Thoughts of Stone Ango Sakaguchi

Thoughts of Stone

Ango Sakaguchi

My father died in my eighteenth year (just in the autumn of the Tokyo earthquake), so there should have been considerable interactions with his children, but there were none. I am the youngest of thirteen siblings (including the eldest) and have only one younger sister, so I am completely different in age from my father. So when I see my friends speaking to their children like friends, since they are only twenty-five or thirty years older than them, it seems strange, as my father and I have no memories of that at all.

My father was a politician of the second or third grade, that is, what one might call a country politician; he was elected to the Diet about ten times and served as a local branch chief, and was not well known in the central government. However, such a person must have been extremely busy. He was rarely at home. Even so, my father was also a poet and disciple of Hoshō, and in his later years he spent thirty years writing a book called 'Hokuetsu Jiwa.' When he was at home, he would stay in his study and never show his face, and the only time I would see him was when he was wearing black. The maid would come to call me, saying that the master was calling for me; she knew what it was and he was bound to do something. I always ground ink with him. My father would not smile, only get irritated and angry if I spilled anything. I was just doing my job. There were so many maids, why should I grind the ink? My father was a stranger with no other relationship than having me grind the ink, and I never saw him anywhere else throughout the year.

Therefore, I know nothing about fatherly love. A fatherless child would rather think about a father's love, but I had a father, and I would be called about once a month to grind ink, and when he would see my frown and say something, I would get irritated and leave, so a father's love was something completely ridiculous and unrelated to me. Fortunately, in my primary schools days, there was no homely fairy tale literature like what boys and girls read today, and the only books I read were byTachikawa Bunko, which were books about ninjutsu masters and great heroes, so there was nothing to make me think about fatherly love from that aspect. I had separated my father from me, thinking that he was an entity that had nothing to do with me. And every time he would paint in ink, I thought he was a nuisance. I thought he was arrogant. And anyway, I just thought that because he was my father, that was all I could do.

With thirteen children, it must have been quite tiring, but my father's indifference towards his children was a matter of disposition, not a matter of numbers. I think he thought that his children should grow up and be what they wanted, however they wanted. In the countryside, however, people are very particular about "family," so they are particular about the eldest son, who is the heir to the family. My father also seems to have been particularly devoted to my eldest brother, but I do not know much about the relationship between him and his other son, as he was different in age from me and was away from home in Tokyo.

There is a poem he wrote in his old age in which he thinks of my elder brother and apologises for his unfilial piety. I want to scoff and say that my father never had such feelings, and that this is just a common world of poetry, but when I read my father's biographies, various authors have said that he was extremely devoted only to his eldest son. He always asked his eldest son to look after him, according to people like Ichishima Shunjosho, who was my father's best friend, and Machida Chuji, a political figure. He also talked a lot about his eldest son, and even talked proudly about how his eldest son encouraged him to look at Western art and how he became interested in mountain climbing. This is still a world that has nothing to do with me, and my father thought of his older brother as "family," but to me there was no relationship between father and son. To me, having a father is better than having a child without a father, and I only knew my father as an unpleasant old man grinding ink.

It seems that my family used to be very wealthy. During the Tokugawa period, they had silver mines and copper mines in addition to rice paddies, and it was said that even if the trees along the Agano River dried up, the gold there would not dry up. However, my father spent it all, and by the time I was old enough to understand, we were totally destitute. We must have been living on borrowed money. But the house was spacious. There were many servants. There were many people who came and went, but the poverty was so great that it must have been very difficult for my mother. That is why my mother was terribly hysterical. Her anger was concentrated on me.

I was always an out-of-touch, cynical child by nature. I was a child with no childish charm whatsoever, I was precocious, an ogre, and all I did was give out things. When I was born, I was almost killed by my mother, who was fed up with the number of children in the world, and she had a cold distance from me from the time I was born. In addition, as I grew up, I was an out-of-touch, neurotic child, which was not the case with other children in the world, so it was understandable that she was fed up with me. I was reading newspapers before I even started primary school.

