風立ちぬ English

Le vent se lève, il faut tenter de vivre.

PAUL VALÉRY

Prelude

In those summer days, while you stood painting with such concentration in the meadow overrun everywhere with plume grass, I would always be lying in the shade of a white birch close beside you.

And then, when evening came and you had finished your work and come to my side, for a while we would rest our hands upon each other's shoulders and gaze off toward the horizon, far in the distance, where masses of billowing thunderclouds, their edges tinged with the color of madder, lay piled one upon another.

As though, from that horizon just beginning to darken toward dusk, something were, on the contrary, being born...

One afternoon on such a day — it was already close to autumn — we lay stretched out in the shade of that white birch, leaving your unfinished painting propped on its easel, and bit into some fruit.

Clouds like drifting sand went streaming across the sky.

Just then, quite suddenly, a wind rose up from nowhere.

Above our heads, the patch of indigo blue glimpsed fleetingly between the leaves stretched and shrank, stretched and shrank.

Almost at the same moment, we heard something fall with a thud somewhere in the grass.

It seemed to be the sound of the painting we had left standing there, toppling over together with its easel.

You made to rise at once and go to it, but I held you back, almost by force, as though unwilling to lose even the smallest part of that moment, and would not let you leave my side.

You let me have my way.

The wind is rising; still, we must try to live.

That line of verse, which had come to my lips unbidden, I kept repeating under my breath, my hand resting on the shoulder of you who leaned against me.

And then at last you shook yourself free of me and rose to go.

The canvas, not yet properly dry, had in the meantime gotten blades of grass stuck all over its surface.

Setting it back up on the easel, and finding it difficult to pick the blades of grass off with your palette knife,

"Oh! If Father were ever to find it looking like this..."

You turned to look at me, and gave me a smile that was somehow vague and uncertain.

"In another two or three days, Father will be coming."

One morning, as we were wandering through the woods, you suddenly said this.

I fell silent, looking somehow discontented.

Then you, watching me in that mood, spoke again in a voice that was slightly hoarse.

"Once that happens, we won't be able to take walks like this anymore, will we."

"We can take any walk we like, if we set our minds to it."

I still seemed dissatisfied, and though I felt your somewhat anxious gaze upon me, I made as if my attention were caught, even more than by that, by the treetops above our heads, which stirred and rustled for no particular reason.

"Father won't let go of me so easily."

At last I looked back at you with what might be called an impatient, exasperated look.

"Then are you saying this is goodbye for us?"

"But there's nothing to be done about it, is there."

So saying, you tried, with what looked like complete resignation, to force a smile for my benefit.

Ah, how pale your face was then — how pale even the color of your lips!

"Why has everything changed like this, I wonder. You seemed to have entrusted yourself to me so completely, in every way..."

So I thought, in the manner of a man puzzling over something he cannot resolve, walking with evident difficulty along the narrow mountain path where bare roots had begun to jut out here and there, letting you go on a little ahead of me.

The trees seemed already to have grown quite dense thereabouts, and the air was cold.

Here and there, small ravines cut into the ground.

Suddenly, this thought flashed through my mind.

Might it not be that you — just as you had been so obedient this summer even to someone like me, a man you had met purely by chance — were, no, far more than that, quietly and utterly surrendering yourself to your father, and beyond him, to whatever it is that ceaselessly governs the whole of you, your father included?

..."Setsuko! If that is the sort of woman you are, then I will love you all the more. Once I have a firmer footing in life, I mean to come for you no matter what — until then, stay with your father exactly as you are now..."

Saying such things only to myself, and yet as though seeking your consent all the same, I suddenly took your hand.

You let me take it, without resisting.

After that, still holding hands like that, we stood before one of the ravines, and in silence gazed down — with a feeling I can only call wistful — at the way the sunlight, filtering through the gaps of the low shrubs whose branches crossed one another overhead in countless flecks, fell mottled far below at the bottom of the little ravine cut deep at our feet, down among the ferns and undergrowth, and how that faint stray light, by the time it reached so far down, trembled and flickered, almost imperceptibly, in a breeze that was itself scarcely there at all.

A few days later, one evening, I found you in the dining hall, taking a meal together with your father, who had come to fetch you.

You had turned your back to me, somehow awkwardly.

The manner and bearing that being at your father's side must almost unconsciously have drawn out of you made you seem to me like some young girl I had never once laid eyes on before.

"Even if I were to call out your name..."

I murmured to myself.

"She wouldn't so much as glance this way. As though it were no longer even her name that I had called..."

That night, after returning from a solitary, rather listless walk I had gone out on, I still wandered for a while through the deserted garden of the hotel.

The mountain lilies were in fragrance.

I gazed absently at the two or three windows of the hotel that still let their light escape.

By then a faint mist seemed to have begun settling in.

As though in fear of it, the lit windows went dark one by one.

And just when I thought the whole hotel had at last gone entirely black, there came a light creak, and one window swung slowly open.

And a young woman, dressed in what looked like a rose-colored nightgown, came to lean quietly against the sill.

It was you...

Even now I can call back clearly that atmosphere of happiness, so like sorrow, which day after day, ever since you and your father had gone, had kept pressing upon my heart.

I shut myself up in the hotel the whole day long.

And I set to work again on the labor I had, for so long, cast aside on your account.

I was able to lose myself in that work with a calm that surprised even me.

Meanwhile everything shifted into another season.

And at last, on the day before I too was to leave, I went out from the hotel on a walk for the first time in a long while.

Autumn had thrown the woods into a disorder almost past recognizing.

Through the trees, now grown considerably bare of leaf, one could see, far off, the terrace of some deserted villa jutting forward.

The damp smell of mushrooms mingled with the smell of fallen leaves.

Such an unforeseen shift of season — the sheer stretch of time that had, unknown to me, passed since I parted from you — struck me as strange.

Was it because somewhere within my heart there lay a kind of conviction that being kept apart from you was only temporary, and that this had come to give even the passing of time a meaning, for me, entirely different from before?

...Something of that sort I had already begun, vaguely, to sense, well before I could confirm it clearly to myself only a little afterward.

Some ten-odd minutes later, I set foot in a meadow overgrown everywhere with plume grass, at the point where the woods came to an end and the land opened out suddenly, offering a view clear to the distant horizon.

And I lay myself down in the shade of a white birch nearby, its leaves already beginning to turn yellow.

It was the very place where, in those summer days, I had always lain just as I was lying now, watching you paint.

Around that horizon, which back then had almost always been blocked by billowing thunderclouds, distant mountain ranges I did not even know the name of now showed each of their outlines clear and distinct, parting the pure white plumes of the grass as they went.

As I gazed with such fixed intensity at the forms of those distant mountains that I might have memorized every one of them, the conviction gradually rose clear into my consciousness that I had, at last, discovered something nature had long since set aside for me, something that until now had lain hidden within myself...

Spring

March came.

One afternoon, as I called at Setsuko's house in my usual manner, as though I had merely happened by in the course of a stroll, I found her father, in the shrubbery just beside the gate, wearing a great straw hat of the kind laborers wear, a pair of shears in one hand, trimming the trees thereabouts.

Catching sight of him like that, I pushed my way through the branches like a child and went up beside him, and after exchanging a word or two of greeting, stood there watching, with some curiosity, what he was doing.—

As I stood there, tucked away entirely within the shrubbery, something white would now and then catch the light on some small branch here or there.

They all looked to be buds, every one of them...

"That girl seems to have grown a good deal stronger these days."

Her father suddenly lifted his face toward me and brought up Setsuko, to whom I had only just then become engaged.

"Once the weather turns a little finer, what would you say to sending her somewhere for a change of air?"

"That would be good, I suppose..."

I said, stumbling over my words, making as if I could not stop worrying over some bud that had been glittering before my eyes for a while now.

"I've been looking about for somewhere suitable these past few days—"

her father went on, paying no mind to me in that state.

"Setsuko says she doesn't know what to make of the sanatorium at F, but you're acquainted with the director there, aren't you?"

"Yes."

I answered somewhat absently, and at last drew toward me by hand the white bud I had spotted a moment before.

"But would she be able to manage, going off to a place like that all on her own?"

"Everyone there seems to go alone, from what I understand."

"Still, I doubt she could bear it very well on her own, don't you think?"

Her father kept a somewhat troubled look on his face, but without turning to me, he abruptly put his shears to one of the branches before him.

Seeing that, I could no longer hold myself back, and out came the words that her father, I could only think, had been waiting for me to say.

"If it comes to that, I could go along with her myself. The work I've got underway now should just about be finished by then..."

So saying, I let go again, gently, of the budded branch I had only just taken into my hand.

At the same moment I saw her father's face brighten all at once.

"If you would do that for us, nothing could suit better — though I'm terribly sorry to put you to such trouble..."

"Not at all — for someone like me, being up in the mountains like that might even make the work go better..."

After that we talked for a while about the mountain district where the sanatorium stood.

But before we knew it, our conversation had drifted back down onto the shrubbery her father was tending.

A kind of fellow feeling the two of us were sensing between us just then seemed to lend even that aimless talk a certain liveliness...

"I wonder if Setsuko is up."

After a while I asked, as though it were nothing in particular.

"Oh, she should be up by now. Go on through, never mind me — right through there..."

Her father gestured with the hand holding the shears toward the garden gate.

Making my way at last out of the shrubbery, I forced open the gate, made stiff with tangled ivy, and went straight from the garden toward the detached sickroom that, until recently, had served as her studio.

Setsuko seemed to have known for some time already that I had come, but she had evidently not expected me to come in that way, through the garden, for she lay on the couch with a bright-colored kimono jacket thrown over her nightclothes, idly turning over in her hands a woman's hat, trimmed with a slender ribbon, that I had never seen before.

As I came toward her, catching sight of her like that through the French doors, she too seemed to have noticed me.

She made an unconscious movement, as if to rise.

But she only lay there as she was, her face turned toward me, gazing at me with a smile that was somewhat abashed.

"Were you up?"

I called out to her from the doorway, tugging off my shoes with some roughness.

"I tried getting up for a bit, but I got tired right away."

So saying, with a listless, weary sort of gesture, she tossed carelessly onto the dressing table beside her the hat she had apparently just been playing with, for no reason at all.

But it fell short and landed on the floor.

I went over to it, and crouching down until my face nearly touched the tips of her feet, picked up the hat, and now began turning it over in my own hands, just as she had been doing a moment before.

Then at last I asked her.

"What were you doing, taking out a hat like this?"

"There's no telling when I'll ever be well enough to wear it, and yet Father went and bought it for me yesterday. ...Isn't he a funny father to have?"

"So this is your father's choosing? What a good father you have, truly. ...Here now, try putting it on, just for a moment."

And when, half in jest, I made as if to set it on her head,

"No, don't..."

she said, and half sat up, as though wearily trying to avoid it.

Then, giving me a faint, apologetic sort of smile, as if she had just remembered something, she began, with hands whose thinness was rather noticeable, to smooth her somewhat tangled hair.

That unstudied gesture of hers, and yet one so naturally girlish, made me feel a sensual pull so breathless it was almost as if she had begun caressing me herself.

And it was so much so that I could not help but tear my eyes away from her...

Presently I set her hat, which I had been turning over in my hands until then, quietly down on the dressing table beside us, and fell silent as though some thought had suddenly struck me, still keeping my eyes turned away from her.

"Are you angry with me?"

she asked, looking up at me all at once, with some anxiety.

"No, it isn't that."

I said, finally turning my eyes to her, and then, with no connection at all to what had gone before, came out abruptly with this.

"Your father was saying just now — do you really mean to go to the sanatorium?"

"Yes. There's no telling when I'll get better, going on like this. If I could get well faster, I'd go anywhere at all. But..."

"But what? What were you going to say?"

"It's nothing."

"It doesn't matter if it's nothing, tell me anyway. ...You really won't say it, will you — then shall I say it for you? You want me to come along with you too, don't you?"

"That isn't it at all."

she said, trying suddenly to cut me off.

But paying that no mind, I went on speaking, my tone quite different from before, growing gradually more earnest, with a certain uneasiness in it.

"...No, even if you told me I needn't come, I'd go with you all the same. But there's something that's been on my mind, some feeling I keep having. ...Even before you and I were together, there was a time I used to dream of going off somewhere, to some lonely spot in the mountains, to live there alone with a dear girl just like you. Didn't I once tell you about that dream of mine, long ago? You remember — that talk about the mountain hut, and I wondered aloud whether we could really live in mountains like that, and you laughed at me so innocently. ...The truth is, I've begun to wonder whether this notion of yours, to go off to the sanatorium now, isn't being moved, without your even knowing it, by something of that same old dream of mine. ...Isn't that so?"

She listened to all this in silence, trying hard to smile, and then—

"I don't even remember anything like that anymore."

she said, quite firmly.

Then, gazing at me steadily with what was almost a look of concern for me, "You do think up the most far-fetched things sometimes..."

A few minutes later, with faces as though nothing at all had passed between us, we stood together looking, with a kind of curiosity, at the lawn beyond the French doors, already grown quite green, where here and there something like a shimmer of heat haze seemed to be rising.

⁂

By April, Setsuko's illness seemed, little by little, to be drawing nearer to a period of convalescence.

And the more tediously slow that progress was, the more each maddening step toward recovery seemed, if anything, to carry the weight of something certain, and it filled us, in a way beyond words, with hope.

On the afternoon of one such day, when I came, her father happened to be out, and Setsuko was alone in the sickroom.

She seemed to be in very good spirits that day, and, for once, had changed out of the nightclothes she almost always wore into a blue blouse.

