白痴 English

In that house lived people and pigs and dogs and chickens and ducks, and truly, the buildings they lived in and the food each ate scarcely differed at all.

There was a lopsided building like a storage shed; downstairs lived the master and his wife, and in the attic a mother and daughter rented a room, the daughter pregnant with a child whose father was unknown.

The single room Izawa rented was a hut set apart from the main house; it was said that the family's consumptive son had once lain here, but it was no hut too fine even for a consumptive pig.

Even so, it came with a closet, a toilet, and a cupboard.

The master and his wife were tailors who also taught sewing to the neighborhood women (which was why they had put the consumptive son in a separate hut), and the husband served besides as an officer of the neighborhood association.

The lodging daughter had originally been a clerk at the neighborhood association office; she had lived and slept there, and was said to have carried on impartially with every officer besides the chairman and the tailor — a dozen-odd men in all — so that the child she now carried was the seed of one of them.

And so the officers pooled money to have the matter of the child disposed of up in that attic; but the world wastes nothing, for among the officers was a tofu-seller, and he alone kept coming to see her even after she had grown pregnant and hidden herself away in the attic, until in the end the girl settled into being, in effect, his mistress.

Once the other officers learned of this, they promptly stopped their contributions, insisting that the tofu-seller alone ought to bear the cost of that one month's living expenses at the parting of the ways — the greengrocer, the watchmaker, the landlord, and seven or eight others of one trade or another (five yen apiece) all refusing to pay — and to this day the girl stamps her feet in fury over it.

This girl had a large mouth and two large eyeballs, and for all that was terribly emaciated.

She hated the ducks and tried to give the food scraps to the chickens alone, but the ducks would snatch them away from the side, so that every day she chased after the ducks in a fury.

The way she ran, thrusting her big belly forward and her rear back in a strange upright posture, resembled nothing so much as a duck.

At the mouth of this alley stood a tobacco shop, where an old woman of fifty-five lived with her face powdered white; she had just driven out her seventh or eighth lover, by all accounts, and was now agonizing over whether his replacement ought to be a middle-aged priest or likewise some middle-aged tradesman of one sort or another, and it was said that if a young man went round to the back door to buy cigarettes she would sell him a few (at black-market prices, of course) — the tailor told "the teacher" (meaning Izawa) that he too ought to try the back door, but as it happened Izawa received a special ration at his workplace and so had no need of the old woman's favors.

Now, diagonally across the way, behind the rice ration station, lived a widow who had a bit of money put by, and two children of hers, a brother (a factory worker) and a sister — and this brother and sister, true siblings both, had become husband and wife to one another.

The widow, however, in the end quietly tolerated it as the cheaper arrangement, until the brother took up with another woman.

It then became necessary to get the sister off their hands, and it was arranged that she marry a relative, an old man of fifty or sixty, whereupon the sister drank rat poison.

Having drunk it, she came to the tailor's (Izawa's lodging house) for her sewing lesson and there began to suffer, and in the end she died; but the neighborhood doctor at the time wrote out a certificate saying heart failure, and the whole matter simply vanished.

Eh?

What doctor would give out so convenient a certificate as that? Izawa asked, aghast, and the tailor, looking quite taken aback himself, asked back, what, isn't that how it's done everywhere else?

Cheap apartment buildings stood crowded together throughout this area, and some fraction of their rooms housed mistresses and prostitutes.

These women had no children, and shared besides the common trait of keeping their rooms tidy, which pleased the landlord, so that the dissoluteness and immorality of their private lives had never once become a problem.

More than half the apartment buildings had become dormitories for the munitions factory, housing besides groups of the Women's Volunteer Corps — among them the mistress of so-and-so of such-and-such department, the section chief's wartime wife (which is to say his real wife had been evacuated to the countryside), the director's second woman, and a pregnant Corps girl who stayed home from the company drawing only her monthly wage.

Among them was one mistress kept at five hundred yen who had a house of her own, and she was the object of everyone's envy.

Next to a drifter back from Manchuria who was said to have made killing his trade (his sister was one of the tailor's apprentices) lived a master of acupressure, and next to him, by all accounts, a master of his craft descended from the line of Tailor Ginji, and behind them a navy lieutenant who ate fish and drank coffee and opened tins and drank liquor every day — and though in this neighborhood one struck water at a single foot's depth, so that no air-raid shelter could properly be dug, the lieutenant alone had built himself, in cement, a shelter finer than his own house.

Also, the department store (a two-story wooden building) along Izawa's route to work had no goods left because of the war and stood closed, but on its second floor a gambling den opened day after day, and its boss occupied several of the People's Bars, glaring at the crowds lined up outside and staying drunk day after day.

Izawa was a man who, on graduating from university, had become a newspaper reporter and then a director of cultural films (still an apprentice, he had never directed on his own), and at twenty-seven he might have been expected to have some knowledge of life's seamy side, and did indeed know a little of the inner workings of politicians, military men, businessmen, and entertainers — but he had never imagined that the ecology of a shopping street hemmed in by small backstreet factories and apartment houses could be anything like this.

When he asked whether it was the war that had coarsened people's hearts, the tailor answered quietly, with the air of a philosopher, no, well, you see, round here it's always been like this.

But the greatest figure of them all was Izawa's next-door neighbor.

This neighbor was a madman.

He had considerable means, and it seemed to be a madman's own particular care that had led him to choose deliberately the very bottom of the alley to build his house — the result, presumably, of an extreme aversion to the intrusion of thieves and other unwanted persons.

For even after making one's way to the very bottom of the alley and passing through the gate of this house and looking about, there was no doorway to be found anywhere — nothing as far as the eye could see but barred windows — the entrance to the house lay on the side directly opposite the gate, so that, in short, one could not reach it without first going the whole way round the building.

It was so arranged that an unwelcome intruder would give up in despair and retreat, or else, while wandering about in search of the entrance, would be discovered as an intruder and the household would go into a state of alert — for this neighbor had no liking for the vulgar men of this fleeting world.

The house was a two-story building of a good many rooms, but as to the arrangement of its interior, even the knowledgeable tailor knew little.

The madman was around thirty, and had a mother living with him, and a wife of twenty-five or -six.

The mother alone, it was said, ought properly to be counted among the sane, but she was violently hysterical, the one great heroine of the neighborhood, who, whenever she had a grievance over the rations, would go charging barefoot into the neighborhood association office — while the madman's wife was an idiot.

In some fortunate year, the madman had been moved to piety, had clad himself in white pilgrim's dress, and set off on the Shikoku pilgrimage, and there, somewhere in Shikoku, he had struck up a rapport with this idiot woman, and had come home bringing her back with him as his pilgrimage souvenir — his wife.

The madman was a fine-looking man of imposing bearing, and the idiot wife too had a refinement about her, as though she were the proper daughter of some proper family, with narrow, heavy-lidded eyes and an oval face, beautiful in the manner of an old-fashioned doll or a Noh mask — so that to look at the two of them side by side, one saw nothing but a handsome man and a beautiful woman, a well-matched pair who might even have seemed deeply cultivated.

The madman wore strong glasses for nearsightedness and always bore a careworn expression, as though wearied by ten thousand volumes of reading.

