“Climb a mountain and you just have to come right back down again. It’s so pointless. And whatever mountain you climb, what is there to see but the same old Mount Fuji? The heart grows heavy just thinking about it.”
I suppose it was a strange thing to say. The proprietress merely nodded ambiguously and carried on sweeping the fallen leaves.
Before going to sleep I would quietly open the curtains in my room and look through the glass at Fuji. On moonlit nights it was a pale, bluish white, standing there like the spirit of the rivers and lakes. I’d sigh. Ah, I can see Fuji. How big the stars are. Fine weather tomorrow, no doubt. These were the only glimmerings I had of the joy of being alive, and after quietly closing the curtains again I’d go to bed and reflect that, yes, the weather would be fine tomorrow—but so what? What did that have to do with me? It would strike me as so absurd that I’d end up chuckling wryly to myself as I lay on my futon.
It was excruciating. My work . . . Not so much the torment of simply dragging pen over paper (not that at all, in fact, since the writing itself is actually something I take pleasure in), but the interminable wavering and agonizing over my view of the world, and what we call art, and the literature of tomorrow, the search for something new, if you will—questions like these left me quite literally writhing in anguish.
To take what is simple and natural—and therefore succinct and lucid—to snatch hold of that and transfer it directly to paper, was, it seemed to me, everything, and that thought sometimes allowed me to see the figure of Fuji in a different light. Perhaps, I would think, that shape was in fact a manifestation of the beauty of what I like to think of as “elemental expression.” Thus I’d find myself on the verge of coming to an understanding with this Fuji, only to reflect that, no, there was something about it, something in its exceedingly cylindrical simplicity that was too much for me, that if this Fuji was worthy of praise, then so were figurines of the Laughing Buddha—and I find figurines of the Laughing Buddha insufferable, certainly not what anyone could call expressive. And the figure of this Fuji, too, was somehow mistaken, somehow wrong, I would think, and once again I’d be back where I started, confused.
Mornings and evenings gazing at Fuji: that’s how I spent the cheerless days. In late October, a group of prostitutes from Yoshida, on what, for all I knew, may have been their only day of freedom in the year, arrived at Misaka Pass in five automobiles. I watched them from the second floor. In a flurry of colors, the girls fluttered out of the cars like carrier pigeons dumped out of baskets, and, not knowing at first in which direction to head, flocked together, fidgeting and jostling one another in silence, until at last their curious nervousness began to dissipate, and one by one they wandered off their separate ways. Some meekly chose picture postcards from a rack at the front of the teahouse; others stood gazing at Fuji. It was a dismal and all but unwatchable scene. Though I, a solitary man on the second floor, might feel for those girls to the extent that I’d be willing to die for them, there was nothing I could offer them in the way of happiness. All I could do was look helplessly on. Those who suffer shall suffer. Those who fall shall fall. It had nothing to do with me, it was just the way the world was. Thus I forced myself to affect indifference as I gazed down at them, but it was still more than a little painful.