桜の森の満開の下 English

When the cherry blossoms come into bloom, people carry along sake and eat dumplings, strolling beneath the blossoms, making merry and calling it a splendid sight, calling it spring in full glory — but this is a lie.

Why is it a lie? Because people gathering beneath the cherry blossoms to get drunk, vomit, and brawl — that is a custom dating only from the Edo period; in ancient times, people found the space beneath the blossoming cherries frightening, and no one thought to call it a splendid sight.

These days, when people speak of beneath the cherry blossoms, they imagine it lively and gay because people gather there to drink and brawl, but if you take the people away from beneath the cherry blossoms, what is left is a fearsome sight. There is even a Noh play — a certain mother, her beloved child stolen away by a kidnapper, searches for the child and goes mad, and comes at last beneath a forest of cherry trees in full bloom; gazing about, she conjures a vision of the child amid the shadows of the falling petals, and dies raving, buried beneath the petals (this last part is my own embellishment) — and if there is no human figure beneath the blossoming cherry forest, it is nothing but frightening.

Long ago, at Suzuka Pass too, the road was such that travelers had to pass beneath the blossoms of the cherry forest.

When the trees were not in bloom, it was fine, but once the season of blossoms came, every traveler went mad beneath the blossoms of the forest.

Thinking only to flee from beneath the blossoms as quickly as possible, they would break into a headlong run toward wherever there were green trees or bare, withered ones.

If a traveler was alone, it was still all right, for the reason that once he had fled headlong from beneath the blossoms and come out under ordinary trees, he could breathe a sigh of relief and think, well, that's over, and be done with it — but for two people traveling together, it was ill-suited.

For the speed of a man's legs differs from person to person, and one is bound to fall behind; however desperately he cries out from behind, "Hey, wait for me!" — everyone has gone mad, and each abandons his companion and runs on.

And so, the instant they passed beneath the blossoms of the cherry forest at Suzuka Pass, travelers who until then had been on good terms fell out with one another, and ceased to trust the other's friendship.

For this reason, travelers naturally came to avoid passing beneath the cherry forest, taking instead the trouble of a roundabout mountain path, and in time the cherry forest was left off the highway, abandoned to the silence of a mountain where not a single soul ever passed.

Some years after that, a mountain bandit came to live on this mountain. He was a thoroughly brutal man, who went out to the highway and, without mercy, stripped travelers of their clothes and took their lives as well — yet even a man like this, on coming beneath the blossoms of the cherry forest, likewise grew afraid and went out of his mind.

So from then on the bandit hated the blossoms, and deep in his heart he would mutter to himself, flowers, now, are a fearsome thing — somehow a hateful thing.

Beneath the blossoms, though there was no wind at all, he felt as though a wind were roaring.

And yet there was not the least breath of wind, nor a single sound.

There was only his own form and the sound of his own footsteps, wrapped in a hushed, cold, unmoving wind.

It seemed to him that, just as the petals scattered softly down, his soul too was scattering, and his life was gradually wasting away.

And so he wanted to shut his eyes, cry out, and flee, but if he shut his eyes he would run into the cherry trees, so he could not shut them after all, and this only drove him the more mad.

But the bandit was a composed man, a man who knew nothing of regret, and so he thought this state of affairs strange.

I'll give it some thought next year, he told himself.

So he thought.

This year he had no wish to think about it.

And he thought that next year, once the blossoms opened, he would think it over carefully then.

Thinking this every year, more than ten years had already passed, and this year too, telling himself again that he would think it over once next year came, another year drew to its close.

While he was thinking such thoughts, the wife who had at first been only one had by now become seven, and he carried off an eighth wife from the highway, along with her husband's clothes.

The woman's husband, he killed.

From the moment he killed the woman's husband, the bandit had felt that something was strange.

It was not as it usually was.

He could not say just where, but it was odd — yet his mind was not one accustomed to dwelling on things, and so even then he did not take it especially to heart.

At first the bandit had had no intention of killing the man; he had meant only to strip him of everything and, as was his custom, kick him off with an order to be gone at once — but the woman was too beautiful, and before he knew it, he had cut the man down.

That this was as unexpected to himself as it was to the woman was plain from the fact that, when the bandit turned around, she had sunk down where she stood, staring blankly up into his face.

When he told her that from today she was his wife, the woman nodded.

When he took her hand and pulled her to her feet, she said she could not walk, and told him to carry her on his back.

Very well, very well, the bandit said, and carried her lightly on his back as he walked, but when they came to a steep, climbing slope and he told her it was dangerous and asked her to get down and walk, she clung to him and said no, no, I won't, and would not get down.

"How could I possibly walk up a slope steep enough to make even a mountain man like you suffer — just think about it."

"Is that so, is that so — there, there."

the man said, and though he was exhausted and in pain, he was in good spirits.