I read newspapers not because I enjoyed reading them like a child, but because I found what was written in them interesting, and I read carefully, especially storytelling. (At that time, in addition to novels, there were always storybooks. I didn't read novels. They weren't interesting.) I read some articles. In those days, the articles on sumo always had pictures of the 48 techniques, and I will never forget how fascinating they were. I never won first place in my primary school days. The first place was always taken by a kid from a temple called Yamada, the second place by me or Yokoyama (who later became a left-wing critic under the pen name Hisao Ikeda), and I remember that I was usually the third place, losing even to Yokoyama. I never did any preparation, revision, or homework, and when I came home from school I would throw my kabado in the doorway and go off to play until night. I was a bratty kid who forcibly summoned children who were scolded for not studying, and if they didn't respond to these summonses, I would change their behaviour. I would get into fights with other children in the neighbourhood. I always got harassed because the way I did things was so unbelievable and unconventional for kids.

My kimono was torn in a month, and I always wore torn clothes like a beggar's child. Then, when I came home at night, my mother would close the gate and put a piece of wood on the door and would not let me in. My relationship with my mother was one of hatred.

Poverty and I were not the only things that afflicted my mother, as she had a chronic illness at the time, bladder stones, which she sometimes moaned about night and day. Moreover, my mother was a second wife, and she had three daughters who were not much older than she was (so the children of these three people, who were my sisters, or nieces, were actually older than me), and the older two of these three conspired to poison my mother with morphine. Since it was not unreasonable for my mother to be semi-crazy, this would all hit me. I now understand why and it is obvious, but at the time I did not, so I hated my mother to the extreme. I hated the other siblings that my mother loved, and I wondered why she hated only me. When I was about eight years old, I was so angry that I raised a knife and chased my elder brother (who was three years older than me) around. I had no regard for my brother. I was confident that I was superior to him in both strength and reading ability, and I never paid him the respect that he deserved. I was not particularly lovable, just a hateful, arrogant, and cynical person. Although my environment played a part, I think a large part of it was in my nature. Despite that, I was a coward and had regrets, and would cover up any wrongdoings that others did know about, and would tell tales on others, and even while I myself did even worse things, I would calmly set people up and act like I was the only good kid, and was generally successful. This was because I was so consistent that it did not seem like the doing of a child, I had proper precautions in place in case I was found out, and most people trusted me, so I wasn't loved by anyone else.

*

I realised that much of my temperament was inborn rather than environmental, that part of it was from my mother, but I felt that the rest came from my father. I didn't know my father. So I read biographies, in order to find myself in him. And I found many unpleasant shadows of myself. What was extolled as my father's strengths and virtues were for me his weaknesses, which I understood as bitterly as a grudge.

My father was faithful. He kept his word and never lied. My father put his wealth in the service of others and did not seek his own gain; my father gave way to others and put off his own prosperity. That is all that my father did. And just as the opposite is true for me, I believe that the opposite was also true for my father. My father was a man who could do no wrong. He was a man who could not do evil, because he wanted to be exalted by others. And I believe that he was the kind of person who would sacrifice himself for that. That is what I thought based on my own experience.

First of all, I am deeply moved by the smallness of my father's character, and it makes me want to cry. My father appeared to be a big-hearted man, but in reality he was a tiresomely obedient and honest person, and yet in reality he was a small-time scoundrel.

The reason why I have this old man, who is almost completely irrelevant to me, burned into my heart on a small scale is that I was in Tokyo at the time of the earthquake, and my father was already on his deathbed, unable to move. I was reading fortunes by myself when the earthquake struck, and the walls shook and fell on the carda. I stood up and ran, and the door fell, along with the paper and shoji screens. I dodged them and went down to the garden, and as I tried to avoid them, tiles fell. I remembered my father and went into the bedroom, where the lintel of the tokonoma alcove had fallen, and I remember sadly holding up the nageshi at my father's bedside with both hands.

