the courage to act on it.

In the meantime I was conscripted, assigned to coastal defense along the Chiba shore, and until the end of the war was put to nothing but digging holes day after day, yet whenever I had even a half-day's leave I would go into town and seek out your works to read.

And how many times I took up my pen, wishing to write you a letter — I could not begin to count.

Yet, having written Dear Sir, I could never think what to write next: I had no particular business with you, and besides, I was a complete stranger to you, and I would only sit there holding my pen, at a loss.

In time, Japan surrendered unconditionally, I returned home, and took up the post at the A post office; then recently, passing through Aomori on an errand, I looked into a bookshop there, found your works, and learned from them that you too had been bombed out and had returned to your hometown of Kanagi-machi — and once again my heart nearly stopped.

Even so I lacked the courage to call unannounced at your family home, and after much deliberation I resolved at any rate to put pen to paper and write you a letter.

This time I would not be at a loss after writing merely Dear Sir.

Because this, you see, is a letter with a purpose.

Moreover, an urgent purpose.

There is something I wish you to explain to me.

Truly, I am in distress.

Furthermore, this is not a problem for me alone — I feel that there may be others who are suffering from something very like this — and so please tell us, for our sake.

That the very first letter I write to you — I who had been longing all that time, throughout my days at the Yokohama factory and my days in the military, to send you a letter — should be one so lacking in joy: that was something I had never imagined at all.

On the noon of August 15th of Showa 20, we were assembled in the square before the barracks, and made to listen to a radio broadcast said to be His Majesty's own address — almost entirely swallowed up by static, so that not a word could be made out — and then a young lieutenant strode up onto the platform and said:

"Did you hear that? Do you understand? Japan has accepted the Potsdam Declaration and surrendered. But that is a matter of politics. We soldiers will continue to fight on, and in the end every last one of us will take his own life, to offer our apology to the Emperor. I for one fully intend to do so, and I expect every one of you to be prepared for the same. Understood? Very well. Dismissed."

Having said that, the young lieutenant stepped down from the platform, removed his spectacles, and as he walked away the tears fell from his face, one after another.

Is that what they mean by solemnity — that feeling?

As I stood there motionless, the air around me seemed to grow dim and hazy, a cold wind came from nowhere, and I felt as though my body were sinking of its own accord down toward the bottom of the earth.

I thought I should die.

I thought it was right to die.

The forest ahead had fallen into a peculiar stillness, appearing pitch-black, and from its crest a flock of small birds took flight in silence, like a pinch of sesame seeds flung into the air.

Ah, it was at that moment.

From behind me, from the direction of the barracks, the sound of someone hammering nails drifted faintly toward me — tok-a-ton-ton.

The instant I heard it — was that what they mean by scales falling from one's eyes? — the heroic solemnity vanished in an instant, I came to my senses as though released from a spell, and in a feeling that was utterly, hopelessly flat and empty, I gazed out over the sand flats in the glare of midsummer noon, and felt nothing, nothing at all.

And so I stuffed my rucksack full of things and drifted home.

That faint sound of a hammer heard from far away had stripped away the illusion of militarism from me with miraculous cleanliness, so that I could never again be intoxicated by that heroic, solemn nightmare — yet the tiny sound seemed to have pierced the very bull's-eye of my brain, for it has continued from that time to the present, and I became a man possessed of a strange and loathsome affliction, something like epilepsy.

Not that I suffer violent fits, by any means.

It is the opposite.

Whenever I am moved by something, whenever I try to rouse myself to action, from somewhere, faintly, that hammer sound comes to me — tok-a-ton-ton — and instantly I come to my senses, and the scene before my eyes is utterly transformed, as if a film projection had abruptly broken off, leaving only a pure white screen, which I stare at blankly, overcome by a feeling of utter futility and absurdity.

When I first came to this post office, I thought to myself: now at last I can freely study whatever I like — first of all I'll write a novel and send it to you to read; and so in the spare moments between my duties at the post office I began writing reminiscences of military life, and worked hard and had written nearly a hundred pages, so that the final completion was to be the next day or the day after at the latest, and on an autumn evening when the post office work was done and I went to the public bath and soaked in the warm water, thinking about how I would write the final chapter that very night — should I end it with the splendid melancholy of the closing chapters of Onegin, or with the despairing conclusion of Gogol's "The Quarrel" —

— and trembling with excitement as I looked up at the bare light bulb hanging from the high ceiling of the bathhouse, I heard, from far away, tok-a-ton-ton — that hammer sound.

