人間椅子 English

Every morning, after seeing her husband off to his office — it was always past ten o'clock by then — Yoshiko would at last have her time to herself, and it had become her custom to shut herself away in the study of the Western-style wing, which she shared with her husband.

There, she was now at work on a long piece of fiction to be published in the summer bumper issue of magazine K.

As a celebrated woman writer of great beauty, she had by this time become so well known that she quite overshadowed her husband, a secretary at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Every day, almost without exception, letters arrived for her from unknown admirers, one after another.

That morning too, when she sat down at the desk in her study, she had first to look through those letters from strangers before she could begin her work.

They were, as one might expect, all tiresome things with the same predictable phrases; yet out of a woman's gentle consideration, she had made it her practice to read through every letter addressed to her, whatever it might contain.

She dealt with the shorter ones first, reading through two sealed letters and a postcard, and when she had finished, there remained a single thick envelope that looked as though it contained a manuscript.

She had received no notice of anything being sent, but it was not at all uncommon for manuscripts to arrive without warning, just like this.

Such things were in most cases long and tedious affairs, yet she thought she would at least look at the title, so she slit the envelope open and drew out the sheaf of papers inside.

As she had expected, it proved to be manuscript paper, bound together.

But for some reason there was neither a title nor a name, and it began abruptly with the words "Madam"

— an opening address.

How strange — then perhaps it was a letter after all, she thought, and ran her eyes idly over two or three lines, when she felt something strangely unusual about it, a vague and unsettling premonition.

And her innate curiosity drove her onward, compelling her to read further and further.

Madam,

I beg your most gracious forgiveness, many times over, for the impertinence of this sudden letter from a man you have never known to exist.

What I am about to tell you may startle you greatly, but I am endeavoring here to confess before you a strange and wondrous sin I have committed.

For several months I have concealed myself entirely from the world of men, and have continued living what can only be described as a demonic existence.

Of course, not a single soul in all the wide world knows of my deeds.

If nothing had changed, I might never have returned to the world of human beings at all.

Yet lately a strange transformation came over my heart.

And I found I could no longer bear to keep to myself the burden of this wretched fate I have brought upon myself.

Merely saying so much will no doubt leave you with many questions, but I beg you to read this letter to the very end.

Then you will understand why I came to feel as I do,

and why I felt compelled to share this confession with you above all others — all of that will become perfectly clear.

Now, where shall I begin? The facts are so utterly beyond the human realm, so fantastically strange, that using such a human means as a letter feels somehow awkward, and I feel my pen grow sluggish.

But there is no use in hesitating.

Let me simply begin from the beginning and set down events in their proper order.

I was born with a face hideous beyond all description.

Please be certain to keep that in mind.

For if you were to grant this impertinent request and agree to meet me, you would see my face — already ugly enough in ordinary life, but now made utterly ghastly by the long months of unhealthy living — without any forewarning, and that would be, for me, unbearable.

What a wretched fate it is that I was born to endure.

For all that I bore such a hideous face, I harbored within my breast a passion as fierce and burning as any man alive, though known to no one.

Though I was in truth nothing more than a penniless craftsman with a face like a goblin, I forgot my actual station and yearned for sweet, extravagant "dreams"

far beyond my reach.

Had I been born into a wealthier home, I might have used money to indulge in various pleasures and thus distracted myself from the misery of my ugliness.

Or if I had been blessed with greater artistic talent, perhaps with beautiful poetry I might have been able to forget the bleakness of this world.

But I, unhappy as I was, could enjoy neither blessing, and had no choice but to live day to day as a wretched furniture craftsman's son, following in my father's trade.

My specialty was making chairs of various kinds.

My chairs were sure to please even the most exacting of clients, and so the firm took special notice of me and gave me only the finest commissions.

Such high-grade work would involve intricate carving on the backrest and armrests, delicate preferences regarding the cushioning, precise specifications for every dimension — all of it requiring a degree of skill and ingenuity that the layman can scarcely imagine; yet the greater the effort, the greater the joy when the piece was at last complete.

