押絵と旅する男 English

If this tale was not a dream of mine, nor a vision born of some temporary madness, then the man who traveled with that pressed picture must surely have been insane.

Yet just as dreams sometimes afford us a fleeting glimpse of another world subtly at odds with our own, and just as madmen are said to perceive things entirely beyond our ordinary senses, it may be that I, through some strange atmospheric lens, caught for one brief instant an inadvertent look into a corner of another world lying outside the field of vision of this one.

It was on some warm, overcast day — I cannot say precisely when.

At the time, I was returning from a trip to Uozu, where I had gone expressly to see the mirage.

When I tell this story, close friends sometimes press me, saying I have never been to Uozu.

And when they say that, I find I cannot produce clear evidence of exactly when or on what date I went.

Was it all a dream, then?

Yet I have never in my life dreamed a dream of such vivid color.

Dreams, like films, are entirely without color — and yet that scene inside the train on that occasion, centered as it was on that garish pressed picture, is burned into my memory with a vividness like the pupil of a serpent's eye, its purples and crimsons lurid and alive.

Can there be such a thing as a dream in color?

It was the first time in my life I had ever seen a mirage.

I had imagined the old familiar picture of a Dragon Palace floating in the breath of a clam, so when I saw the real thing, I was struck with a shock close to terror, as though cold sweat were breaking out on my skin.

Along the pine-lined shore of Uozu, tiny human figures swarmed like millet seeds, holding their breath and gazing out at the vast expanse of sky and sea.

I had never seen such a quiet sea — silent as a mute.

I had always assumed the Sea of Japan was a rough sea, so this too came as a great surprise.

That sea was gray, without a single ripple, stretching on like an infinite swamp into the farthest distance.

Unlike the Pacific, it had no horizon; sea and sky melted together in the same shade of gray, blanketed in mist of unfathomable depth.

What one assumed to be sky in the upper reaches of the mist was in fact the surface of the sea, and great white sails — ghost-like, buoyant — slid silently past.

The mirage was like drops of ink let fall on a milky film, spreading and seeping of their own accord, then projected as an impossibly vast moving picture onto the great sky.

The forests of the distant Noto Peninsula, transformed by the distorting lens of misaligned air, were magnified absurdly and yet vaguely overhead — like black insects beneath an out-of-focus microscope — pressing down upon the watchers from the great sky directly before them.

They resembled oddly shaped dark clouds, yet whereas the location of a cloud is clearly defined, the mirage had a strangely indefinite distance from the viewer — that was its mystery.

It seemed at times like a great specter drifting far out at sea, and at other moments like a strangely shaped mass of mist looming within a foot of one's face, and finally it felt like a mere speck of haze floating on the surface of one's own cornea.

This ambiguity of distance gave the mirage a mad, uncanny quality far beyond anything one could have imagined.

Vast black triangles of uncertain shape would pile up like towers, then crumble in an instant, stretch sideways and run like a long train, then break apart and appear as a row of standing cypress treetops, and though they seemed to stand motionless, they transformed unnoticed into something entirely different.

Had the mirage's power been enough to drive a man mad, I could hardly have escaped that power, at least not before reaching the train on my return journey.

Having stood for more than two hours gazing at that spectacle in the sky, I can say with certainty that I remained in a state entirely different from ordinary feeling throughout that evening — from leaving Uozu until spending the night on the train.

Could it have been that it was a kind of passing madness that brushes over the human heart like a wandering spirit?

I boarded the train bound for Ueno from Uozu Station at around six in the evening.

By some strange coincidence — or perhaps that is simply how trains are in that region — the second-class carriage I boarded was as hollow as a chapel, and besides myself there was only a single passenger already there, huddled in the far corner on a cushioned seat.

The train ran endlessly along the desolate coast, over steep cliffs and sandy shores, filling the air with its monotonous mechanical din.

Out over the swamp-like sea, a sunset the color of dark blood glowed dimly in the depths of the mist.

Unusually large white sails glided through it like something from a dream.

It was a sultry day with no wind at all, and the faint breeze that crept in through the open windows as the train moved was as spectral and short-lived as a ghost.

A succession of short tunnels and rows of snowbreak pillars striped the vast gray sky and sea as they flashed past.

By the time we passed the cliffs of Oyashirazu, dusk had closed in to where the electric lights inside the carriage and the brightness of the sky outside seemed almost the same.

It was just at that moment that the sole fellow passenger in the far corner suddenly stood up, spread a large black satin furoshiki on the cushion, and began to wrap in it a flat parcel about two by three feet that had been leaning face-outward against the window.