Seeing her looking like that, I could not help but try to draw her out into the garden.

A little wind was blowing, but even that was soft enough to feel pleasant.

She laughed a little uncertainly, but even so, in the end, gave in to me.

And putting her hand on my shoulder, she stepped, with a rather unsteady, timid gait, out through the French doors and onto the lawn.

As we drew near the shrubbery along the hedge, thick and tangled with all sorts of foreign varieties mixed in, their branches so crossed with one another that one could scarcely tell which was which, small buds of white and yellow and pale violet, scattered here and there across the thicket, already looked ready to burst into bloom at any moment.

I stopped before one such thicket, and suddenly recalling that she had once told me, perhaps the previous autumn, what it was,

"This was lilac, wasn't it?"

I said, turning toward her, half as a question.

"I'm not sure that one is really lilac, actually."

she answered, a little apologetically, her hand still resting lightly on my shoulder.

"Hm... so you've been lying to me about it all this time, is that it?"

"I never lied about it, that's just what I was told when someone gave it to me. ...But it isn't such a very nice flower anyway."

"Well now, confessing that just when it's about to bloom! Then that other one over there is probably a fraud too..."

I said, pointing toward the thicket next to it. "What was that one called again?"

"Broom? The yellow kind?"

she took it up.

We moved this time to stand before that other thicket.

"This broom really is the genuine thing. Look, there are two kinds of buds, the yellow and the white, see? This white one here, they say it's quite rare... Father is very proud of it..."

Trading such idle talk, all the while Setsuko never took her hand from my shoulder, and leaned against me not so much wearily as in a kind of quiet rapture.

After that we fell silent together for a while.

As though by doing so we might hold back, even a little, this life of ours that was blooming and fragrant just as it was.

Now and then a soft breeze, pushed out from between the hedges beyond as though it were some held breath finally released, reached as far as the thicket before us, lifting its leaves ever so slightly, and then passed on, leaving the two of us there, entirely and completely to ourselves.

Suddenly she buried her face in the hand she had resting on my shoulder.

I noticed that her heart was beating faster than usual.

"Are you tired?"

I asked her gently.

"No."

she answered in a small voice, but I felt her weight settling more and more, gently, against my shoulder.

"I feel so sorry for you, being this weak, that it must be hard on you..."

What she whispered then, I felt more than I actually heard.

"Why can't she see that it's just that frailty of hers that makes you dearer to me than you would otherwise be..."

I called out to her in my heart, unable to help my impatience, but on the surface I kept perfectly still, pretending I had caught none of it, and then she suddenly lifted her face away from me, and, gradually taking even her hand from my shoulder,

"I wonder why I've grown so faint-hearted lately. Even when I was at my very worst before, none of it ever troubled me like this..."

she murmured, in a very low voice, as though talking to herself.

A silence stretched those words out, full of unease.

Presently she raised her face all at once and looked steadily at me, and then, lowering it again, said, in a voice pitched a little too high, as though strained—

"I suddenly want to live, I think..."

Then she added, in a voice scarcely audible at all,

"Because of you..."

⁂

It was, in the summer of two years before, when we first met, that this line of verse had suddenly risen unbidden to my lips, and which I had since taken to murmuring now and then, for no particular reason—

The wind is rising; still, we must try to live.

—that had gone forgotten ever since, only to come welling back up unexpectedly, just now, between the two of us; such were those days, one might say standing before life itself, more vividly alive, more achingly full of joy, than life itself could ever be.

By the end of that month we had begun making preparations to go to the sanatorium at the foot of Mount Yatsugatake.

Taking advantage of an occasion when the director of that sanatorium, a slight acquaintance of mine, happened to be coming up to Tokyo, I arranged to have him examine Setsuko's condition once before we set out.

One day, having at last managed to get the director to come all the way out to Setsuko's house in the suburbs, after his first examination he said to the two invalids, "Well now, it's nothing very serious. Just go up into the mountains for a year or two and be patient about it,"

and I saw him off as far as the station, hurrying away as he was, having left the patients with those words.

I wanted him to tell me, if no one else, a more exact account of her condition.

"But don't let the patient hear any of this. I'll have a proper talk with the father myself before long."

With that preface, the director, wearing a somewhat troubled expression, explained Setsuko's condition to me in fairly close detail.

Then, looking steadily at me as I listened to all this in silence, "You're looking rather poorly yourself, aren't you. I ought to have examined you too while I was at it,"

he said, as though feeling sorry for me.

When I came back from the station and went into the sickroom again, I found her father had stayed on at the bedside of the patient, who lay there as before, and was already discussing with her the date for their departure to the sanatorium.

Wearing what must have been a rather gloomy expression, I joined in the discussion as well.

"But still..."

her father said presently, rising as though some errand had just occurred to him. "Seeing as she's already recovered this much, it does seem a pity she couldn't just go for the summer alone,"

he said, sounding thoroughly doubtful, and left the sickroom.

Once we were alone together, we both fell silent, without either of us quite meaning to.

It was an evening that felt thoroughly like spring.

I had been feeling, for some while now, as though a headache were coming on, and as it grew steadily worse, I quietly rose, trying not to draw attention, and went over to the glass doors, pushing one of them half open, and leaned against it.

And for a while I stayed there like that, my mind so blank I could not have said what I was thinking about, gazing with empty eyes toward the shrubbery beyond, veiled everywhere in a thin haze, thinking, "What a lovely smell — what flower could that be—"

and nothing more than that.

"What are you doing?"

came the patient's voice, somewhat hoarse, from behind me.

It roused me at once from that peculiar, numbed state I had fallen into.

Keeping my back turned to her, I said, in a tone that sounded contrived, as though I had truly been thinking of something else entirely,

"I was thinking about you, and about the mountains, and about the life we're going to be living up there together..."

I said, haltingly, in fits and starts.

But as I went on saying such things, I began to feel as though I really had been thinking of them, just a moment before.

Yes, and I believe I had also been thinking something like this.—

"Once we're up there, all sorts of things will really happen, I suppose. ...But life is the kind of thing best left entirely to itself, the way you always do. ...If we do that, surely we'll even be given things we could never have thought to wish for ourselves. ..."

Even as I thought such things within my heart, quite unaware of it myself, I found my attention drawn instead entirely toward some trivial impression that seemed, on the face of it, to be nothing at all...

The garden out there was still faintly bright, but when I came to my senses, I found the room itself had already grown quite dim.

"Shall I turn on the light?"

I said, collecting myself all at once.

"Not yet, please leave it as it is..."

Her voice, answering me, was hoarser than before.

For a while we had no words between us.

"I feel a little short of breath, the smell of the grass is so strong..."

"Then I'll shut this too, shall I."

I answered, in a tone that was almost sorrowful, and put my hand to the door's handle, beginning to draw it shut.

"Wait..."

Her voice this time sounded almost strangely neutral, without inflection.

"You were crying just now, weren't you?"

I turned toward her with a look of surprise.

"Of course I wasn't crying. ...Look at me and see."

She would not so much as turn her face toward me from the bed.

It was already too dim to be quite sure, but she seemed to be staring fixedly at something.

But when, with some unease, I followed her gaze with my own eyes, I found she was only staring into empty space.

"I understand, I do... what the director was saying to you just now..."

I wanted to answer her at once, but no words at all would come from my mouth.

I only shut the door quietly, so as to make no sound, and turned again to gaze out at the garden as it sank into evening.

Presently I heard, behind me, something like a deep sigh.

"I'm sorry."

she said at last.

Her voice still carried a slight tremor, but was far steadier than before.

"Don't let this trouble you... From now on, let's really live, for as long as we possibly can..."

Turning around, I saw that she had quietly touched her fingertips to the corners of her eyes, and was keeping them resting there, quite still.

⁂

On a somewhat overcast morning in late April, seen off by her father as far as the station, we boarded the second-class carriage of a train bound for the mountains, appearing, before her father, as cheerful as though we were setting off on a honeymoon.

The train began, slowly, to pull away from the platform.

Leaving behind, on the platform, only her father, standing there and doing his best to appear unconcerned, though his back was bent slightly forward, and he looked, all at once, to have grown old.—

Once we had entirely left the platform behind, we closed the window and, our faces suddenly turned lonesome, sat down together in a corner of the empty second-class car.

Our knees pressed close against each other, as if by doing so we might warm one heart against the other...

The Wind Has Risen

After our train had climbed over the mountains time and again, and run for a while along a deep ravine, and then taken a long while to cross a plateau that opened out suddenly, thick with vineyards, and at last began its long, unrelenting, seemingly endless climb into the mountain country proper, the sky sank lower still, and the pitch-black clouds that until then had seemed to seal it entirely shut began, before we knew it, to break apart and drift, pressing down as though they meant to bear straight upon our very eyes.

The air, too, had begun to carry a chill that seemed to come from somewhere deep below.

With my coat collar turned up, I watched, with some unease, Setsuko's face — she had her eyes shut, her body buried entirely in her shawl — which looked less tired than somehow faintly excited.

Now and then she opened her eyes vacantly and looked toward me.

At first, each time this happened, we would smile at one another with our eyes, but in the end we only looked at each other with unease, and quickly looked away again.

And then she would close her eyes once more.

"It's turned rather cold, hasn't it. I wonder if it might even snow."

"Does it really snow, even this late in April?"

"Yes — around here, you can never quite rule it out."

Though it was still only about three o'clock, I turned my eyes to the window, where it had already grown quite dim outside.

I realized, from the countless leafless larches lining the way, with here and there a jet-black fir mixed among them, that we must already be passing along the skirts of Mount Yatsugatake, though of the mountain itself, which should have been right before us, not so much as a shadow or an outline was to be seen...

The train came to a stop at a small station that looked exactly the sort one would expect at the foot of the mountains, scarcely more than a storage shed.

At the station, an elderly porter, wearing a workman's coat marked with the crest of the highland sanatorium, had come to meet us.

I walked Setsuko, supporting her with my arm, as far as the old, small automobile that had been left waiting in front of the station.

I felt her stagger slightly within my arm, but I pretended not to notice.

"You must be tired."

"Not really."

Several people who looked like locals, who had gotten off with us, seemed to be whispering something to each other around us, but by the time we had climbed into the automobile, they had already, before we knew it, mingled with other villagers and become indistinguishable, vanishing into the village.

After our automobile passed through the village, its rows of shabby little houses continuing on, and came out onto a slope of broken, uneven ground that seemed to stretch on without end all the way up toward the unseen ridgeline of Yatsugatake, a large building with a red roof and several wings came into view ahead of us, a stand of mixed woodland at its back.

"That must be it."

I murmured, feeling the car's body tilt beneath me.

Setsuko only lifted her face for a moment and gazed at it vacantly, with eyes that looked somewhat anxious.

Once we reached the sanatorium, we were put into room number one, on the second floor of the ward, at the very far end, with its back giving directly onto the mixed woodland behind.

After a brief examination, Setsuko was ordered straight to bed.

In the sickroom, its floor laid with linoleum, there was nothing but a bed, a table, and a chair, all painted entirely white — and, besides that, only the several trunks that the porter had just then finished delivering.

Once we were alone together, I remained restless for a while, unwilling even to go into the cramped little side room set aside for attendants, and instead wandered about, gazing vacantly around that bare-feeling room, and going again and again to the window, worrying only about the look of the sky.

The wind was dragging heavy, jet-black clouds along.

And now and then it tore some sharp sound loose from the woodland behind the building.

Once, looking rather cold, I went out onto the balcony.

The balcony ran on, without any partition at all, straight to the sickroom far at the other end.

Since there was not a soul to be seen up there, I walked on without minding, peering into each sickroom one after another, until, through a half-open window, I caught sight of a patient lying in bed in what turned out to be the fourth room, at which I hurried straight back the way I had come.

At last the lamp was lit.

Then we sat down to face the meal a nurse had brought us.

It was, for the very first meal we were to share alone together, a rather forlorn one.

During the meal, since it was already pitch dark outside, I noticed nothing at all, only thinking that everything around us had grown strangely quiet all of a sudden, when, before I knew it, it seemed to have begun snowing.

I rose, narrowed the half-open window a little further, and, pressing my face to the glass, stared so fixedly at the falling snow that it began to fog with my own breath.

Then, finally pulling myself away from it, I turned toward Setsuko and began, "Say — whatever made us come to a place like this..."

I started to say.

Still lying in bed, she looked up at me with a pleading sort of look, and pressed a finger to her lips, as if to keep me from saying it.

⁂

Where the great, easy, ochre-colored skirts of Mount Yatsugatake at last began to ease their slope, the sanatorium stood facing south, its several wings spread out in parallel rows.

The slope of those foothills stretched on further still, tilting a few small mountain villages, whole and entire, down its grade, before finally coming to an end, wrapped round entirely in countless black pines, within some unseen ravine.

From the balconies opening south off the sanatorium, one could look out over those tilted villages and their reddish cultivated fields, and beyond them, on a clear day, above the endless ranks of pine forest that ringed them round, the Southern Alps and two or three of their spurs could be seen, from south to west, appearing and vanishing amid clouds that they themselves seemed forever to be raising up.

On the morning after we arrived at the sanatorium, when I woke in my little side room, I saw, framed within the small window, a sky cleared to a deep indigo blue, and, rising within it, several mountain peaks white as cocks' combs, almost near enough to touch, appearing with all the unexpectedness of things that had just that moment sprung into being out of the air itself.

And from the snow piled on the balcony and the roof, which one could not see while lying in bed, a steady mist of vapor seemed to be rising, bathed all at once in a light that already felt like spring.