It may sound presumptuous of me to say so, but I believe that feeling is comparable to the delight an artist feels upon completing a fine work.

When a chair was finished, I would first sit down in it myself and try out how it felt to be seated.

And amid the dreary life of a craftsman, that moment alone would fill me with an indescribable sense of satisfaction.

I would wonder what manner of noble person, or what beautiful person, might come to sit here — the sort of house that could commission such a fine chair must surely have a room luxurious enough to match it.

On the walls there would surely hang oil paintings by celebrated artists; from the ceiling a great chandelier like a jewel would descend.

The floor would be spread with costly carpets.

And on the table before this chair, gorgeous Western flowers would bloom in a riot, releasing their sweet fragrance.

Lost in such reverie, I would feel for a brief instant as though I had become the master of that splendid room myself, and a pleasure beyond all description would fill my heart.

My fleeting fantasies continued to grow without restraint.

I — poor, ugly, nothing but a humble craftsman — in the world of fantasy became a noble prince, seated in the fine chair I had made with my own hands.

And at my side, the beautiful woman who always appeared in my dreams was smiling sweetly, leaning in to catch every word I said.

That was not all.

In my fantasies I would take that woman's hand and whisper to her the sweet words of love.

But each and every time, my hazy purple dream was shattered in an instant by the shrill chatter of a neighbor's wife, or the hysterical wailing of a sickly child somewhere nearby, and once again the ugly reality would bare its grey carcass before my eyes.

Returned to reality, I found there, instead of the noble prince of my dream, only my own pitiable and hideous self.

And the beautiful woman who had just been smiling upon me...

Where in the world could she be?

Even the grimy nursemaid playing about in the dust nearby would not so much as glance my way.

Only the chair I had made stood there alone, like a last remnant of the dream that had just vanished.

But even that chair would soon be carried off to some other world entirely, a world utterly different from ours, would it not?

And so, each time I completed a chair, I was seized by an inexpressible sense of emptiness.

That feeling, terrible and impossible to put into words, grew with the passing months and years until it became something I could no longer bear.

"If I am to go on living like a maggot, I had better be dead."

I thought those very words in all seriousness.

Tapping away at my chisel in the workshop, hammering nails, or kneading pungent lacquer, I would turn the same thought over and over in my mind with stubborn persistence.

"But wait — if I am resolved enough to die, if I can summon that much courage, surely there must be some other way. For instance..."

And so my thoughts gradually turned toward something more terrible.

Around that time, I had been commissioned to make a large leather-upholstered armchair, the like of which I had never attempted before.

This chair was to be delivered to a hotel in the same city of Y, run by a foreigner — the firm I worked for had originally planned to import one from abroad, but had lobbied hard to win the commission by arguing that Japan too had chair-makers whose work was second to none.

For that reason I threw myself into the making of it, forgetting food and sleep alike.

I poured my very soul into the work, utterly absorbed.

When at last the finished chair stood before me, I felt a satisfaction I had never known before.

It was, even to my own eyes, a magnificent piece that I could not help but gaze at in admiration.

As was my custom, I moved one of the set of four armchairs out to the sun-drenched floorboards and settled into it at my leisure.

What extraordinary comfort it was to sit in.

The plump, yielding resilience of the cushion — neither too firm nor too soft; the smooth touch of the tanned leather, left in its natural grey rather than dyed; the generous backrest that held one at the perfect incline, gently supporting the back; the armrests, swelling with a delicate curve on either side — all of these together maintained a wondrous harmony and seemed to embody, in tangible form, the very word "comfort"

itself.

I sank deeply into it, caressing the rounded armrests with both hands, lost in a kind of ecstasy.

Then, as was my habit, my unstoppable fantasies rose up in succession, dazzling as a rainbow of five colors.

Is that what they call a vision?

What my mind conjured appeared before my eyes with such startling clarity that I grew terrified, wondering if perhaps I had lost my senses.

As I sat there, a remarkable idea suddenly floated into my mind.

