The Youth of Things: Life and Death in the Age of Kajii Motojiro

On the Road

158 On the Road I discovered the road during the season when the deutzias were in bloom. When I worked out it was just as easy to get home from E station as from M station, and with hardly any difference in terms of distance, I was delighted. This wasn’t just because I enjoyed a change. To get the tram to my friend’s place from M required a major detour, whereas it was incomparably closer from E. On my way home one day, I got off the tram at E on a whim and set off in the general direction I was heading for. After a short walk, I had a vague sense that I’d come onto a road I was already familiar with. I realized that it led into the road I always walked along to get to M station. The timidity I’d been walking along with until then now struck me as completely ridiculous. I ended up going along that road two out of three times. M was a terminal, but so was E. If you got on at E, you changed at T. In order to get to T, it took two or three times longer from M than it did from E. The trams went back and forth between E and T on a single track. It was a quiet line. While waiting for the tram to depart, the conductor would play with the local kids, or get them to pull the tram pole around to face the other direction. When I suggested to the conductor that there probably weren’t many accidents, he told me there were more than you’d expect 159 considering how relatively few trams came this way. The track was for the exclusive use of trams, with level crossings and rails spread over sleepers, the same as for steam trains. From the tram windows, you could look into the houses that lined the track. The houses weren’t exactly run-down, but obviously they certainly weren’t splendid establishments that merited special attention. But there’s something about the interior of people’s homes that makes them irresistible . I had a habit of gazing out from the tram window, and one day I caught sight of a pair of deutzias along the tracks. At the time, I was constantly referring to the thumb-worn chart I’d used from junior high school days while I searched for deutzias blooming in the open fields and thickets near my home. I’d get right up close to the white flowers and compare them with my chart. The Hakone deutzia, the apricot deutzia: there were lots that looked similar, but I just never came across the genuine articles. One day, I finally did. And once I’d discovered them, I saw them all the time. As for blossom, they gave the impression of being rather ordinary. But I sensed something refined in those two varieties of deutzias I saw along the tracks. One Sunday, I was going into town with a friend who was visiting and we went up the slope as usual. “If we climb to the space right at the top of this hill, we can get a great view of Mount Fuji,” I told him. GoodviewsofFujilasteduntilthebeginningofspring.Inthemorning, you could see its outline covered in snow and glittering in the sun above Mount Tanzawa. In the evening when the sun sank far in the distance, both mountains stood out like identical silhouettes against the rosy sky. Our eyes have gazed so much on the shape of Mount Fuji that we describe it as “an upside-down fan,” or “an upturned mortar.” What would happen if we could envisage Fuji in terms of its actual mass and height, and experience it as something real with broad plains and specific altitude? These thoughts now in my mind were a reflection of the fierce passions I’d felt toward nature during the winter when I was drawn to looking at Fuji any number of times during the day. Those were my feelings then. (My symptoms had deteriorated considerably since early spring, and recently I’d been overwhelmed with morbid feelings of lethargy.) On the Road 160 Kajii Motojirō “That’s the racecourse there. My house is over this way.” Standing shoulder to shoulder with my friend, we faced a panorama of undulating hills, with red roofs poking their heads...