Having overslept a little, I leapt up in a hurry and went into the next room.

Setsuko was already awake, wrapped in her blanket, her face looking rather flushed.

"Good morning."

I said cheerfully, feeling my own face beginning to flush in just the same way.

"Did you sleep well?"

"Yes."

She nodded at me.

"I took a sleeping draught last night. My head aches a little now."

As if unwilling to let such a thing trouble me, I threw the window wide open with great energy, and the glass door onto the balcony besides.

The glare was such that for a moment I could see nothing at all, but as my eyes gradually grew used to it, I began to make out a faint mist of vapor rising everywhere — from the snow-buried balcony, from the roof, from the fields, even from the trees.

"And I had the strangest dream. You see..."

she began, from behind me.

I sensed at once that she was forcing herself to say something that must have been hard to confess.

As always at such times, her voice just now had carried a slight hoarseness.

This time it was my turn to turn toward her and press a finger to my lips, to keep her from saying it...

Presently the head nurse came bustling in, with her air of brisk kindliness.

For it was her practice, every morning, to go about from sickroom to sickroom, calling on the patients one by one.

"Did you rest well last night?"

the head nurse asked, in a cheerful voice.

The patient said nothing, and only nodded obediently.

⁂

Life in a mountain sanatorium of this kind naturally comes to take on a peculiar sort of humanity all its own, one that begins precisely from the point where ordinary people already believe the road has come to its end.—

It was not long after I was admitted, when the director called me into the examining room and showed me the X-ray photograph of the diseased part of Setsuko's chest, that I began, only vaguely, to become aware of that unfamiliar sort of humanity taking shape within myself.

The director led me to the window, and holding the plate up to the light so that I too could see it clearly, went through it point by point, adding his explanations.

On the right side of the chest, several pale white ribs stood out quite distinctly, but on the left, they were almost entirely obscured by a great lesion, dark and strange, shaped almost like some flower.

"The lesion has spread further than I expected. ...I hadn't thought it had gotten this bad. ...At this rate, she may well be one of the two or three most serious cases in the whole hospital just now..."

With the director's words ringing dully in my ears, I came back from the examining room feeling almost as though I had lost the power of thought altogether, that dark, strange, flower-like image I had just seen rising alone, vivid and distinct, onto the threshold of my consciousness, quite apart from anything those words had said.

The nurses in white passing me, the patients already sunbathing naked on the balconies here and there, the stir and bustle of the ward, the twittering of small birds — all of it passed before me with no connection to anything at all.

At last, having entered the farthest wing of the ward, and slowing my steps mechanically as I made to climb the stairs leading up to the second floor where our room was, I heard, coming in a steady stream from the sickroom just this side of the stairs, a strange, unnervingly dry cough, the like of which I had never once heard before.

"Ah, so there's a patient even in a place like this,"

I thought, and stared vacantly at the number on that door: No. 17.

⁂

And so our somewhat peculiar life of love began.

Ever since her admission, Setsuko had been ordered to rest completely, and had remained in bed the whole time.

Because of this, she looked, if anything, more like an invalid than she had before her admission, when, on days she felt well, she had made a point of getting up — though I did not think the illness itself had actually worsened.

The doctors too seemed always to treat her as a patient who would soon be well again.

"This is how we take the illness alive,"

the director would say, almost as if in jest.

Meanwhile the season, as though making up for lost time, began advancing with sudden speed.

It was almost as though spring and summer had come rushing in together at once.

Every morning, it seemed, the calls of warblers and cuckoos woke us.

And nearly the whole day long, the fresh green of the surrounding woods pressed in upon the sanatorium from every side, tinting even the inside of the sickroom with its own bright freshness.

In those days, even the white clouds that rose from the mountains each morning seemed, by evening, to have wandered back again to the very peaks they had come from.

When I try now to call back those first days we spent together, those days when I stayed almost constantly at Setsuko's bedside, they resemble one another so closely, in a sameness not without its own charm, that I can scarcely tell which came before and which after.

Or rather, I feel that as we went on repeating those similar days, we slipped, at some point, entirely outside of time itself.

And in those days that seemed to have slipped free of time, every last trifling thing in our daily life took on a charm utterly unlike anything it had held before.

This faintly warm, sweet-smelling presence so close beside me, her breath coming a little quick, that supple hand holding mine, that smile, and then, too, the ordinary talk we exchanged from time to time — take all of that away, and what would remain would be days so plain that nothing at all was left; and yet I could be certain that this, in its essentials, was all our human life really amounts to, and that the only reason such small things could satisfy me so completely was that I shared them with this woman.

If there was any single event at all in those days, it was only that she would now and then run a fever.

That, without question, was steadily wearing her body down.

But on such days we tried all the more carefully, all the more slowly, to savor the charm of our usual routine, as though secretly stealing a taste of forbidden fruit, so that our happiness in life — a life with something of the taste of death about it — was, at such times, kept all the more perfectly intact.

One such evening, I from the balcony and Setsuko from her bed, we both gazed in the same quiet rapture as the mountains, hills, pine forests, and terraced fields opposite us caught the last light of a sun that had only just sunk behind the ridge, half tinged with a vivid madder red, half slowly overtaken by an uncertain grey.

Now and then, as if suddenly remembering themselves, small birds rose up over the woods in a shallow arc.—

I found myself thinking that this whole landscape, called into being for only a single instant by an early-summer evening such as this — all of it made up of the same familiar props we always saw — could probably never again be gazed upon by us, even by ourselves, with quite so overflowing a sense of happiness as it was just now.

And I dreamed that if, long afterward, this beautiful evening should ever come welling back into my heart, I would find in it a perfect picture of our happiness itself.

"What are you thinking about so hard?"

Setsuko finally spoke, from behind me.

"I was thinking how beautiful it would be, if someday, long from now, we should come to remember this life of ours, just as it is right now."

"That might really be true."

she answered, as though agreeing with me were itself a source of real pleasure.

Then we both fell silent again for a while, gazing once more at the same scenery.

But before long I began to feel, quite suddenly, an odd sensation — as though the self gazing so raptly at it all were both myself and not myself, something strangely vague and boundless, and somehow, for that very reason, faintly painful.

Just then I thought I heard, behind me, something like a deep breath.

But it also seemed as though it might have been my own.

As if to make certain, I turned toward her.

"Not so very much..."

She began to say, watching me steadily in return, in a voice slightly hoarse.

But having begun to say it, she seemed to hesitate a little, and then, suddenly, in a tone quite different from before, almost reckless, she added, "It would be lovely if we could just go on living like this forever, wouldn't it."

she added.

"There you go again!"

I cried out, sharply, sounding thoroughly exasperated.

"I'm sorry."

she answered briefly, and turned her face away from me.

That strange, unaccountable mood I had felt a moment before seemed, in me, to be turning gradually into a kind of irritation.

I turned my eyes toward the mountains once more, but by then that strange beauty which had, for one instant, risen up over the landscape had already vanished.

That night, as I was about to go to bed in the side room next door, she called me back.

"I'm sorry, about before."

"It's all right now."

"You see, I meant to say something else, back then... but it just came out that way instead."

"Then what was it you meant to say?"

"...You once told me that it's only in the eyes of someone about to die that nature can ever seem truly beautiful. ...I remembered that, just then. Somehow the beauty of it all, right then, felt exactly like that."

So saying, she gazed at my face as though pleading with me about something.

As though struck to the heart by those words, I found myself lowering my eyes without meaning to.

Just then, a thought suddenly crossed my mind.

And that vague, unsettled feeling that had been irritating me until now finally took clear shape within me....

"Of course — how did I fail to see it? It wasn't I who found nature so beautiful just then. It was the two of us. If I put it plainly, it was Setsuko's soul that had been dreaming, only through my eyes, only in my own particular way of seeing. ...And all the while, without even realizing that Setsuko was dreaming of her own last moment, here I was thinking, quite on my own, only of some distant time when we would both have lived long lives..."

By the time I, having turned such thoughts over and over in my mind, finally lifted my eyes again, she was still watching me steadily, just as before.

As though avoiding her gaze, I bent down over her and kissed her forehead, gently.

I was ashamed, to the very bottom of my heart....

⁂

At last full summer came.

It was, if anything, even fiercer here than down on the plain.

In the woodland behind the building, the cicadas shrilled without stopping the whole day through, as though something down there had caught fire.

Even the smell of resin drifted in through the wide-open window.

By evening, many patients had their beds wheeled out onto the balconies, so as to breathe a little more easily in the open air.

Seeing them, we realized for the first time that the number of patients at the sanatorium had suddenly been increasing of late.

But we, as always, went on with our life together, minding no one else.

Around this time, Setsuko had lost her appetite entirely because of the heat, and seemed, more often than not, unable to sleep well even at night.

To guard her afternoon naps, I began paying even closer attention than before to footsteps in the corridor, and to the bees and horseflies that came darting in through the window.

I even fretted over my own breathing, which grew loud in spite of myself in the heat.

Watching over her sleep like that, at her bedside, holding my own breath, was, for me too, a state very close to sleep itself.

I could feel, with an almost painful clarity, every change in her breathing as it quickened or slackened while she slept.

I even shared, it seemed, the very beating of her heart.

Now and then a mild difficulty in breathing seemed to seize her.

At such times her hand would twitch faintly and rise toward her throat, as if to press something down there — and while I hesitated over whether I ought to wake her, wondering if she were being seized by some nightmare, that anguished spell would soon pass, and a state of slack calm would follow.

At that I too would find myself letting out a breath of relief, and would even feel a kind of pleasure of my own in the quiet breathing she now drew.—

And when she woke, I would gently kiss her hair.

She would look at me, her eyes still heavy with languor.

"Were you there the whole time?"

"Yes — I was dozing off a little myself, over here."

On nights like that, when I too found myself unable to fall asleep for a long while, it became almost a habit of mine, without my even realizing it, to bring my own hand up toward my throat and mimic that same pressing gesture.

And only after noticing myself doing it would I finally feel a real difficulty breathing of my own.

But that, to me, was almost a pleasant sensation.

"You've been looking rather pale lately, I think."

she said one day, studying me more closely than usual.

"Is something the matter with you?"

"It's nothing."

I was pleased to hear her say it.

"Haven't I always looked like this?"

"Won't you go out for a walk once in a while, instead of staying by my side the whole time?"

"Who could possibly go walking in this heat. ...And the nights are pitch dark besides. ...Anyway, I go back and forth through the hospital corridors so much every day as it is."

To keep the conversation from going any further in that direction, I would bring up talk of the other patients we happened to pass every day in the corridors.

I would tell her about the younger patients who liked to gather in a knot along the edge of the balcony, turning the sky into a racecourse and picking out shapes of animals in the drifting clouds, or about that unnervingly tall patient, badly afflicted with nerves, who always clung to her attendant nurse's arm as she wandered the corridors back and forth with no destination at all.

But the one patient I always made a point of avoiding, even in conversation, was the one in room seventeen — whose face I had still never once seen, but whose unnerving, chilling cough I heard every single time I passed that door.

I could only suppose that it must be the most serious case in the whole sanatorium....

August had at last drawn near its end, and yet the nights remained oppressively hard to sleep through.

On one such night, as we were both lying awake, unable to fall asleep (the nine o'clock hour for lights-out had long since passed....),

a stir of commotion, indistinct but growing, began somewhere in the ward far below and away from us.

Mixed into it were, now and then, footsteps hurrying along a corridor, small stifled cries from a nurse, and the sharp clatter of some instrument striking against another.

For a while I listened with a growing sense of unease.

Just when it seemed at last to have died down, an identical hush of unease rose up, almost simultaneously, first in one ward and then another, until at last it reached even the ward directly beneath us.

I knew well enough, by then, what it was that was raging like a storm through the sanatorium just then.

Straining my ears again and again through it all, I kept watch on the patient next door, who, though the light had long since been put out, still seemed just as unable to sleep as we were.

The patient did not even seem to turn over, but lay perfectly still.

I too lay just as still, holding my breath almost to the point of suffocation, waiting only for that storm to die down of its own accord.

It was not until well past midnight that it finally seemed to be subsiding, and I, letting out a breath of relief in spite of myself, had just begun to drift toward sleep when, quite suddenly, the patient next door gave two or three sharp, nervous coughs, coughs that had clearly been held back by force until then, and I woke with a start.

The coughing seemed to stop again almost at once, but I could not stop worrying about it, and quietly went into the next room.

In the pitch darkness, the patient lay with eyes wide open, as though frightened all alone, looking straight toward me.

I said nothing, and went to her side.

"I'm still all right."

she said, forcing herself to smile, in a voice so low I could barely make it out.

I sat down on the edge of the bed without a word.

"Stay there, please."

the patient said to me, in a faint, timid voice quite unlike her usual self.

We spent the rest of that night just like that, without either of us so much as closing our eyes.

A few days after that, summer suddenly began to weaken.

⁂

By September, a somewhat unsettled rain had begun falling on and off, again and again, until before long it was coming down almost without a break.

It seemed to be rotting the leaves before it could even turn them yellow.

Even the rooms of the sanatorium, for all their size, had to keep their windows shut every day, until they grew almost dim with shadow.

The wind would sometimes rattle the doors.

And it would tear loose from the woodland behind us a monotonous, heavy sound.

On windless days, we spent the whole day listening to the rain falling along the roof onto the balcony.

On one early morning, when that rain had at last begun to resemble fog, I stood at the window, looking down vacantly, and noticed that the long, narrow courtyard the balcony faced seemed to have grown a little brighter.