One day, when there was an air-defense drill in this alley and the housewives were bustling about at their work, this man stood watching in his kimono, laughing uproariously, and then before long he suddenly changed into air-defense gear and reappeared, and no sooner had he snatched a bucket from one of the women than he began, with cries of ei! and ya! and hoo-hoo and several other strange sounds, drawing water and flinging it, setting a ladder against the wall and climbing up onto it, shouting commands from the rooftop, and at last launching into a full speech of exhortation.

It was only at this point that Izawa first realized the man was mad; this neighbor would sometimes come climbing over the fence and dump the bucket of food scraps at the tailor's pigsty, and while he was at it throw stones at the ducks, and, with a perfectly innocent face, feed the chickens only to suddenly kick one of them — yet Izawa had taken him for a considerable personage, and the two of them had quietly exchanged silent bows whenever they met.

But then, what difference was there, really, between a madman and an ordinary man?

If there was any difference, it was rather that the madman was, at bottom, more modest than an ordinary man: the madman laughed uproariously when he wanted to laugh, made speeches when he wanted to make speeches, threw stones at the ducks, or spent a good two hours poking at a pig's face and rump.

Ordinary men, by contrast, are at bottom far more fearful of others' eyes, and take the most scrupulous pains to seal off the main part of their private lives from other people.

It was for the same reason that the entrance had been set a full circuit away from the gate; his private life, generally, made little noise, was sparing of useless chatter toward others, and had about it something contemplative.

One side of the alley was lined with apartments that seemed to press down on Izawa's hut, overflowing year-round with the sound of running water and the women's coarse voices; two sisters, both prostitutes, lived there, and on nights when the elder sister had a customer the younger walked up and down the corridor without end, and when the younger had a customer it was the elder who paced the corridor deep into the night.

Merely because the madman laughed uproariously, people took him for a creature of another race.

The idiot wife, by contrast, was remarkably quiet and meek.

She only murmured something timidly under her breath, and the words could scarcely be made out, and even when they could be made out, their meaning was never clear.

She knew nothing of cooking, not even how to boil rice — perhaps she could have managed it if made to try, but whenever she bungled something and was scolded she only grew more timid and bungled it worse, and even when sent to collect the rations she could do nothing on her own but simply stand there, so that the neighbors did everything for her.

Well, she's the madman's wife, of course an idiot, one can hardly ask more of her, people would say, but the mother was deeply dissatisfied and raged that a woman ought at least to be able to cook rice.

And yet ordinarily she was a well-mannered, refined old woman; but her hysteria, whatever set it off, was extraordinary, and once she started raving she was fiercer even than the madman, and of the three lunatics in that house, it was the old woman's shrieking that was by far the noisiest and most morbid.

The idiot woman lived in a state of fright, forever timid even on ordinary, peaceful days, flinching at the mere sound of someone's footsteps, and when Izawa called out a greeting to her she would only stand there blankly, frozen in place.

The idiot woman too would sometimes come to the pigsty.

The madman would come intruding as boldly as if it were his own house, throwing stones at the ducks and poking at the pigs' cheeks, but the idiot woman would come slipping in soundlessly, like a shadow, and crouch behind the pigsty, holding her breath.

This place was, so to speak, her refuge, and at such times there would generally arise, from next door, the old woman's bird-like shrieking of Osayo, Osayo — and at each cry the idiot's body would flinch and sway in a kind of echo, and when at last she forced herself to move, it came only after a long, repeated struggle, like the resistance of some insect.

Newspaper reporter, director of cultural films — these were the basest of base trades.

All they understood was the fashion of the times; their whole existence lay in not falling behind the moving hour, and the pursuit of self, of individuality, of originality, simply did not exist in that world.

In their everyday talk, words like self and humanity and individuality and originality flooded out far more than they ever did among company men, bureaucrats, or schoolteachers — but this existed only on the level of words, and was in fact as absurd a thing as spending every last yen wooing a woman and then calling the misery of a hangover the anguish of the human soul.

Ah, the thrill of the rising sun flag, thank you, soldiers, one's eyes welling up before one knew it, boom boom boom went the bombs, and one flung oneself to the ground in a blind panic, rat-a-tat-tat went the machine guns — they wore themselves out over such fabricated prose, possessing not one line of genuine feeling nor any loftiness of spirit, and made their films out of it, all the while convinced that this was what it meant to express war.

And some of them would say that the military censors made it impossible to write anything, and yet they had no notion of any true writing to fall back on — for the truth and the genuine feeling of a piece of writing itself has nothing whatever to do with censorship.

In short, in any age at all, these men have no content, only an empty self.

They can be turned this way or that, left or right, however fashion dictates, and take their models from the language of cheap popular novels, convinced all the while that this is the expression of the age.

And in fact the age itself is nothing more than that shallow, foolish thing — this war and this defeat, overturning two thousand years of Japan's history, had, in the end, what real bearing at all on the truth of human beings?

The fate of an entire nation was being driven by nothing but the will most devoid of introspection and the blind rampaging of the foolish masses.

If, before the department head or the company president, one so much as brought up individuality or originality, he would turn his face away with the unspoken message, what a fool — thank you, soldiers, ah, the thrill of the rising sun flag, one's eyes welling up before one knew it, OK, that was all a newspaper reporter amounted to, and in fact, that was all the age itself amounted to.

Is it really necessary to spend a full three minutes transcribing the divisional commander's exhortation word for word, is it really necessary to copy out from beginning to end the workers' odd morning chant that sounds like a Shinto prayer — when he asked this, the department head turned his face away with a click of his tongue, then wheeled abruptly round, crushed his precious cigarette flat into the ashtray, glared at him, and said: listen, in an age of raging surf, what good is beauty, art is powerless!

Only the news is the truth!

he bellowed.

The directors, for their part, and the planning-department men, for theirs, each formed their own cliques, building among themselves a world of mutual obligation just like that of the long-sword toughs of the Tokugawa era, disposing of talent by duty and sentiment, and constructing a seniority system more company-man than any company man's.

By this means each defended his own mediocrity, treated any struggle for supremacy through artistic individuality or genius as a sin, a violation of the guild, and maintained a fully equipped organization, in the spirit of mutual aid, for relieving the poverty of talent.

Within, it was an organization for relieving the poverty of talent; without, it was an organization for procuring alcohol, and this clique would occupy the People's Bars, drink three or four bottles of beer apiece, get drunk, and hold forth on art.

Their hats, their long hair, their neckties, their coats — these were the trappings of artists, but their souls and their guts were more company-man than any company man's.

Izawa believed in the originality of art and could not bring himself to give up the uniqueness of individuality, and so he could find no rest within that system of duty and sentiment — worse, he could not help hating its mediocrity and its low, contemptible souls.

He became an outcast from the clique; when he offered a greeting no one answered, and some even glared at him.

Steeling himself, he marched into the president's office: is there any theoretical necessity linking the war to this poverty of artistry?

Or is it simply the will of the military? If all one is to do is copy reality as it stands, then a camera and two or three fingers are quite enough.

It is for the special mission of cutting this reality by some particular angle and constructing it into art that we artists exist — but the president, midway through, turned his face away, smoked his cigarette with a sour look, and began a bitter half-smile that seemed to say, why don't you just quit the company, are you afraid of being conscripted — his expression saying, if drawing a salary means only throwing yourself into ordinary work as the company plans it, then don't think about anything beyond that, you're too impertinent — and without a word of reply, he made a gesture that meant, go home.