Perhaps that is what they mean by the devil's whisper.

It was as wild and fantastic as a dream, and deeply unsettling.

Yet that very unsettlingness held an irresistible allure, tempting and enticing me.

At first it was simply this: I did not want to part with this beautiful chair into which I had poured so much of my care; if it were possible, I wanted to follow the chair wherever it went, to remain with it always — nothing more than that simple wish.

But as I drifted along on the wings of reverie, that wish had, before I knew it, become fused with a certain terrible idea that had long been fermenting in my mind.

What a madman I am.

I resolved to carry out in actual fact that most bizarre of fantasies.

In great haste I completely dismantled the one armchair I judged to be the finest of the four.

Then I rebuilt it from scratch, rearranging it to suit my peculiar scheme.

It was a very large armchair, so the seat was upholstered in leather all the way down to the floor, and the backrest and armrests were also built exceptionally thick — inside, running throughout, there was a hollow large enough for a man to conceal himself in without being detected from outside.

Of course, it still contained a sturdy wooden frame and many springs, but I applied certain modifications to these, creating enough room that a man could slip in his knees beneath the seat, tuck his torso and head into the back, and crouch in the shape of the chair itself, hidden within.

Such work was entirely within my craft, and I finished it neatly and conveniently to my satisfaction.

For example, I fashioned a gap in the leather — invisible from the outside — to allow for breathing and for hearing what passed outside; I built a small shelf inside the backrest, just beside where the head would rest, to store necessities, and filled it with a canteen and army hardtack.

I provided a large rubber bag for a certain necessary purpose, and devised various other contrivances, so that as long as there was food, one could remain inside for two or three days without suffering any inconvenience.

In a manner of speaking, that chair had become a single room for one human being.

Stripping down to my undershirt, I opened the trapdoor rigged in the bottom and slipped entirely inside the chair.

It was a truly strange sensation.

Pitch dark, stifling, like crawling into a grave — a feeling beyond all description.

And come to think of it, it was indeed a grave.

The moment I climbed into the chair, I vanished from this human world entirely, as though I had put on a cloak of invisibility.

Before long, a messenger from the firm arrived with a large cart to collect the set of four armchairs.

My apprentice — the two of us were the only ones living there — went out to deal with the messenger, none the wiser.

As they were loading the cart, one of the workmen shouted, "This one's cursedly heavy,"

and I, inside the chair, gave an involuntary start — but since the armchair itself was in fact extremely heavy, nothing seemed amiss, and soon the jolting vibration of the cart communicated itself to my body with a strange and peculiar sensation.

I was terribly anxious, but in the end nothing went wrong, and by that same afternoon the armchair containing me had been set down firmly in a room at the hotel.

I learned later that it was not a private room but a lounge of sorts — a place where all manner of people came and went frequently: to wait for someone, to read the newspapers, to smoke.

You have no doubt already guessed: the first purpose of this strange scheme of mine was to slip out of the chair when no one was about and prowl through the hotel, committing theft.

Who in the world would imagine that a human being might be concealed inside a chair? The very idea is absurd.

I could move from room to room like a shadow, helping myself to whatever I wished.

And when people began raising a clamor, I would only need to slip back to my hiding place inside the chair, hold my breath, and watch their bumbling search at my leisure.

You must be familiar, Madam, with the creature found along the seashore called the hermit crab

— a kind of crab.

It looks rather like a large spider, and when no one is about, it struts and swaggers as though it owns the shore, but the instant it hears a human footstep it darts back inside its shell with astonishing speed.

Then it peeps out its hairy, creepy front legs just a little from the shell and keeps watch on the movements of the enemy.

I was exactly that hermit crab,

just so.

Instead of a shell I had a chair for a hiding place, and instead of a seashore I strutted and swaggered through a hotel.

Now, this outlandish scheme of mine succeeded splendidly precisely because it was so outlandish — going entirely beyond what anyone could have anticipated.

By the third day after arriving at the hotel, I had already completed a satisfying piece of work.