This gave me a somehow peculiar feeling.

The flat object was most likely a framed picture, but it had been leaning with its face toward the window glass, as though there were some particular reason for doing so.

It seemed as though it must have been taken out from a wrapping and placed with its face deliberately toward the outside.

And when I glimpsed its surface as he wrapped it again, the brilliantly colored painting depicted on it appeared strangely vivid, somehow not of this ordinary world.

I looked afresh at the owner of this peculiar parcel.

I was startled to find that the owner himself was even stranger than the strangeness of the object.

He wore an extremely old-fashioned black Western suit — the kind with a narrow collar and pinched shoulders, the sort one can only see in faded photographs of our fathers in their youth — yet on him, who was tall with long legs, it fitted with a curious elegance and even looked rather chic.

His face was narrow, and aside from the fact that both his eyes glittered a little too brightly, it was well-proportioned and gave a smart impression overall.

His neatly parted hair shone thick and black, and at first glance he appeared to be somewhere around forty, but looking carefully one could see that his face was covered in an extraordinary number of wrinkles, and he might as easily have been taken for sixty.

The contrast between that jet-black hair and the wrinkles carved across the pale face gave me a jolt when I first noticed it — an intensely uncanny sensation.

When he had carefully finished wrapping his parcel, he glanced over toward me; it happened to be just the moment when I had been watching his movements with keen attention, and our gazes met squarely.

At that, he seemed to feel a touch of embarrassment — he bent the corner of his lips in the faintest of smiles.

I too nodded my head involuntarily in greeting.

After that, as we passed two or three small stations, we sat in our respective corners, exchanging occasional glances from across the carriage and then awkwardly looking away again.

Outside it had grown completely dark.

Even pressing my face to the window glass and peering out, I could see nothing beyond the occasional distant pinprick of a fishing boat's port light far offshore — no other light whatsoever.

In the endless darkness, only our long narrow carriage, like the sole remaining world, went on rattling forward forever.

It felt as though, leaving just the two of us behind in that dim compartment, the whole world and every living creature had vanished without a trace.

Not a single passenger boarded our second-class carriage from any station, nor did a train boy or conductor show their face even once.

Looking back on it now, that too seems exceedingly strange.

I had become gradually afraid of that man, who might have been forty or sixty and carried the air of a Western magician.

Fear, when there is nothing else to distract one, grows without limit, spreading to fill every part of the body.

At last the fear had saturated me to the very tips of my finest hairs, and unable to bear it any longer, I suddenly stood up and walked straight over toward the man in the far corner.

It was precisely because I found the man loathsome and frightening that I went to him.

I settled quietly into the seat facing him, and stared into his wrinkled white face — which appeared even stranger the closer I was to it — with eyes half-narrowed, breath held, in a kind of strange inverted state of mind, as though I myself were the specter.

The man had been watching me with his eyes from the moment I rose from my seat, and when I peered into his face like that, as if he had been expecting it, he indicated with his chin the flat parcel at his side, and without any preamble, as naturally as if this were an ordinary greeting:

"Is it this, then?"

he said.

His tone was so matter-of-fact that I was startled by it.

"You would like to see this, wouldn't you?"

When I said nothing, he repeated himself once more.

"Will you show it to me?"

Drawn in by his manner, I found myself saying something odd.

It wasn't as though I had left my seat in order to see the parcel.

"I would be delighted to show you. I have been thinking since a little while ago — surely you will come to look at this, I thought."

The man — or rather, old man would be a more fitting word — said this and began to untie the large furoshiki with deft long fingers, and propped the frame-like object in the window again, this time with its face toward me.

I glanced briefly at the surface, and without thinking, closed my eyes.

I cannot explain why even now, but I felt compelled to do so, and kept my eyes shut for several seconds.

When I opened my eyes again, before me was something the like of which I had never seen.

Yet I have no words to explain clearly what made it

"strange."

The frame held a scene painted in toxic muddy pigments dominated by indigo — in the manner of a Kabuki stage backdrop depicting a palace interior — showing tatami-matted rooms opening into one another in extreme perspective, green floor and latticed ceiling receding far into the distance.

To the front left was painted a clumsily black study window in the shoin style, and beside it, ignoring all rules of perspective, a writing desk of the same dark color.

These backgrounds, one might perhaps best describe as resembling the peculiar painting style unique to votive tablets.

Against this background, two figures of about a foot in height stood out in relief.