Just then, from the far side of the courtyard, I saw a nurse coming toward us through that mist-like rain, gathering up, almost at random, the wild chrysanthemums and cosmos blooming here and there.

I recognized her as the attendant nurse from room seventeen.

"Ah — the patient I always used to hear that unpleasant cough from, I wonder if he's died,"

the thought crossed my mind, and as I went on watching that nurse, soaked with rain and somehow strangely excited, still gathering flowers, my heart suddenly felt as though it were being gripped tight.

"So it really was him, the worst case here after all. But if he's finally died — then who's next? ...Ah, I wish the director had never said what he said to me..."

Even after the nurse, her arms full of flowers, had vanished behind the balcony, I stayed there vacantly, my face pressed to the windowpane.

"What are you looking at so intently?"

the patient asked me, from the bed.

"There's a nurse out there gathering flowers, in all this rain — I wonder who it could be for."

I murmured, almost to myself, and at last pulled myself away from the window.

But for the whole rest of that day, somehow, I could not bring myself to look the patient full in the face.

It seemed to me at times that she saw through everything, and yet was only pretending not to know, and would sometimes fix her eyes steadily upon me, and that thought only tormented me all the more.

Telling myself again and again that it was wrong for us to begin harboring, each on our own, some unshared unease and dread, and to let the two of us start thinking our separate, private thoughts like this, I tried hard to put the whole incident quickly out of my mind — only to find, before I knew it, that my thoughts had come circling back to it once again.

And in the end, I even found myself suddenly recalling — though I had put it entirely out of mind until now — that dream the patient had described to me on the snowy night we first arrived at the sanatorium, that ominous dream which I had at first refused to hear, but had at last given in and drawn out of her anyway.—

In that strange dream, the patient lay as a corpse, inside a coffin.

People carried the coffin, crossing some field she did not recognize, and passing into a wood.

And yet she, already dead, could see with perfect clarity, from within the coffin, the wintry, withered fields and the black fir trees, and could hear the sound of the wind blowing lonesomely across them.... Even after waking from that dream, she had felt, quite vividly, that her ears had gone terribly cold, and that the rustling of the firs still filled them....

While that fog-like rain went on falling for several more days, the season had already, without our noticing, changed into another.

Within the sanatorium too, I realized, of all those many patients there had been, one by one, two by two, they had left, until only the most serious cases remained, the ones who would have to spend this coming winter here, and the whole place had turned lonesome again, just as it had been before summer came.

The death of the patient in room seventeen made that all the more suddenly apparent.

One morning near the end of September, glancing idly out through a window on the north side of the corridor toward the misty woodland behind the building, I found it strangely unsettling to see people going in and out among the trees more than usual.

When I asked the nurses about it, they all seemed to know nothing whatsoever.

I let the matter slip from my mind after that, but the following day, from early morning, two or three laborers came again, and I caught glimpses, through the fog, of them starting to cut down what looked like a chestnut tree at the edge of that rise.

That day, quite by chance, I happened to learn of an event from the previous day that none of the other patients seemed to know of yet.

As it turned out, the story was that the unnervingly nervous patient had hanged himself somewhere in that wood.

Now that I thought of it, I realized that the big man who used to walk the corridors clinging to his attendant nurse's arm, whom I used to see several times a day, had suddenly stopped appearing since the day before.

"So it was his turn..."

Ever since the patient in room seventeen had died, I had grown thoroughly on edge, and now, with this second, wholly unexpected death coming barely a week later, I found myself, quite against my will, feeling a certain relief.

So much so that the sense of horror I ought certainly to have felt at so grim a death seemed almost entirely lost on me, because of it.

"Just because they said he was next worst after the man who died before, doesn't mean he was bound to die too,"

I told myself, lightly enough, to reassure myself.

Where two or three chestnut trees had been cut down in the woods behind us, leaving the spot looking oddly bare, the laborers had now gone on to cut away the edge of that rise itself, carrying the earth down to a small open space along the north side of the ward, where the ground fell off in a somewhat steep grade, and had begun shaping the whole area into a gentle slope.

They were, it turned out, at work turning the spot into a flower bed.

⁂

"There's a letter from your father."

I handed Setsuko one letter from the bundle the nurse had just given me.

Still lying in bed, she took it, her eyes suddenly lighting up like a girl's, and began to read.

"Oh — he says he's coming."

Her father, then away on a trip, had written to say that he meant to stop by the sanatorium before long, on his way home.

It was a clear October day, though with a rather strong wind blowing.

Since Setsuko had of late lost her appetite, having been confined to bed so long, and had grown noticeably thin, she began, from that day, to make a point of eating properly, and would sometimes sit up in bed, or perch on its edge.

Every so often, too, something like the trace of a private, remembered smile would drift across her face.

In it I recognized the first sketch, so to speak, of that girlish smile she showed only ever in her father's presence.

I let her go on as she pleased.

A few days later, one afternoon, her father arrived.

He looked somewhat older in the face than before, but even more noticeably, he had taken to stooping.

It gave him the air, somehow, of a man rather afraid of the very atmosphere of the hospital.

As soon as he entered the sickroom, he sat down at the bedside, in the very spot where I usually sat.

Perhaps from having moved about a little too much these past few days, Setsuko had run something of a fever the evening before, and on the doctor's orders — to the disappointment of all her hopes — had been confined to complete rest since morning.

Her father, who seemed to have convinced himself that she was already well on her way to recovery, looked somewhat troubled to find her still confined to bed like that.

And as though trying to discover the cause of it, he looked carefully about the sickroom, watched the nurses' every movement, and even went out onto the balcony to look around — all of which seemed, in the end, to satisfy him.

Then, seeing the patient's cheeks growing rosier and rosier — more from fever than from excitement — he said, "Still, her color is really quite good,"

and kept repeating it, again and again, as though trying to convince himself that his daughter must be getting better somewhere, somehow.

I made some excuse of an errand and left the sickroom, leaving the two of them alone together.

When I came back in a little while later, I found the patient sitting up in bed.

Spread out across the coverlet was a whole array of candy boxes and other little wrapped parcels her father had brought.

They all seemed to be things she had loved as a girl, and which her father still believed, even now, that she loved.

Catching sight of me, she flushed like a girl caught at some mischief, and hurriedly tidied it all away, then lay straight back down.

Feeling somewhat out of place, I sat down in a chair by the window, a little apart from the two of them.

The two of them went on with the conversation my entrance had apparently interrupted, though now in voices lower than before.

Much of it concerned people and matters I knew nothing about.

Some of it even seemed to move her with small feelings I could never have understood.

I sat comparing the two of them, watching their evidently happy exchange as though I were looking at some painting of it.

And in her expressions and the rise and fall of her voice as she spoke to her father, I recognized something intensely girlish coming back to life in her.

And the sight of her childlike happiness set me dreaming of that girlhood of hers, which I myself had never known....

For a moment, when the two of us were alone together, I went up to her and murmured, teasingly, in her ear.

"You look today like some rosy-cheeked girl I've never met before."

"I don't know what you mean."

she said, covering her face with both hands, exactly like a young girl.

⁂

Her father stayed two days.

Before he left, he had me act as his guide and walked with him around the sanatorium grounds.

But his real purpose was to speak with me alone.

It was a day so clear there was not a single cloud in the sky.

Even when I pointed out Mount Yatsugatake, its reddish flank showing unusually clear and distinct, her father barely lifted his eyes to it, and went on talking earnestly.

"I can't help wondering whether this place really agrees with her constitution. It's been more than half a year now, and you'd think she'd have improved a little more by now..."

"Well, the weather was poor everywhere this summer, wasn't it? And they say mountain sanatoriums like this one are really at their best in winter..."

"That might be so, if she could hold out until winter... but I doubt she has the patience to bear it that long..."

"But she seems to mean to stay through the winter herself, from what she's told me."

Frustrated, wondering how I could possibly make her father understand just how much this solitude in the mountains was nurturing our happiness, and yet, thinking of all the sacrifice he was making for our sake, unable to bring myself to say any such thing, I went on with our disjointed exchange.

"Well, since she's come all this way into the mountains, why not let her stay as long as she can manage?"

"...But will you stay with her too, through the winter?"

"Yes, of course I will."

"That really is asking a great deal of you. ...But tell me, are you doing any work of your own these days?"

"No..."

"Still, you mustn't spend all your time looking after her and neglect your own work entirely."

"Yes, I mean to start again soon..."

I said, stumbling over the words.

—"That's true, I really have neglected my work for far too long now. I have to find some way to take it up again while there's still time."

...Turning such thoughts over in my mind, I felt my chest fill with something I could not quite name.

After that we stood together in silence for a while on the hillside, gazing up at the countless scale-like clouds that had, before we knew it, spread far across the midday sky from the west.

Presently we passed through the woods, their leaves by now entirely turned yellow, and made our way back to the hospital from behind.

That day too, two or three laborers were at work cutting away that same hillside.

As we passed by them, I only remarked, as casually as I could manage, "They say they're making a flower bed here, apparently."

and left it at that.

That evening, after seeing her father off at the station and coming back, I found the patient lying on her side in bed, choking on a violent fit of coughing.

She had never once coughed this violently before.

Waiting for the fit to subside a little, I asked,

"What's wrong?"

and she managed only to answer,

"It's nothing. ...It'll stop soon."

That much the patient managed to say.

"Give me some of that water."

I poured a little water from the flask into a cup and brought it to her lips.

She took a single sip of it and stayed calm for a while, but that state lasted only a short time, and another fit, if anything more violent than the last, seized her once again.

There was nothing at all I could do for her, writhing there almost to the very edge of the bed, and all I could manage was to ask,

"Shall I call a nurse?"

"........."

Even after the fit had subsided, she went on twisting her body in evident pain for a long while, covering her face with both hands, and only nodded in reply.

I went to call a nurse.

By the time I followed the nurse, who had run ahead without waiting for me, back into the sickroom, the patient, supported by the nurse's two hands, had settled into a somewhat easier position.

But she only stared vacantly ahead, her eyes wide open.

The coughing fit seemed, for the moment, to have stopped.

The nurse, gradually letting go of the hands she had used to support her,

"There now, it's stopped. ...Just stay quite still for a little while, won't you,"

she said, and began straightening the disordered blankets.

"I'll go and arrange for an injection right away."

The nurse said, as she left the room, murmuring a word in my ear as she passed — I had been standing rooted at the door, not knowing where else I ought to be.

"She's brought up a little blood in her sputum."

I finally went and stood at her bedside.

Her eyes were open, but vacantly so, and I could only think she must be asleep.

Brushing back the small, tangled curls of hair from her pale forehead, I gently stroked with my hand that cold, sweat-dampened brow.

As if she had at last felt the warmth of me there, a faint, enigmatic smile flickered briefly across her lips.

⁂

Days of absolute rest followed, one after another.

The sickroom windows were kept entirely covered with yellow shades, and the room itself was left dim.

Even the nurses walked about on tiptoe.

I stayed at her bedside almost without leaving it.

I took on the night watch alone as well.

Now and then the patient would look toward me as though about to say something.

I would quickly press a finger to my own lips, to keep her from saying it.

Such silences drew each of us back into our own separate thoughts.

And yet we each felt, with an almost painful clarity, exactly what the other was thinking.

And while I brooded over this whole incident as though it were nothing more than the visible form that the sacrifice the patient had been making for my sake had finally taken, it was plain to me that she, for her part, seemed to be tormenting herself with regret, as though her own carelessness had shattered, in a single instant, everything the two of us had spent so long, so carefully, nurturing together.

And the pitiful way she seemed to reproach only her own carelessness, never once counting her own sacrifice as any sacrifice at all, wrung my heart.

Even as I let her go on paying such a sacrifice, as though it were only her rightful due, could the pleasure of life that we so shared and savored together on a bed that might, at any moment, become a deathbed — that very thing we believed could make us happier than anything else in the world — could it really, in the end, ever fully satisfy us?

Was what we now took for our happiness, perhaps, something far more fleeting, something closer to mere caprice, than we ourselves believed it to be?

....

Worn out from the night watch, turning such thoughts over and over beside the patient as she dozed, I felt, with growing unease, that our happiness these days seemed forever on the verge of being threatened by something or other.

That crisis, however, passed within about a week.

One morning, the nurse finally took the shades down from the sickroom windows, and left part of a window open.

Blinking against the autumnal sunlight now pouring in through the window,

"It feels wonderful,"

the patient said from her bed, as though brought back to life.

Spreading a newspaper open at her bedside, thinking to myself that the very events that move a person most powerfully seem, once they've passed, to look almost as if they had happened to someone else entirely, I glanced over at her and said, in a tone that came out teasing despite myself,

"You shouldn't get so worked up next time your father visits, you know."

She colored a little and took my teasing without complaint.

"Next time Father comes, I'll act like I don't even notice."

"If you can really manage that, well then..."

Trading such jokes back and forth like that, each of us tending gently to the other's feelings, we fell together into a childish habit of pinning all the blame on her father.

And in that way, quite without meaning to force it, we settled into a light-hearted mood, as though the whole affair of that past week had been nothing but some small mistake, and made our way through, without any great difficulty, the crisis that had, until just a little while ago, seemed to be threatening us not only in body but in spirit as well.

At least, that was how it appeared to us....

One evening, as I sat reading a book at her side, I suddenly closed it, went to the window, and stood there for a while, lost in thought.

Then I came back to her side again.

I picked the book up once more and began reading it.

"What's wrong?"

she asked, looking up at me.