I think it was the day after that. I was ordered by my father to visit the victims of the fire. I visited Takaaki Kato and Reijiro Wakatsuki. At Reijiro Wakatsuki's residence, I only left my business card, but at Takaaki Kato's residence, I was invited to meet him, and he asked me, a junior high school student, about my father's condition in extremely polite terms. I no longer remember the conversation. I have forgotten everything, but I met this large man, big-headed like a Buddhist monk, with a long, round, large face, like a sea monster, but even though he was a very exaggerated and impressive man, he seemed to understand my immaturity and childishness. My father was stubborn, impressive, and moody, and although they had similar hair styles, my father was more childish in some ways. However, my father's true heart did not have even a trace of the immaturity that I share. My father was an adult. He had no dreams. There was something strangely childish about Takaaki Kato that immediately resonated with me. I immediately felt relieved. And I keenly felt how small my father was. I was eighteen at the time.

My father loved to hang a plaque in the drawing room that read "Qi Fu Ba," but it was written by a Chinese, and the Chinese character for "seven" was not read as "seven" but as "long," so anyone could read it as "long unbearable." My father used to find it amusing because the guests would read it that way and linger for a long time, but now I have only one of my father's belongings and it hangs in the living room. My father also had the phrase "You may also exchange your descendants for sakè" engraved on his library seal. I think this was probably his true feelings, not just my father's, but I also have feelings that are quite similar to his. For me too, these are not the kind of things people do on the street, but they are by no means deep, and depending on how you look at it, they are a kind of temperamental flow of a very empty literary taste, so I always feel tired, busy, and sad.

In addition to being a member of the Diet, my father was also president of a newspaper and chairman of a stock exchange, and was in a position where he could have made as much money as he wanted if he followed his own personal principles, but he never pursued personal love. When he was nominated for the position of vice minister for political affairs, he promoted his junior colleagues but not himself. That was the way he handled things, and I do not think his feelings were pure. I think he lacked true honesty. I know this because I am his child and I am the recipient of his temperament. My father was a big drinker and would get drunk, but he never seduce women in public, so he was much better than me, and I am sloppy in that respect and completely ashamed of myself, but I do not like my father, who was said to have been magnanimous and carefree when drinking.

In my father's biography, there is one thing I admired about his words, which is that he, as the chairman of the board of directors of the exchange, told people from his position that if they stood on the verge of settling a dispute, they should settle it at once even if it took all night. Otherwise, both sides would waver overnight, and things would go back to the way they were before. I once mediated between Shiro Ozaki and Shobo Takemura to reconcile their dispute, but because I neglected to sign the agreement on the spot, a call came from Shiro Ozaki the next day and things went back to the way they were, and I keenly felt that my father's words were true. And I found myself following in my father's footsteps again, and it was very unpleasant.

In his biography of my father, there is a story about him told by Kaido Ozaki, who was 19 years old and the lead writer of the Niigata Shimbun when my father was a director of the Niigata Exchange. He said that my father was the only person in Niigata that Ozaki knew who didn't get drunk and flirt with women, but Nodo added, "But I don't know what the other side of the story is." Nodo is a man who cannot help adding this kind of annotated viewpoint to everything, and in this respect he is closer to a man of letters than to a politician. His views on everything are so human, so humanistic, and he has a temperament that makes him unable to help but add his own commentary. My father lacked that. I, however, have it in abundance, and in that respect I have the full Nodo's sarcasm. I have too much of the Nodo-like odour, to the point that I am sick of it myself. And when I think of my father, to whom Noda refers, "But I don't know the other side of the story," it seems as if it is specifically interpreted based on my own unpleasant temperament, and whenever I think of my father, I picture Nodo's words as applying them to me and feel unpleasant. Therefore, I have the same dislike for Nodo as I have for my own body odour. My father had neither the bitterness nor the sweetness of Nodo. If Nodo was a second-rate person, my father was less than third-rate.

*

What I feared most about my father's temperament was the thorough coldness he displayed towards me. My mother and I were connected by familiarity, but there was nothing at all to connect me with my father. This was because my father was cold, and because he had shunned me, and I had taken it for granted that I had been shunned, and there was no connection at all.

I realise sometimes my own surprising coldness. There are times when I push everything away. What is behind this is that at such times, in fact, I am simply and single-mindedly afraid of the world. When I push away individual things and people, I am conscious of the world as a whole, and I even push away myself and try to sell myself to the world's expectations. I think my father was like that. When I was not seeking personal gain or success, I think that I pushed myself away and actually sold myself to the world's agendas. My father was the boss of a rural politician, and he was full of himself.