In an instant the tide receded, and I was nothing more than a naked man stirring the water with a splash in a dim corner of the bathtub.

With a feeling of extraordinary tedium I climbed out of the tub, scraped the dead skin from the soles of my feet, and half-listened to the other bathers talking about rations.

Pushkin and Gogol — they seemed as tasteless as the names of foreign toothbrush brands.

I left the bathhouse, crossed the bridge, went home, ate my meal in silence, then retired to my room, flipped through the nearly hundred pages of manuscript on my desk, and was so appalled by the utter stupidity of it all that I could not even summon the energy to tear it up, and from that time on I used the pages, day by day, as nose paper.

Since then, to this day, I have not written a single line of anything resembling a novel.

My uncle has a small collection of books, and from time to time I borrow such things as anthologies of masterworks from the Meiji and Taisho eras, reading them with varying degrees of admiration, in a thoroughly unserious manner, and when a blizzard comes I go to bed early — a life utterly lacking in what one might call "the spiritual" —

— and in the meantime, looking through world art collections, I found myself far less impressed than before by the French Impressionists I used to love so much, and was now struck most of all by the work of Ogata Korin and Ogata Kenzan, two brothers of the Genroku period.

Korin's azaleas, in particular, seemed to me superior to anything by Cezanne, Monet, or Gauguin.

Thus my so-called inner life gradually began to breathe again, though I was hardly so presumptuous as to harbor the wild ambition of becoming a master on the order of Korin and Kenzan; at most I was a dilettante in the rural backwater, and the best work I was capable of was sitting at the post-office window from morning to night, counting other people's banknotes — but even that sort of life could hardly be called a degenerate one for a man as incapable and uneducated as myself.

There may be, after all, such a thing as a crown of humility.

Perhaps diligence in the ordinary work of each day is itself the most elevated form of inner life.

And so I began, little by little, to take pride in my daily existence, and it happened that around that time there was the currency exchange, and even in a third-class post office in a place as remote as this one — or rather, the smaller the post office the more shorthanded they were, and the more frantic the pace — and in those days we were from early morning each day processing deposit declarations and pasting the old-yen stickers, and could not rest even when exhausted; and in particular, since I was living as a dependent on my uncle's kindness, I threw myself into the work as a way of repaying him, working so hard that my hands felt as heavy as if they were encased in iron gloves, and I lost all sensation in them.

I worked like that, slept like the dead, and then the next morning sprang up the moment the alarm clock at my bedside went off, went directly to the office, and began a thorough cleaning.

Cleaning had been the responsibility of the female clerks, but since the great currency-exchange upheaval began, I had developed a strange momentum in my work, wanting to do everything I could think of at a frantic pace, more today than yesterday, more tomorrow than today, with a ferocious, almost frenzied acceleration, like a man half-mad, until on the day the exchange uproar was at last to be finished, I rose again while it was still dark, cleaned the office with tremendous energy, got everything in perfect order, then sat down at my window, and just as the morning sun came shining directly into my face and I narrowed my sleep-deprived eyes, feeling somehow strangely proud and satisfied, and the words "labor is sacred" came to mind, and I let out a long sigh —

— at that moment, faintly from far away, I seemed to hear tok-a-ton-ton, and from that instant everything became idiotic in a flash, and I got up, went to my room, pulled the futon over myself, and went to sleep.

When someone came to call me for meals, I said bluntly that I was not feeling well and would not be getting up today; it seemed that day was the busiest the office had ever been, and with me, their best worker, suddenly taken to bed, everyone was apparently quite put out — but I spent the entire day in a drowsy half-sleep.

It seemed that my repayment of gratitude to my uncle had actually gone into the negative thanks to this selfishness of mine, but by then I had not the slightest inclination to work with all my heart and soul, and the next day I slept excessively late, then sat vacantly at my window, doing nothing but yawning, leaving most of the work to the female clerk beside me.