"It's nothing."

I answered carelessly, and kept my eyes on the book for a few seconds more, as though absorbed in it, but at last I spoke.

"Since I've done so little of anything since coming here, I've been thinking I ought to start on some work of my own."

"Yes, you really ought to. Father was worried about that too."

she answered, with a serious expression.

"Don't spend all your time thinking only about someone like me..."

"No — it's you I want to think about, more than ever..."

Chasing after the vague idea for a novel that had just then flashed into my head, I went on speaking, almost as though talking to myself.

"I've decided I want to write about you, in a novel. I can't seem to think about anything else, these days. This happiness we've been giving each other, this joy in living that begins from the very place everyone else believes is the end of the road — I want to take that, something so entirely our own that no one else even knows of it, and turn it into something more solid, something with a shape to it at last. You understand what I mean?"

"I understand."

she answered at once, as though she had been following my thoughts as her very own.

But then, with a small, crooked smile,

"You may write whatever you like about me, then."

she added, brushing me off lightly.

I chose, however, to take those words quite at their word.

"Yes, I'll write it exactly as I please. ...But this time I'll need a great deal of help from you too, you know."

"Is there something I can do?"

"Yes — while I'm at work, I want you to be happy, from the crown of your head down to the tips of your toes. Otherwise..."

Feeling my own mind working with an odd new liveliness, more than it ever did when I sat brooding alone, now that we seemed to be thinking it through together like this, I found myself, before I knew it, pacing back and forth across the sickroom, as though driven on by one thought after another welling up inside me.

"You'll lose all your energy, staying by a sick woman's side all the time like this. ...Won't you get out for a walk now and then?"

"Yes — once I'm properly at work,"

I answered readily, my eyes shining.

"I'll take plenty of walks too."

⁂

I came out of the woods.

Across a great ravine, beyond the woods opposite, the whole skirt of Mount Yatsugatake spread out endlessly before my eyes, and far ahead, almost level with the woods themselves, lay a narrow village with its tilted fields, and, within it, the sanatorium buildings, their many red roofs spread out like wings, appeared as a tiny but perfectly distinct shape.

I had been wandering, ever since early morning, from wood to wood, scarcely knowing where my feet were carrying me, given over entirely to my own thoughts, letting them lead me wherever they pleased — but now, at the instant that small shape of the sanatorium, drawn unexpectedly close by the clear autumn air, suddenly came into view before my eyes, I felt as though I had woken, all at once, from something that had possessed me, and for the first time found myself thinking, at some distance, of the strangeness of the life we led there, day after day, going about our lives so unremarkably, surrounded within those walls by so many other invalids.

And driven on, one thought after another, by that urge to create which had been welling up in me for a while now, I began turning our strange, day-after-day existence into a single story, one strangely pathetic, and yet quiet and still....

"Setsuko, I don't believe two people have ever loved one another quite the way we do. There was never a you before this, not really. And there was never really a me, either..."

My reverie moved over the various events that had befallen us, at times rushing quickly past them, at times settling on a single spot, lingering there, hesitating, on and on, without end.

Though far away from Setsuko in body, I went on, all the while, speaking to her, and hearing her answer.

That story of ours seemed, like life itself, to have no end at all.

And before I knew it, the story had begun to live by its own power, unfolding as it pleased without any regard for me, leaving me behind wherever I lingered too long in one place, and, as though the story itself desired precisely such an outcome, it began contriving the sorrowful death of its ailing heroine.—

A girl who, sensing her own end drawing near, spent what strength remained to her trying, with all her failing power, to live cheerfully, nobly, to the last — a girl who died, seemingly happy, in her lover's arms, grieving only for the grief that would be left to him — the image of such a girl rose up before me, clear as if painted on the empty air....

"The man, hoping to make their love something still purer, draws the sickly girl along with him into a mountain sanatorium, but as death begins to threaten them, he comes to doubt, more and more, whether the happiness they are seeking there, even if they should attain it perfectly, could ever truly satisfy them. — But the girl, even in her death agony, dies seemingly content to the last, grateful to him for having faithfully nursed her through it all. And the man, sustained by so noble a death, comes at last to be able to believe in their own small happiness after all..."

That ending seemed to have been lying in wait for me there all along.

And suddenly, that image of a girl at the point of death struck me with an unexpected violence.

As though waking from a dream, I was seized by a horror and a shame beyond all telling.

And as if trying to shake such a reverie off myself, I rose abruptly from the bare beech root I had been sitting on.

The sun had already climbed high.

The mountains, the woods, the villages, the fields — all of it floated there, seemingly so settled and secure in the mild autumn light.

Within the small, distant shape of the sanatorium too, everything must, without question, have already fallen back into its daily routine.

And then, all at once, when I pictured Setsuko's lonely figure, left out of that daily round among all those strangers, waiting for me all by herself, forlorn, the thought grew suddenly unbearable, and I hurried down the mountain path.

I passed through the woods behind the building and returned to the sanatorium.

And skirting round the balcony, I made my way toward the sickroom at the very end.

Without noticing me at all, Setsuko lay in bed, twirling the end of her hair in her fingers as she always did, gazing up into empty space with a rather sorrowful look.

I had almost raised my hand to tap on the windowpane, but stopped myself, and stood gazing steadily at her like that.

She looked as though she were only just barely enduring something that threatened her, and yet seemed so lost in her own vacant thought that she was probably not even aware, herself, of wearing such an expression at all....

With a feeling as though my heart were being gripped tight, I went on watching that unfamiliar figure of hers....

And then suddenly, her face seemed to brighten.

She lifted her face and even began to smile.

She had noticed me.

I went in from the balcony and came to her side.

"What were you thinking about?"

"Nothing at all..."

she answered, in a voice that somehow did not sound like her own.

When I said nothing further, and merely fell into a somewhat gloomy silence, she at last seemed to return to her usual self, and asked me, in that familiar, intimate voice of hers, "Where did you go? You were gone so long."

she asked me.

"Over that way."

I said carelessly, pointing toward the distant woods visible straight ahead from the balcony.

"My goodness, you went all the way over there? ...Do you think you'll be able to work?"

"Yes, well..."

I answered curtly, quite unlike myself, and fell back for a while into the same silence as before, but then, out of nowhere, I asked,

"Are you happy, with the life we're living now?"

in a voice that came out somewhat strained.

She seemed a little startled by such an abrupt question, but then looked steadily back at me, and, nodding as though quite certain of it,

"Why are you asking me such a thing?"

she asked back, sounding genuinely puzzled.

"I got to thinking, somehow, that this life we're living might just be some caprice of mine. That I've been treating it as though it were something so precious, even to you..."

"Don't say such things."

she cut me off suddenly.

"Saying such things — that's your caprice, if anything."

But even at that, I still seemed unsatisfied.

She watched my gloomy expression for a while, fidgeting, but at last, as though she could bear it no longer, she said,

"Don't you see how content I am, being here like this? Even at my very worst, not once have I ever wished to go home. If you hadn't been here beside me, I don't know what would have become of me, truly. ...Even just now, while you were away — at first, the longer you were gone, the more I told myself I was only saving up that much more joy for when you came back, and I bore it stubbornly like that — but then, once the time I had told myself you'd surely be back by had long since passed and still you didn't come, I finally grew truly frightened. This very room, where we're always together, began to feel like some room I'd never seen before, and I grew so afraid I nearly wanted to run out of it. ...But then, at last, I thought of something you once said to me, and it calmed me a little. You once told me, didn't you — how beautiful this life of ours would seem, if we ever came to remember it, long afterward..."

Her voice growing steadily hoarser as she finished saying this, she gazed steadily at me, her mouth twisted into something that was not quite a smile.

Listening to her words, my chest filled unbearably, and yet, as though afraid to let her see how moved I was, I quietly stepped out onto the balcony.

And from there I gazed, deeply absorbed, at the whole landscape around us, lit now by a light that resembled, and yet was entirely unlike, that early-summer evening light that had once seemed to paint our happiness there so perfectly — this was the light of an autumn morning, colder, carrying a deeper, more somber tone.

Feeling myself filled with an unfamiliar emotion, one that resembled that old happiness and yet gripped my chest far more tightly still....

Winter

October 20, 1935

In the afternoon, leaving the patient behind as usual, I left the sanatorium, passed between fields where farmers were busy with the harvest, crossed through the woods, and came down into a narrow, deserted village nestled in a hollow of the mountain; then, crossing a suspension bridge over a small mountain stream, I climbed a low hill thick with chestnut trees on the far side of the village, and sat down on its upper slope.

There, for hours, in a bright and quiet frame of mind, I lost myself in thinking out the shape of the story I was about to set my hand to.

Now and then, as though suddenly remembering themselves, children below my feet would shake a chestnut tree until its nuts came raining down all at once, a loud crash that echoed through the whole valley, startling me each time....

I found I loved the feeling that everything I saw and heard around me seemed to be telling me that the fruit of our life together, too, had already ripened, and seemed almost to be urging me to hurry and gather it in.

At last, when the sun began to sink, and I saw the village down in the valley already swallowed entirely in the shadow of the wooded hills opposite, I rose slowly, came down the mountain, crossed the suspension bridge once more, and, after wandering somewhat aimlessly through the narrow village, where water wheels here and there kept up their endless creaking turn, I made my way back along the edge of the larch forest that spread across the whole skirt of Mount Yatsugatake, quickening my steps a little as I thought of the patient, no doubt growing restless by now, waiting for my return.

October 23

Near dawn, I woke with a start, startled by some strange sound that seemed to have come from very close beside me.

I lay listening intently for a while, but the whole sanatorium was as silent as death.

After that my mind grew wide awake, and I could not fall back asleep.

Through the windowpane, where a small moth clung motionless, I gazed vacantly at two or three faint stars of dawn still glimmering there.

But before long that hour of daybreak began to seem unaccountably lonesome to me, and I quietly rose and, hardly knowing myself what I meant to do, walked barefoot into the still-dark room next door.

Approaching the bed, I bent down and looked at Setsuko's sleeping face.

At that she opened her eyes wide, quite unexpectedly, and looking up at me,

"What's the matter?"

she asked, sounding puzzled.

Giving her a look meant to say it was nothing at all, I slowly bent down over her, and, as if no longer able to hold myself back, pressed my face close against hers.

"Oh, you're so cold."

she said, closing her eyes, and moved her head slightly.

Her hair carried a faint fragrance.

We stayed like that for a long while, cheek against cheek, feeling each other's breath.

"Oh — a chestnut fell again..."

she whispered, opening her eyes halfway to look at me.

"Ah, so that's what it was, a chestnut. ...That's what must have woken me up earlier."

I said, my voice a little strained, and gently let her go, then walked over to the window, which had gradually begun to grow bright.

And leaning against it, letting some hot trace of something — I could not have said from which eye it had welled up — run down my cheek as it would, I gazed at the ridge of the mountains opposite, where a few motionless clouds had begun to take on a murky reddish tinge.

From the direction of the fields, sounds of activity were at last beginning to be heard....

"You'll catch a chill, doing that."

she said, in a small voice, from the bed.

I turned toward her, meaning to answer with something light and easy.

But meeting her eyes, wide open and gazing at me with such anxious concern, no such words would come.

And without a word, I left the window and went back to my own room.

A few minutes later, the patient broke into that violent, uncontrollable coughing that always came to her at daybreak.

Slipping back under the covers, I lay listening to it with an unease beyond all telling.

October 27

Today too I spent the afternoon among the mountains and woods.

A single theme has not left my thoughts the whole day through.

The theme of a true betrothal — how much happiness can two people give each other, across a lifetime so terribly short?

The figure of a young man and woman, standing side by side, heads bowed quietly before some fate they cannot resist, warming heart against heart, body against body — such a pair, lonesome and yet, in some way, not entirely without joy, rises up clearly before my eyes as our own image.

What else could I possibly set myself to paint now, apart from that?

....

As I hurried back, as I always did, along the edge of the larch forest sloping down the seemingly endless skirt of the mountains, all turned yellow now, I made out, far off at the edge of the woodland behind the sanatorium, a tall young woman standing there in the slanting evening light, her hair catching the sun so brightly it dazzled the eye.

I stopped for a moment.

It certainly looked like Setsuko.

But seeing her standing there entirely alone in such a place, I could not quite believe it was really her, and only quickened my pace a little more than before.

But as I drew nearer and nearer, it was indeed Setsuko.

"What's happened?"

I asked, rushing to her side, out of breath.

"I was waiting here for you."

she answered, laughing, her face slightly flushed.

"Is it really all right for you to do something so reckless?"

I looked sideways at her face.

"It's fine, just this once. ...Besides, I'm feeling wonderful today."

She said, forcing her voice to sound cheerful, still gazing steadily off toward the mountainside I had just come from.

"I could see you coming from way off."

I said nothing, and stood beside her, gazing in the same direction.

She spoke again, cheerfully.

"You can see the whole of Yatsugatake from out here, can't you."

"Mm."

I answered, sounding rather listless, but as I stood there like that, shoulder to shoulder with her, gazing at the mountain, a strange, tangled feeling suddenly came over me.

"This is the first time you and I have ever looked at that mountain together like this. And yet I have the strangest feeling that we've done exactly this, many times before."

"That can't possibly be, can it?"

"No, it's true... I've only just realized it... A long time ago, we looked at this very mountain together, just like this, from the opposite side. No — back in the summer, whenever we looked toward it, the clouds always got in the way, and we could hardly see anything at all. ...But then, once autumn came, I went there alone one day, and far off at the edge of the horizon, I saw this mountain, seen from the very opposite side of where we are now. That mountain I saw far off, not knowing at all which one it was — it must certainly have been this one. The direction fits exactly. ...You remember that meadow, don't you, thick with plume grass everywhere?"