What could this be, if not the basest of base trades?

There were even times when he thought that if being conscripted outright as a soldier would deliver him from the agony of thinking, then bullets and starvation themselves might almost seem a kind of peace and comfort.

At Izawa's company, there was "Do Not Let Rabaul Fall,"

or "Planes for Rabaul!"

and while they drew up plans and storyboards for things like this, the American forces had already bypassed Rabaul and landed on Saipan.

"The Decisive Battle for Saipan!"

Before the planning meeting was even over, Saipan fell in its final annihilation, and now American planes from that very Saipan had begun flying overhead.

"How to Put Out Incendiary Bombs"

"Ramming from the Sky"

"How to Grow Potatoes"

"Not One Plane Shall Return Alive"

"Saving Electricity and Airplanes"

It was a strange kind of passion.

Strange films that planted a bottomless tedium in their audience were made one after another, raw film stock grew scarce, working cameras grew few, and the artists' passion raged white-hot into frenzy — "The Kamikaze Special Attack Corps"

"The Decisive Battle for the Homeland"

"Ah, the Cherry Blossoms Have Scattered"

As though possessed by something, their poetic sentiment was in a state of excitement.

And so, pale as blank paper, films of infinite tedium were made, while Tokyo, come tomorrow, was about to become a ruin.

Izawa's passion was dead.

He would wake in the morning.

The thought that he must go to the company again today made him drowsy, and just as he was dozing off the air-raid warning would sound out, and he would get up, wind on his puttees, pull out a cigarette, and light it.

Ah, if I skip work I'll run out of these cigarettes, he would think.

One night, running late, Izawa barely managed to catch the last train, and since the private line was already closed for the night, he walked a considerable stretch of the night road home.

When he switched on the light, oddly, his permanently unmade bedding was nowhere to be seen; since there had never once been an instance of anyone cleaning up while he was out, let alone anyone entering the room at all, he opened the closet in puzzlement, and there, beside the stacked futons, the idiot woman lay hidden.

With anxious eyes she watched his expression and then buried her face between the futons, but once she saw that Izawa was not angry, relief brought a rush of familiarity, and she settled down to a degree that was almost bewildering.

She could only speak by muttering under her breath, and even her muttering had nothing to do with what he was asking — she would say this and then that, stringing together only her own private, brooding thoughts, and even those only in the vaguest and most fragmentary summary.

Without asking outright, Izawa guessed at the circumstances — she had probably been scolded and, at her wit's end, fled here — and so, out of a wish to spare her needless fright, he skipped over most of his questions and asked only when and from where she had come in; the woman muttered on this and that, incomprehensibly, and finally rolled up one sleeve and stroked a spot on her arm (there was a graze there), saying it hurts, or it still hurts now, or it hurt a while ago, dividing up the time into all sorts of fine distinctions, so that at any rate he gathered she had come in through the window sometime after nightfall.

She also seemed to say something to the effect of, I walked around outside barefoot and so I've dirtied the room, I'm sorry — but since he could only piece together her meaning out of a muttering that wandered through countless blind alleys, he could not say for certain which particular thread that I'm sorry connected to.

Rousing the neighbor at dead of night to return a woman who was frightened out of her wits was an awkward business in itself, and yet, waiting until dawn to return her and thereby revealing that she had spent the night here — what kind of misunderstanding that might produce, given that the man in question was a madman, was beyond even his imagining.

Well, come what may, a strange courage welled up in Izawa's heart.

In truth it was nothing more than a susceptibility to the allure of curiosity and stimulation against the numbness of his ordinary life — but let come what may, in any case, all that mattered was that seeing this reality as a kind of trial was something his way of living required.

He told himself there was no need to think of or fear anything beyond the immediate duty of sheltering the idiot woman for one night.

He told himself, too, that there was nothing shameful in the strange emotion he felt at this wholly abrupt turn of events.

He laid out two beds and put the woman to sleep, and had turned off the light for perhaps a minute or two when she suddenly sat up, slipped out of bed, and seemed to be crouching somewhere in a corner of the room.

Had it not been the dead of winter, Izawa might not have bothered himself over it and simply gone to sleep, but it was a particularly cold night, and dividing a single bed's worth of bedding between two people already let the outside air press straight against the skin, so cold that his body would not stop shivering.

He got up and switched on the light, and found the woman crouched by the doorway with her collar drawn tight about her, her eyes bearing the look of a creature cornered with no way of escape.

What's wrong, go to sleep, he said, and she nodded at once, almost too readily, and crawled back into bed, but no sooner had he turned off the light for a minute or two than she got up again, just the same as before.

He led her back to bed and told her not to worry, that he would not so much as lay a hand on her body, and she, with a frightened look in her eyes, muttered something under her breath that sounded like an excuse.

When he turned off the light a third time, the woman got up at once, opened the closet door, went inside, and shut it from within.

This obstinate behavior made Izawa angry.

He flung the closet open roughly: what exactly are you misunderstanding here — after I've explained myself so plainly, to go and shut yourself inside a closet is an insult of the highest order; if this house is so untrustworthy, why did you come fleeing to it in the first place; this makes a mockery of me, it heaps an unjust shame on my character, as though you were somehow the victim here — enough of this farce, already.

But then it occurred to him that this woman had not even the capacity to understand the meaning of these words, and nothing could be more deflatingly absurd than that — it seemed to him it would be far more sensible simply to slap her across the face and go straight to sleep.

At that the woman wore a strangely unresolved expression and muttered something under her breath — words that seemed to mean, I want to go home, I shouldn't have come.

But then, she said, I no longer have anywhere to go home to — and at those words even Izawa was struck to the heart, and he said: then you may as well spend the night here in peace; I only grew angry because you carried on as though you were some sort of victim when I meant you no harm at all — now go to sleep in the bedding, not shut up in that closet.

At that the woman stared at Izawa and muttered something rapidly under her breath.

Eh?

What did you say — and then Izawa was so startled he nearly leapt up.

For out of the woman's muttering, one phrase came through with perfect clarity: because you hate me.

Eh, what did you say?

Izawa's eyes widened in spite of himself as he asked her again, and the woman's face fell, and she went on and on, saying things that meant, I shouldn't have come, I'm hated, I didn't think it would be like this — and then she stared blankly off at some random point, lost in a daze.

Only now did Izawa understand.

The woman had not been afraid of him at all.

The whole situation was exactly the reverse.

She had not come merely because she had been scolded and had nowhere else to flee.

She had come counting on Izawa's affection.

But what, in the world, could there possibly have been to make the woman believe in Izawa's affection?

He had done nothing more than call out a hello four or five times near the pigsty or in the alley or on the road — thinking it over, the whole thing was utterly abrupt, nothing but a farce, and what confronted Izawa now was simply the idiot woman's will, her sensibility, something that was, in any case, being forced on him from outside the human.

That after the light went off, once a minute or two had passed and the man's hand had not touched her body, she took this as a sign that she was disliked, and slipped out of bed in shame — whether, in an idiot's case, this was truly a thing of grief, whether Izawa was even entitled to believe it was, this too remained unclear.

And in the end she had shut herself inside the closet.