And the day after that, and the day after that, I was thoroughly listless and sluggish and sullen — that is to say, I became an ordinary window clerk.

"Are you still not feeling well somewhere?"

when my uncle the postmaster asked me this, I gave a thin smile and replied:

"Nothing is wrong. Perhaps neurasthenia."

"That's right, that's right," said my uncle with a knowing look,

"Is that so," said my uncle, with an air of satisfaction:

"I had figured as much. You have a poor head, and you read difficult books — that's what comes of it. Men like you and me, with poor heads, are best off not trying to think difficult thoughts."

He laughed, and I gave a wry smile.

This uncle of mine is a man who is supposed to have graduated from a technical college, but there is not a trace of the intellectual about him anywhere.

And then — (you may have noticed that my writing contains rather a lot of "and then"s?

Is that also a characteristic of a poor head's prose style, I wonder.

I am very much aware of it myself, but it comes out naturally, so I am resigned to it) — and then, I fell in love.

Please do not laugh.

No — even if you do laugh, there is nothing I can do.

Like a small fish in a goldfish bowl hovering motionless at a spot two inches from the bottom, pregnant somehow of its own accord, so too, while I was drifting through my days in a fog, I had somehow, before I knew it, fallen into a shamefaced kind of love.

When one falls in love, music truly begins to pierce one deeply, does it not.

I think that is the surest sign that one has contracted the sickness of love.

It was a one-sided love.

But I was helplessly, hopelessly in love with this woman.

She was a maid at the one small inn in this coastal hamlet.

She seemed to be not yet twenty.

My uncle the postmaster was a drinker, and whenever some village gathering was held in the back parlor of that inn, he was sure to attend without fail, so he and the maid were on familiar terms, and whenever the maid appeared at the post-office window on some errand to do with savings or insurance, my uncle would invariably tease her with some stale, unfunny joke.

"You seem to be doing quite well for yourself lately — quite diligent about saving, I must say. Very commendable. Found yourself a nice man, have you?"

"How tiresome," she would say.

And she would say it with a face that truly looked bored.

And indeed she said it with a face that looked genuinely bored.

She had a face like a Van Dyck painting — not the face of a woman but the face of a young nobleman.

Her name was Tokida Hanae.

I could see it written in her savings book.

It seemed she had previously lived in Miyagi Prefecture; in the address column of her savings book, her former address in Miyagi was written and crossed out in red, with her new address here written in beside it.

According to the gossip among the female clerks, she was a woman who had lost everything in the war in Miyagi and had come drifting to this hamlet just before the unconditional surrender, and was a distant relation of the inn's proprietress; they said she seemed to have loose morals, and despite her youth was quite formidable — but people who have evacuated to a place always get a bad reputation among the locals.

I did not believe in the least that she was formidable, but her savings were by no means small.

It is improper for a post-office clerk to publicize such things, but in any case, even as my uncle teased her, Hanae-san would come in once a week or so to deposit two or three hundred yen in new currency, and the total was steadily growing.

It was not that I thought she had found herself a nice man, but every time I stamped two hundred yen or three hundred yen in Hanae-san's passbook, my heart would pound and my face would flush.

And gradually I grew miserable.

Hanae-san was not formidable at all — and yet, would not the people of this hamlet all pursue her, give her money, and ruin her?

When I thought that it was surely so, there were times I was so startled that I would bolt upright in my bed in the middle of the night.

But Hanae-san continued to come in as before, about once a week, coolly bringing her money.

By now, far from my heart pounding and my face flushing, I felt so agonized that my face turned pale and cold sweat broke out on my forehead, and I cannot count how many times, counting the grimy banknotes she offered so primly, one by one, I was seized by a sudden impulse to tear them all to shreds.

And I wanted to say just one thing to Hanae-san.

That famous line from Izumi Kyoka's novel: "Even if it kills you, never let yourself become someone's plaything!"

It was so theatrical, so theatrical — and moreover a line utterly beyond the lips of a clumsy country person like myself — yet I desperately wanted to say it to her in all sincerity.