The terrifying yet thrilling feeling when I was about to steal; the indescribable delight when I succeeded; and the amusement of lying perfectly still, watching people rush about just under my nose, shouting that the thief had gone this way and that.

What strange and wonderful pleasure all of that gave me.

But I regret that I have no time to describe it in detail now.

For there, I discovered a pleasure ten or twenty times greater than any theft, a pleasure of the most extraordinary kind.

And confessing that — that is in truth the real purpose of this letter.

I must go back to the beginning, to when my chair was first placed in the hotel lounge.

When the chair arrived, the hotel's proprietors went around for a time examining how it sat, then all was still and not a sound could be heard.

Presumably the room was empty.

But just having arrived, it was absolutely beyond me to climb out of the chair — the very thought terrified me.

For what seemed a very long time — though perhaps it only felt that way — I concentrated every nerve in my ears so as not to miss the slightest sound, and lay perfectly still, listening to what was happening around me.

Then, after a while, heavy footsteps rang out — from the corridor, most likely.

As they drew within a few yards, the sound was muffled almost to inaudibility by the carpet on the floor, but soon I heard the rough breathing of a man, and before I could think, a large frame that could only be a Westerner's dropped onto my knees with a thud, and the chair bounced softly two or three times.

The man's solid, heavy haunches and my thighs pressed together so closely, with only a thin layer of tanned leather between them, that I could feel the warmth of his body.

His broad shoulders leaned against me at just the level of my chest, and his heavy hands lay over mine, separated only by the leather.

The man was smoking a cigar, it seemed.

A rich, masculine fragrance drifted in through the gaps in the leather.

Madam, imagine for a moment that you were in my position, and picture the scene.

What a fantastically strange spectacle it was.

Overcome with terror in the darkness inside the chair, I pressed myself as small as I could, cold sweat streaming from under my arms, all capacity for thought gone, utterly dazed.

Beginning with that man, throughout the day various people took turns sitting on my knees one after another.

And not one of them noticed that I was there — that what they firmly believed to be a soft cushion was in fact the living thigh of a human being, of me.

Pitch darkness; a leather-bound world where I could not move.

What a strangely captivating world it was.

In that world, human beings were felt as creatures utterly unlike the people one is accustomed to seeing with one's eyes.

They were nothing but voices, breath, footsteps, the rustle of clothing, and a number of rounded, resilient masses of flesh.

I could distinguish one person from another not by their faces but by the feel of their bodies.

Some were bloated with fat, giving a sensation like rotten fish.

Others, quite the opposite, were gaunt and dried-out, feeling like bare skeletons.

Beyond that, in the curvature of the spine, the spread of the shoulder blades, the length of the arms, the girth of the thighs, even the length of the coccyx — taking all these things together, no two people of similar build were exactly the same in every way.

Beyond facial features and fingerprints, human beings must certainly be capable of being completely distinguished by the overall feel of the body.

The same holds true for the opposite sex.

In ordinary circumstances one judges women chiefly by the beauty or plainness of their faces, but in this world inside the chair, such things were entirely beside the point.

What existed there was nothing but the naked body, the voice, and the scent.

Madam, please do not be offended by the frankness of my account. There, I developed a powerful attachment to the body of a woman — she was the first woman to sit in my chair —

an intense love.

By her voice I could tell she was a young foreign woman, still in the flower of youth.

The room happened to be empty at that moment; she entered, singing something softly to herself as though filled with some private joy, moving with a light, dancing step.

She came up to the armchair where I was hiding, and without further ado flung her full, pliant body down upon me.

For some reason she found this amusing, and burst out laughing, thrashing her arms and legs about, wriggling and bouncing like a fish caught in a net.

For nearly half an hour she sat on my knees, singing now and then, and in time with the song swaying and shifting her heavy body this way and that.

This was, for me, a truly staggering event, one I had never in the least anticipated.

I was a man who had always regarded women as something sacred — or rather, as something frightening — and had been too reserved even to look a woman in the face.

