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

Landscapes of the Heart

175 Landscapes of the Heart 1 Takashi gazed at the slumbering street from the window of his room. Other windows showed no sign of life, and deep night’s stillness gathered halo-like around streetlamps. The whirring of golden insects was broken from time to time only by the sound of their collisions. This part of town was a world of its own where few people passed even in daytime, where fish guts and corpses of rats remained untouched for days. Houses on both sides were in some disrepair, apparently due to weathering by natural forces. Amid the crumbling roughly plastered walls of faded ochre, people seemed to live their listless lives like discarded rags. The window of Takashi’s room, open to the street, placed him like a dinner guest in the seat of honor. At times the sound of the wall clock pendulum found its way to him through gaps in the door. The wind passed darkly over distant trees, and a nearbyoleandershrubpresentlybegantostirinthedepthsofnight.Takashi simply gazed. The outline of houses rising faintly in the dark emerged and dissolved before his very eyes, but before these thoughts had time to settle in Takashi’s mind, he felt them pass. Crickets chirped. From somewhere near—or so it seemed—the faintly rotting smell of vegetation wafted up. 176 Kajii Motojirō “Your room smells of those French escargots,” a friend said when he came to visit Takashi. “You know, whatever room you live in immediately turns gloomy,” said another. A picnic kettle with a constant residue of tea dregs, an assortment of books with their jackets scattered all about, scraps of paper, and a space cleared among it all to spread out his bedding. In the midst of this Takashi slept through the day like a heron on its nest. When he awoke, he heard the school bell in the distance. And at night when others slept peacefully, he came to this window and gazed out. His thoughts, passing like shadowy figures in a deep mist, gradually took clearer shape. The scenes, dispersing and gathering before his very eyes, appeared for a moment entirely familiar, and then another moment they began to strike him as completely strange. These moments, too, passed. Takashi could no longer tell where his own thoughts ended and the town in deep night began. The oleander in the dark was his very gloom. The earthen wall was revealed in the subdued lamplight, its shadow blending into monochrome darkness. At that point, his ideas took on an even more substantial shape. Takashi felt that the landscapes in his heart were close enough to beckon. 2 Takashi remained alert at his window so far into the night because he couldn’t sleep at such an hour, because sleep afflicted him with too many dark thoughts. He had contracted a serious illness from a woman. A long time ago he experienced a dream that went like this. His legs had swollen up. On them were two rows of what looked like teeth marks from a bite. As the swelling gradually got worse, the marks deepened and spread further out. Some of them resembled a person’s navel: a protuberance of repulsive flesh from the inside peeping out. Other marks were long deep cuts like traces of worms that had eaten their way through old books. 177 It was a strange feeling; his legs swelling and turning blue even as he watched. There was no pain whatsoever. The swellings looked like red cactus flowers. His mother was there. “Ah! See what’s happened.” He addressed his mother with a note of censure. “Don’t you know what it is?” “I thought you must have left the marks with your nails.” He was sure his mother had applied pressure with her nails. But even as Takashi was speaking, the thought flashed through his mind that maybe the cause was that other thing. He became increasingly convinced that Mother could not possibly have anyknowledgeofit.Inhisdream,Takashiappealedtoher:“Mother,please!” At first his mother was unnerved, but she finally agreed to do her best to make him better. Quite suddenly the two rows of swellings had shifted to the space between his chest and stomach. While he watched, unsure of what she would do, his mother peeled back the skin of his chest (at some point it had slackened like withered breasts) and proceeded to insert one swelling into the other, as if...