In my coldness, besides the coldness of my father, there was coldness from my mother. My mother's side was a large landowner named Yoshida, and this family had a Jewish aquiline nose, which I inherited from them, and my mother's brother had blue eyes. My mother's brother had a completely Jewish face, and looked nothing like the Japanese people. This old man with the aquiline nose and blue eyes would rub up against me when I was about ten years old, glaring at me and saying, "You know, you could be a hell of a great man, but you could also be a hell of a bad man, a hell of a bad man." I remember that luridness like a spell.

My mother was nearly be killed by her stepdaughter, and because of her chronic illness she was sometimes afraid of death. When I was a child she was a woman who fought against death, became hysterical, and was completely afraid of death, but as she grew older and reconciled with me, she became a brave old woman who calmly waited for death. I don't have even a trace of the bravery that pushed death away from me, and all I feel is a timidness that fears death, but I am aware of the abnormal coldness that has been passed down from my mother to me.

My mother was an inconsistent woman, very stingy and yet very generous; she spared a penny and yet gave away things to others; she spared a piece of china, but then suddenly threw it all away to make way for new china. She was neither fickle nor moody. She was a woman who was stingy when she was generous and bold when she discarded things, and she was able to maintain her composure without relating the two. Even when she generously gave something to someone, she did not have any affection for that person, so it was completely separate, and even if she was counting on a second time, there was no contact, so she would show her extremely stingy side and it would annoy her. She didn't think about other people at all. She accepted everything as if it was natural. She was a cold person at heart because she had decided deep down that it didn't matter.

We had many students in our family. Now they are presidents, executives, mayors, and generals, but although they can understand my father's personality, they still think my mother's personality is like a monster, and incomprehensible. The truth is, there was not the slightest bit of sweetness in her prayers. And yet, she did not know how to doubt. She accepted everything as it was.

Since she was such a generous woman, I rarely became obsessed with her and hated her, but she only hated my two stepdaughters and me, so it was only natural that I, a child, would have a very hard time being hated by such a woman, and since I was in primary school, I had often wondered whether to run away from home or commit suicide. It was only natural that I was cynical on top of being cynical by nature, and from primary school onwards I learned to steal because I never received a penny and nothing was bought for me. When I went to secondary school, I didn't get a penny of pocket money. I took things and sold them, bought everything with my bank book and gave it to people all the time. I even bought things I didn't want. Not for me to use, but to give to others. I gave things to people not because I wanted people to love me, but to make my mother's anger to smolder, out of rebellion against her. Therefore, the truth in my heart always seemed to be burning.

I had been nearsighted since primary school, but when I entered secondary school, I could not see the black letters without glasses, even in the front row. My mother never bought me glasses. I couldn't understand English and maths because I was blind, and I started missing school because I was afraid that people would find out the truth about my blindness. I finally got a pair of spectacles and I was so excited that I was going to study hard this time, but I was careless again and somehow bought a pair of dark glasses. I never meant to buy dark glasses, so I still don't know what happened. Perhaps the optician made a mistake. I went to school wearing them, not knowing they were dark glasses. My friend snatched them out of my hands because he was curious about them, and on the day I bought them, my glasses were broken.

I knew that I would never be able to buy them again, and fortunately, because I had dark glasses, my friends thought that I had worn them for show, and that I was not blind to begin with. I had no choice but to take a full-fledged break from school and spend every day lying in the pine forests by the sea. And I flunked out. But I didn't have to flunk out of school. But I couldn't help but grieve and torment and rebel against my mother, so I went to the trouble of writing a blank answer sheet. The teacher handed out the papers. When the teacher finished handing out the papers, I would put out a blank answer sheet with a particularly high-stepping, clownish smile. Everyone laughed. I walked out with a heroic air, but I was surprised that my heart did not break with sadness.

