Miscellany from Kugenuma

I was lying flat on my back on the second floor of the Azumaya in Kugenuma, perfectly still. Near my pillow my wife and my aunt sat facing each other, looking out past the garden toward the sea. Without opening my eyes, I said, "It’s going to rain any minute now." My wife and aunt paid no attention. My wife especially said, "In weather like this?" But in less than two minutes it had turned into an extraordinary downpour.

×

I was walking along a path through the pines where there was not a soul in sight. Ahead of me a white dog went along, wagging its tail. I looked at the dog’s testicles and felt a chill in their pale reddish color. When the dog reached a bend in the path, it suddenly looked back at me. Then it quite distinctly grinned.

×

I noticed a tree frog struggling in the sand by the roadside. At that moment I wondered what it meant to do if a motorcar came along. But it was a little path where no motorcar could possibly enter. Even so, I grew uneasy and with the tip of my cane flicked the frog into the grass thick along the roadside.

×

Among the pines, all bent the same way by the wind, I found a white Western-style house. Then I saw that the house itself was warped. I thought it must be my eyes. But no matter how many times I looked again, the house was still warped. I found this unbearably eerie.

×

I went to take a bath. It was about eleven at night. At the sink in the bathhouse a young man was washing his face without using a towel. He was a young man worn thin, as if his flesh had been plucked away. I suddenly felt disgusted and went back to my room. There, in my room, a bellyband had been taken off and left lying there. Startled, I undid the sash to look, and it was indeed my own bellyband. (All the above happened while I was staying at the Azumaya.)

×

While I am dreaming, I am my usual self. Last night, July 19, I was riding in a carriage with Mr. Shigesaku Sasaki, asking the driver in his straw hat about prices in Peking as we went along. But within about twenty minutes of waking fully, I somehow sink into melancholy. Only now and then, as though a bright landscape were visible through a tear in a gray tent, do I return to my ordinary state of mind. It seems that, somehow, things are steadily going wrong in my head.

×

While out walking again, I came upon a child dressed in a white bathing suit. The child had fastened little pieces of bamboo sheath to its ears like a rabbit’s. Even from fifteen or twenty yards away, the sharp tips of those bamboo sheaths struck me as strangely terrifying. That fear lingered for a while even after I had passed the child.

×

I was absentmindedly smoking, thinking of nothing but unpleasant things. In the next room in front of me, a maid we had hired after coming here seemed to be folding diapers with her back turned to me. All at once I said, "There’s a caterpillar on those diapers." Why I said such a thing, I myself had no idea. Then the maid said in an absurdly startled tone, "Oh, there really is one on them."

×

As I opened a tin of butter, I remembered a summer in Karuizawa. At that instant I felt a sharp prick at the back of my neck. Startled, I turned around. A horsefly flew off. Nor was it the kind of horsefly found around here. It had green eyes, exactly like the horseflies so common in Karuizawa.

×

Lately there is nothing so frightening to me as a cloudy, windy day. It feels as though the landscape around me, full of hostility, were pressing steadily in on me. And yet the dog and the thunder that used to frighten me before no longer affect me at all. The day before yesterday, July 18, I even walked on while two or three dogs barked furiously at me. But once the sound of the wind in the pines begins to rise, I either pull the quilt over my head even in broad daylight, or flee to the next room where my wife is.

×

While walking alone, I found a house with a sign out front for a dentist. But when, two or three days later, I passed the same place with my wife, no such house was to be seen. I said, "It was definitely there," and my wife said, "It definitely was not." Then I asked my wife’s mother about it. She too said, "There is no such house." But I still cannot help believing there really was one. The sign had the character for tooth and the character hon written on it, and underneath them the word doctor written in katakana, so it was too unusual for me to have mistaken it. (All the above happened after we rented the house.)

(July 20, Taisho 15 [1926]) [Posthumous manuscript]