Even if it kills you, never be anyone's plaything; what does material wealth matter, what does money matter.

Is it true after all that being thought of by someone brings that someone's thoughts to you?

It was around the middle of May.

Hanae-san, as was her custom, appeared composed on the far side of the office window, and said "please" as she held out her money and passbook to me.

I sighed, accepted them, and with a sad feeling counted the dirty banknotes one by one.

Then I wrote the amount in the passbook and returned it to Hanae-san without a word.

"Are you free around five o'clock?"

I could not trust my own ears.

I thought I was being deceived by the spring wind.

The words were that low and swift.

"If you are free, please come to the bridge."

Saying that, she smiled faintly, then immediately composed herself again and walked away.

I looked at the clock.

It was just past two.

What I was doing from then until five o'clock, I am embarrassed to say, I honestly cannot now remember.

No doubt I was going around with some intensely serious expression, wandering aimlessly, and then suddenly telling the female clerk beside me in a loud voice what a fine day it was — though it was actually cloudy — and when she was startled, glaring at her and then standing up to go to the toilet, making a complete fool of myself.

At five minutes to seven — I mean five minutes to five — I left the house.

On the way, I noticed that the nails on both my hands had grown long, and for some reason that bothered me so unbearably, almost to the point of tears, that I still remember it to this day.

Hanae-san was standing at the foot of the bridge.

Her skirt seemed too short.

I caught a glimpse of her long bare legs, and cast my eyes down.

"Shall we go toward the sea?"

Hanae-san said this calmly.

Hanae-san walked ahead, and five or six paces behind, I followed, slowly toward the sea.

And even walking that far apart, our strides had quietly, without our noticing it, fallen perfectly into step with each other, which was disconcerting.

The sky was overcast, there was a slight wind, and sand dust was rising on the shore.

"Here will do," she said.

Hanae-san stepped between two large fishing boats pulled up on shore, and sat down on the sand.

"Come. Sitting here the wind doesn't reach you, and it's warm."

I sat down about two meters from where Hanae-san sat with her legs stretched out before her.

"I'm sorry for calling you out like this. But there is something I simply had to say to you. About my savings — you think something strange about that, don't you?"

I saw my moment, and answered in a hoarse voice:

"Yes, I do think it strange."

"It's natural you would," she said,

and then Hanae-san looked down, scooping sand with her hand and sprinkling it on her bare legs, and continued: "That isn't my money. If it were my money, I wouldn't bother saving it here. Saving it up deposit by deposit like this is such a nuisance."

I understood at once, and nodded silently.

"You see? That passbook belongs to the proprietress. But that is absolutely secret. You mustn't tell anyone. Why the proprietress does such a thing — I have a vague idea, but it is all very complicated, and I don't want to talk about it. I am having a hard time of it. Do you believe me?"

She laughed a little, and I thought her eyes had taken on a strange gleam — but it was tears.

I desperately wanted to kiss Hanae-san.

I thought I would gladly endure any hardship with Hanae-san.

"Everyone around here is so hopeless. I was worried you might have the wrong idea about me, and I so wanted to say just one thing to you, and so today I made up my mind and —"

At that moment, from a nearby shed, the sound of hammering nails was actually heard — tok-a-ton-ton.

This time the sound was not a hallucination.

In Sasaki's barn on the shore, someone had in fact begun hammering nails loudly.

Tok-a-ton-ton, ton-ton-tok-a-ton — they hammered away vigorously.

I shuddered and stood up.

"I understand. I won't tell anyone."

I noticed at that moment a fairly large amount of dog droppings just behind where Hanae-san was sitting, and I nearly warned her about it.

The waves rolled in listlessly, and a boat with a dirty sail tottered by, very close to shore.

"Well then, farewell."

A vast, hollow emptiness.

What do I care about her savings.

She is a stranger to me in any case.

Whether she becomes someone's plaything or anything else — that has nothing to do with me at all.

How stupid.

I was hungry.

After that, Hanae-san continued as before to bring her money in and deposit it every week or ten days, until now the amount had grown to several thousand yen, but I felt not the slightest interest.

Whether it was, as Hanae-san said, the proprietress's money, or whether it was after all Hanae-san's own money — either way, it had absolutely nothing to do with me.