Because I had failed, my family hired me a private tutor. His name was Gen Konno, and he was a brilliant student at the medical school, from Morioka. However, Mr Konno didn't know that I wasn't going to school because I didn't have glasses and couldn't see the writing on the blackboard, and being stubborn and vain, I couldn't bring myself to admit it, so I continued to skip school every day, sleeping in the pine forest by the sea on sunny days, and on the second floor of the bakery next to the school on rainy days. Then I was kicked out of school. I entered junior high school in Tokyo, but I was glowing with hope, with the joy of leaving my mother and, perhaps, of being able to buy spectacles and study in Tokyo. However, after parting with my mother, I realised that I loved her more than anyone else in the world.

*

I was a total idiot in Niigata Junior High School. I was a very rude kid. The head teacher was Takitani's art teacher, who I've forgotten what he was, but he was a model, and he told me to submit an absence notice. I forged one and threw it at the teacher, saying "Hiyo." The teacher was a weak-willed person, so he just read it with a resentful and angry look, but I still feel that it's unforgivable. I threw a bucket at the teacher and ran out the window, and even though I was absent from school every day, after school I would go to Shibetsu for judo. I was found by the teacher and ran away. Then I formed a group called Rokka-kai with the kids from the brothel, Kitamura, and Otani, and we skipped school and practiced karuta on the second floor of a karuta-ya. By karuta I mean Ogura Hyakunin Isshu, the game played during the New Year holidays, and I practised it every day for a year and a half, so it's no use talking about it. Otani, the owner of a brothel, was a second-year medical student who would fill a medicine bottle with sake and drink it at school. He once sneaked into the English teacher's office during an exam and stole the exam questions. He once stole a family sword, sold it, and drank sakè with the money, and once, in a restaurant, he caused a ruckus. It seems that Otani was my teacher in these matters, and there was another master named Watanabe. This was the behaviour of an eighth-grader, and although I was devastated, my soul was just as sad as it is today. This sadness is exactly the same as it is now. It will probably never change, and it will never grow, but the sadness of fear and longing, the sadness of wanting to run away and rise, the fifteen-year-old me and the forty-year-old me will be the same.

This sadness is not inherited from blood, but is a dispositional thing that is externally sensitised and assimilated by contact, and judging from my eldest brother's character today, my father was certainly a man who did not have this sadness. Even now I feel that my father is a stranger, and therefore I harbour no hostility or resentment towards him. However, in a sense separate from hostility, just as I have hated my father since I was a child, I have hated his businesslike, adult-like attitude that seemed to be preoccupied with his grief, and I have fundamentally hated such adult-like attitudes in general.

When I judge a person today at a glance and decide whether I like them or not, and whether I can trust them or not, I only look at the source of this sadness. This is a very dangerous method, and it often leads to misjudging people. However, there are pros and cons in every person, and there is no such thing as perfection, so where can we place standards? I simply realised that my standard is one of the resentments that have been passed down from my father to the present day, and I thought about the narrowness of the world in which humans live, and I felt the need for humans to precisely recall and reconsider the small world they have lived in since they were born. Today, I feel an instinctive revolt against politicians, business types, and those who do not have the noise of the grief of human children, and I do not want to give an inch, but I do not know how to be careless and open to the children of people possessed by the shadows of grief, and I do not know how to have a hedge at their mercy.

My father had lost his young heart. But that is not the state of a healthy person's mind, so in his later years he came into contact with his eldest son and discovered the child's world and was amazed by its freshness. He began to look at foreign films, mountaineering, progressive social movements and the like with a sparkle of curiosity, but it was just like the eyes of a stranger, a traveller in a foreign land, who had lost the real honesty to assimilate and become flesh and blood. There was no essential freshness in the world of the "old man."

I often think about an old man with whom I had no emotional connection, that this man had even weaker emotional connection with me than the old man next door, my uncle, or my teacher at school, and that I had to call him father. Thinking about the old man who thought of me as nothing more than a child grinding ink, and who had no dreams for me after his death, I sometimes find myself thinking of 'Dream of the Red Chamber,' in which a stone takes on human form through its fervent wish, as if it were my own embodiment. I sometimes think to myself that I am like a stone. And the stone thinks.

