Ryūnosuke, please …
Enter the bookstore, the second-hand bookstore. You place the book on the counter, and you ask, you ask, How much is this? One yen sixty sen, smiles the woman who owns the shop. But for you, I’ll make it one fifty …
Take me back, Ryūnosuke. Please take me back …
You had sold it to her for a mere seventy sen, and can only bargain her down to one forty. But you miss this book, for you love this book. So you sigh, then you nod. And hand over double the amount you had sold it for. It always happens, you never learn …
Thank you, Ryūnosuke. Thank you …
Outside the store, back on the street. The buildings now dark, the streets now white. All very quiet, so strangely quiet. Jimbōchō covered with snow, you are wrapped in your cape. The steel-grey cover of Zarathustra pressed against your chest, a self-mocking smile upon your chapped lips. You walk and you trudge. Through the night, in the snow. Back to your house, back to your library, your very own library, your very own …
House of Books …
Book after book, book by book, pile by pile, shelf by shelf, screen by screen and wall by wall, you build and you build a house of books, your house of books. Made of paper, made of words. A house of books, a world of words: everything you know about the world, everything you learn about the world, you know and you learn from books, through words. You cannot think of anything you do not to some degree owe to books. First books, you believe, then reality; ‘from books to reality’, your unchanging truth: you do not try to improve your knowledge of life by observing the passers-by in the street. No, rather you read about the life of mankind in books, in order to better watch the passers-by in the street. Yes, real-life people are merely passers-by. In order to understand them – all their loves, all their hates, their lives and their deaths – to truly know them as they pass you by, you sit in your house of books, in your world of words, and you read and you read, book after book, observing and noting peculiarities of speech, of gesture, facial expressions, the line of a nose and the tilt of an eyebrow, the way they hold their hands, rough outlines and sketches, in Balzac, Poe, Baudelaire, Dostoevsky, Flaubert, the brothers Goncourt, Ibsen, Tolstoy, Strindberg, Verlaine, De Maupassant, Wilde, Shaw and Hauptmann; you will be the most well-read man of your generation. But every book you read is a textbook for life, an instruction in the art of living. You will find yourself in love with certain women. Yet none will show you what beauty truly is; only thanks to Balzac, thanks to Gautier, thanks to Tolstoy, only thanks to them do you notice the beauty of a woman’s ear, translucent in the sunlight, or the shadow of an eyelash, falling on a cheek. If you had not read of such beauty in books, then you would have seen nothing in a woman except the female animal of your species. Without books, without words, life would be unbearable, so unbearable, so ugly, so very, very ugly –
Not worth a single line of Baudelaire …
But your house of books, your world of words, with its screens and its walls, with its windows and doors, is built from other people’s books, other people’s words, borrowed and bought, always, already stolen and used; in your second-hand house of books, in your second-hand world of words, your life is always, already secondhand, second-hand.
6. A Bridge, a Gate; on the Way to Work …
One day, at school, you are daydreaming, looking out of the window, not thinking, just dreaming, the wind so very, very strong today, the wind moving through the branches of the trees today, the leaves rustling, the leaves trembling, each leaf, each leaf, halting your dreams, holding your gaze, enchanting you, bewitching you, making you see, making you feel, see for yourself and feel for yourself, the beauty of nature, the wonder of creation, this secret, this mystery, a current, a light; you will always remember this day, this moment, for this is the day, the moment, you know what you want to do, to do with your life, the rest of your life –
You will devote your life to literature, to the creation of literature, the rest of your life to writing.
In the Japanese language you have the word kaku, which means ‘to write, to draw or to paint’, in other words ‘to compose or to depict’. The characters with which kaku is written consist of ‘the hand’ radical on the left and the character for ‘seedling’ on the right. The character for ‘seedling’ is itself a compound of two radicals: one for ‘grass’, the other for ‘field’. When you put them all together you get kaku or egaku: a picture of a hand planting a seed. For you, all art originates from the germ of an idea, then the seed has to be planted or sown, then cultivated and nurtured by hand. This is what writing means to you, and this is what you are going to do.
You put down your wooden sword, you pick up your thin pen and you begin to scratch, you begin to write, copying down the old tales Fuki tells, scribbling down the stories the maids share, tales and stories of ghosts and of fireballs, widows obsessed with their