"But get down just once, won't you. I'm a strong man, mind you — it's not that I'm in pain and want a rest. It's only that my eyes aren't set in the back of my head, and though I've been carrying you all this while, it's been maddeningly frustrating not to see you. I'd like you to get down, just once, and let me look upon that lovely face of yours."

"No, no."

the woman said again, and clung all the more desperately to his neck.

"I cannot bear to stay still even a moment in a lonesome place like this. Hurry on, without resting even a moment, to wherever your home is. Otherwise, I won't be your wife. If you make me feel this lonesome, I'll bite my tongue and die."

"There, there. I understand. I'll grant whatever you ask."

The bandit, thinking of the pleasures the future held with this beautiful wife of his, felt a happiness that melted through him.

Puffing himself up and squaring his shoulders, he turned himself around in a full circle to show her the mountain before, the mountain behind, the mountain to the right, the mountain to the left, and said,

"Every one of these mountains, every single one, belongs to me."

But the woman paid not the slightest attention to such a thing.

He was taken aback, and disappointed all over again, and said,

"Listen. Every mountain your eyes can see, every tree, every valley, down to the very clouds rising from those valleys — it's all mine."

"Walk faster, won't you. I don't want to stay at the foot of a cliff covered all over with jagged rocks like this."

"There, there. Once we get home, I'll fix you up a feast beyond compare."

"Can't you hurry any faster? Run, won't you."

"Even alone, this stretch of road is no small trial to get through at a run."

"You're quite the coward for how you look. To think I'd end up with such a spineless, worthless husband. Ah, ah. Whatever am I to rely on from now on?"

"What nonsense. A slope like this—"

"Ah, how maddening. Are you tired already?"

"Don't be foolish. Once we're through this slope, I'll run so fast not even a deer could keep up."

"But your breath sounds pained. Isn't your face gone pale?"

"That's just how it is at the start of anything. Once I get my stride, I'll run fast enough to make your head spin back there."

But the bandit's body was so exhausted it felt as though it had come apart, joint from joint.

And by the time he had stumbled to the front of his own house, his eyes swam, his ears rang, and he had not even the strength left to wring out a single hoarse word.

Seven wives came out from the house to greet him, but the bandit, unbending his body which had gone stiff as stone, spent every last ounce of his strength simply setting the woman down from his back.

The seven wives were struck by a beauty in the woman such as they had never seen before, but the woman was startled by the ugliness of the seven wives.

Among the seven wives there had once been some fairly pretty ones, but now there was no trace of it left.

The woman, unnerved, shrank back behind the man and said,

"What are these mountain hags?"

"These are my former wives."

the man said, flustered — "former"

was the word he had thought up and tacked on; for a hasty answer it was rather well done, but the woman showed no mercy.

"Well now, is this your wife?"

"Well, you see, I never knew a woman as lovely as you existed."

"Cut that woman down for me."

The woman cried out, pointing at the one among them with the best-formed face.

"But look here, you needn't kill her — just think of her as a maidservant."

"You killed my husband, and yet you can't kill your own wife? And you still mean to make me your wife?"

A groan escaped the man's tightly shut mouth.

The man leapt up as if bounding into the air, and had already cut down the woman who had been pointed out.

But there was no time even to catch his breath.

"This one now. Next, there — this one."

The man hesitated, but at once strode over and drove his broadsword into the woman's neck with a single crunching stroke.

Before the head had even come to a stop rolling, the woman's plump, glossy, clear voice was already ringing out beautifully, pointing to the next one.

"This one. Next."

The woman who was pointed at hid her face in both hands and let out a shriek.

Rising over that cry, the broadsword flashed through the air.

The remaining women suddenly sprang up all at once and scattered in every direction.

"If even one of them gets away, I won't stand for it. There's one hiding behind that thicket. There's one fleeing off upstream."

The man, brandishing his bloodied sword, ran wild through the mountain woods.

Only one woman had failed to flee in time, and had collapsed where she sat, her legs giving way beneath her.

She was the ugliest of them all, and lame besides, and when the man, having cut down every last one of the fleeing women, came back and casually raised his broadsword,

"It's all right. Just this one. I'll keep her on as my maidservant."

"Since I'm already at it, I'll just finish her off."

"You fool. I'm telling you not to kill her."

"Ah, is that so. So you did."

The man flung down his bloodied sword and dropped to sit where he stood.

Exhaustion surged up all at once, his eyes swam, and he felt the weight of himself, as if he had taken root and grown up out of the earth.

Suddenly he became aware of the silence.

A terror that made him want to leap up surged within him, and when he turned with a start, the woman stood there with an air of somewhat forlorn composure.

The man felt as though he had woken from a nightmare.

And then his eyes, and his very soul, were naturally drawn in by the woman's beauty and grew still.

And yet the man felt uneasy.

What kind of unease it was, why he felt it, what exactly it was that troubled him — he himself did not know.

It was only that, since the woman was too beautiful and his soul had been drawn wholly into her, he was able to pay no great heed to the swell of unease within his breast.

Somehow, it seems familiar, he thought.