*

Ever since I was a child, I have been frightened of the concept of "house." Old houses in snowy regions are particularly gloomy in architecture, with every room dimly lit, with unclear boundaries between rooms, and are as gloomy and vast as a maze. There seems to be a sense of coldness, emptiness, despair for the future, and a curse floating about. The people who live there are insects that have lived there for generations, and even after death, they turn into spirits and are formalised as if they are still in the house, and gradually grow into the shape of the insects that live there.

The house in which I was born and raised was a temporary residence in Niigata City, so it was not as spacious and gloomy as the old houses in the countryside, but it was still a building that used to be a monk's school, and at first glance it looked like a temple, surrounded by a dense forest of pine trees as large as two trees, with a garden that was always out of the sun, submerged in the silence of the pine winds and nests of ravens and owls.

I hated my mother's house and would stay out all night after school, but when it rained, I had no choice but to go into the maid's room. The maid's room was in the attic, and because it was the roof of a temple building, it was larger and gloomier than any other room. There is also a place where one of the stiles has been cut off by about one ken, which is due to the fate of a student who hung himself when he was a monk's school student, and then, fearing bad luck, they only cut off that part. However, the cut was also completely colourless, and any distinctions in the age of the cut were already lost in the depths of time. This attic was like a labyrinth, winding deep into the darkness, where I hid in the shadows and scolded myself for reading a story book. In snow country, there is no sound at all when the snow is falling. Those who don't know seem to think of the intensity of the blizzard, but the emptiness of a night when all sound has completely stopped and the falling snow has fallen to the bottom of a sound vacuum is more heartbreaking than the howling and screaming of the blizzard. Ah, it's deep snow again, I think. And then, as my mind thinks of this, I can't help but think of the darkness, the transience, and the futility of the future. Even in my child's mind, it was like that. I was afraid of "home" itself.

My house in Tokyo was like a boarding house for my many sisters' daughters, that is, my nieces, when they grew up and started going to school in Tokyo. These girls, as they all said, felt that this small room in Tokyo was like their own and they loved it. In a country house, your room is connected to all the other rooms, so you can't have the feeling that it's your own room. And in that whole big room, there was a hint of something brooding. It was the history of the house, the fate of those born in the house, the sighs, the narrow contemplation of the house that always seem to block the emanation of some freedom, and the gloom that seemed to indicate the limits of emotion. As a boy, I had to fear and curse the house because of my mother's hatred.

After I had to leave junior high school to live in a pine forest on the sea, looking at the sky, my home was the sky, the sea, the sand, and the pine forest. It was the wind, the sound of the wind.

Ever since kindergarten, I had been haunted by the sadness of wandering off to an unknown town, but when I was absent from school, I always felt empty and sad as I sat under the pine trees in the shade of the thorn bushes and gazed at the sky.

I still love the sea more than anything else today. I love the monotonous sandy beach. When I lie on the beach and look at the sea and the sky, I feel a sense of fulfillment in my heart, even if I just lie there all day. This is the feeling that was planted in my heart as a boy, and it is the feeling of my hometown. I was unaware of it, however. I thought that all human beings love the sea, the sky, the desert, the plateau, the emptiness without choice. I was not comforted by landscapes of mountains and rivers, where there are mountains and tears. One day, Takeo Kitahara asked me if there was a hot spring with a beautiful view, so I told him about Shin-Kazawa Onsen. This place is located in the Asama Plateau, and is just a vast, endless grassland, with not even a shadow of a tree. It was my favourite place. However, Kitahara went there and came back and said that he had never been to a place with such a bad view. I was surprised to find that Kitahara really disliked the monotony of the scenery.

I was surprised to realise for the first time that there is no universality in the landscapes I like. He likes the scenery of Hakone, for example, but then I realised that ninety-nine per cent of human beings prefer the varied landscapes of mountains and water to the landscapes I prefer. And I began to understand the reason why I feel contented even when lying down and looking at the sea or the sky, and the memories of my childhood. The sadness and sorrow in my heart have not changed since I was a boy.