And as for which of us, in the end, had suffered a broken heart — I can't help feeling it was myself who was jilted, yet since I did not feel particularly sad about being jilted, I think this was quite a peculiar way to have a broken heart.

And once again I became the same vague, ordinary clerk.

When June came, I had occasion to go to Aomori, and by chance I witnessed a workers' demonstration.

Until then I had felt not so much disinterest in social or political movements as something approaching despair.

No matter who does it, it all amounts to the same thing.

And no matter what movement I myself joined, in the end I would only end up a sacrifice on the boat of the leaders' desire for fame and power.

A man who with complete conviction makes a grand speech proclaiming his beliefs, insisting that if you follow his words, surely you yourself and your family, your village, your country, nay the whole world will be saved — and when it goes unsaved, says it is because you did not follow him — who keeps being rebuffed over and over by a single courtesan until he becomes desperate and shouts for the abolition of licensed prostitution, who indignantly punches a handsome comrade, causes a scene, becomes a nuisance, and by some chance receives a decoration, who rushes home in triumphant spirits, crying "Mother, look!" and proudly opens the little box to show his wife — only for her to say coldly: "Oh, only the Order of the Rising Sun, Fifth Class? At least Second Class would have been worth something," and the husband deflated — that kind of man, half-mad, who was entirely absorbed in political and social

movements — that was what I had assumed all such people were.

And so for the general election in April of this year, even with all the commotion about democracy and so on, I felt no inclination to trust any of those people; the Liberal Party and Progressive Party seemed unchanged, full of the same old faces, hardly worth considering; and as for the Socialist Party and Communist Party, however spirited and cheerful they seemed, I could not rid myself of the impression that they were something unclean — maggots swarming on the corpse of the unconditional surrender, as it were, opportunists feeding on defeat — and on voting day, April 10th, though my uncle the postmaster had told me to vote for a Mr. Kato of the Liberal Party, I said yes, yes, left the house, took a walk along the shore, and came home.

I had believed that no matter how much one argued about social or political matters, the dreariness of our daily lives could not be resolved — but that day, having by chance seen the workers' demonstration in Aomori, I realized that everything I had thought until then was wrong.

Full of life and vitality — would that be the right way to put it?

What a joyful march it was.

I could find not a shadow of gloom nor a wrinkle of servility anywhere.

It was pure, expanding energy.

Young women too were marching, flags in hand, singing labor songs, and my chest grew full and tears came to my eyes.

Ah, I thought, it was good that Japan lost the war.

For the first time in my life, I thought I had seen the true form of freedom.

If this was the child born of political and social movements, then I thought that human beings ought first and foremost to study political thought and social thought.

As I continued to watch the march, I was filled with a great elation in which the single path of light I was to walk seemed more surely and unmistakably felt than ever before; tears flowed pleasantly down my cheeks, and then, as if I had opened my eyes underwater, the scenery around me blurred to a hazy green, and through that dim, swaying light the crimson flags burned — oh, that color — and as I wept and resolved never to forget it even in death, tok-a-ton-ton, faint and distant, it came to me, and after that it was all over.

What on earth is that sound?

It does not seem the kind of thing that can be so simply dismissed as nihilism.

That hallucination of tok-a-ton-ton demolishes even nihilism itself.

When summer came, a sudden enthusiasm for sports spread among the young men of this region.

I may have something of an old man's utilitarian streak in me — for I felt that going naked and wrestling and getting badly injured from a throw, or making fierce faces while running to see who was fastest among a group of men who all ran the hundred meters in twenty seconds, was all simply ridiculous, and it never once occurred to me to join the young men in their sports.

But this August there was a relay race to be run through the various coastal hamlets in this district, with many young men from the county participating, and this post office at A was to be one of the relay stations, where runners arriving from Aomori would hand off to the next runner; just after ten in the morning, when the runners who had set out from Aomori were expected to arrive here, all the staff came out to watch, leaving only me and the postmaster inside to sort through the simple insurance records — when presently there came a commotion of "They're coming, they're coming!" and I stood up to look out the window, and in what was evidently meant to be a last heavy push, with both hands spread wide, fingers splayed like a frog's, as if parting the air before him, with a peculiar

swinging of the arms, barefoot, wearing nothing but shorts, chest thrust high, head thrown back with an expression of agony and swaying left and right, a runner came tottering up to the front of the post office, gave a single groan, and collapsed.