Something like this had happened before, sometime — what was it, he wondered.

Ah, that's it, that's the one.

When it came to him, he was startled.

Beneath the cherry forest in full bloom.

It resembled the feeling of passing beneath those blossoms.

Where, what, in what way it resembled it, he could not say.

But that it resembled it in some way was certain.

He was always the sort of man who understood only that much, and who did not trouble himself over not understanding further.

The mountain's long winter had ended; patches of snow still lingered here and there atop the peaks and in the shadowed hollows of the valleys, but the season of blossoms was about to arrive, and signs of spring shone across the whole sky.

This year, once the cherry blossoms bloom, he thought.

At the moment he came beneath the blossoms, it was not yet so very bad.

And so he would resolve himself and walk straight in beneath the blossoms.

But as he walked on, he would gradually go out of his mind; before, behind, right, left — whichever way he looked, nothing but blossoms overhead — and as he drew near the center of the forest, a blind, senseless terror would become more than he could bear.

This year, he thought, he would try standing stock-still in the middle of that forest in full bloom — no, he would go so far as to sit himself down upon the ground.

At that moment it occurred to him — should he take this woman along too? — and when he glanced at her face, his heart gave a sudden lurch, and he hurriedly looked away.

A feeling that it would be terrible if the woman were to see into his mind lodged itself, for some reason, burning in his chest.

★

The woman was tremendously selfish.

However carefully he prepared a feast for her, she always found something to complain of.

He ran the mountains to catch small birds and deer.

He caught wild boar and bear as well.

The lame woman wandered the forest all day long, searching for tree buds and roots of grass.

But the woman had never once shown satisfaction.

"Do you mean for me to eat things like this every day?"

"But this is a feast beyond compare. Before you came here, I only ate this much perhaps once every ten days."

"You're a mountain man, so I suppose that's fine for you. But it won't go down my throat. In a lonesome mountain wilderness like this, on the long nights, all one hears is the cry of the owl — couldn't I at least eat something as fine as what they eat in the capital? What is the wind of the capital like, I wonder. You cannot even imagine how bitter it is to me, having that wind of the capital cut off from me. You tore the wind of the capital away from me, and in its place all you have given me is the cawing of crows and the crying of owls. And you do not even think it shameful, or cruel, do you."

The man could not grasp the sense of the woman's resentful words.

For the man did not know what the wind of the capital was like.

He had not the faintest idea.

He could think of nothing that this life, this happiness of theirs, might be lacking.

He was only bewildered by the anguish in the woman's resentful manner, and, knowing nothing at all as to how he ought to deal with it, he suffered from sheer frustration.

Up until then, there was no telling how many travelers from the capital he had killed.

Travelers from the capital were wealthy and carried splendid belongings, so the capital was, to him, easy prey; and if he went to the trouble of seizing a man's belongings only to find the contents disappointing, he would curse, tch, this country bumpkin, or this dirt farmer — which is to say, that was the whole of his knowledge concerning the capital: it was a place where people with splendid belongings lived, and he thought of nothing beyond the idea of stripping them of those belongings.

He had never even had cause to consider which direction the sky over the capital lay in.

The woman treasured her combs, her hairpins, her ornamental pins, her rouge.

Even if he so much as brushed her robes with his muddy hands, or hands wet with the blood of mountain beasts, she scolded him.

As though her robes were her very life, and as though guarding them were his own sworn duty, she made him keep himself clean and ordered him to tend the house.

A single robe and a single narrow cord were not enough for her; it took several robes and any number of cords, and those cords were tied into strange shapes and left to hang needlessly loose, and by the addition of all manner of ornaments, a single complete figure was at last brought into being.

The man's eyes went wide.

And he let out a sigh of admiration.

He found himself convinced.

In this way a single beauty was brought into being, and that he himself was filled by that beauty admitted of no doubt; fragments that were, each on its own, meaningless, incomplete, and incomprehensible, gathered together to complete a single thing, and if that thing were taken apart it would revert to meaningless fragments once more — and this he came to accept, in his own fashion, as a kind of strange and marvelous sorcery.

The man cut timber from the mountain and made whatever the woman commanded.

What the thing was, and for what purpose it was being made, he himself could not know while he was still in the making of it.

It turned out to be a folding stool and an armrest.

The stool, that is to say, was a chair.

On fine days, the woman had it carried outside, and sat there, now in the sunlight, now in the shade of the trees, with her eyes closed.

Indoors she would lean against the armrest as though lost in thought, and to the man's eyes watching her, all of it was nothing but a strange, alluring, tormenting figure.

The sorcery was being worked in reality, and though he himself was its assistant, he was forever puzzled by, and forever admiring, the result of the sorcery that was being wrought.

Every morning, the lame woman combed out the woman's long black hair.

For the water used in this, the man drew it from a distant, especially pure spring in the valley stream, and he cherished the labor of taking such particular care.

It had become the man's wish to himself become one of the powers of that sorcery.

And he thought he would like to add his own hand to the combing of that black hair.

