Fuji from the window of an apartment in Tokyo is a painful sight. In winter it’s quite clear and distinct. That small white triangle poking up over the horizon: that’s Fuji. It’s nothing; it’s a Christmas candy. What’s more, it lists pathetically to the left, like a battleship slowly beginning to founder. It was during the winter three years ago that a certain person caught me off guard with a shocking confession. I was at my wits’ end. That night I sat alone in one room of my apartment, guzzling sake. I drank all night, without sleeping a wink. At dawn I went to relieve myself, and through the wire mesh screen covering the square window in the toilet I could see Fuji. Small, pure white, leaning slightly to the left: that’s one Fuji I’ll never forget. On the asphalt street below the window, a fishmonger sped by on his bicycle, muttering to himself (“You can sure see Fuji good this morning . . . Damn, it’s cold . . .”), and I stood in the dark little room, stroking the mesh screen and weeping with despair. That’s an experience the like of which I hope never to go through again.

In the early autumn of 1938, determined to rethink my life, I packed a single small valise and set out on a journey.

Kōshū. What distinguishes the mountains here is their gentle and strangely aimless rise and fall. A man named Kojima Usui once wrote, in The Landscape of Japan, that “to these mountains come many cross-grained, self-willed sorts to disport themselves like wizard monks.” As mountains go, these are, perhaps, freaks. I boarded a bus in Kōfu City and arrived, after a boneshaking, hour-long ride, at Misaka Pass.

Misaka Pass: one thousand three hundred meters above sea level. At the top of the pass is Tenka Chaya, a small teahouse, in a room on the second floor of which my mentor Ibuse Masuji had been holed up writing since early summer. I’d come with the knowledge that I’d find him here. Provided it wouldn’t be a hindrance to his work, I, too, intended to rent a room in the teahouse and do a bit of disporting amid those mountains.

Mr. Ibuse was hard at work. I received his permission and settled in, and spent each day from then on, like it or not, face to face with Fuji. This pass, once a strategic point on the road to Kamakura that connected Kōfu with the Tokaido Highway, offers a prospect of the northern slope that has been counted as one of the Three Great Views of Mount Fuji since ancient times. Far from being pleased with the view, however, I found myself holding it in contempt. It’s too perfect. You have Fuji right before you and, lying at its feet, the cold, white expanse of Lake Kawaguchi cradled by hushed, huddling mountains on either side. One look threw me into blushing confusion. It was a wall painting in a public bath. Scenery on a stage. So precisely made to order it was mortifying to behold.