"Yes."

"But it really is strange. To think that all this while, we've been living right at the foot of that very mountain, without either of us ever realizing it..."

The image of my own self, from exactly two years before, on the last day of autumn, gazing from far off at these same mountains, seen for the first time standing out sharply against the horizon through the thick plume grass, dreaming, with a happiness that was almost sorrowful, that surely someday the two of us would be together — that image rose up vividly before my eyes now, filling me with a deep and tender nostalgia.

We fell into silence.

Gazing at the ranked mountains above which what looked like a flock of migrating birds passed silently overhead, we stood there together, shoulder pressed against shoulder, with the same fond feeling we had known in those first days together.

And we let our shadows, growing longer and longer, stretch out across the grass as they pleased.

Presently a little wind seemed to rise, and the woodland behind us suddenly stirred to life.

"We should start back now,"

I said to her, as though the thought had only just occurred to me.

We went into the woods, where leaves were falling steadily all around us.

I stopped now and then, letting her walk a little ahead of me.

A flood of small memories came welling up within me, almost tight enough to grip my heart, of that summer two years before, when I used to walk her through the woods just so, letting her go two or three steps ahead of me only so that I could watch her all the more clearly.

November 2

At night, a single lamp draws us close together.

Under that light, grown so used now to not speaking, I go on steadily writing our story, the one whose theme is the happiness of our life together, while Setsuko lies in the shadow of the lampshade, in the dim bed, so quietly asleep that one could hardly tell whether she was there at all.

Now and then, when I lift my face toward her, I find her watching me steadily, as though she had been watching me, unmoving, all along.

Her eyes are full of a tenderness that seems almost to be saying to me, "As long as I can be by your side like this, that's all I want."

as though she longed to say it aloud.

Ah, how much that helps me, even now, to believe in the happiness that is truly ours, and to go on striving to give it, at last, some clear and lasting shape!

November 10

Winter is coming.

The sky opens wider, and the mountains draw nearer and nearer.

Sometimes only above the mountains, what looks like a snow cloud sits motionless, unmoving, for hours on end.

On such mornings, whether driven down from the mountains ahead of the snow or not, even the balcony fills with small birds one hardly ever sees otherwise.

After such a snow cloud has vanished, sometimes only the upper slopes of the mountains stay a pale white for the better part of a day.

And of late, that snow has begun to linger noticeably on several of the peaks, staying just as it is.

I find myself recalling those years, some time ago now, when I used often to love dreaming of living in some lonely wintry mountain country just like this, entirely cut off from the world, alone with some dear girl, loving each other so achingly that it almost hurt.

I had wanted to let that boundless, sweet dream of life, which I had carried unspoiled since childhood, live out, entirely intact, untouched, precisely within a nature so severe that most people would find it fearsome.

And for that, it had to be exactly this — a real winter, in some truly lonely mountain country, nothing less....

—Near daybreak, while that somewhat frail girl still sleeps, I rise quietly and dash out cheerfully from the mountain hut into the snow.

The surrounding mountains, bathed in the light of dawn, glow a rosy pink.

I go to the neighboring farmhouse for fresh-drawn goat's milk, and come back nearly frozen through.

Then I lay firewood in the hearth with my own hands.

Before long it catches, crackling briskly, and by the time that girl finally wakes at the sound of it, I am already there, my hands numb with cold, and yet writing down, with evident joy, this very mountain life we are living together, exactly as it is....

This morning, I found myself recalling that old dream of mine from years ago, calling up before my eyes a winter scene, almost like some woodblock print, of the kind that could never really exist anywhere at all, rearranging the furniture within that log-built hut in my mind, and consulting with myself over just how it ought to be arranged.

And then, at last, that whole backdrop fell to pieces, blurred, and faded away, until all that remained before my eyes, as though it alone had spilled out of that dream into reality, was a scattering of snow on the mountains, the bare, stripped trees, and the cold air itself....

Having finished my own meal alone ahead of her, I had pulled my chair over by the window and lost myself in such memories, when I suddenly turned to look at Setsuko, who had only just finished her own meal and now sat up in bed, gazing toward the mountains with a vacant, somehow weary look in her eyes, and found myself, quite unlike my usual self, gazing with something close to pain at her face, worn thin, her hair a little disheveled.

"Is it possible that this dream of mine is what's brought her all the way to a place like this?"

I said to the patient, though not aloud, my heart filling with something close to regret.

"And yet, of late, I've thought of nothing but my own work. Even now, sitting here beside you like this, I never once really think of you as you actually are. And yet I go on telling myself, and telling you too, that it's precisely by working that I think of you all the more. And somehow, without noticing, I've let myself go on frittering away my time on my own foolish dreams, instead of on you at all...."

Whether she had noticed the way I was gazing at her, as though there were something I wanted to say, the patient, from the bed, looked back at me steadily, without the least smile, in perfect earnest.

Of late, without either of us quite noticing, it had become our habit to hold each other's gaze like that for far longer than before, as though drawing each other ever more tightly together.

November 17

In another two or three days, I should be able to finish my notebook.

If I go on writing about this life of ours, it will never come to an end.

To bring it to some kind of finish, I suppose I must give it some sort of ending — and yet, this life we are still, even now, living together, is a life I do not wish to give any ending at all.

No, I doubt one could even be given.

It would surely be best, instead, to let it end just as it stands now, exactly as we are.

Exactly as we are, now?

...I find myself recalling a line I once read in some story — "nothing hinders happiness so much as the memory of happiness."

That line comes back to me now.

How different, now, is what we give each other from the happiness we once gave each other!

It resembles that happiness, and yet is something quite different from it, something far more achingly tight around the chest.

This true shape of ours, which has not yet fully come to the surface of our life together — if I press straight on after it now, will I really find, waiting there, an ending fit for the story of our happiness?

I cannot say why, but I cannot help feeling that somewhere in that side of our life which I still have not been able to bring clearly into the light, something lies hidden that bears, somehow, a kind of hostility toward that very happiness of ours....

Turning such thoughts over with some unease, I put out the light and was about to pass by the patient, already asleep, when I found myself stopping short, and stood gazing at her sleeping face, the only pale thing floating there in the darkness.

The somewhat hollowed skin around her eyes seemed to twitch faintly now and then, and I could not help but feel that she looked as though something were threatening her.

Or was it only my own nameless unease making it seem so to me?

November 20

I read back through the whole of the notebook I have written so far.

What I had meant to accomplish there seemed, more or less, to have been achieved well enough to satisfy me.

But apart from that, as I went on reading, I began to discover within myself, in connection with our own "happiness" — the very theme of that story —

a truly unexpected, uneasy version of myself, one who could no longer fully taste that happiness at all.

And before I knew it, my thoughts had drifted away from the story itself.

"We, in this story, believed we could go on tasting whatever small joy in life was allowed us, and that this alone could make us happy, each in our own particular way. At least, I thought that alone could keep my own heart bound fast. — But had we aimed too high, after all? And had I underestimated, just a little, my own hunger for life? Is that why my heart's bindings now feel so close to tearing apart?...."

"Poor Setsuko..."

I went on thinking, without even trying to put away the notebook I had left lying open on the desk.

"I cannot help feeling that she has seen straight through, in silence, this very hunger of mine that I myself had been pretending not to notice, and feels only sympathy for it. And that, in turn, is exactly what torments me now.... How could I have failed so completely to hide such a self from her? How weak I really am...."

When I turned my eyes toward the patient, who lay in the shadow of the lamp with her eyes half closed, I felt almost as though the breath had been knocked out of me.

I stepped away from the lamp and made my way quietly toward the balcony.

It was a night with only a small moon.

It let one make out only the faintest outlines of the cloud-wrapped mountains, hills, and woods.

Everything else had dissolved almost entirely into a dull, bluish darkness.

But it was not any of those things I was looking at.

I was calling vividly back to mind, from a memory in which nothing at all had yet faded, those very mountains, hills, and woods we had once gazed at together on that early-summer evening, with a sympathy so aching that it had felt, at the time, as though we might carry that happiness of ours all the way to the end.

And having called that instant of landscape back to mind so many times since, that scene in which even we ourselves had seemed to become wholly a part of it, those things had, before we knew it, become a part of our very existence, so that the present, ever-changing shape they took on with the seasons had, at times, become almost invisible to us....

"That we were once able to hold a moment of happiness like that — was that alone enough to justify our having gone on living together like this?"

I asked myself.

A light footstep sounded suddenly behind me.

It could only be Setsuko.

But I made no move to turn around, and stayed exactly as I was.

She too said nothing, and stood there a little apart from me.

And yet I felt her presence so close beside me that I could almost feel her very breath.

Now and then a cold wind swept soundlessly across the balcony.

Somewhere far off, a dead tree had its sound torn violently loose.

"What are you thinking about?"

she finally spoke.

I did not answer her at once.

Then, turning suddenly toward her, laughing uncertainly,

"You already know, don't you?"

I asked back.

She watched me carefully, as though wary of some trap.

Seeing that, I said,

"I'm thinking about my work, that's all."

I went on slowly.

"I can't seem to find a good ending, no matter what. I don't want to end it in a way that makes it seem as though we'd lived our lives for nothing. Won't you think it through with me, just this once?"

She gave me a smile.

But there was still something uneasy about that smile.

"But I don't even know what you've written, do I."

she said at last, in a small voice.

"That's true, isn't it."

I said, laughing uncertainly once more.

"Well then, I suppose I'll read some of it to you before long. Though even the beginning isn't polished enough yet to read aloud to anyone."

We went back inside.

As I sat down again by the lamp and picked up once more the notebook I had left lying there, she came and stood behind me, resting a hand gently on my shoulder, and leaned in as if to peer over it at the pages.

I turned around abruptly.

"You'd better get to bed now,"

I said, in a voice that came out drier than I meant.

"All right."

she answered obediently, and, taking her hand from my shoulder with some hesitation, went back to bed.

"I don't think I'll be able to sleep, somehow."

she said, two or three minutes later, almost to herself, from within the bed.

"Shall I put out the light, then? ...I'm finished for tonight anyway."

So saying, I put out the light and rose, going to her bedside.

And sitting down on the edge of the bed, I took her hand in mine.

For a while we stayed like that, silent together in the darkness.

The wind seemed to have grown considerably stronger since before.

It kept tearing sound loose, ceaselessly, from the woods here and there.

And now and then it dashed itself against the sanatorium building, rattling some window somewhere, and, last of all, made the window of our own room creak faintly.

As if frightened by it, she would not let go of my hand.

And with her eyes closed, she seemed absorbed, wholeheartedly, in some working of something within herself.

Before long her grip on my hand loosened a little.

She seemed to be pretending to have fallen asleep.

"Well, my turn now, I suppose..."

Murmuring such things to myself, I went into my own pitch-dark room to put myself, unable to sleep just as she was, to bed.

November 26

These days I often wake around the break of day.

At such times, I often rise quietly and study the patient's sleeping face closely.

Even as the edges of the bed and the bottles on the table gradually take on a yellowish tinge, her face alone stays pale forever.

"Poor thing."

There are times when I find myself saying it, as though it had become some habit of mine, without even noticing.

This morning too, waking near dawn, I gazed for a long while at the patient's sleeping face, and then, on tiptoe, slipped out of the room and went into the woods behind the sanatorium, bared almost entirely of leaves by now.

Every tree had only two or three dead leaves left clinging to it, holding out against the wind.

By the time I came out at the far edge of that empty woodland, the sun, having only just cleared the peak of Yatsugatake, was already turning to a deep red, before my eyes, the great bank of cloud that lay low and motionless over the mountains ranged from south to west.

But that light of dawn did not seem likely to reach the ground below for some while yet.

The winter-withered woods, fields, and wasteland caught between those mountains all looked as though they had been utterly abandoned by everything.

At the edge of that bare, wintry wood, I walked back and forth, stopping now and then to stamp my feet against the cold.

Turning over, again and again, thoughts I could no longer even recall myself, I suddenly lifted my head and found that the sky, before I knew it, had lost its glow and was now entirely shut in by dark clouds.

Noticing this, and feeling suddenly, oddly deflated, as though I had been secretly waiting all along for that dawn light, which had so beautifully burned the sky only a moment before, to reach down to the ground at last, I hurried back to the sanatorium.

Setsuko was already awake.

But even noticing that I had returned, she only lifted her eyes toward me briefly, wearily.

And her face looked even paler than it had while she slept.

When I came to her bedside and, playing with her hair, tried to kiss her forehead, she shook her head, weakly.

I asked nothing, and only watched her sadly.

But she, rather than looking at me at all, seemed to be trying not to see my sorrow, and gazed off into empty space with a vacant look in her eyes.

Night

I alone had known nothing of it.

After the morning examination, the head nurse called me out into the corridor.

And there, for the first time, I was told that Setsuko had brought up a small amount of blood that morning, without my knowledge.

She had kept it from me entirely.

The hemorrhage was not serious enough to be called dangerous, but the director had left instructions that an attendant nurse should be kept with her for a while, as a precaution.—

There was nothing for me to do but agree.

I arranged to move, for the time being, into the room next door, which happened to be vacant.

I am now writing this diary alone, in a room identical in every way to the one we shared together, and yet one that feels, at the same time, entirely unfamiliar to me.

Even though I have been sitting here for several hours now, the room still feels somehow empty.