No, not those hands, the woman said, pushing him away and scolding him.

The man drew back his hand like a child, and, embarrassed, thought it a dream without end to watch the black hair take on its sheen, be bound up, and reveal the face beneath, a single beauty being drawn out and born.

"A thing like this, now."

He turned over in his hands the patterned combs and ornamented hairpins.

These were things whose meaning or worth he had never before been able to recognize, and even now he had no judgment as to the harmony between one thing and another, or as to what ornament itself might mean.

But he understood their magic power.

That magic power was the life within the thing.

Even things have a life within them.

"You mustn't touch them. Why must you reach for them every single day, without fail?"

"It's a strange thing, isn't it."

"What's so strange about it?"

"Nothing in particular, I suppose."

the man said, embarrassed.

He felt a certain wonder, but he could not say what its object was.

And a fear of the capital had begun to take root in the man's heart.

That fear was not terror, but rather shame and unease at his own ignorance, resembling the unease and shame that a learned man feels before something he does not know.

Whenever the woman said "the capital"

his heart quailed and trembled.

But he had never in his life feared any visible thing, so he was unfamiliar with the feeling of fear, and unaccustomed too to a feeling of shame.

And so toward the capital he held nothing but hostility.

He had assaulted hundreds, thousands of travelers from the capital, and not one of them had been able to stand against him — he thought this over with satisfaction.

Whatever part of his past he called to mind, there was no unease of ever having been betrayed or wounded.

Once he realized this, he was always cheerful, and proud besides.

He set his own strength against the woman's beauty, to compare them.

And, so far as his awareness of his own strength went, the only thing he regarded as even somewhat troublesome was the wild boar.

And even the boar was not, in truth, so very fearsome a foe, so he felt he had room to spare.

"Are there people in the capital with fangs?"

"There are samurai who carry bows."

"Ha ha ha. As for bows, I can bring down a baby sparrow clear across the valley. There can't be anyone in the capital whose hide is tough enough to break a blade."

"There are samurai who wear armor."

"Does armor break a blade?"

"It does."

"I can pin down a bear or a boar with my bare hands, you know."

"If you're really such a strong man, then take me to the capital. Use your strength to deck me out, all around, with the things I want — the finest of the capital's fashion. And if you can give me joy that reaches to the very core of me, then you truly are a strong man."

"Nothing to it."

The man made up his mind to go to the capital.

He meant to pile up around the woman, before three days and three nights had passed, every comb, every hairpin, every ornamental pin, every robe, every mirror, every stick of rouge to be had in the capital.

He had not a single worry.

The one thing that did weigh on his mind was something else entirely, having nothing to do with the capital at all.

It was the cherry forest.

In two or three days, the forest would come into full bloom.

This year, without fail, he had resolved.

He would sit, without stirring, right in the middle of the cherry forest at the height of its bloom, and see it through.

Every day he went in secret to the cherry forest, and gauged the swelling of the buds.

Three more days, he told the woman, who was pressing him to set out.

"What preparations could you possibly need?"

the woman said, knitting her brows.

"Don't tease me so. The capital is calling to me."

"Even so, I have a promise to keep."

"You? Who is there in this mountain wilderness for you to have made a promise to?"

"Well, there's no one, that's true. But even so, there's a promise."

"Now that's a strange thing to hear. If there's no one, then who did you make this promise with?"

The man found he could not lie.

"The cherry blossoms are going to bloom."

"You made a promise with the cherry blossoms?"

"The cherry blossoms are going to bloom, and I have to see them before I can set out."

"And why is that?"

"Because I have to go and see beneath the cherry forest."

"And why do you have to go and see it, that's what I'm asking."

"Because the blossoms are going to bloom."

"Because the blossoms are going to bloom — why, though?"

"Because beneath the blossoms, a cold wind lies stretched taut."

"Beneath the blossoms?"

"Because beneath the blossoms there is no end."

"Beneath the blossoms?"

The man no longer understood himself, and his face crumpled in confusion.

"Take me with you, beneath the blossoms too."

"That, I cannot do."

the man said flatly.

"It has to be alone. It won't do otherwise."

The woman gave a bitter smile.

It was the first time the man had ever seen a bitter smile.

He had never before known such a spiteful sort of smile.

And this he did not judge to be "spiteful"

in that fashion — rather, he judged it to be a thing that could not be cut down, even with a sword.

The proof of this was that the bitter smile had been carved into his mind as though stamped there with a seal.

Like the blade of a sword, it sliced sharply at his mind each time he recalled it.

And this was a thing he himself could not cut away.

The third day came.

He set out in secret.

The cherry forest was in full bloom.

The moment he stepped in, he recalled the woman's bitter smile.

It sliced through his mind with a sharpness he had never known before.

That alone was enough to throw him into confusion.

The coldness beneath the blossoms came surging in from every direction, boundless.

In an instant his body was laid bare to that wind and turned transparent, and the wind roared through him from every side, until there was nothing left stretched taut but wind alone.