That same man was now in the same room, on the same chair — more than that, separated from this unknown foreign girl by only a single thin layer of tanned leather, close enough to feel the warmth of her skin.

And yet, with no sense of unease, she entrusted the whole weight of her body to me, and at her ease, with no one watching, made herself comfortable in whatever posture she pleased.

I could, inside the chair, go through the motions of embracing her.

I could press my lips to her full neck through the leather.

Beyond that, I was entirely free to do whatever I wished.

From the moment of this astonishing discovery, I forgot entirely the theft that had been my original purpose, and surrendered myself wholly to that strange world of sensation.

I began to think.

Was this not the world inside the chair — this world — my true dwelling place?

A man as ugly and faint-hearted as I had no ability to do anything in the bright, open world except go about feeling inferior, living in shame and misery.

Yet once I changed my world and took to enduring the cramped discomfort inside this chair, I could draw near to beautiful women who in the bright world would never have let me so much as speak to them, let alone approach — I could hear their voices and feel their touch.

Love from within a chair (!)

What an incomprehensible, intoxicating attraction it holds — no one who has not actually crept inside a chair could ever understand it.

It is a love of touch alone, and hearing, and the faintest hint of smell.

A love in a world of darkness.

Surely not of this world at all.

Is this not perhaps the carnal desire of the devil's kingdom?

When you think of it, what strange and terrible things must be taking place in the unseen corners of this world — it is truly beyond imagining.

My original plan, of course, had been to flee the hotel as soon as I had accomplished my theft, but having lost myself in that most bizarre of joys, I had no thought of fleeing — instead I made the inside of the chair my permanent dwelling, month after month, continuing that life.

On my nightly excursions I was careful upon careful not to make the slightest sound or let myself be seen, so naturally I was in no danger; yet it was in truth a remarkable thing, even to myself, that for several months I lived like that inside the chair and was never once discovered.

Nearly every hour of the day and night I spent in that cramped space inside the chair with my arms bent and my knees folded, until my entire body went numb and I could no longer stand fully upright, and in the end I was crawling on all fours — like a cripple — on my trips to the kitchen and to the bathroom.

What a madman I am.

Even suffering to such a degree, I could not bring myself to abandon that strange world of sensation.

There were guests who stayed a month or two, as though the hotel were their home; but being a hotel, of course, there was always a steady coming and going of guests.

And so my strange love affairs changed partners with the passage of time, and there was nothing I could do about it.

And the memory of each of those many strange lovers was etched into my heart not by their faces, as is ordinarily the case, but primarily by the contour of their bodies.

One had a body as keen and slender as a young foal; another had a body as bewitching as a serpent, supple and sinuous; another was round as a rubber ball, plump with fat and full of resilience; yet another had a body as solidly powerful as a Greek sculpture, harmoniously and fully developed.

Beyond these, every woman's body had its own peculiar character and its own peculiar charm.

And in the course of moving from woman to woman, I experienced, in addition, other strange encounters of a different kind.

One day, the ambassador of a powerful European nation — this I knew from overheard talk among the Japanese hotel boys — laid his impressive frame across my knees.

He was known to the world at large less as a statesman than as a poet, and for that reason I felt an exhilarating, almost trembling pride at having made contact with that great man's skin.

He sat on top of me for some ten minutes, conversing with two or three of his countrymen, then rose and left.

Naturally I could not understand a word of what was being said, but each time he gestured, his body — which seemed warmer to the touch than ordinary men's — would stir and shift, giving me a tickling sensation and a stimulus impossible to put into words.

At that moment I found myself idly imagining this:

What if!

What if I were to drive a sharp knife through the leather and plunge it straight into his heart — what consequences would it set in motion?

Surely it would deal him a mortal wound from which he could never recover.

His home country, not to mention the political world of Japan, would be thrown into tremendous upheaval as a result.

What passionate articles the newspapers would carry.

His death would have a profound impact on the diplomatic relations between Japan and his country, and from an artistic standpoint as well, his passing would be an immense loss to the world.

Yet all that great affair could be brought about with ease by a single movement of my hand.