I say they stood out because only the figures themselves were made as pressed-picture work.

A white-haired old man in an old-fashioned black velvet Western suit sat stiffly (and remarkably, his features — apart from the color of his hair — were identical to the old man who owned the frame, right down to the cut of his suit), while a ravishing girl of seventeen or eighteen, in a crimson fawn-spotted long-sleeved kimono with a black satin sash, leaned against the old man's suited knee with an inexpressible air of shy allure — a scene akin to an amorous stage tableau.

The contrast between the old man in Western clothes and the beautiful girl was exceedingly strange — needless to say — but what I meant by

"strange" was not that.

In contrast to the roughness of the background, the craftsmanship of the pressed picture was astoundingly fine.

The face portions were fashioned from white silk built up to create even the finest wrinkles in relief, the girl's hair was composed of real human hair planted strand by strand and dressed as one would dress a living person's hair, and the old man's head must certainly also have been planted with actual white hairs, one by one, with great care.

The Western suit had proper seams, with millet-grain-sized buttons placed appropriately; and then there was the swell of the girl's breast, the suggestively curved line of her thigh, the overflow of red crepe silk, the glimpse of bare skin, the shell-like nails growing from her fingers.

One felt that if one were to examine it through a magnifying glass, even the pores and fine hairs would be there, properly made.

I had seen pressed-picture work only in the form of actor-portrait hagoita decorations, and fine though those could be, this pressed picture was of a refinement that put them in an entirely different category.

It was no doubt the work of a master craftsman.

But that was not what I meant by

"strange."

The frame as a whole appeared to be quite old — the mud pigments of the background were flaking away in places, and the girl's crimson fawn silk and the old man's velvet were faded beyond recognition — yet even in their faded, flaking state they retained an indescribable poison-vivid quality, and held a living energy that seemed to sear itself into the viewer's retina, which was strange in its own way.

But that was not what I meant by

"strange" either.

What I mean, to put it as plainly as I can, is that the two figures in the pressed picture were alive.

In Bunraku puppet theater, once or twice in a day's performance — and then only for the briefest instant — a puppet manipulated by a master will seem to have been breathed upon by a god and to be truly alive; and these pressed-picture figures gave the impression of having caught a puppet in precisely such a living moment and pinned it to the board before life could escape, so that it lived on eternally.

Perhaps reading surprise in my expression, the old man spoke in a heartening tone, almost crying out:

"Ah, perhaps you understand."

And as he said this, he carefully unlocked with a key the black leather case he wore from his shoulder, took from it a very old-fashioned pair of binoculars, and held them out to me.

"Please, look through this telescope once. No — from there you are too close. Forgive me, but move a little further away. Yes — that spot there will do nicely."

It was a truly strange request, but possessed by limitless curiosity, I did as the old man said, rose from my seat, and moved five or six steps away from the frame.

The old man held the frame up in both hands toward the electric light so I could see it better.

Looking back on it now, it must have been a truly peculiar and mad-looking scene.

The telescope was most likely a foreign-made prism binocular from twenty or thirty years before — the kind of oddly shaped instrument one used to see on the signs of opticians when we were children — worn from handling, its black covering peeled away to reveal the bare brass underneath in places; in the same manner as its owner's suit, it was a thoroughly old-fashioned, nostalgic object.

I spent a moment turning the binoculars around in curiosity, and then raised them to my eyes to look through them.

Suddenly — quite suddenly — the old man let out a cry that was nearly a shriek, and I nearly dropped the glasses.

"No, no! That is upside down! You must not look through it upside down! Don't, don't!"

The old man had gone pale, eyes round and wide, waving his hands repeatedly.

I could not understand his strange behavior — why looking through the binoculars the wrong way around should matter so greatly.

"Oh yes, yes — it was upside down, wasn't it."

I had been so intent on looking through the binoculars that I paid little attention to the old man's strange expression, and simply turned them the right way around and quickly raised them to my eyes to look at the figures in the pressed picture.

As the focus came in, the two circular fields of vision gradually merged into one, and what had been a vague rainbow-like blur slowly sharpened, until the upper half of the girl — startlingly large — spread across my entire field of vision as though she were the whole world.

I have never seen anything appear in quite that way, before or since, so it is difficult to convey to a reader, but the nearest feeling I can recall is perhaps what one sees watching a diving ama from a boat at the instant of her surfacing.