Only his voice cried out.

He ran.

What emptiness it was.

He wept, he prayed, he struggled, seeking only to flee.

And when he realized he had broken free from beneath the blossoms, he found in himself the same feeling as waking from within a dream.

What differed from a dream was the true suffering of his body, gasping for breath as though at its last.

★

The man, the woman, and the lame woman began to live in the capital.

Every night, the man crept into whatever mansion the woman commanded.

He carried off robes, jewels, and ornaments, but these alone were not enough to satisfy the woman's heart.

What the woman desired more than anything was the head of whoever lived in that house.

In their house, the heads from dozens of mansions had already been gathered.

The heads were arranged, partitioned off behind screens on the four sides of the room, and some were hung up; though there were far too many for the man to tell one from another, the woman remembered each and every one, and even once the hair had fallen out, the flesh had rotted, and nothing remained but bleached bone, she still remembered whose it was and where it had come from.

If the man or the lame woman moved a head from its place, she flew into a rage, and scolded them at length — this one belongs to such-and-such a family, this one to so-and-so's family.

Every day the woman played with the heads.

A head would go out for a stroll, taking its retainers along.

One head's family would come calling upon another head's family.

A head would fall in love.

A woman's head would jilt a man's head, and at other times a man's head would abandon a woman's head and leave her weeping.

A princess's head was deceived by a Great Counselor's head.

On a moonless night, the Great Counselor's head crept in disguised as the head of the man the princess's head loved, and there they exchanged vows.

After the vow was made, the princess's head realized the deception.

The princess's head could not bring herself to hate the Great Counselor's head, and wept instead at the sorrow of her own fate, and became a nun.

Then the Great Counselor's head went to the nunnery and violated the princess's head, now a nun.

The princess's head tried to die, but yielded to the Great Counselor's whispered words, fled the nunnery, hid herself away in the village of Yamashina, and, becoming the Great Counselor's kept woman, grew back her hair.

By now, both the princess's head and the Great Counselor's head had lost their hair, their flesh had rotted, maggots seethed within them, and the bone showed through.

The two heads held a drinking bout and dallied in love, tooth-bone clacking against tooth-bone, their rotted flesh sticking together with wet, smacking sounds, their noses crushed flat, their eyeballs gouged out.

Each time the two faces stuck together with a wet smack and crumbled further out of shape, the woman was overjoyed, and laughed and chattered shrilly.

"There now, eat up her cheek. Ah, delicious. Let's eat the princess's throat too. There, gnaw on the eyeball too. Let's slurp it right down. There, lick, lick. Oh, how delicious. It's simply too much, isn't it — there, sink your teeth right in."

The woman laughed, a bright, rippling laugh.

It was a beautiful, clear laugh.

A crisp voice, like the ring of thin porcelain.

There was a monk's head too.

The monk's head was hated by the woman.

It was always cast in the villain's part, hated by all, tormented to death, or put to execution by officials.

The monk's head, once it had become a head, sprouted hair after all, and in time that hair too fell out, and it rotted through completely, until it was nothing but bleached bone.

Once it was bleached bone, the woman commanded that another monk's head be brought.

The new monk's head still kept the fresh, dewy beauty of a young acolyte.

The woman was delighted, and set it on her table, made it drink sake, pressed her cheek to it, licked it, tickled it — but she soon grew tired of it.

"A fatter head, a more hateful-looking one."

the woman ordered.

The man, finding it a bother, brought back some five heads dangling at once.

There was the head of a doddering old monk, and one with thick eyebrows and fleshy cheeks, its nose shaped like a frog clinging on.

There was a monk's head with pointed, horse-like ears, and a monk's head of a most solemn, virtuous look.

But of them all, only one pleased the woman.

It was the head of a great monk of about fifty, an ugly man with drooping eye corners, sagging cheeks, and thick lips, so heavy they seemed to hold his mouth agape in a slovenly way.

The woman pressed the drooping corners of its eyes between her fingertips, twisting them up and around, or thrust two sticks into the holes of its snub, lionlike nose, or stood it on its head and rolled it about, or clasped it to her, pressing her own breast between its thick lips to make it suckle, and laughed uproariously.

But she soon tired of it too.

There was the head of a beautiful girl.

It was a pure, quiet, noble head.

It was childlike, and yet, being a dead face, it carried a strange, grown-up melancholy, as though behind its closed eyelids were hidden all at once, jumbled together, thoughts of joy, and sorrow, and thoughts too precocious for its years.

The woman doted upon this head as though it were her own daughter, or her own younger sister.

She combed out its black hair for it, and applied makeup to its face.

This way, no, that way, she fussed carefully over it, until a gentle face rose up, as though a fragrance of flowers wafted from it in waves.

For the girl's head, a young nobleman's head was needed.

The nobleman's head too was carefully made up, and the two young heads gave themselves over to a wild, blazing game of love.