Thinking of it, I could not help but feel a strange sense of power.

On another occasion, a famous dancer from a certain country came to Japan, and by chance she stayed at that hotel, and though it was only once, she sat down in my chair.

That time too I was moved much as I had been by the ambassador, but she gave me, beyond that, the sensation of an ideal physical beauty such as I had never experienced before.

Her beauty was so overwhelming that I had no room for base thoughts, and could only worship her with the same reverence one feels before a work of art.

I had still other curious, strange, and sometimes eerie experiences besides these, but to set them all out here in detail is not the purpose of this letter, and as this has grown quite long enough, let me hasten to the most essential point.

Now, some months after I had come to the hotel, a change occurred in my situation.

The foreign proprietor of the hotel was obliged for some reason to return to his home country, and the entire establishment, contents and all, was transferred to a Japanese company.

The Japanese company, wishing to move away from the former extravagant manner of operation and run the place more profitably as a hotel for a general clientele, changed its approach accordingly.

Furnishings that were no longer needed were consigned to a large furniture dealer to be auctioned off, and my chair was among the items in that auction catalogue.

When I learned of this, I was crestfallen at first.

I even considered taking that as my opportunity to return to the world of ordinary life and start afresh.

By that time the money I had stolen had accumulated to a considerable sum, so even if I went back out into the world, I would not have to live as miserably as before.

Yet when I thought it over, leaving the foreign hotel was on one hand a great disappointment, but on the other hand it represented a new kind of hope.

For despite all the various women I had loved over these several months, they had all been foreigners, and no matter how fine or appealing the body of any one of them, I could not help feeling a strange spiritual dissatisfaction.

Perhaps a Japanese person cannot experience true love unless it is with a fellow Japanese.

I had been coming increasingly to think so.

And just then my chair was put up for auction.

Perhaps this time it would be purchased by a Japanese person.

Perhaps it would be placed in a Japanese home.

That was my new hope.

I decided, in any case, to continue living inside the chair a little while longer.

I suffered greatly during the two or three days at the furniture dealer's shop, but fortunately, when the auction began, my chair found a buyer without delay.

It must have been because, even with some age to it, the chair was striking enough to attract anyone's eye.

The buyer was a government official who lived in a large city not far from Y.

When I was transported from the furniture dealer's shop to that man's house — a distance of several miles in an extremely jolting truck — I suffered agonies inside the chair; but even that was nothing compared to the joy of knowing that the buyer was, as I had hoped, Japanese.

The official who purchased the chair owned a rather fine house, and my chair was placed in the spacious study of the Western-style wing; what pleased me greatly was that the study was used less by the master of the house than by his young and beautiful wife.

From that time forward, for nearly a month, I was in constant company with the lady.

Except at mealtimes and when she retired to sleep, her supple body was always upon me.

This was because she had shut herself in the study and was deeply absorbed in writing a book.

How greatly I loved her — there is no need to enumerate it all tediously here.

She was the first Japanese person I had ever been in contact with, and moreover she possessed a fully beautiful body.

With her, I felt for the first time what I recognized as true love.

Compared to it, the many experiences at the hotel deserved no more to be called love at all.

The proof of this is that never before had I felt any such thing, yet with that lady alone I was not content with secret caresses — I racked my brains to find some way to make my presence known to her.

I wanted, if at all possible, for the lady to become conscious of me inside the chair.

And — self-serving as it sounds — I wanted her to love me.

But how could I give her a signal?

If I were to make it plainly known that a human being was hiding there, she would certainly, in her surprise, tell the master of the house and the servants.

That would not only ruin everything, but I would be branded with a dreadful crime and even made to suffer legal punishment.

So instead I endeavored at least to make the lady find my chair as comfortable as possible, and to make her grow fond of it.

As an artist, she was surely possessed of finer sensibilities than ordinary people.

If she could feel life in my chair — if she could develop an attachment to it not as a mere object but as something alive — even that alone was enough to satisfy me fully.

Whenever she settled upon me, I took care to receive her as softly and gently as I could.