Even the lamplight here glows cold, as though no one at all were in the room.

November 28

I have left the notebook of my nearly finished work lying untouched on the desk, without laying a hand to it.

I had already told the patient that it would be better for us to live apart for a while, if only so I could finish it.

But how could I possibly go back alone, in this state of unease I feel now, into that condition of ours which I had painted, in that very notebook, as so happy?

Every day, every two or three hours, I go to the room next door and sit for a while at the patient's bedside.

But since letting the patient talk is the worst thing for her, we mostly stay without speaking at all.

Even when the nurse is not there, the two of us sit silently, hands clasped together, each of us trying not to meet the other's eyes as much as we can.

But whenever, by some chance, our eyes do happen to meet, she gives me that same faintly embarrassed smile she used to show me in our very first days together.

But she quickly looks away again, gazing off into empty space, and lies calmly, without showing the slightest complaint at being kept this way.

Once she asked me whether my work was progressing.

I shook my head.

At that she gave me a look of pity.

But she has not asked me about it again since.

And each day passes quietly, resembling every other day, as though nothing at all were happening.

She even refuses to let me write to her father in her place.

At night, I sit late at my desk doing nothing at all, gazing vacantly as the pool of lamplight falling on the balcony grows fainter and fainter the farther it reaches from the window, until it is swallowed on every side by the darkness, feeling as though I were looking at the very inside of my own heart.

Thinking that perhaps the patient, too, is still lying awake, thinking of me....

December 1

These days, for some reason, the moths drawn to my lamp seem to have increased again.

At night, such moths come flying in from who knows where, dashing themselves violently against the closed windowpane, wounding themselves in the impact, and yet, still desperate for life, trying, half dead already, to bore a hole through the glass.

Even after I, finding it a nuisance, put out the light and get into bed, they go on beating their wings madly for a while, but gradually the sound weakens, until at last they cling somewhere, motionless.

On such mornings, I invariably find, beneath that window, the corpse of a moth, shriveled like a dead leaf.

Tonight too, one such moth has at last flown into the room, and has been circling madly around the lamp I am sitting by for some while now.

Presently it falls onto the paper before me with a small thud.

And it lies there motionless for a long while.

Then, as though suddenly remembering it is still alive, it takes flight again, abruptly.

It looks, for all the world, as though it no longer even knows itself what it is doing.

Before long it falls again onto my paper with the same small thud.

With a strange kind of dread, I make no move to drive the moth away, and, feigning indifference, let it go on dying there, on my own paper.

December 5

In the evening, the two of us were alone together.

The attendant nurse had just gone off to her meal.

The winter sun had already begun sinking behind the western ridge.

And its slanting light suddenly brightened the room, which had, by then, grown noticeably chill.

I sat at the patient's bedside, my feet resting on the heater, bent over a book I held in my hands.

Just then the patient suddenly cried out, faintly,

"Oh — Father."

in a small, startled voice.

I gave a start, in spite of myself, and lifted my face toward her.

I saw that her eyes were shining more brightly than usual.—

But feigning not to have caught that small cry at all, I asked, as casually as I could,

"Did you say something just now?"

I asked.

She did not answer for a while.

But her eyes seemed to shine all the brighter for it.

"Do you see that spot, on the left edge of that low mountain, where the sun catches it a little?"

She said at last, as though finally resolving to speak, pointing toward it briefly with her hand from the bed, and then, as though forcing out some words that were hard for her to say, brought that same fingertip up to her own lips instead. "There's always a shadow that forms there, right about this time, that looks exactly like Father's profile. ...Look, can't you see it, forming right now?"

Following her fingertip, I could tell at once which low mountain she meant, but all I could make out there was the ridged folds of the mountainside, thrown into sharp relief by the slanting light.

"It's fading already... ah, only the forehead is left now..."

At last I too could make out that fold of the mountainside that looked like a forehead.

It brought back to me, too, the memory of her father's own solid, broad forehead.

"Has she been seeking out her father, even in some shadow like this, deep down in her heart? Ah, she still feels him with her whole body, she's still calling out to him...."

But an instant later, darkness filled that low mountain entirely.

And every shadow vanished.

"You want to go home, don't you?"

I said, the first words that came to mind, before I could stop myself.

Right after, I searched Setsuko's eyes with some unease.

She looked back at me with an almost cold, distant look, but then, suddenly turning her eyes away,

"Yes — somehow I've begun wanting to go home."

she said, in a hoarse voice scarcely audible at all.

Biting my lip, I quietly stepped away from the bed, trying not to draw attention, and walked over toward the window.

Behind me, she spoke again, her voice trembling slightly.

"I'm sorry. ...But it's only for a moment, this feeling. ...It will pass soon enough..."

I stood at the window with my hands clasped together, saying nothing.

Darkness had already pooled at the foot of the mountains.

But a faint light still lingered on their peaks.

Suddenly a dread that seemed to grip me by the throat came over me.

I turned abruptly toward the patient.

She had both hands pressed to her face.

Filled with a sudden, overwhelming dread that everything was about to be taken from us all at once, I rushed to the bed and pulled her hands away from her face by force.

She made no resistance.

That high forehead, those eyes that already held a certain quiet light, that firmly set mouth — none of it had changed in the least from usual, and yet it all seemed, to me, more inviolable than ever before....

And I could not help feeling, in turn, almost like a child myself, so utterly frightened over nothing at all.

Then, as though all the strength had suddenly drained out of me, I sank to my knees and buried my face against the edge of the bed.

And I stayed there like that, my face pressed against it, for a long, long while.

Feeling, all the while, the patient's hand stroking my hair, gently....

By then the room itself had grown quite dim.

The Valley of the Shadow of Death

December 1, 1936, at the village of K—

This village, which I was seeing again after nearly three and a half years, lay already buried entirely in snow.

Snow had apparently been falling steadily for about a week, and had only just stopped this morning.

A young woman from the village, whom I'd hired to look after my cooking, and her younger brother, loaded my luggage onto what looked like a small sled belonging to the boy, and hauled it up for me as far as the mountain hut where I meant to spend this coming winter.

Following along behind the sled, I nearly slipped and fell several times along the way.

That was how solidly the snow in the shadow of the valley had already frozen over....

The hut I had rented stood a little to the north of the village, in a small valley where a scattering of old foreign-owned summer villas had long stood here and there — mine was said to be at the very farthest edge of them, if I understood right.

I was told that the foreigners who came to spend their summers there called this valley the Valley of Happiness.

What could possibly be happy about such a deserted, lonesome valley as this, I wondered, passing one after another of those villas, now abandoned entirely and buried in snow, as I climbed the valley trailing a little behind the two of them, when, quite unexpectedly, the exact opposite name for the valley very nearly rose to my own lips.

I hesitated for a moment, as if holding it back, but then changed my mind and finally spoke it aloud.

The Valley of the Shadow of Death. ....

Yes, that name suits this valley far better, I thought — at least for someone like me, meaning to spend a lonely, widower's existence in a place like this, in the very depths of winter.—

Turning such thoughts over, I finally made my way to the very last hut, the one I had rented, only to find the snow all around that bark-shingled hut, with its almost apologetically small veranda, covered in a great many unfamiliar tracks.

While the elder of the two, a young woman, went ahead into the shuttered hut to open the storm doors, I had her little brother point out each of those strange tracks to me, one by one — this one a rabbit's, this one a squirrel's, and this one a pheasant's.

Then I stood on the veranda, half buried in snow, and looked around at my surroundings.

Looking back down from there, the shadowed valley we had just climbed formed part of a neat, compact little basin.

Ah — the little brother, who had just gone back down alone on that sled of his, could still be glimpsed, now and then, between the bare trees.

I watched that small, endearing figure of his until it finally vanished into the leafless woods below, and by the time I had taken in the whole valley like that, the inside of the hut seemed to have been put in order, and I went inside for the first time.

The walls were entirely lined with cedar bark, and there was not even a proper ceiling — a cruder construction than I had expected, and yet it did not feel unpleasant.

I went straight up to the second floor as well, and found that everything, from the bed to the chairs, came in pairs.

As though meant precisely for you and me.—

Come to think of it, how often, in those old days, had I dreamed of living just like this, in some mountain hut just like this one, alone together with you, in a solitude shared only by the two of us!....

In the evening, once the meal was ready, I sent the village girl straight home.

Then, alone, I pulled a large table up beside the hearth, and decided to do all my writing, and take all my meals, right there at it.

Just then I happened to notice that the calendar hanging overhead was still showing September, and, rising to tear it off, I marked today's date before, at last, after a full year, opening this notebook of mine again.

December 2

Somewhere off to the north, the mountains seem to be caught in a constant blizzard.

Even Mount Asama, which yesterday I could see as clearly as if I could reach out and touch it, is today entirely hidden in snow clouds, evidently raging fiercely somewhere beyond, and even this village at the foot of the mountains catches the edge of it, the sun breaking through brightly one moment and fine snow drifting ceaselessly the next.

Whenever the edge of such snow happens to sweep suddenly over the valley, the sky stays perfectly clear and blue over the mountains ranged far to the south, on the other side of the valley, while the whole valley itself darkens and is swept by a fierce burst of blowing snow.

And then, just as suddenly, the sun comes blazing back out again....

Going to the window now and then to watch that ceaselessly changing scene in the valley, then coming straight back to the hearth again, I spent the whole day, for that reason or another, in a rather restless mood.

Around midday, the village girl came, carrying a cloth-wrapped bundle on her back, walking barefoot through the snow in her tabi.

Her hands and even her face looked chapped with frostbite, but she seemed a gentle, obedient sort of girl, and, better than anything else, one of few words — which suited me perfectly.

As I had the day before, I had her only prepare the meal and sent her straight home again.

After that, as though the day were already over, I did not stir from the hearth, and spent the time doing nothing at all, watching vacantly as the firewood, fanned now and then by some breeze of its own making, crackled and burned.

Night came on just like that.

Once I had finished a cold meal alone, my spirits settled a little.

The snow seemed to have stopped without amounting to much, but the wind had begun picking up instead.

Whenever the fire died down even a little and its crackling quieted, in that lull I could suddenly hear, close at hand, the sound of that wind tearing sound loose from the bare woods outside the valley.

About an hour later, feeling somewhat flushed from a fire I was not yet used to, I stepped outside the hut for some fresh air.

I walked about for a while in the pitch-black outdoors, and once my face had finally grown thoroughly chilled, I turned to go back inside, and it was only then, by the light spilling from within, that I noticed fine snow was still falling steadily.

Once back inside, I went and stood by the fire again, to dry my somewhat dampened clothes.

But as I stood there warming myself, before long I forgot even that I was drying myself at all, and fell into a vacant reverie, calling back to mind a certain memory.

It was of a night, this same time last year, when snow had been falling around the mountain sanatorium where we stayed, on a night late just like tonight.

I had stood again and again at the sanatorium entrance, unable to wait any longer for your father, whom I had summoned by telegram, to arrive.

At last, near midnight, your father arrived.

But you, glancing at him only briefly, let nothing more than something that was not quite a smile drift across your lips.

Your father said nothing, and only gazed steadily at your utterly worn, exhausted face.

Now and then he would turn a look of evident anxiety toward me.

But I pretended not to notice, and only went on looking, without really meaning to, at you alone.

Then, feeling as though you had suddenly begun to say something, I went over to your side, and you said to me, in a voice scarcely audible at all, "There's snow in your hair..."

you said to me.—

Now, crouched alone here by the fire, drawn in by that memory as it suddenly welled back up in me, I raised my hand to my hair without thinking, and found it still faintly, coldly damp.

I had not noticed it at all, until I checked like that....

December 5

These past few days, the weather has been fine beyond all telling.

In the mornings, sunlight floods the whole veranda, there is no wind at all, and it is wonderfully warm.

This morning I even carried a small table and chair out onto the veranda, and took my breakfast there, facing the valley still buried entirely in snow.

Thinking to myself, as I sat down to breakfast, what a waste it seemed to be living all alone like this, I happened to glance toward the base of a withered shrub right in front of me, and found that a pheasant had come, without my noticing.

Not just one but two, pecking about restlessly for food in the snow....

"Look, come see — there are pheasants here."

I murmured to myself, my voice lowered, imagining you were right there in the hut with me, and I held my breath and watched the pheasants intently.

All the while worrying that you might carelessly make some sound with your footsteps....

Just then, from some hut nearby, snow slid from a roof with a great roar that echoed through the whole valley.

I gave a start in spite of myself, and watched, thoroughly startled, as the two pheasants took flight as if from right beneath my own feet.

At almost that same instant, I felt, with an almost painful vividness, you standing right beside me, saying nothing, just as you always did at such moments, only watching me with your eyes opened wide.

In the afternoon, I came down from the hut in the valley for the first time, and walked once around the snow-buried village.

Having only ever known this village from summer through autumn, I found that the woods, the paths, the boarded-up huts, all now uniformly covered in snow, looked oddly familiar, and yet I could not recall, no matter how I tried, what they had looked like before.

Along the road I used to love walking, the one they called the Water-Mill Road, a small Catholic church had even been built, without my ever knowing it.

And that beautiful, plain wooden church, beneath its snow-capped, pointed roof, already showed walls of wood boarding that had begun to darken with age.

That, more than anything else, made the whole area seem strange and unfamiliar to me.

After that, I went, pushing through fairly deep snow, into the woods where you and I had so often walked together.

Before long I recognized a single fir tree that seemed familiar to me.

But as I finally drew close to it, a sharp, shrieking bird cry came from within its branches.