They sulked, they raged, they hated one another, they told lies, they deceived one another, they put on faces of sorrow — but whenever their two passions flared up together, each one's fire scorched the other, and both were consumed, becoming a single soaring flame that burned and mingled as one.

But before long a wicked samurai's head, or a lecherous old man's head, or an evil monk's head, some filthy head, would come to interfere, and the nobleman's head would be kicked and struck and at last killed, and filthy heads from right and left, from before and behind, would crowd in and set upon the girl in a jumbled mass, until the rotted flesh of the filthy heads clung to the girl's head, fanglike teeth sank into her, the tip of her nose was chipped away, and her hair was torn out in clumps.

Then the woman would jab the girl's head with needles to bore holes in it, cut and gouge at it with a small knife, until she had made it a filthier, more wretched, more unbearable-to-look-at head than any of the others, and would fling it aside.

The man came to hate the capital.

Once the novelty of the capital had worn off, all that remained was a feeling he could never grow accustomed to.

In the capital, though he wore a suikan robe like everyone else, he still walked about with his shins bare.

In broad daylight he could not even wear his sword.

He had to go to the market to buy things, and even when he drank at a tavern with painted women, he had to pay for it in coin.

The merchants at the market mocked him.

Even the country women who came to sell their piled-up vegetables, even the children, mocked him.

The painted women laughed at him too.

In the capital, the nobles passed down the middle of the road in ox carriages.

Their barefoot retainers, dressed in suikan robes, usually walked along with their faces flushed from the sake they had been served, swaggering and putting on airs.

He was shouted at as a fool, an idiot, a dullard, whether in the market, on the road, or in a temple courtyard.

Yet by now, such things no longer even angered him.

More than anything, the man suffered from boredom.

Human beings, he thought, deep down, are a tedious lot.

In short, people wearied him.

When a large dog walks by, a small dog barks at it.

The man was like the dog being barked at.

He disliked resentment, envy, sulking, and thinking things over.

The mountain's beasts, its trees, its rivers, its birds, had never wearied him so, he thought.

"The capital is a tedious place, isn't it."

he said to the lame woman.

"Don't you want to go back to the mountains?"

"Well, the capital isn't tedious to me."

the lame woman answered.

The lame woman spent the whole day cooking, doing laundry, and chatting with the neighbors.

"In the capital I can chat with people, so I'm never bored. I hated the mountains — they were tedious."

"Doesn't chatting bore you?"

"Of course not. Anyone who's talking never gets bored."

"For me, the more I talk, the more bored I get."

"That's because you don't talk — that's why you're bored."

"That can't be so. I don't talk because talking bores me."

"But just try talking. I'm sure you'll forget your boredom."

"About what?"

"Anything you like — whatever you feel like saying."

"There's nothing I feel like saying."

The man, irritated, gave a yawn.

There were mountains in the capital too.

But atop those mountains there were temples, and hermitages, and, if anything, there were even more people coming and going there.

From the mountain, the whole capital could be seen at a glance.

What an enormous number of houses, he thought.

And what a filthy sight it was, he thought.

By day, he almost forgot that he killed people every night.

For he had grown bored even with killing people.

It held no interest for him at all.

He would strike with his sword, and the head would simply drop off.

A head was a soft thing.

He never felt the resistance of bone at all — it was just like cutting a radish.

The weight of the head, by comparison, surprised him far more.

He felt as though he could understand the woman's feelings now.

In the bell tower, a monk was ringing the bell in a fit of despair.

What a foolish thing to be doing, he thought.

There was no telling what a man might do.

If he had to live day after day face to face with people like this, even he, he thought, would rather choose to live surrounded by their heads instead.

But the woman's desires had no end to them, and he had grown weary of that too.

The woman's desire was, so to speak, like a bird that flew on and on, endlessly, in a straight line across the sky.

It flew on in a straight line, without ever pausing to rest.

That bird never tired.

It cut through the wind, forever brisk, gliding smoothly and briskly onward without end.

But he himself was only an ordinary bird.

At most he flitted from branch to branch, or now and then crossed a valley, no more than that, and he resembled an owl dozing where it perched on a branch.

He was quick and nimble.

His whole body moved well, he walked well, his every motion was full of life.

But his heart was a heavy-tailed bird all the same.

It never so much as occurred to him to fly on and on, endlessly, in a straight line.

The man gazed at the sky over the capital from atop the mountain.

A single bird flew across that sky in a straight line.

The sky turned from day to night, and from night to day, an endless repetition of light and dark going on and on.

At the far end of it there was nothing at all — however long it went on, there was only the endless light and dark, and the man could not, in fact, bring himself to accept that endlessness.

The day beyond that, and the day beyond that, and the day beyond that again — he thought of the endless repetition of light and dark.

His head felt as though it would split.

This was not from the weariness of thinking, but from the sheer agony of it.

When he returned home, the woman was, as always, absorbed in her game with the heads.

The moment she saw him, she had clearly been waiting for him.