Whether that ought to be read as an idiot's expression of shame and self-abasement — there were not even words by which to judge such a thing, and so, whatever the truth of the matter, there was no way forward except for him to descend to the idiot's own level.

Why, after all, should he need some half-baked, human sort of good sense?

Was it a disgrace to a human being, for him too to possess the same artlessness of heart that the idiot possessed?

What he himself had needed, more than anything, was a heart like this idiot's — a childlike heart, an artless heart.

He had forgotten it somewhere along the way, and had only gone on fouling himself, thinly and meanly, in the frantic thinking of other men, chasing after shadows of falsehood, utterly exhausted.

He laid the woman down in bed, sat by her pillow, and stroked the hair from her forehead the way one would soothe a small daughter of three or four to sleep, and the woman opened her eyes vacantly — and in that there was nothing whatever different from the innocence of a small child.

I don't dislike you, the expression of human affection is never a matter of the body alone, a human being's last dwelling place is his native home, and you, in a manner of speaking, are always like an inhabitant of that home — Izawa began, at first, oddly solemnly, to say such things, but of course there was no chance of it reaching her, and in the end what were words, really, what value could they possibly have; there was no proof, even, that human affection alone was some kind of truth; where, in fact, could anything be found true enough to entrust one's living passion to — all of it was nothing but shadows of falsehood.

As he stroked the woman's hair, a wish to weep aloud rose up in him, and he was overcome by a sorrowful feeling, as though this small, elusive affection — which did not even cast a fixed shadow — were the destiny of his whole life, and he were stroking, artlessly, the very hair of that destiny.

Whatever would become of this war?

Japan would be defeated, the American forces would land on the home islands, and perhaps the greater part of the Japanese people would perish.

It seemed like nothing so much as another supernatural fate — a kind of decree of heaven.

He had, however, a far pettier problem.

It was a problem astonishingly petty, and yet it pressed right before his eyes, forever flickering there and never letting go.

It was the roughly two hundred yen he received in salary from the company, and the anxiety of how much longer he could go on receiving it, whether he might be fired tomorrow and left wandering the streets.

Whenever he received his monthly pay, he trembled with the fear of also being told, in the same breath, that he was dismissed, and once he had the pay envelope in hand he felt, absurdly, a happiness at his life having been extended one more month — and then, looking back on the pettiness of it, he always felt like weeping.

He dreamed of art.

Before that art, his two-hundred-yen salary was nothing but a single grain of dust — so why should it cling to his very bones and become an agony great enough to shake the foundations of his existence?

It was not merely the outward form of his life; his very spirit, his very soul, were confined within those two hundred yen, and to stare hard at that pettiness and go on remaining calm, without so much as losing his mind, only made it all the more pitiful.

In an age of raging surf, what good is beauty.

Art is powerless!

— the department head's absurd bellow bit into Izawa's chest, sharp and enormous in its force, carrying an entirely different truth from the one it had been meant to carry.

Ah, Japan will lose.

His countrymen would collapse one after another like clay dolls crumbling apart, countless legs and heads and arms flung up into the air together with the blasted debris of concrete and brick, until there was nothing left but a flat graveyard, without a tree, without a building, without anything at all.

Where he would flee to, into which hole he would be driven, where he would be blown to pieces along with that very hole — it all had a dreamlike unreality, and yet, if he should happen to survive, then for the sake of that fresh rebirth, and for the sake of a life lived in some utterly unpredictable new world, a life on a field strewn with rubble, Izawa felt, if anything, a curiosity stirring within him.

That was a fate certain to arrive within half a year or a year, and yet, despite the certainty of its coming, it registered in his mind only as some distant play, as if from a world within a dream.

That mere two hundred yen had a decisive power that blocked out everything before his eyes and stripped away his very hope of living, root and all — even in his dreams it was two hundred yen that throttled him and made him groan in his sleep, and already the whole passion of his still-young twenty-seven years had been bleached white, and was he not already, in reality, only wandering vast and vacant across a dark wilderness?

Izawa wanted a woman.

That cry — I want a woman — had once been Izawa's greatest hope; and yet any life with a woman was confined within two hundred yen, and every pot, every kettle, every measure of miso, every grain of rice bore the curse of those two hundred yen, and children born under that curse were possessed by it too, and the woman herself, as if turned into a mere hireling, would become a demon possessed by the curse, muttering day after day.

The light in his chest, art, the light of hope — all of it would go out, and life itself would be trodden into mush like horse dung on the roadside, and then dry up and scatter in the wind, leaving no trace behind.

Not even a fingernail's mark of it would remain.

Such a curse clung to the woman's very back.

It was an unbearably petty life.

He himself had not even the power to pass judgment on the pettiness of this reality.

Ah, war — this great destruction, judging everyone with its bizarre, freakish fairness, until the whole of Japan becomes a field strewn with rubble and clay dolls topple one after another — what a sorrowful, immense love of the void that is.

He wanted to fall fast asleep in the arms of that god of destruction, and so, whenever the air-raid warning sounded, he wound on his puttees with something like a burst of life in him.

Playing with the anxiety over his own life was the one thing that made each day worth living.

When the all-clear sounded he was left disappointed, and the despairing loss of feeling would begin all over again.

This idiot woman knew nothing of cooking rice or making miso soup.

Standing in the ration line was the most she could manage, and even speaking was not fully within her power.

Like the thinnest single pane of glass, she reverberated to even the faintest breeze of joy or anger or sorrow or delight, only receiving other people's will and letting it pass on through the creases of her blankness and her fear.

Not even the evil spirit of two hundred yen could find a place to dwell in this soul.

Was this woman not just like a sad doll made for him alone?

Izawa pictured before his eyes an endless journey, in which he held this woman in his arms and the two of them walked buoyantly on, blown by the wind, across a dark wilderness.

And yet, that this notion should feel oddly outlandish to him, that it should seem like some outrageous piece of foolishness — that too, no doubt, was because the pettiest of human shells was gnawing away at the very core of his heart.

And knowing this, why was it that this welling-up notion, this artlessness of affection, should still feel to him like nothing but sheer falsehood?

Was there some essential law by which the prostitute in that apartment building, or some lady of noble birth somewhere, was more human than this idiot woman?

And yet the state of things was absurd enough that such a law did seem to exist, sternly, as though it were real.

What was he afraid of?

It was as though that evil spirit of two hundred yen — even now, when he was trying to sever himself from that spirit through this very woman, was he not, all the same, still bound fast by its curse?

All he was really afraid of was appearances before the world.

And that world was nothing more than the prostitutes and mistresses of the apartment building, the pregnant Corps girls, the housewives shrieking through their nasal, duck-like voices at their assemblies in the ration line.

Beyond that, this so-called world existed nowhere at all — and yet, obvious as this fact was, he did not believe it in the least.

He was afraid of some mysterious law.

It was a night astonishingly short (and, at the same time, endlessly long).

He had thought the long night would go on without end, and yet before he knew it the sky had grown pale, and the cold of dawn had made his whole body stiffen like an insensate stone.

He had simply gone on, at the woman's pillow, stroking her hair.

*

From that day, a different life began.

And yet it was neither different nor even changed, beyond the fact that one more woman's body now occupied the same house.