"Well done! You pushed through!"

shouted one of the attendants, who lifted him up and brought him under the window where I was watching, and dashed a bucket of water over him; the runner looked to be in a condition of nearly half-dead peril, his face ashen as he lay there limp, and looking at him I was overcome by a strangely intense feeling.

"Touching" — it may be presumptuous for a twenty-six-year-old like me to use such a word, but "moving" perhaps, or however one might put it — when the squandering of strength reaches this point, I thought, it becomes magnificent.

Whether these men came in first or second, the world would take almost no interest — and yet they were risking their lives, even doing a last heavy push.

They were not carrying any particular ideal of building a so-called cultural nation through this relay race, nor — having no ideals — were they mouthing such ideals for appearances' sake, running in hopes of earning the world's praise.

Nor did they harbor ambitions of becoming great marathon runners; they surely knew that in a small country race like this, the time recorded was of no importance, and when they got home they had no inclination to boast of their feat to their families — in fact they probably worried their fathers might scold them — and yet they wanted to run anyway.

They wanted to do it with their lives.

No one needed to praise them.

They simply wanted to run.

It was an unrewarded act.

A small child climbing a dangerous tree still has the desire to pick and eat the persimmons, but this life-risking marathon had not even that.

I thought it was very nearly a passion born of nothingness.

And it perfectly matched my own hollow state of mind at the time.

I began playing catch with the office staff.

If I kept at it until I was utterly spent, there was a freshness like shedding an old skin — and the instant I thought "this is it," again that tok-a-ton-ton would sound.

That tok-a-ton-ton sound strikes down even the passion of nothingness.

By now the tok-a-ton-ton sounds more and more frequently: when I unfold the newspaper to read the new constitution article by article, tok-a-ton-ton; when my uncle consults me about the post-office personnel and a good idea suddenly flashes to mind, tok-a-ton-ton; when I try to read your novels, tok-a-ton-ton; recently there was a fire in this hamlet and I got up and was about to rush to the scene, tok-a-ton-ton; keeping my uncle company over dinner and having a little sake and thinking I might have a bit more, tok-a-ton-ton; when I thought perhaps I had gone completely mad, tok-a-ton-ton too; contemplating suicide, tok-a-ton-ton.

"What would you say life is, in a word?"

I asked my uncle last night in a joking tone, while keeping him company at his evening drink.

"Life? That I don't know. But the world — it's sex and greed."

I thought it was an unexpectedly apt answer.

And then it suddenly occurred to me — what if I became a black-marketeer?

But when I imagined having made ten thousand yen as a black-marketeer, tok-a-ton-ton promptly sounded.

Please tell me.

What is that sound?

And how can one escape from it?

At this point I am truly paralyzed by this sound, unable to move.

Please, write back to me.

One last thing I must add: before I had even written half this letter, the tok-a-ton-ton was already sounding insistently.

How pointless it is, writing a letter like this.

Even so, I persisted and wrote this much.

And because it was all so pointless I grew reckless and I feel as though I wrote nothing but lies.

There is no such woman as Hanae-san, and I did not see the demonstration.

Most of the other things seem to be lies as well.

But the tok-a-ton-ton alone does not seem to be a lie.

I am sending this just as it is, without rereading it.

Respectfully yours.

The certain author who received this strange letter was an unfortunately ignorant and thoughtless man, but he gave the following reply.

Dear friend,

What affected anguish.

I don't have much sympathy for you, actually.

You still seem to be avoiding the disgrace that, with ten fingers pointing and ten eyes watching, admits of no excuse whatsoever.

True thought requires courage more than wisdom.

Matthew chapter 10, verse 28: "And fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul: but rather fear him which is able to destroy both soul and body in hell."

In this passage, the word rendered "fear"

seems to be closer in meaning to "reverence"

or "awe."

If you can feel the thunderclap of these words of Jesus, your hallucination should cease.

No more.