When the ama's naked body is deep down, the complex movement of the blue water layer distorts the body into unnatural winding curves like seaweed, blurring the outline so she looks like a white specter; but as she glides upward the blue of the water thins layer by layer and her form grows clearer, until the moment she breaks the surface — her head popping up — in that instant, as though waking from a dream, the white underwater phantom reveals itself to be unmistakably a living human being.

In just that same way, the girl in the pressed picture materialized before me through the binoculars, and began to move as a living girl of full human scale.

Beyond the lens of the nineteenth-century old-fashioned prism binoculars, there existed a wholly different world beyond our imagining, inhabited by a ravishing girl with a yuiwata coiffure and a white-haired man in old-fashioned Western dress, living their strange existence.

I was not supposed to look, and yet here I was being made to look by a sorcerer.

With that kind of inexplicable, topsy-turvy feeling — yet possessed as though by a spell — I fell to gazing into that mysterious world.

The girl was not moving as such, but the entire impression of her had changed entirely from what the naked eye had seen: she was full of life, her pale face flushed slightly pink, her breast pulsing (I actually heard the beating of her heart), and it seemed as though through the crepe kimono, the vitality of a young woman evaporated in warm waves from her flesh.

After sweeping the length of her body with the binoculars, I shifted the glass toward the white-haired man she was leaning against.

The old man too was alive in the world of the binoculars, the same as she; and yet despite the appearance of happiness — his arm around a young woman's shoulders, a woman some forty years his junior — remarkably, his wrinkled face, filling the lens, showed beneath all those hundreds of wrinkles an expression of deep, troubling anguish.

Perhaps it was partly that the lens brought his face unnaturally close and enormous, but the longer one looked, the more one felt a chilling dread — it was a peculiar expression mingling sorrow and terror.

Seeing it, I felt as though I were under a nightmare's grip, and looking through the binoculars became unbearable, so I tore my eyes away and glanced around me.

It was still the lonely night train, unchanged: the framed pressed picture was there, the old man holding it was there, outside the window was pitch dark, and the monotonous sound of the wheels was the same as before.

It felt like waking from a bad dream.

"You look quite bewildered, sir."

The old man set the frame back against the window, took his seat, and gestured for me to sit across from him, then spoke to me while watching my face.

"My head seems a little confused. It is rather stifling, isn't it."

I covered my embarrassment with some such remark.

The old man hunched forward, bringing his face close to mine, his long fingers on his knees moving with the flutter of a signal, and in a very low whisper:

"They were alive, weren't they."

he said.

And then, as if about to reveal a matter of great importance, he hunched even further forward, opened his glittering eyes wide and round, and fixed me with a penetrating stare, whispering:

"Would you care to hear their true story?"

Between the swaying of the train and the sound of the wheels, I wondered if I had misheard the old man's low, muttering voice.

"Did you say their story?"

"Their story, yes."

The old man answered in the same low voice.

"In particular, the story of the white-haired old man there."

"From his youth?"

I too, that evening, found myself speaking in a strangely off-key way.

"Yes, it is the story of when he was twenty-five."

"I would very much like to hear it."

I urged the old man along in a perfectly ordinary way, as casually as one might prompt someone for the biography of an ordinary living person.

At that, the old man twisted the wrinkles of his face with what seemed like joy, and said, "Ah, so you will listen after all."

And with that, he began the following most wondrous story.

"It is the great event of my entire life, so I remember it well — it was the twenty-seventh of April, in Meiji twenty-eight, in the evening, when my brother came to be as you see him there" (and he pointed to the old man in the pressed picture). "At the time, both my brother and I were still living under our father's roof; our home was on Nihonbashi-dori, third block, where our father ran a dry-goods shop. It was not long after the twelve-story tower had been built in Asakusa. Because of that, my brother used to go up the Ryounkaku — the Cloud-Surpassing Pavilion — almost every day, delighted with it. You see, he had a peculiar fondness for foreign things, and was always after the latest novelty. That telescope there — he discovered it in a strange curiosity shop in the Chinese quarter of Yokohama, the property, he said, of a foreign ship's captain, and brought it home. He told us he paid a considerable sum for it, even by the standards of the day."

Each time the old man said "my brother,"

he would glance or point toward the old man in the pressed picture, as though that person were seated right there.

The old man conflated his real brother as he existed in memory with the white-haired figure in the pressed picture, and spoke as though the pressed picture were alive and listening, as though conscious of a third party close at hand.

Strangely, I found none of this the slightest bit odd.

It seems we were at that moment inhabiting a different world, one that diverged somewhere from ours, transcending the laws of nature.