It had a hollowness so complete it seemed a lie — one could not, in truth, find so much as a single new shoot springing up anywhere around him, or within his spirit.

He had, at any rate, come to some rational understanding of the strangeness of what had happened, but his life itself had undergone no more change than if he had merely moved his desk to a different spot.

Every morning he went to work, and back at the house, left alone inside the closet, an idiot waited for his return.

And no sooner had he stepped outside than he had already forgotten the idiot woman, feeling only a distant sense, as though the whole matter had taken place ten or twenty years before, its memory already indistinct.

This thing called war possessed, strangely enough, a wholesome kind of forgetfulness.

Truly, this astonishing power of destruction that war has, this shifting mutability of space it brings about, is such that a single day can work the change of hundreds of years; what happened a week ago comes to feel like something from years past, and what happened a year ago is set apart at the very bottommost layer, buried beneath everything else in memory.

It had only just been a short while ago that the road near Izawa's home, and the buildings surrounding the factory, had been torn down in that whole town-wide uproar of forced evacuation, rising like a cloud of dust — and even before the debris had been cleared away, it had already receded into the distance as though it were a commotion from a year past, and this great change, which had once utterly transformed the look of the streets, had by the second glance become nothing more than a perfectly ordinary landscape.

Somewhere among the miscellaneous fragments of that wholesome forgetfulness, the idiot woman too was blurred into indistinctness, just the same.

Wedged in among those miscellaneous fragments — the scraps of wood left from the evacuated tavern in front of the station where people had lined up only yesterday, the crater left by a bomb-shattered building, the burnt-out ruins of the streets — the idiot's face merely lay there, tumbled among them.

And yet the air-raid warning sounded every day.

At times the actual air-raid alarm sounded too.

And whenever it did, he fell into a state of mind that was extremely unpleasant.

It was the fear that there might have been an air raid near the house he had left empty, that some change unknown to him might even now be taking place — but the sole reason for that fear was really only the anxiety that the woman might have gone to pieces, run outside, and let the whole matter become known to the neighborhood.

Because of this anxiety over unknown changes, he was never able to get home while it was still light out.

How many times had he railed, uselessly, against the wretchedness of being unable to overcome this vulgar anxiety — he wanted, at the very least, to confess everything to the tailor, but he despaired at the meanness of that impulse, for it was nothing but a wretched device for allaying his fear by confessing the smallest possible fraction of the damage, and he could only curse and rage at the fact that his own true nature was nothing more than that of the vulgar, ordinary world.

There were two faces of the idiot woman that he could never forget.

At the turning of a street corner, at the climbing of the office stairs, at the moment of pushing free of the crowd on the train — at all sorts of unexpected moments, he would suddenly recall those two faces, and each time all his thought would freeze, and a single instant of frenzy would lie frozen there in despair.

One of those faces was the idiot's face at the moment he first touched the idiot's body.

And the event itself, by the very next day, had already been pushed off into the far distance of some memory a year old, and yet the face alone, severed from it, kept coming back to him.

From that day, the idiot woman was nothing but a body forever waiting — beyond that there was no other life to her, not even a single fragment of thought.

She was always simply waiting.

The mere touch of Izawa's hand on some part of her body was, for her, the whole of her consciousness — an act of the flesh — and her body, and her face too, did nothing but wait.

Astonishingly, even deep in the night, the mere touch of Izawa's hand was enough for her flesh, sunk stupefied in sleep, to produce the very same response — the flesh alone was always alive, forever waiting.

Even while asleep!

And yet, as for what might be going on in the mind of the woman while she was awake — it was, from the start, nothing but emptiness; was not all that existed there merely a stupor of the soul, and a living flesh?

Even when awake, her soul slept; even when asleep, her flesh was awake.

All that existed was an unconscious carnal desire.

It was nothing but a body, awake at every hour, stirring with the tireless, insect-like squirming of its own reactions.

The other face — this had happened to be one of Izawa's days off — arose when, in broad daylight, a bombing raid that lasted two hours struck a district not far away, and Izawa, who had no air-raid shelter of his own, crawled with the woman into the closet and hid there, using the bedding as a shield.

The bombing was concentrated on a district some four or five hundred meters from Izawa's house, but the house shook as though the very axis of the earth were being wrenched, and with each blast his breath and his thoughts alike were cut off.

Falling bombs might all seem alike, but between an incendiary bomb and a high explosive there was a difference in sheer dread roughly equal to that between a rat snake and a pit viper: the incendiary, for all its especially eerie rattling sound rigged into it, produced no explosion on the ground, and so the sound simply faded away overhead with a whoosh — a dragon's head trailing off into a snake's tail, as the saying goes, only here there was not even a tail left at all, and it lacked, for that reason, any truly decisive terror.

A high-explosive bomb, though, however faint and low its falling sound might be, drew out a single unbroken line like the sound of pouring rain, and this thing, at the very end, produced an explosion violent enough to seem to tear the earth's very axis apart — the sheer, packed dread contained in that single drawn-out line was beyond all reckoning, and as its footsteps of explosion, boom boom boom, drew ever nearer, the despairing terror of it left one, quite literally, feeling not at all alive.

What was more, since the planes flew at such a high altitude, even the droning of the American aircraft passing overhead came through only faintly, as though nothing at all were the matter, and it was exactly like being struck with a great axe by some monster who appeared to be looking the other way.

Since one could never be certain of the state of one's attacker, that strange, distant droning was itself deeply unsettling, and it was into that unease that the single drawn-out, rain-like line of the falling bomb's sound would come stretching out.

The terror of waiting for the explosion — this alone was enough to stop one's words, one's breath, one's very thoughts.

All that lived and gleamed there was the despair, cold as the very edge of madness, of thinking, this time it's really the end.

Izawa's hut, fortunately, was surrounded on all four sides by the two-story buildings of the apartment houses, the madman's house, and the tailor's, so that while some of the neighboring houses had their window glass shattered or their roofs damaged, his own hut alone did not even suffer so much as a crack in its glass.

Only a blood-soaked air-defense hood came falling into the field in front of the pigsty.

Inside the closet, only Izawa's eyes gleamed.

He saw.

The idiot's face.

Its agony of despair, clutching at empty air.

Ah, a human being has reason.

Even at the worst of times, some shadow of restraint, of resistance, still lingers on.

That there should be not even so much as that shadow of reason, of restraint, of resistance — that it could be a thing so wretched as this!

On the woman's face, on her whole body, there clung only a terror and an anguish thrown open onto the window of death itself.

The anguish moved, the anguish writhed, and the anguish let fall a single drop of tears.

If a dog's eyes could shed tears, it would be a thing as utterly grotesque as a dog laughing.

Tears without so much as a shadow of reason in them — that they could be a thing so hideous as this!

Strangely enough, small children of four or five, or even six or seven, do not cry in the midst of a bombing.

Their hearts pound like waves, their words desert them, and they only open their eyes wide, strangely.

Of their whole body, only the eyes are alive, but at first glance they are merely opened wide, not necessarily etched with any directly dramatic expression of anxiety or fear.

If anything, they quietly kill off their own feelings to a degree that makes them seem, oddly, more rational than an ordinary child.

In that instant, every grown adult amounts to no more than that, or rather to even less, since adults display their anxiety and their anguish over death all too openly — so that, in a manner of speaking, the children even seem more rational than the adults.