I felt fear and hatred towards "home," but felt home and love in the sea, sky, and wind. However, at the same time, they were both the front and back of the same thing, and I felt the most home and love for the mother whom I hated and feared, and I called out to my mother of home in the sea, sky, and wind. I was always calling out to her yearningly. And so, in the house I feared, in the floating presence of that gloomy mass, I also entrusted and hid the passion of my unquenchable destiny. I, too, was an insect of the house, always escaping from it.

About one block away from my house was a villa called Yoshida, which was the villa of my mother's family. There lived a man who was a cousin of mine, and the head housemaid's son was a moron. I think he was about five years older than me. He became a moron when he was in the fourth grade of primary school, but at that time he was about fourth grade in Go, and if he had not become a moron, he might have become an expert Go player. After he became a moron, his strength weakened year by year, and he went from being ranked by his cousin to being ranked by a certain number of points to being ranked by his partner.

Behind this villa was a prison, and if he lost at Go, my cousin threatened him by saying that he would be put in prison or in the storehouse. The idiot still had the confidence of having played Go with him years ago, so he began playing with a laugh (he really did laugh. He was so stubborn and arrogant that it was shocking), but contrary to his expectations, the moron always lost. He said, "I wonder," and when the Go stone was about to die, he began to think seriously, and not understanding why he was losing, he began to panic seriously. Because he was a moron, he had no illusions or leeway, so you can imagine the joy of winning. However, the cousin was not satisfied with that, so he really put him in the storehouse and locked him overnight, or pushed him out the back gate into the prison's fields and closed the gate. The moron spent the night crying and apologising. But he never learnt his lesson. He would then start to laugh at my cousin the next day, and after half apologising, he would mutter that he really couldn't have lost, and then tilt his head back in thought.

The pain of losing every night and being thrown into the storehouse made him finally run away from home. He lived like a beggar, scavenging in the city's rubbish dumps and living in the open, and when he just couldn't catch on, he was sent to a mental hospital by the police after about a year of shivering in the streets. By that time, his body was already weak from his long wandering, and he died in hospital at the end of winter.

It was still late at night, and the family had just finished a fireside meal at the villa, when suddenly there was a gust of wind that first blew down the entrance door that was always closed to him, then the gust went through the earthen floor and knocked down the fireside door, then the door leading from the kitchen to the back, then the three-mat door where the moron always stayed, and then it stopped. It all happened in an instant, and only a shrill sound remained. It was the physical strength of a human being pushing with all his might to create a beast, only to be hidden by the wind. Then came a phone call from the hospital, informing them that the moron had just taken his last breath.

I had seen him running and hiding in his own kind's rubbish bin. The sadness of the moron was my own sadness. There wasn't a day that went by that I didn't wish to leave home and escape into the blue, if only I had the confidence to scavenge through rubbish dumps, lie down in the fields, and cower under the verge and live. I was a junior high school student then, and every day I missed school, hiding in the pine forest by the sea on sunny days and upstairs in the bakery on rainy days, but it was a wonder that my heart was not filled with sorrow, and that all four strokes were painted over with sin, fear, and darkness. To the blue sky! To the heaven and earth where I am alone! I thought the sadness of the moron was my own image. I was close to this moron. On rainy days, I would often visit the idiot at his villa and have him show me the forest.

The moron, who had scavenged in the rubbish tannery, ran away and hid like a dog and would not return home, became a spirit at the moment of death and returned home violently. It was as wild a return home as the god of thunder, yet he never perverted it. He did not even avenge my cousin's capriciousness by screwing up his nose and kicking him in the side as he ran. He simply knocked down the door violently, came back in, and, pushing past the people at the other end, burst into his three-tatami room. And there his demonic soul returned to eternal nothingness.

This fact was burned into my heart. And so did my feelings towards my mother. There were times when I would take a day off school and lie down in the pine forest, my heart bursting with grief and dying, and there were times when my soul would violently kick down the door and return home, but I too would never even look up at my mother's nose. Deep in the sky, beyond the clouds, my mother, invisible to me, was always calling to me. I was calling to my mother back home.

And I am still living. And I am still afraid of my house. I wonder when I will have to knock down this door and die. A stone thinks.