"Have you ever been up the twelve-story tower? Ah, you haven't. What a pity. Who on earth conjured that thing — it was a truly extraordinary, outlandish contraption. On the surface it was said to have been designed by an Italian engineer named Balton, but just think about it: in those days, what was Asakusa Park but the Spider-Man sideshow, girl acrobats, ball-balancers, the Gensui top-spinning act, peephole devices; the most exotic things were perhaps the model of Mount Fuji or the mazes and the Cedar-Forest-of-Yashajin exhibit. And then up shoots this enormous brick tower of a height that simply shouldn't exist — nearly forty-six ken tall, that's more than half a cho, with an octagonal top shaped like a Chinese coolie's hat, pointed at the tip; from any elevated spot in Tokyo you could see that red monster from anywhere in the city.

"As I mentioned, it was the spring of Meiji twenty-eight, shortly after my brother had acquired this telescope.

"A strange thing began to happen to my brother.

"Our father worried terribly that perhaps he had gone out of his mind; and I — as you may have guessed — was impossibly fond of my brother, and was sick with worry at his strange behavior.

"What it was like: my brother would scarcely eat, would not speak to anyone in the house, and when at home would shut himself in his room doing nothing but brooding.

"He grew thin; his face turned the ashen color of a consumptive, and his eyes alone moved restlessly.

"Though he was never one with a good complexion to begin with.

"When even that grew paler and more sunken, it was truly pitiful to see.

"And yet, for all that, every single day without fail, as if reporting to a job, he would wander off somewhere from around noon until dusk.

"When asked where he went, he wouldn't say a word.

"Our mother, worried and trying every approach to find out what was troubling him, could get nothing out of him.

"This went on for about a month.

"So worried was I that one day I secretly followed my brother to see where he went.

"It was our mother who asked me to do it.

"That day too was a dull, overcast, unpleasant day, just like today, and after noon my brother put on that black velvet Western suit — which he had tailored to his own design and which was then the height of Western fashion — slung this telescope over his shoulder, and went ambling off toward the horse-tramway line on Nihonbashi-dori.

"I followed him, being careful not to be noticed.

"Are you following so far?

"Well then, my brother waited for a horse tram going to Ueno, and hopped aboard.

"It was not like the electric trams today — you couldn't simply take the next car and follow.

"There simply weren't enough cars, you see.

"With no other option, I spent some of the pocket money Mother had given me and hired a rickshaw.

"A rickshaw with a vigorous puller could easily keep up with a horse tram and follow without losing sight of it.

"When my brother alighted from the horse tram, I got out of the rickshaw too, and plodded along following him again on foot.

"And where did we end up but the Kannon Temple in Asakusa.

"My brother went through the Nakamise arcade, passed straight before the main hall, threaded through the sideshow tents behind the hall, pushing his way through the crowds, and came before the twelve-story tower I mentioned — went in through the stone gate, paid his fee, and disappeared inside the tower through the entrance bearing the tablet reading 'Ryounkaku'

— wouldn't you know it.

"I had never in my wildest dreams imagined that my brother had been coming to such a place every single day, and was utterly astonished.

"Being still a child — I had not yet turned twenty — I had a strange thought: that perhaps my brother had fallen under the spell of this twelve-story monster.

"I had been up the twelve-story tower only once, taken by my father, and had not gone since, so I felt somehow uneasy about it; but since my brother was going up, I had no choice, and climbed the dim stone staircase one flight behind him.

"The windows were not large, and the brick walls were thick, so it was cold and dark as a cellar.

"It being the time of the Sino-Japanese War, a row of oil paintings of battle scenes — rare novelties in those days — was hung along one wall.

"Japanese soldiers with terrifying, wolf-like faces howling as they charged; Chinese soldiers, their sides pierced by bayoneted rifles, pressing both hands against spurting blood, their faces and lips turning purple as they writhed; a queue-haired severed head flying up like a balloon — the most indescribably toxic, blood-soaked oil paintings glistening in the dim light from the windows.

"Between them, gloomy stone stairs wound upward endlessly like the inside of a snail's shell.

"It was a genuinely peculiar, unsettling feeling.

"The top floor was an open octagonal viewing corridor with only a railing and no walls; when one reached it, the light suddenly burst open bright, and after the long dim journey up, it was a shock.

"The clouds were so low they seemed within reach, and looking out, the rooftops of all Tokyo lay in a jumble like so much refuse, and the old gun emplacements at Shinagawa looked like a miniature rock arrangement.

"Bearing the dizziness, when one peered straight down, even the Kannon hall was far below, the canvas sideshow tents looked like toys, and the walking people below were all heads and feet.

