Having claimed my mail one day, I was riding the bus back to Misaka Pass, sitting next to a woman of about sixty who wore a dark brown coat over her kimono, whose face was pale and nicely featured, and who looked a lot like my mother, when the girl conductor suddenly said, as if it had just occurred to her, “Ladies and gentlemen, you can certainly see Fuji clearly today, can’t you?”—words that could be construed as neither information nor spontaneous exclamation. All the passengers—among them young salaried workers with rucksacks, and silk-clad geisha types with hair piled high in the traditional style and handkerchiefs pressed fastidiously to their lips—simultaneously twisted in their seats and craned their necks to gaze out the windows at that commonplace triangle of a mountain as if seeing it for the first time and to ooh and ah like idiots, briefly filling the bus with a buzzing commotion. Unlike all the other passengers, however, the elderly person next to me, looking as though she harbored some deep anguish in her heart, didn’t so much as glance at Fuji, but stared out the opposite window at the cliff that bordered the road. Observing this, I felt a sense of almost benumbing pleasure and a desire to show her that I, too, in my refined, nihilistic way, had no interest in ogling some vulgar mountain like Fuji, and that, though she wasn’t asking me to, I sympathized with her and well understood her suffering and misery. As if hoping to receive the old woman’s motherly affection and approval, I quietly sidled closer and sat gazing vacantly out at the cliff with her.

Perhaps she felt somehow at ease with me. “Ah! Evening primroses,” she said absently, pointing a slender finger at a spot beside the road. The bus passed quickly on, but the petals of the single golden evening primrose I’d glimpsed remained vivid in my mind.

Facing up admirably to all 3,778 meters of Mount Fuji, not wavering in the least, erect and heroic—I feel almost tempted to say Herculean—that evening primrose was good. Fuji goes well with evening primroses.

Mid-October came and went, and I was still making very little progress with my work. I missed people. Sunset brought scarlet-rimmed clouds with undersides like the bellies of geese, and I stood alone in the corridor on the second floor smoking cigarettes, intentionally not looking at Fuji, my eyes fixed instead on the autumn leaves of the mountain forests, crimson as dripping blood. I called to the proprietress of the teahouse, who was sweeping up fallen leaves in front.

“Good weather tomorrow, Missus!”

Even I was surprised by the shrillness of my voice; it sounded almost like a cry of joy. She rested her hands on the broom a moment and looked up at me dubiously, knitting her brow.

“Did you have something special planned for tomorrow?”

She had me there.

“No. Nothing.”

She laughed. “You must be getting lonesome. Why don’t you go mountain climbing or something?”