When she grew tired from sitting on me, I would gently, imperceptibly shift my knees to ease the position of her body.

And when she began to doze off in a light sleep, I would rock my knees ever so slightly, so faintly as to be imperceptible, and serve as her cradle.

Whether this attentiveness was rewarded, or whether it was simply my imagination, it seems lately that the lady has developed something like a fondness for my chair.

She sinks into my chair with a sweet gentleness — as a nursing infant nestles into its mother's arms, or as a maiden yields to her lover's embrace.

And even the way she shifts her body on my knees seems full of an affectionate familiarity.

And so my passion burned more fiercely day by day.

Until at last — oh, Madam, at last I came to harbor a desire so presumptuous, so outrageous, that it was beyond all reason.

I came to think in all earnestness that if only I could see the face of my beloved just once, and exchange even a few words with her, I would be content to die then and there.

Madam, you must certainly have guessed long before this.

Please forgive me this great impertinence in telling you that the one I call my beloved

is, in truth, you.

Ever since your husband purchased my chair at that furniture shop in Y, I have been a wretched man pouring hopeless love upon you.

Madam, I beg this of you as the one wish of my life.

Would it be entirely impossible for you to meet me just once?

And would it be entirely impossible for you to offer even a single word of consolation to this miserable and ugly man?

I ask for nothing more than that.

I am far too ugly, far too degraded, to ask for anything more.

I beg you, please, please hear the earnest plea of a man condemned to the greatest misfortune.

Last night I crept out of your house in order to write this letter.

To make such a request of you face to face would be terribly dangerous, and besides, it is quite beyond what I am capable of doing.

And as you read this letter, I am pacing about with a pale face, haunting the surroundings of your home in anxious dread.

If you would be so gracious as to grant this most impertinent of requests, please drape your handkerchief over the pot of fringed pinks on the windowsill of the study; at that signal I will present myself at your front door as a perfectly ordinary caller.

And this strange letter closed with words of ardent supplication.

Yoshiko had turned quite pale by the time she reached the halfway point of the letter, seized by a terrible premonition.

Without thinking she rose to her feet and fled from the study where the eerie armchair stood, coming to the Japanese-style sitting room.

She thought of not reading the latter half and simply tearing the letter up, but uneasy as she was, she went on reading it at the small desk in the sitting room, in spite of herself.

Her premonition proved correct after all.

What a terrifying reality this was.

Inside that armchair she had been sitting in every day — could there really have been a man, a stranger, concealed within it?

"Oh, how dreadful."

She shuddered as though cold water had been poured down her back.

And for a long time she could not stop trembling strangely.

She was so stunned that her mind went blank, and she had absolutely no idea what she ought to do about any of it.

Examine the chair (?).

How on earth could she possibly do anything so revolting?

Even if the man was no longer there, his food supplies and other filthy things belonging to him must still be inside.

"Madam, a letter for you."

She spun around with a start, and there was a maidservant who had just brought a sealed letter that appeared to have just arrived.

Yoshiko reached out mechanically and took it, and was about to open it, when she glanced at the address on the envelope and was so violently startled that she nearly dropped it.

There, in handwriting identical in every stroke to that of the uncanny letter she had just been reading, was her name.

For a long time she wavered over whether to open it or not.

At last she tore it open and read through the contents, trembling.

The letter was a very brief one, but it contained a strange text that caused her to start all over again.

Please forgive me many times over for the impertinence of writing to you so suddenly.

I am a person who has long admired your work.

What I have sent under separate cover is a poor piece of fiction of my own.

If you would do me the honor of reading it and offering your criticism, I would be more grateful than I can say.

For a certain reason I posted the manuscript before writing this letter, so I presume you have already read it.

What did you think of it?

If my humble work has in any way made an impression upon you, there could be nothing more wonderful.

I deliberately omitted it from the manuscript, but the title I intend for it is "The Human Chair"

— that is what I should like to call it.

Well, please forgive me for imposing upon you, and allow this to serve as my request.

In haste.