"At the top, a group of more than ten sightseers clustered together looking apprehensive and whispering in low voices as they gazed toward the sea at Shinagawa; but my brother, apart from the others, stood alone with the telescope to his eye, intently scanning the precincts of the Asakusa temple.

"Seen from behind like that, in the whitish, blankly overcast sky, my brother's figure in its velvet Western suit stood out sharp and clear, with none of the clutter below visible, and though I knew it was my brother, he had the feeling of a figure in a Western oil painting — so solemn and unapproachable that I hesitated to call out to him.

"But remembering what Mother had told me, I could not stand there forever, so I came up behind my brother and called out, 'Brother, what are you looking at?'

"and spoke to him.

"My brother started and turned around, but said nothing, his face wearing an awkward expression.

"I said: 'Father and Mother are terribly worried about how you have been lately. I wondered where you went every day, and it turns out you have been coming here, Brother. Please tell me why. Please confide in me at least, since we have always been so close.'

"Fortunate that no one was nearby, I pleaded with him there on top of the tower.

"He would not open up at first, but I kept pleading again and again, and at last he seemed to give in, and finally told me the secret he had been carrying for a month.

"But the cause of my brother's anguish was itself, again, a most peculiar matter.

"My brother told me that about a month earlier, while he had been up on the twelve-story tower looking through this telescope at the grounds of the Kannon temple, he had caught a glimpse — just a flash — of a girl's face in the crowd below.

"That girl was, he said, a beauty beyond any words, someone who seemed not of this world, and though my brother had always been entirely indifferent to women, that one girl inside the telescope made his blood run cold with the force with which she had utterly captivated his heart.

"At that moment he had looked only once and then, startled, had lowered the telescope; when he tried to find her again in the same direction, no matter how frantically he searched, the lens could not land on that girl's face.

"Through the telescope she had appeared close, but she was actually at a great distance; and in a dense crowd, having seen her once does not guarantee being able to find her a second time.

"From that time on, my brother could not forget the beautiful girl he had glimpsed in that telescope, and being an extremely shy person, he fell into an old-fashioned lovesickness.

"People today may laugh, but in those days people were of a more unhurried nature, and there were many men who fell in love with a woman glimpsed in passing and then pined away — it was that kind of era.

"Needless to say, dragging that weakened body, which could barely eat, my brother went up the twelve-story tower every single day without fail — like reporting to work — in the sad and slender hope that the girl might again pass through the grounds of the Kannon temple, and peered through his telescope.

"Love is a strange thing.

"When my brother had told me everything, he again began gazing through the telescope like a man burning with fever; and I, fully sympathizing with his feelings, had not the heart to try to stop him — though it was a futile search with one chance in a thousand — and nearly moved to tears, I stood watching my brother's back.

"Then at that moment — ah, I cannot forget that strange and beautiful sight.

"It is more than thirty years ago now, yet when I close my eyes like this, those dream-like colors rise before me as vividly as if it were real.

"As I mentioned, standing behind my brother, all I could see was the sky, and in the drifting mottled clouds my brother's slender suited figure floated up like a picture, and as the clouds moved I could almost mistake his body for drifting through the air.

"Then suddenly — like fireworks shooting up — countless red and blue and purple spheres floated one after another, vying with each other, drifting upward through the white overcast sky.

"Words cannot convey it — it was truly like a painting, and like an omen of something; I was struck with an inexplicable, uncanny feeling.

"Peering quickly below to see what it was, I found that by some mischance a balloon vendor had released all his rubber balloons into the sky at once; and though the rubber balloon itself was much rarer in those days than now, even after understanding what it was I still felt that peculiar sensation.

"Strange as it may seem, whether that set something off or merely coincided with it, it was right then that my brother, in a state of great excitement, his pale face flushing red and his breath quickening, came over toward me, suddenly seized my hand and said: 'Come, quickly — we will be too late if we don't hurry.'

"and pulled me along forcefully.

"Being dragged along and running down the stone steps of the tower, I asked the reason, and he said he had found the girl from before — she appeared to be seated in a wide room with green tatami, so if we went now she would certainly still be there in her place.

"The spot my brother had identified was marked by a large pine tree behind the main hall — beneath which, he said, there had been a wide room with tatami; but when the two of us went there and searched, the pine tree was certainly there, yet there was no house of any kind nearby, and we were utterly mystified.