The idiot's anguish bore not the slightest resemblance to the children's wide-open eyes.

There was in it only an instinctive terror of death and an anguish over death — it was not a human thing, was not even an insect's thing, but only a single, hideous motion.

If there were anything at all resembling it, it might only be the motion of a caterpillar barely an inch and a half long, swollen up to five feet in length and writhing.

And in her eye, a single drop of tears spilled.

There were no words, no screams, no groans, and no expression at all.

She was not even conscious of Izawa's presence.

In a human being, so utter a solitude as this could never be possible.

That, with only a man and a woman together in a closet, one should forget entirely the existence of the other — this could never happen in the case of a human being.

People speak of absolute solitude, but absolute solitude can only exist when one is conscious of another's existence — how, then, could there be a solitude so blind, so unconscious, so absolute as this?

It was the solitude of a caterpillar, and how wretched the very face of that absolute solitude was.

How unbearably hideous, the face of an anguish without so much as a single fragment of a shadow of a mind behind it.

The bombing ended.

Izawa raised the woman up in his arms, but this woman who would respond to the mere touch of a single one of his fingers on her breast had, for now, lost even that carnal reflex.

There was nothing but the sensation of holding this corpse-like body and falling forever, an endless, dark, dark falling.

That day, right after the bombing, he had gone out walking, and among the flattened houses he had seen a woman's leg blown clean off, a woman's belly with her intestines spilled out, a woman's head twisted and torn away.

Izawa walked without any destination through the still-smoking ruins left by the great air raid of March tenth, passing beneath the smoke that kept billowing up.

People lay dead here and there, just like grilled skewers of chicken.

They lay dead in clusters.

It was exactly like grilled chicken.

It was neither frightening nor filthy.

There were bodies burned right alongside a dog's, and it was a dog's death in the fullest sense — dying for nothing — and yet there was not even the faintest trace of the sorrow, the pathos, one might feel over such a death.

It was not that a human being had died like a dog; rather, a dog, and something else much like it, lay there simply arranged and laid out, just like a plate of grilled chicken skewers.

Not a dog, and certainly not, from the start, a human being either.

If the idiot woman were to burn to death — would that not simply be a doll made of earth returning to earth?

If a night should come when incendiary bombs rained down on this town too... whenever Izawa thought of it, he could not help becoming conscious of his own figure, oddly calm and sunk in thought, his own face, his own eyes.

I am calm.

And I am waiting for the air raid.

Very well, then.

He gave a mocking laugh.

I simply hate ugly things, that's all.

And after all, is it not merely a body without a soul to begin with, burning and dying?

I will not kill the woman.

I am a mean, vulgar man.

I haven't the nerve to do it myself.

But the war will probably kill the woman for me.

All I need is to seize some small handhold that will turn the war's cold hand toward her head.

I don't know.

Probably some moment or other will simply resolve it naturally, that's all.

And Izawa waited for the air raid with the utmost calm.

*

It was April fifteenth.

Two days earlier, on the thirteenth, there had been Tokyo's second great night air raid, causing damage around Ikebukuro, Sugamo, and the Yamanote area, and since he happened to obtain the disaster certificate that came of it, Izawa went out to Saitama on a buying trip and came back carrying some rice on his back in a rucksack.

The moment he reached home, the air-raid warning began to sound.

That the next raid on Tokyo would fall somewhere around this part of the city was something anyone could guess, given which areas remained unburned — the day of this street's fate was drawing near, at the earliest tomorrow, at the latest surely within a month.

He thought at the earliest tomorrow because, judging from the pace of the raids so far, the interval needed to prepare a formation for night bombing had never been shorter than about a day — but Izawa never imagined that this very day would turn out to be that day.

That was precisely why he had gone out on his buying trip in the first place — though buying rice was not his only purpose; the farmhouse belonged to a family he had known since his student days, and depositing two trunks and a rucksack full of belongings with them had really been his main object.

Izawa was utterly exhausted.

His traveling clothes doubled as air-defense wear, so he simply flopped down in the middle of the room with the rucksack for a pillow, and, at this most pressing of hours, actually dozed off to sleep.

When he suddenly woke, radios everywhere were blaring away, and the head of the enemy formation was already closing on the southern tip of Izu — had already passed the southern tip of Izu.

At the same moment, the air-raid alarm began to sound.

This is finally the last day for this street, Izawa sensed at once.

He put the idiot woman in the closet, slung a towel over his shoulder, put a toothbrush in his mouth, and went out to the well; a few days earlier he had gotten hold of some Lion tooth-cream, and had been savoring, with nostalgia, that long-forgotten freshness spreading through his mouth from the paste, and so, sensing this day of fate upon him, he found himself, for whatever reason, in the mood to wash his face and brush his teeth — but first the tooth-cream, which had merely shifted a little from where it properly belonged, could not be found for a long time (it seemed a truly long time), and once he had finally found it, the soap this time (this too an old scented toilet soap) had likewise merely shifted a little from its place and could not be found for a long time, and — ah, I'm panicking, calm down, calm down — he kept banging his head on the cupboard and stumbling against the desk, so that for a while

he tried to bring every movement and every thought to a halt and gather his spirit together, but his body itself, instinctively, went on panicking and sliding about on its own.

When at last he found the soap and went out to the well, the tailor and his wife were flinging their belongings into the air-raid shelter at the corner of the field, and the attic girl, so like a duck, was wandering about with her own bundle dangling from her hand.

Izawa, at any rate, congratulated himself on the tenacity with which he had refused to give up until he tracked down the tooth-cream and the soap, and wondered what this night's fate would in the end turn out to be.

Before he had even finished wiping his face, the anti-aircraft guns began firing, and when he raised his head, a dozen or more searchlights were already crossing and tangling directly overhead in a great commotion, and there, floating right in the middle of their beams, hung an American plane.

Then another plane, and another, and when he happened to lower his eyes, the area around the station had already become a sea of fire.

It's finally come.

Once the situation became clear, Izawa finally grew calm.

He put on his air-defense hood, threw a quilt over himself, stood beneath the eaves, and counted the planes — up to twenty-four.

Floating there in the middle of the beams of light, they all passed directly overhead.

Only the sound of the anti-aircraft guns went on firing like something gone mad, while no sound of bombing came at all.

By the time he counted the twenty-fifth plane, that familiar rattling sound had begun, like a freight train racing over an overhead crossing — the falling of incendiary bombs — but it seemed to pass right over Izawa's head, concentrating instead on the factory district behind him.

He could not see from beneath the eaves, so he went as far as the front of the pigsty and looked behind him, and found the factory district already a sea of fire, and, astonishingly, American planes were now coming one after another from the exact opposite direction of the ones that had been passing overhead until then, dropping bombs across the whole area behind him.

By then the radio had already gone silent, and the entire sky was hidden behind a thick, red-glowing curtain of smoke, so that the shapes of the American planes and the beams of the searchlights alike had vanished completely from sight.

On every side but one corner to the north, it had all become a sea of fire, and that sea of fire was drawing steadily closer.

The tailor and his wife were a cautious pair; they had always kept their air-raid shelter set up for storing belongings, with mud already prepared for sealing the cracks, and now, following every step exactly as planned, they had packed their belongings into the shelter, sealed it with mud, and finished piling field soil on top of that as well.

