I boarded a streetcar at Owarichō. For Asakusa.
"Transfer?" "NO."
So answering, I asked myself, "You going again?"
I got off at Kaminarimon and ate dinner at a sukiyaki restaurant. Afterwards I went to a movie, but it wasn't the least bit interesting. At a magazine shop I bought the Subaru tanka number.
Even as I was thinking to myself, "Don't go! Don't go!" my feet were heading toward Senzokumachi. I secretly slipped past the Hitachiya and came out in front of a new shop on the corner called the Kinkatei, and it was just at that moment that a white hand thrust itself from the lattice of the shop and caught me by my kinono sleeve. Before I realized it, I was on my way in.
God! That girl! Hanako. Age seventeen. At a glance I immediately thought, "It's Koyakko! Her face is just like Koyakko's, only she's a few years younger."
A moment or two later I left the place with a bedraggled old woman who sold cakes. She pulled me about here and there until we came out along a tall brick wall behind the Senzoku Primary School. On both sides of the narrow lane were back-street tenement houses with all their doors closed. There was no traffic, as if the street had been consigned to oblivion. The moon was shining.
I thought, "I've finally come to the very depths of this miserable world!"
"Please wait here," the old woman said. "I'll go open the door." For some reason she kept looking around. Evidently she was afraid of the police.
She quietly opened the door of the nearest room in that deadly silent tenement building and came back part way. I saw her beckoning me in the moonlight. She showed me into that forbidding building and went out saying, "I'll keep watch from over there."
Hanako had arrived before me, and no sooner had I gone in than she threw her arms around me.
It was a small dirty place. Even at a glance I could see that the walls were dirty, the straw mats rotting, and that the room had been built without a ceiling. A small lamp on the edge of an oblong wooden brazier dimly lit up the miserable conditions of the room. An old clock ticked away monotonously.
When I entered a narrow two-mat room partitioned off by sooty sliding paper doors, I found the bed already laid out. Even the slightest laugh rattled the doors.
I looked intently at the girl's face in the dim light and saw looming in the semi-darkness around white face exactly like Koyakko's. I was so taken with it that my eyes narrowed in ecstasy.
"She resembles her, she really does!" Repeatedly I whispered these words to myself.
"Look, my hairdo's all ruined, so don't keep staring at me like that!"the girl said.
The skin of that young girl was so soft it fascinated me. The clock in the next room kept on ticking.
"You tired already?" she asked.
I heard the old woman quietly entering, but nothing more came to me.
"What's she doing now?" "Crouching in the kitchen. I'm sure she is."
"She's pathetic, isn't she?"
"Don't mind her."
"But she's really pitiful!"
"Well, yes, she's pathetic. She's really all alone."
"You'll be like that too when you get old."
"Oh no, not me!"
After a while she said, "Stop staring at me!"
"You really do look alike."
"Like Who?"
"My kid sister."
"Oh, I'm so happy!" Hanako said, burying her face against my chest.
It was a strange night. Until then I had slept with many women. But I had always been irritated, as though I was being urged on by some unknown force. At such moments I had always jeered at myself. Never before this night had I experienced such feelings of fascination, such indescribable feelings, so much so that my eyes had narrowed in delight.
I no longer thought about anything. Enraptured, I could feel my body warming to its very core by the heat from the girl. Furthermore, the act of copulating, which had done nothing recently but leave me with unpleasant sensations, was performed twice this night in sheer pleasure. And even afterwards not a trace of disgust remained in me. We sat up in bed and smoked.
"Look," she whispered. "After you leave, turn to the left and wait for me at the corner of the second alley."
At the dead end of an alley in that world of misery, I stood by the side of a hydrant in moonlight pure as water. She finally came running along the darkened half of the street, her clogs sounding lightly. The two of us walked side by side. Occasionally she drew near me to
say, "Really, please do come again. You hear?"
It was midnight when I returned to the boardinghouse. I had, oddly enough, no feelings of regret. I felt only some "indefinable ecstasy."
There was no fire in my room, and my bed had not been laid out. I slept as I was.