"I thought it was a delusion on my brother's part, but his downcast state was so pitiable that for comfort I went around asking at the tea stalls in the vicinity, yet there was not a shadow or trace of any such girl.

"In the searching we became separated, but after making the rounds of the tea stalls and returning to the foot of the pine tree after some time, I found that among the various street stalls there, a peephole entertainment vendor was doing business with sharp cracking sounds of his whip, and looking closely, I saw my brother bent forward, peering desperately through the peephole eyepiece.

"'Brother, what are you doing?'

"I said and tapped his shoulder, and he started and turned around — I can never forget the look on my brother's face at that moment.

"How shall I describe it — as though he were seeing a dream, his facial muscles had gone slack, his eyes had the look of someone gazing at something very far away, and even his voice when he spoke to me sounded strangely hollow.

"And he said: 'The girl we were looking for is in here.'

"he said.

"When he said so, I quickly paid my coin and looked through the peephole eyepiece — and it was a peepshow of the story of Yaoya Oshichi.

"The scene showing was Oshichi leaning against Kichiza in the study of the Kichijoji temple.

"I will not forget it.

"The husband and wife running the show were singing together in hoarse voices, beating time with a whip: 'Press with the knee, signal with the eye —'

"that was the line they were singing.

"Ah, that strange melody of 'Press with the knee, signal with the eye —'

"seems to ring in my ears still.

"The figures in the peepshow picture were pressed-picture work, and must have been the craft of a master.

"How vividly lifelike and beautiful Oshichi's face was.

"It looked truly alive even to my eyes, so it was hardly surprising that my brother should have said what he said.

"My brother said: 'Even if I now know that this girl is a made-up pressed picture, I cannot give up. It is sad, but I cannot give her up. Just once — once would be enough — I want to become a pressed-picture man like Kichiza, inside this picture, and speak with this girl.'

"and stood there in a daze, making no move to go.

"Thinking back on it, the peepshow picture had an opening at the top to let in light, and at an angle from the top of the twelve-story tower this would certainly have been visible.

"By that time the sun was already setting, foot traffic had grown sparse, and before the peepshow only two or three children with short-cropped hair lingered reluctant to leave.

"The overcast sky that had hung heavy since midday was by dusk pressing down lower still as though it might rain at any moment, making the air even more oppressive — the kind of weather that made one fear one might go mad.

"And in one's ears a sound like the distant rolling of drums.

"In that, my brother stood gazing at something in the distance, and went on standing there endlessly.

"That interval seemed to last a full hour.

"When it had grown completely dark and the gas flower-lights of the distant ball-balancing act had begun to glitter and flicker, my brother seemed to snap awake, and suddenly seized my arm: 'Ah, I've had a good idea. Please — as a favor to me — hold this telescope upside down, put the big glass to your eye, and look at me through it from there.'

"he said, saying something strange.

"'Why?'

"I asked, but he said, 'Never mind why, just do it for me,'

"and would not listen.

"I had never been much fond of optical instruments by nature — telescopes, microscopes — the uncanny business of distant things leaping toward one's eye, or tiny insects swelling into the size of animals, felt somehow ghoulish to me.

"And so I had rarely looked through my brother's prized telescope, and the less I had used it, the more it seemed to me a device of devilish nature.

"Moreover, to look through the telescope upside down at my brother in the dusky gloom behind the Kannon hall with hardly a soul about was both mad and uncanny — but since my brother pleaded so insistently, I had no choice and did as he said.

"Looking through it upside down, my brother standing two or three ken away appeared reduced to about two feet tall and small as he was, stood out sharply from the darkness.

"The surrounding scenery did not appear at all — only my brother's small suited figure stood there alone in the center of the glass.

"Then, no doubt because my brother walked backward,

"he grew smaller and smaller before my eyes, until at last he was a charming doll-like figure of about a foot tall.

"And then, as if that figure floated up into the air, in a moment before I could cry out, it dissolved and disappeared into the darkness.

"I was frightened (you may think it foolish for my age, but truly in that moment the fear pierced through me) and suddenly lowering the binoculars, called out 'Brother!'

"and ran toward the direction where my brother had disappeared.

"But for whatever reason, search as I might, I could not find my brother anywhere.

"Given the time, he could not have gone far, yet however I looked I could find no trace of him.

"And so, just like that, my brother vanished from this world forever — from that moment on I came to fear even more that devilish instrument called a telescope, particularly this one, which had belonged to some unknown foreign ship captain, some foreigner from who knows where; and whatever other glasses might be, this glass alone I believed with firm conviction must never be looked through upside down.