With a fire like this, it's simply no use, is it.

The tailor stood with his arms folded, dressed in the old-style firefighting garb, watching the flames.

Even if they tell us to put it out, there's no doing it with a fire like this.

I'm getting out of here.

No sense dying choked in smoke — the tailor had already piled a mountain of belongings onto his handcart. Come on, teacher, let's clear out together.

At that moment Izawa was seized by a fear so complicated it was almost a clamor.

His body had already begun sliding along after the tailor, but when he checked that slide with some resistance of the mind that seemed to shake off his body's own motion, he felt, at the very same moment, as though a shriek fit to tear itself apart had gone up from some corner of his own heart.

I'll burn to death for this one instant's delay, he thought, and he went nearly blank with terror, and yet once again he held back the slide of his body, which seemed ready to stagger off on its own.

"I — well, I'm going to stay a little longer, anyway. I have work to do, you see. I'm an artist, after all, and when a chance comes to gaze at my own figure right at the very extremity of life, I'm required to make my final transaction, right there at that extremity. I want to run, but I can't run. I can't let this chance slip by. Please, all of you, go on ahead now. Quickly, quickly — one instant more and it'll be too late for everything."

Quickly, quickly.

One instant more and it would be too late for everything.

By everything, he meant his own life.

Quickly, quickly — this was not a voice urging the tailor on, but his own voice, wanting to flee one instant sooner than the next.

For him to flee this place, it had to be after everyone around him had already left.

Otherwise, the idiot woman's figure would be seen.

Well then, teacher, take care of yourself.

The tailor too was in a panic as he hauled his handcart out.

The cart went off, banging against the corners of the alley as it went.

That was the last sight of the alley's inhabitants fleeing.

An endless roaring sound like the crashing of surf that washes over rocks, or like the endless falling of countless anti-aircraft shell fragments raining on rooftops, an eerie shaa-shaa going on and on without a single pause or change in pitch — this was the mass footfall of the refugees flowing along the prefectural road.

Even the sound of the anti-aircraft guns had by now gone somehow dull and lifeless, while a strange vitality was packed into the flow of that footfall.

How many people in this world could ever recognize that endless, uncanny, unbroken flow of sound, with no rise or fall to it, as the footfall of human beings?

Heaven and earth alike were filled with nothing but a countless multitude of sounds.

The droning of American planes, the anti-aircraft fire, the falling sound of the bombs, the roar of the explosions, the footfall of the crowd, the shell fragments striking the roofs — and yet, within a radius of some tens of meters around Izawa, a small patch of darkness had somehow formed in the middle of that red sky and red earth, and it was, in that patch, utterly hushed.

A strange thickness of silence, a thickness of solitude enough to drive one mad, wrapped itself deep and heavy on every side.

Just thirty more seconds, just ten more seconds, let me wait.

Why, and who exactly was giving the order, and why he had to obey it — Izawa felt on the verge of going mad.

He felt, suddenly, as though he might writhe, wail aloud, and go blindly running off.

At that moment a falling sound came down right above his head, a sound that seemed to churn up the inside of his eardrums.

He flung himself down without thinking, and overhead the sound suddenly vanished, and an almost unbelievable stillness settled once more over everything around him.

Well, well — that gave me a scare.

Izawa got up slowly and brushed the dirt from his chest and knees.

When he raised his face, the madman's house was already spouting flame.

So, it finally got hit, did it — he felt strangely calm.

When he came to himself, the houses on either side of it, and the apartment building right before his eyes, were spouting flame as well.

Izawa flung himself into the house.

He knocked the closet door flying (it actually came off its track and clattered down), then, holding the idiot woman as if in an embrace, threw a quilt over the two of them and ran outside.

What happened in the minute or so after that, he had no idea at all — it passed in a complete daze.

As he neared the mouth of the alley, once again a sound came falling straight for the top of his head.

He got up again from where he had flung himself down, and saw that the tobacco shop at the mouth of the alley was also spouting flame, while in the house across the way, fire was pouring out from inside the Buddhist altar.

He came out of the alley and looked back, and saw that the tailor's house too had begun spouting flame, and it seemed that Izawa's own hut had begun to burn as well.

On every side was nothing but a sea of fire, and by now there were few refugees left on the prefectural road, only sparks flying up and whirling madly — it's no good now, Izawa thought.

When he reached the crossroads, from here on there was terrible congestion, with every single person making for the same one direction.

That was the direction where the flames were furthest away.

That place was no longer a road at all, but nothing more than a current made of human beings and belongings and screams, all piled up together, shoving and jostling and pushing forward, trampling over each other, swept along; and whenever a falling sound bore down from overhead, the whole current would drop to the ground all at once and, strangely, come to a perfect, unified stop, and only a few men would go running on, trampling right over the fallen crowd, while the great mass of people, burdened with belongings, with children, with wives, with the old, called out to one another, stopped, turned back, collided, were flung aside, and all the while the flames pressed in close on both sides of the road.

They came to a small crossroads.

The whole current was making, once again, for a single direction here too, precisely because the flames were furthest off that way, but Izawa knew there was neither open ground nor field in that direction, and if the next American plane's incendiaries should block the way ahead, that road held nothing but the fate of death.

On the other road, the houses on both sides were already burning fiercely, but Izawa knew that beyond it a small stream flowed, and that going a few hundred yards up along that stream would bring one out into a wheat field.

Not a single figure was running down that road, and Izawa's resolve wavered because of it, but then, glancing along it, he saw, some hundred and fifty meters ahead, the figure of a single man throwing water at the raging flames.

Throwing water at the raging fire was hardly the word for it — there was nothing brave about the figure at all; he merely dangled a bucket, threw a bit of water on the flames every now and then, stood there blankly, walked about, moving with a strangely dull, sluggish air, a figure so vacant it was almost impossible to guess at what was going on in the man's mind.

At any rate, if one man could stand there without burning to death, Izawa thought.

I'll put my luck to the test.

Luck.

Indeed, all that was left to him now was a single stroke of luck, and the resolve to choose it.

There was a ditch at the crossroads.

Izawa soaked the quilt in the ditch.

Izawa put his arm around the woman's shoulders, threw the quilt over them both, and parted ways with the flow of the crowd.

The moment he took a step toward the road where the raging fire whirled madly, the woman instinctively stopped, and staggered unsteadily, as though being pulled back toward the flow of the crowd.

"You fool!"

He gripped her hand with all his strength and pulled her along, and as she staggered out onto the road he caught her shoulders and held her fast: "Go that way and all you'll do is die."

He pressed her body against his chest and whispered.

"When we die, it'll be like this, the two of us together. Don't be afraid. And don't leave my side. Forget the fire, forget the bombs — listen, the road of our whole life together, the two of us, is always this very road. Just keep your eyes fixed straight ahead on it, and cling to my shoulder. Understand?"

The woman gave a small, deliberate nod.

That nod was clumsy, childish, and yet Izawa felt so moved by it that he nearly went out of his mind.

Ah — through all those long, repeated hours of terror, under the bombing by night and by day, this was the very first will the woman had ever expressed, the one and only answer she had ever given.

Izawa felt almost frenzied at the pathetic touchingness of it.