"Tonight, bring me the head of a shirabyoshi dancer. The most beautiful shirabyoshi's head there is. I mean to make her dance. I'll sing an imayo song for her while she does."

The man tried to call back to mind the endless light and dark he had gazed upon just now from atop the mountain.

This room was supposed to be that same endless, boundless sky of repeating light and dark, but he could no longer call it to mind.

And the woman was not a bird at all, but only, as always, a beautiful woman.

And yet he answered,

"I don't want to."

The woman was startled.

And then, at last, she burst out laughing.

"Well, well. Has a cowardly wind blown through you too? So you're just a weakling after all."

"I'm no such weakling."

"Then what is it?"

"It's that there's no end to it, and I've grown sick of it."

"Oh, that's a strange thing to say. Nothing has an end to it. Eating your rice every single day, isn't that endless too? Sleeping every single night, isn't that endless too?"

"That's different."

"How is it different?"

The man was at a loss for an answer.

But he thought it was different, all the same.

And so, to escape the anguish of being talked in circles, he went outside.

"Bring me the shirabyoshi's head."

The woman's voice called after him, but he did not answer.

He wondered why, and in what way, it was different, but he could not say.

Night gradually fell.

He climbed again to the top of the mountain.

By now even the sky could no longer be seen.

When he came to himself, he found he was thinking of the sky falling down.

The sky was falling.

He suffered as though his throat were being throttled.

It was the thought of killing the woman.

The endless running of light and dark across the sky — this he could stop, by killing the woman.

And then the sky would fall.

He would be able to breathe easy at last.

And yet there was a hole opened in his heart.

The shape of the bird had flown out of his breast, and vanished without a trace.

Was that woman himself, he wondered?

And was the bird flying endlessly in a straight line across the sky himself as well?

he wondered, doubting.

If he killed the woman, would he end up killing himself?

What was he even thinking?

He no longer even knew why the sky had to be made to fall.

Every thought of his had become impossible to grasp.

And once each thought had ebbed away, all that remained behind was pain.

Dawn broke.

He found he had lost the courage to go back to the house where the woman was.

And for several days he wandered the mountains.

One morning, when he woke, he found himself lying beneath cherry blossoms.

It was a single cherry tree.

The cherry tree was in full bloom.

He leapt up in surprise, but it was not in order to flee.

For it was only a single cherry tree.

He had suddenly remembered the cherry forest on the mountain at Suzuka.

That cherry forest on the mountain, too, must surely be in full bloom by now.

He forgot himself in a wave of longing, and sank into deep thought.

I'll go back to the mountains.

I'm going back to the mountains.

Why had he forgotten so simple a thing?

And why had he been so absorbed in thoughts of making the sky fall?

He felt as though he had woken from a nightmare.

He felt as though he had been saved.

The scent of early spring in the mountains, which until now he had lost even the sense of, pressed in upon him, sharp and cold, and he knew it fully.

The man went back home.

The woman greeted him with apparent joy.

"Where have you been? I'm sorry for saying such unreasonable things and causing you pain. But do try to imagine how lonesome I've been, with you gone."

Never before had the woman been so gentle.

The man's heart ached.

His resolve nearly melted away and vanished.

But he made up his mind.

"I've decided to go back to the mountains."

"And leave me behind? How did such a cruel thing ever come to dwell in your heart?"

The woman's eyes blazed with anger.

Her face was filled with the mortification of betrayal.

"Since when did you become so heartless?"

"That's just it. I hate the capital."

"Even with me here?"

"I simply don't want to live in the capital, that's all."

"But I'm here, aren't I. Have you come to hate me? While you were gone, I thought of nothing but you, the whole time."

A drop of tears welled in the woman's eyes.

It was the first time tears had ever come to the woman's eyes.

The anger had by now vanished from the woman's face.

All that remained overflowing was the anguish of reproach for his coldness.

"But you can't live anywhere but the capital, can you. And I can't live anywhere but the mountains."

"I can't go on living unless I'm with you. Can't you understand how I feel?"

"But I can't live anywhere but the mountains, I tell you."

"That's why, if you go back to the mountains, I'll go back with you too. I couldn't go on living apart from you, not even for a single day."

The woman's eyes were wet with tears.

She pressed her face against the man's chest and let hot tears fall.

The heat of those tears sank into the man's chest.

It was true that the woman had come to be unable to live without the man.

A fresh head was the woman's very life.

And there was no one but him to bring her those heads.

He was a part of her.

She could not let him go.

The woman was confident that once the man's nostalgia had been satisfied, she would bring him back to the capital again.

"But could you really live in the mountains?"

"As long as I'm with you, I could live anywhere at all."

"There aren't any heads in the mountains, the kind you want."

"If I had to choose between you and the heads, I'd give up the heads."

The man wondered whether it might be a dream.

For it was too much joy to believe.

Not even in his dreams could he have imagined so undeserved a wish come true.

His heart was filled with fresh hope.