When I stopped in front of it, a single bird, tinged with blue, of a kind I had never once seen before, took flight with a startled flutter, but immediately settled on another branch and, as if daring me to come closer, cried out again and again, shrill and defiant.

I left even that fir tree behind, though it went against my will to do so.

December 7

In the winter-withered woods beside the meeting hall, I thought, for a moment, that I heard the call of a cuckoo, two brief cries in succession.

That call seemed, at once, terribly distant and terribly close, and made me search the withered thickets, the bare trees, and the sky around me, but I heard nothing more of it after that.

I came to think, in the end, that I must have only imagined it after all.

But even before that thought had fully formed, the withered thickets, the bare trees, the sky around me — all of it had already, vividly, sprung back to life within me, restored entirely to their beloved summer appearance....

And yet it was in that very moment, too, that I truly understood: everything I once possessed in this village, that summer three years ago, has already been lost, and nothing at all of it remains to me now.

December 10

These past few days, for some reason, you have not come vividly back to life within me at all.

And there are times when this solitude I live in now feels almost more than I can bear.

In the mornings, when the firewood I have stacked in the hearth refuses to catch, I grow impatient in the end and rake it about roughly.

It is only at such moments that I suddenly sense you there beside me, watching me with concern.—

And then, finally collecting myself, I restack the firewood anew.

Or again, in the afternoon, when I think to take a walk into the village, and go down the valley, I find that these days, with the thaw setting in, the path is so bad that my shoes grow heavy with mud almost at once, making walking so difficult that I usually turn back partway.

And when I reach the valley, where the snow is still frozen solid, I feel a sudden relief in spite of myself — though from there it is nothing but a breathless climb, the whole way back up to my hut.

So, trying to lift my own spirits, which were forever threatening to sink, I recalled, half-remembered, the words of that psalm — "Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me..."

and repeated them to myself, but even those words felt, to me, hollow and empty.

December 12

Toward evening, as I passed the small church along the Water-Mill Road, I saw a man who looked like the church's caretaker carefully scattering coal ash over the slush and mud.

I went up beside him and asked, more or less idly, whether this church stayed open all through the winter.

"They say they'll be closing it in another day or two this year—"

the caretaker answered, pausing for a moment in scattering the ash.

"Last year it stayed open the whole winter through, but this year Father is going off to Matsumoto, you see..."

"Are there any believers in this village, even in winter?"

I asked, rather bluntly.

"Almost none come, really. ...Mostly Father says the daily mass all by himself."

Just as we were talking there like that, the priest, said to be German, came back from wherever he had been.

This time it was my turn to be caught by that friendly-seeming priest, who did not yet fully understand Japanese, and to be asked all manner of questions.

And in the end, evidently having misunderstood something I said, he pressed me repeatedly to be sure to come to Sunday mass the next day.

December 13, Sunday

Around nine in the morning, without really seeking anything in particular, I went to that church.

Before an altar lit with small candles, the priest, together with a single server, had already begun the mass.

Being no believer myself, and not knowing quite what to do, I only sat down as quietly as I could on a straw-bottomed chair at the very back.

But once my eyes grew used to the dimness inside, I noticed, in the shadow of a pillar in the very front row of what I had thought was an entirely empty congregation, a middle-aged woman, dressed entirely in black, kneeling there alone.

And once I realized that she seemed to have been kneeling there the whole time, I suddenly felt, to the very bone, just how cold the inside of that chapel truly was....

The mass went on for nearly another hour after that.

Just as it was drawing to a close, I noticed the woman suddenly take out a handkerchief and press it to her face.

But I had no idea what it might be for.

Before long, the mass seemed to have ended at last, and the priest, without turning toward the congregation, withdrew for a moment into a small room to one side.

The woman still did not stir at all.

But in that interval, I alone quietly slipped out of the church.

It was a faintly overcast day.

After that I wandered aimlessly through the thawing village, filled the whole while with some sense of never quite being satisfied.

I went, too, to that meadow where a single white birch stood out sharply at its center, the meadow where you and I had so often gone to paint, and stood there, resting my hand fondly on the birch, its base still ringed with lingering snow, until my fingertips went nearly numb with cold.

But even your figure from those days would hardly rise up within me at all....

At last I left that place too, and, with a loneliness beyond all telling, made my way straight back up the valley through the bare trees, and returned to the hut.

Panting for breath, I sat down without thinking on the boards of the veranda, and just then I suddenly felt you drawing close beside me, as if to comfort me in my irritable mood.

But I pretended not to notice even that, and only sat there vacantly, resting my chin on my hand.

And yet, for all that, I felt you there more vividly than ever before — so vividly it seemed almost as though your hand were resting on my shoulder....

"Your meal is ready now, if you please—"

From inside the hut, the village girl, who seemed to have been waiting for my return for some while, called me in to eat.

Startled back to reality, I went inside with a face gloomier than usual, thinking that she might have left me alone just a little longer.

And without a word to the girl, I sat down to my usual solitary meal.

Toward evening, still feeling somewhat on edge, I sent the girl home, but before long I began to feel some regret over it, and went out onto the veranda again, without any particular purpose.

And as I stood there once more, gazing down vacantly (though this time without you...) at the valley, where a good deal of snow still remained, I made out someone slowly climbing up toward me through the bare trees, looking this way and that across the whole valley.

Wondering where he might be headed, I kept watching, and saw that it was the priest, apparently searching for my hut.

December 14

Having made an arrangement with the priest the evening before, I went to call on him at the church.

He was to close the church the next day and leave at once for Matsumoto, it seemed, and even as he talked with me, he kept getting up now and then to give some instruction to the caretaker, who was busy packing.

He said, again and again, how truly regrettable it was to be leaving now, just when he was on the point of gaining a single believer in this village.

At once I thought of the middle-aged woman, also apparently German, whom I had seen at the church the day before.

And just as I was about to ask the priest about her, it occurred to me, quite suddenly, that perhaps he had misunderstood something, and was speaking of me myself instead....

Our conversation, oddly out of step with each other like that, grew more and more halting after that.

And before long, falling silent together, we sat by the almost too-hot hearth, gazing out through the windowpane at the sky, bright as only winter skies can be, where small clouds went tearing past, torn to shreds by what looked like a strong wind.

"A sky as beautiful as this, you only ever see on a cold day like this, with a wind like this,"

the priest remarked, quite casually.

"Yes, truly — only on a cold day like this, with a wind like this..."

I answered, echoing his words almost exactly, feeling, strangely, that this offhand remark of his alone had somehow touched something within me....

After staying with the priest for about an hour like that, I returned to the hut to find a small parcel had arrived.

It was Rilke's "Requiem," which I had ordered long before,

together with two or three other books, covered in various forwarding labels from having been sent on from place to place, having only now, at last, found its way to me.

At night, once I had made all my preparations for bed, I sat by the hearth, minding the sound of the wind now and then, and began reading Rilke's "Requiem."

and began reading it.

December 17

It has turned to snow again.

It has been falling almost without pause since this morning.

And even as I watched, the valley before me turned entirely white once more.

So winter deepens, further still.

Today too I spent the whole day by the hearth, going now and then, as though suddenly remembering to, to the window to gaze vacantly out at the snow-filled valley, then coming straight back to the hearth, turning again to Rilke's "Requiem,"

and turning to it again.

Feeling something fiercely close to remorse at my own weak, womanish heart, which even now would not let you rest quietly in death, but went on and on seeking you out....

I have my dead, and I have let them go their way,

and was startled to find them so unlike their reputation, so very sure of themselves,

so quickly at ease in being dead, so strangely cheerful,

that it startles me even now.

Only you — you alone have come

back.

You brush past me, wander about, collide with

something, and it makes a sound because of you,

and so betrays you.

Oh, do not take from me

what I have learned at such cost.

I am the one in the right, and you are the one who is wrong,

if it is that you feel some longing for anyone's belongings.

We, even with those very things before our eyes,

It does not exist here.

The moment we perceive it,

we do nothing but reflect that thing back out of our own being.

December 18

With the snow finally stopped, I thought it the perfect time to go, at last, deep into the woods behind the hut, where I had never yet been.

Now and then showered with a burst of snow crashing down of its own accord from some tree, I made my way, with something like real delight, from one stand of woods to the next.

Of course, no one else had left any tracks there before me — there was only, here and there, a scattering of what looked like rabbit tracks, hopping about everywhere.

And now and then something like a pheasant's footprints cut straight across the path....

But no matter how far I went, the woods did not end, and since what looked like a snow cloud had begun spreading over them, I gave up going any deeper and turned back partway.

But I seemed to have taken a wrong turn somewhere, and before I knew it, I had lost even my own tracks.

Feeling suddenly, unaccountably uneasy, I pushed on through the snow regardless, cutting straight through the woods toward where my hut ought to be, when, before I knew it, I began to feel, behind me, the sound of another set of footsteps, quite certainly not my own.

It was, however, a footstep so faint it was scarcely there at all....

I never once turned to look, and went straight on, down through the woods.

And with a feeling as though my chest were being gripped tight, I let the last few lines of Rilke's "Requiem," which I had only just finished reading the day before,

rise, unbidden, to my own lips.

Do not come back.

And if you can bear it,

be dead among the dead.

The dead, too, have work enough to do.

But help me, insofar as it will not distract you,

the way distant things so often help me — within myself.

December 24

At night, I was invited to the village girl's house, and spent a lonely Christmas there.

Though this is a mountain village left utterly deserted in winter, being the kind of place many foreigners come flooding into during the summer, it seems even the ordinary village households have picked up the custom, and enjoy some small imitation of the holiday themselves.

Around nine o'clock, I made my way back alone from the village, through the shadowed valley lit faintly by the snow.

And as I came to the last stretch of bare woods, I happened to notice, on a clump of withered brush by the roadside, capped with snow, a small point of light falling faintly upon it, from I could not tell where.

Wondering how such a light could possibly be shining in a place like that, I looked around the whole narrow valley, scattered here and there with its villas, and found that the only lit window anywhere, high up at the top of the valley, was almost certainly my own hut....

"So this is where I live, all alone, up there at the head of that valley,"

I thought, and began climbing slowly up through it.

"And until now, I never once realized that the light from my own hut was reaching all the way down into these woods below. Just look...."

I said, as though speaking to myself, "There, and there too — nearly covering the whole valley, all those small points of light scattered across the snow, every single one of them is the light from my own hut...."

When I finally reached the hut, I stood right there on the veranda, meaning to see, once more, just how far that light of mine actually reached into the valley.

But looking at it that way, the light cast only the faintest glow immediately around the hut itself.

And even that faint glow grew fainter and fainter the farther it spread from the hut, until it merged entirely with the snow-light of the valley.

"So then — the light that had looked so abundant from down there is really nothing more than this, seen from up here."

I murmured to myself, somehow deflated, and yet, still gazing vacantly at that dim glow, a thought suddenly occurred to me.

"—But isn't the shape of this light, exactly, like my own life? I think the brightness surrounding my life amounts to no more than this much — and yet, in truth, just like the light from this hut of mine, there must be far more of it than I ever imagine. And perhaps all of it, without my ever being conscious of it, is quietly keeping me alive like this, without my even knowing...."

Such an unexpected thought kept me standing there, for a long while, on that cold veranda lit only by the snow.

December 30

It is a truly quiet night.

Tonight too I let such thoughts rise up in my mind of their own accord.

"I don't seem to be any more happy than most, nor any more unhappy either. Things like happiness, and all the rest of it, used to make us fret so much, once — but now I find I can forget about them entirely, if I only try. If anything, this state of mine these days might be far closer to happiness than that ever was. Or rather, my heart these days resembles that happiness, only somewhat sadder — and yet it isn't entirely without its own pleasure, either.... That I can go on living now, so seemingly unconcerned, may be because I am living like this, all alone, keeping as much apart from the world as I can — but that a coward like me could ever manage such a thing at all, that is truly, entirely thanks to you. And yet, Setsuko, not once, in all this time, have I ever thought of this solitary life I am living now as being for your sake. However I look at it, it seems to me nothing more than doing exactly as I please, for myself alone. Or perhaps, after all, I am doing it for your sake too, and it is only that I have grown so used to a love from you far too great for someone like me to deserve, that even that comes to feel, to me, like something done for myself alone. Is that how completely you loved me, asking nothing of me in return, all this while?...."

As I went on turning such thoughts over, I suddenly rose, as though struck by some idea, and went outside the hut.

Standing on the veranda as I always did, I heard, from somewhere that seemed to lie just on the other side of this very valley, the wind stirring ceaselessly, as though from very far away.

And I stayed there on the veranda, listening to it, as though I had come outside for the sole purpose of hearing that distant sound of wind.

At first, everything lying before me in the valley appeared only as a single mass, faintly lit by the glow of the snow, but as I went on looking at it, without really meaning to, whether because my eyes had gradually grown used to it, or because I was, without knowing it, filling in the gaps with my own memory, one by one, its lines and shapes slowly began to rise into view.

Everything here has become so familiar to me now, this valley people call the Valley of Happiness — yes, now that I've grown so used to living here, I find I too could almost call it that, along with everyone else, and yet — how truly quiet it is, right here, even while the wind rages so on the other side of the valley.

Now and then, somewhere just behind my hut, something seems to creak faintly — probably nothing more than the bare, dead branches of the trees rubbing against each other, stirred at last by that wind arriving from so far away.

And every so often, some last trace of that wind, reaching even as far as my own feet, shifts two or three fallen leaves gently over other fallen leaves, with a faint, rustling sound....