Now, for the first time, he was holding a human being in his arms, and he felt an infinite pride in the human being he held.

The two of them ran, passing through the raging flames.

Once they had broken free of the mass of hot wind, the road on both sides was still a sea of burning flame, but the roof ridges had already burned and collapsed, so that the fire's force had weakened and the heat had lessened.

There too, a ditch was overflowing with water.

He splashed water over the woman from her feet up to her shoulders, then soaked the quilt in the water once more and threw it back over them.

Scattered across the road were burned belongings and bedding, and two people lay dead.

They seemed to be a man and a woman, both around forty.

The two of them, arms round each other's shoulders again, ran on through the sea of fire.

At last the two of them came out at the edge of the small stream.

But here, the factories on both sides of the stream were blazing up in raging flame, and they could neither advance, nor retreat, nor even stand still — but then Izawa noticed a ladder set down into the stream, and, throwing the quilt over the woman, he lowered her down, and leapt down himself in a single bound.

The people they had parted from earlier were walking in the stream now, scattered in twos and threes.

The woman, from time to time, dipped her own body into the water of her own accord.

It was a situation that would have forced even a dog to do the same, and yet, with the freshness of a new and lovely woman being born before his eyes, Izawa stared wide-eyed, drinking in greedily the sight of her figure bathing in the water.

The stream flowed on, passing out from beneath the flames and beginning to run beneath the darkness.

The whole sky was still colored with fire, so that a true darkness was impossible, and yet in this darkness, which he had lived to see again, Izawa found only a spreading blankness, born of some vast, unfathomable exhaustion and a boundless void.

At the bottom of it lay some small relief, but that relief seemed to him oddly petty, oddly absurd.

Everything had come to seem ridiculous.

When they came up out of the stream, there was a wheat field.

The wheat field was ringed by hills on three sides, some three hundred yards square in extent, and through its middle ran the national highway, cut straight through the hills.

The houses on the hill were burning, and the public bathhouse, the factory, the temple, and other buildings at the edge of the wheat field were burning too, and the color of each fire was different — white, red, orange, blue, every shade and hue its own.

Suddenly a wind began to blow, the air roaring, and fine droplets of water like mist came showering down over everything.

The crowd still flowed on, winding endlessly along the national highway.

Several hundred people rested in the wheat field, but compared to the endlessly winding crowd on the highway, they amounted to nothing at all.

Beyond the wheat field lay a hill covered with a grove of mixed trees.

Inside that hillside grove there was hardly anyone at all.

The two of them laid the quilt out beneath the trees and lay down.

At the foot of the hill, at the edge of a field, a single farmhouse was burning, and the figures of several people could be seen throwing water on it.

Behind it there was a well, and a man was working the pump with a clatter, drinking the water.

Drawn by the sight of him, some twenty men and women, young and old, came running in at once from every direction across the field.

They worked the pump with a clatter, taking turns drinking the water.

Then they held their hands out toward the flames of the collapsing house, lining up in a circle to warm themselves, leaping back whenever a mass of fire came crashing down, turning their faces from the smoke, talking among themselves.

Not one of them lifted a hand to help put out the fire.

The woman said she was getting sleepy, and among her mutterings — I'm tired, my feet hurt, my eyes hurt too — about one in three was, I want to sleep.

Go ahead and sleep, Izawa said, wrapping the quilt around her, and lit a cigarette.

By the time he was on some cigarette or other, far off in the distance the all-clear siren sounded, and several policemen were walking through the wheat field, announcing that the raid was over.

Their voices were all alike hoarse and cracked, hardly sounding human at all.

Those within the jurisdiction of Kamata Station, they announced, should gather at Yaguchi National School, since it had escaped the fire.

People rose up from between the furrows of the field and went down to the highway.

The highway was once more a wave of people.

Izawa, however, did not move.

A policeman came up to him too.

"What's the matter with her? Is she hurt?"

"No, she's just tired, and sleeping."

"Do you know where Yaguchi National School is?"

"Yes, I'll rest a while and go along afterward."

"Take heart, man. It's nothing to be beaten by this."

The policeman's voice did not go on any further.

The policeman's figure disappeared, and at last only the two of them were left in the grove.

Only the two of them — and yet was the woman, after all, still nothing more than a single lump of flesh?

The woman was sound asleep.

Everyone else, at this moment, was walking through the smoke of the burnt ruins.

Everyone had lost their home, and everyone was walking on.

Not one of them, surely, was even thinking of sleep.

The only ones able to sleep now were the dead, and this woman.

The dead would never wake again, but this woman would wake before long, and yet, in waking, there was nothing at all that could ever be added to this sleeping lump of flesh.

The woman was making a faint snoring sound he had never heard from her before.

It resembled the grunting of a pig.

This woman herself is nothing but a pig, Izawa thought.

And he suddenly found himself recalling some small fragment of a childhood memory.

At the command of one ringleader among them, a dozen-odd children were chasing a piglet around.

Cornering it, the ringleader cut a piece of meat from the pig's haunch with a jackknife.

The pig showed no sign of pain and made no particular cry.

As though it did not even know its own flesh had been cut away, it only went on running about.

Izawa thought of a time when the American forces would land, when heavy shells would go screaming in every direction, when concrete buildings would be blown apart, and, with American planes diving overhead to strafe them with machine-gun fire, he and the woman would be tumbling and fleeing amid the clouds of dust, the collapsed buildings, and the craters in the ground.

Behind the crumbled concrete, a woman was being pinned down by a man; the man forced her down and, even as he indulged himself in the act of the flesh, tore off pieces of the flesh of her haunch and ate them.

The flesh of the woman's haunch grew steadily less, but the woman thought only of carnal pleasure.

As dawn drew near, the cold began to set in, and even though Izawa was wearing his winter overcoat and a thick sweater besides, the chill was unbearable.

Down below, all around the edge of the wheat field, there still stretched a whole field of flame, still burning.

He wanted to go down there and warm himself, but he could not move for fear the woman would wake.

For some reason, the thought of waking her felt unbearable to him.

He also thought of leaving her behind while she slept and going off on his own, but even that had come to seem too much trouble.

When a person throws something away — even a scrap of paper — there must be at least that much spirit and fastidiousness needed to do the throwing away.

He had simply lost even that much spirit, that much fastidiousness, needed to throw this woman away.

There was not a shred of affection left in him, nor any lingering attachment, but neither was there enough spirit left even to abandon her.

It was because he had no hope for tomorrow, no hope for going on living.

Even if, come tomorrow, he were to cast off the woman's figure, was there any hope waiting for him anywhere at all?

What was there left to rely on in order to go on living?

He did not even know where he might find a house to live in, or so much as a hole in the ground to sleep in.

The American forces would land, every kind of destruction would break out across heaven and earth, and the immense love of that war's destruction would judge everything, and settle it all.

He had even stopped thinking.

Once the sky grew pale, he would wake the woman, and without so much as a glance back at the burnt ruins, would set out walking, in any case, toward whatever station lay furthest away, in search of some place to sleep — this much Izawa had decided.

Would the trains be running, he wondered.

Resting against a fence made of railway ties near some station, Izawa found himself wondering whether the sky would clear this morning after all, and whether sunlight would come pouring down on his own back, and on the back of the pig lying beside him.

It was only because this morning was too terribly cold.