Its arrival was sudden and violent, and the anguished thoughts of only moments before had already been swept away to some far distance, impossible now to grasp.

He forgot too the woman she had been until yesterday, who had never been so gentle as this.

There was only now, and tomorrow.

The two of them set out at once.

They decided to leave the lame woman behind.

And as they set out, the woman turned to the lame woman and, in secret, told her to wait, for she would be back soon.

★

Before them, the shapes of the mountains of old appeared.

It was as if they would answer, were he to call out.

They chose to take the old road.

No one walked that road any longer, and the shape of the road itself had vanished, become nothing but forest, nothing but a mountain slope.

To go by that road meant passing beneath the cherry forest.

"Carry me on your back. I can't walk a mountain slope with no road like this."

"Ah, of course."

The man carried the woman lightly on his back.

The man remembered the day he had first won the woman.

That day too he had carried her on his back, climbing the mountain path on the far side of the pass.

That day too had been full of happiness, but today's happiness was richer still.

"The day I first met you, you carried me on your back too, didn't you."

the woman said, remembering it as well.

"I was just remembering that myself."

The man laughed happily.

"There, you can see it, can't you. Every one of those is my mountain. The valleys, the trees, the birds, even the clouds — all of it is my mountain. Ah, the mountains are good. Don't they make you want to run? Nothing like that ever happened in the capital."

"The first day, I made you run while carrying me on your back, didn't I."

"That's true. I got so tired my head was spinning."

The man had not forgotten the cherry forest in full bloom.

But on this day of happiness, what could beneath that forest in full bloom possibly amount to?

He was not afraid.

And then the cherry forest appeared before his eyes.

It was, without question, in full bloom across its whole expanse.

Petals, blown by the wind, were falling in a light patter.

The bare earth was carpeted everywhere with fallen petals.

Where could these petals have fallen from, he wondered?

For overhead, as far as the eye could reach, spread clusters of blossoms in such full bloom that not a single petal among them seemed to have fallen at all.

The man walked in beneath the blossoms in full bloom.

All around, it grew hushed, and seemed to grow colder by degrees.

He suddenly noticed that the woman's hand had gone cold.

A sudden unease came over him.

In an instant, he understood.

That the woman was a demon.

Suddenly, a cold wind came surging in with a roar, from every quarter of the boundless space beneath the blossoms.

Clinging to the man's back was an enormous old woman, her whole body purple, her face huge.

Her mouth was split wide open to her ears, and her frizzled hair was green.

The man ran.

He tried to shake her off.

The demon's hands tightened their grip and dug into his throat.

His eyes began to go dark.

He was beside himself.

With the strength of his whole body, he pried the demon's hands loose.

He slipped his neck free through the gap in her hands, and the demon slid off his back and fell to the ground with a thud.

Now it was his turn to grapple with the demon.

He seized the demon by the throat.

And when he came to himself, he found he was strangling the woman with the whole strength of his body, and she was already dead.

His eyes had gone dim.

He tried opening them wider, but he could not feel that his sight had come back to him for it.

For what he had strangled to death was, after all, unchanged from before — still the woman — and only the same woman's corpse lay there now.

His breath stopped.

His strength, his very thoughts, everything stopped all at once.

Onto the woman's corpse, several cherry petals had already come to rest.

He shook the woman.

He called out to her.

He embraced her.

It was all in vain.

He collapsed and burst into tears.

Perhaps, from the day he had first come to live on this mountain until this very day, he had never once wept.

And when he came naturally back to himself, white petals had piled up upon his back.

It was just about the very center of the cherry forest.

In every direction, the boundaries were hidden by blossoms, and he could not see beyond them.

The fear and unease he had always known before had vanished.

There was no cold wind blowing in from the far edges of the blossoms either.

There was only a hush, and, softly, softly, the petals went on scattering down.

For the first time, he sat beneath the cherry forest in full bloom.

He could go on sitting there forever.

For he no longer had anywhere to return to.

The secret of what lies beneath the cherry forest in full bloom, no one knows even now.

Perhaps it was "solitude"

— such a thing, perhaps, is what it was.

For the man no longer had any need to fear solitude.

He himself had become solitude itself.

For the first time, he looked all around him.

Overhead there were blossoms.

Beneath them, a hushed, boundless emptiness filled everything.

Softly, softly, the blossoms fell.

That was all there was to it.

There was no secret beyond that.

After a time, he became aware of a single, faintly warm something.

And he realized that it was the sorrow within his own breast.

Wrapped in the clear, cold stillness of the blossoms and the emptiness, that faintly warm swelling came, little by little, to make itself known to him.

He tried to brush away the petals resting on the woman's face.

Just as his hand was about to reach her face, it seemed to him that something strange had happened.

For beneath his hand there was now only a drift of fallen petals; the woman's form had vanished without a trace, become nothing but a scattering of petals.

And his hand, reaching to part those petals, and his body as well, by the time he stretched them out, had already vanished.

Behind, there remained only petals, and a cold emptiness stretched taut.