"As for this telescope in particular, unlike other glasses, I was deeply averse to it,

"and I firmly believed that looking through it upside down would bring calamity.

"Now you understand why I was so alarmed when you were about to hold it upside down just a little while ago.

"But then — after long hours of searching in exhaustion, when I returned to the front of the peepshow stall,

"a thought struck me all at once.

"It was this: that my brother, so consumed with love for the girl in the pressed picture, had used the power of the devilish telescope to shrink his own body to the same size as the pressed-picture girl, and had quietly slipped into the world of the pressed picture.

"So I asked the peepshow vendor, who had not yet packed up, to show me the Kichijoji scene again — and what do you think? There was my brother in the picture, turned into pressed-picture work, in the lantern's light, with a happy expression, holding Oshichi in his arms in place of Kichiza.

"But I did not feel sad; I was so glad to the point of tears at my brother's happiness in having achieved his heart's desire.

"I made a firm promise with the vendor to let me have the picture at whatever price, however dear (and oddly enough, the vendor seemed not to notice at all that my brother in his Western suit was sitting in place of the young page Kichiza), then dashed home and told our mother everything in full detail — whereupon both my father and my mother said, 'What are you talking about? Have you gone mad?' and would not believe a word, no matter what I said.

"They simply refused to hear of it.

"Isn't that amusing?

"Ha ha ha ha ha ha!"

The old man laughed at this point as if it were the most comical thing in the world.

And strangely, I too, sympathizing with the old man, burst out laughing right along with him.

"Those people believed that a human being simply does not become a pressed picture. But as proof that he had become one, haven't I told you that my brother's form vanished utterly from this world after that? Even so, those people assumed he had simply run away from home — a completely wrong guess. Amusing, isn't it. In the end, without regard to what anyone said, I wheedled money from my mother, finally obtained that peepshow picture, and traveled with it from Hakone to Kamakura. It was because I wanted to give my brother a honeymoon journey. Traveling on the train like this brings back those memories. Just as today, I propped this picture against the window so that my brother and his sweetheart could see the scenery outside. How happy my brother must have been. And the girl — how could she have disliked such sincere devotion from my brother? Like a true pair of newlyweds, blushing shyly, skin touching skin, they murmured to each other lovingly, exchanging endless tender words.

"After that, our father closed down the business in Tokyo and withdrew to the old family home near Toyama, and I followed, and have lived there ever since; but more than thirty years have now passed since all this happened, and I thought I would show my brother the changed Tokyo after so long, and that is why I am traveling with him now like this."

"But the sad thing, you know, is this: the girl — much as she is alive — was made by human hands from the beginning, so she does not age; but my brother, even after becoming a pressed picture, was merely forced to change his form, and since he is fundamentally a human being with a lifespan, he ages just as we do.

"Look at him — my brother, who was a beautiful young man of twenty-five, now has white hair and hideous wrinkles covering his face.

"How sad it must be for him.

"The girl beside him is forever young and beautiful, while only he himself grows ugly and old.

"It is a terrible thing.

"My brother wears a sorrowful expression.

"For several years now he has always worn that anguished look.

"Thinking of that, I cannot help but feel the deepest pity for my brother."

The old man sat gazing with a darkened expression at the old man inside the pressed picture, and then after a moment, as though suddenly recollecting himself:

"Ah, what a long story I have told. But you understood, didn't you? You will not call me mad as the others do? Ah, that is what makes it worthwhile to have told. Now then, the two of them must be tired as well. And to have heard such talk about themselves in front of a stranger — they must be quite embarrassed. Well, let me give them their rest now."

And as he spoke, he gently wrapped the framed pressed picture in the black furoshiki.

At that instant — or was it merely my imagination? — the faces of the pressed-picture figures seemed to shift slightly, and for just a moment they appeared to smile a shy smile at me from the corner of their lips.

The old man fell entirely silent after that.

I too was silent.

The train went on, as ever, rumbling along through the darkness with its dull rhythm.

After about ten minutes like this, the sound of the wheels slowed, two or three lights glimmered outside the window, and the train stopped at some small mountain station I did not recognize.

A single station worker could be seen standing alone on the platform.

"Well then, I will go ahead — I am staying the night at a relative's here."

The old man clasped the wrapped frame, sprang lightly to his feet with those parting words, and stepped off the train; watching from the window, the slender old man's receding figure — how exactly it was the very image of the old man in the pressed picture — paused at the simple gate to hand his ticket to the station worker, and then dissolved into the darkness behind and was gone.