(a tentative translation)

A small, everyday incident triggers a change in the psyche of the people involved. Or they are reminded of a condition they once suffered from. Such things may happen to you. What do you do when it happens to you? “One Wednesday Morning” (retitled “The Staircase Scattered with Glass Shards”) is a work that deals with such an ordinary incident and attempts to depict the extraordinary nature that lurks in it. Please critique it to see how far I have been able to write.

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The apartment was located in the southeastern part of Tokyo, near a pond associated with a Buddhist saint Nichiren of the 13th century. H and N lived on the second and third floors, respectively, of the rented apartment, but they never saw each other. Rather than having different rhythms in their lives, they were both so absorbed in their work and hobbies that they did not have time to reflect on their daily lives in their rooms.

H was a man in his late thirties and a civil servant. On weekends, he would go mountain climbing on Friday nights and return late on Sunday nights. N is a woman in her mid thirties and a part-time lecturer. She teaches Korean at several universities or colleges in the Kanto region. On her days off, she stays in bed until after noon. It is not an easy job, as she has to take time to prepare for classes and travel from one university to another, which is physically exhausting. H moved into this apartment a few years ago to be separated from his ex-wife.

It was a Wednesday in mid-September, the morning of the weekly garbage collection day, the year of H’s divorce in the spring. Suddenly, a chain reaction of rumbling sounds echoed through the apartment as glass shattered against concrete. Driven by anxiety, H opened the door to find glass shards of various sizes scattered on every level from the second floor to the first floor, glistening in the morning sunlight.

On the lower level, a distraught N was standing there in her room clothes. She was on her way down the stairs to take the garbage out to the collection point when the plastic bag containing the empty bottles and jars she was holding in her hand ripped open. H felt a faint odor of alcohol wafting down the stairs.

H went to his room to pick up a sweeper and a dustpan. N returned to her room on the third floor and brought the same cleaning tools. Thus began a strange joint operation, in which N further cleaned each step that H had cleaned. Looking at the transparent bluish-purple and greenish shards of various sizes, H wondered how many she had dropped, whether they were vials of 아침 이슬*, and so on.

• Meaning “morning dew.” One of the Korean soju liquor brands.

Although he had only seen N a few times, or perhaps because of this, H had been concerned about her ever since he moved into his new house a few years ago and greeted her. Without showing any such concern, he quietly and painstakingly finished cleaning up to the bottom floor. After opening the front door of the apartment slowly and stepping outside, they both crossed the street, supporting the dustpan with shards of glass on it with both hands as if they were carrying a broken object, and crouched down together at the garbage collection point. H was very nervous because they were in a position where they might hit each other’s heads, and N had not yet regained her composure.

N was still restless, and her muscles bulging from her knees to her shins were very fleshy, as if she were about to fall on his buttocks. The two filled a large empty bottle with the shards of glass they had swept up, little by little. “Oh, just enough,” N murmured happily. They placed the glass shards into a plastic bag, being careful not to spill any, and finally, H tightly closed the mouth of the bag. As she peered closely into the work, N’s clothes sagged around her chest, and two clusters swayed behind her clothes.

H arrived at work later than usual because of the morning incident, and perhaps because of his high spirits, he had been enveloped in a strange sense of happiness all day long. He was not irritated by anything unpleasant. And as the days went by, he missed N more than before.

On a Wednesday morning, two weeks after the glass incident, H was driving slowly along the sidewalk in his small bike as usual when he noticed a woman with a similar build and appearance to N walking in front of him. He slowed down and observed her for a while and was convinced that it must be her, so he turned around and said “Good morning” to her as he passed her. But there was no response. He had mistaken her for someone else. Did my desire to see her give rise to a hallucination? Having passed by her, there was no way to go back and check.

H had left his small bike at the top of the stairs in his apartment. It was another Wednesday, a public holiday in October, and he was at home instead of going to the mountains. In the morning, he was tending to his bicycle on the landing in front of the door to the rooftop when the door to N’s room directly below it opened. Suddenly, a very loud and lively music started to play. The door was quickly closed and she seemed to have gone out. H continued to tend to the room, thinking that she had left the music on, which meant that someone must be in the room.

After a while, N came home with a friend. She must have gone to the nearest station to pick her friend up. When H finished cleaning the bike and walked down the stairs past N’s room, he heard the sound of women exchanging pleasantries and laughter. He could not hear them well through the door, but they seemed to be speaking in a language other than Japanese. It was probably Korean. H was somewhat relieved to learn that N, who appeared to be a quiet person, had a surprisingly lively side.

N’s mailbox on the first floor read “NAMIYA”. H had thought it was a Japanese name, but it might be a Korean name. If it were Korean, it would be 남궁. Come to think of it, her face shape somewhat resemble the masks (탈) used in the Korean mask play 탈춤. Unlike Japanese Noh masks, many of the masks are rich in expressions of joy, anger, sorrow, and pleasure. H giggled to himself as he imagined N’s various facial expressions, comparing them to 탈.

The following Wednesday, H took a rare train ride to work. As he was walking toward the station, H slowly followed N, and when she was about to go through the ticket gate without noticing that N had dropped something small, H stopped her and tried to give it to her. She gave him the lost item, but again, he got the wrong person. After this incident, he began to wonder if he was mentally ill.

It had only been a month and a half since the glass incident, and he wondered what had happened. He felt as if he was not himself, as if he had become an empty lie. H wonders if shards of glass have entered his body and are causing damage to his cranial nerves. Or, perhaps, N has taken his soul and body. He thought that must be the case.

It was painful and intolerable that he was being hunted down and reduced to a small size. He managed to keep working, and he did not stop climbing mountains on weekends, but neither of these activities seemed as rewarding or enjoyable as they used to be. H felt completely stuck.

H had experienced a similar sense of stagnation in his late teens. His family was falling apart, and after a few years his father left home and went to live with a woman. H kept walking in midnight until he was exhausted. He barely managed to keep himself alive by doing so. It was a time when he went back and forth in the pitch blackness of the darkness. The situation is not dissimilar to the present one, but something is different. Being in the depths of the earth and being in the hell world are not the same thing. At the time, he was still unaware of this fact. In the depths of the earth, the next recorded tape would play over and over again like a damaged record. When he heard it, he felt a sense of suffocation and pressure, as if he were being carried on an elevator that was descending down a mine shaft.

This is a truck for the collection of waste materials and useless people at home or at offices. We will collect any unwanted junk or scrap (TVs, air conditioners, audio equipment, computers, etc.), large or heavy, from your home or office. We don’t care if they are mechanically or mentally broken. Please consult us about anything.

When the garbage truck came around, H was unable to think of anything else. He had a fear that he would be eliminated from the world and disposed of. On the other hand, he was sometimes moved by a power that he could not control. His spirit had not been destroyed.

Now that he recognized that he was in hell, he thought that it was not a glass bottle that shattered on Wednesday morning, but his spirit that had been shattered and broken into pieces. So the only way out of it was to rebuild himself. However, the glass bottle cannot be restored to its original state. Can a person ever return to normal? First of all, we must recover what we were doing before the breakdown of our spirit. Stop lamenting, stop thinking, and go forward toward something. H had lost the ability to make sound judgments. Maybe that’s why he wanted a teenage-like impulse.

Perhaps that Wednesday morning, or perhaps N’s psyche had also gone haywire. No, there may have been an anomaly even before that. She may not have been aware of it. H should make her aware of it. He even created such an intrusive sense of mission. By doing so, H felt a weak power rising up from his inner self, and this sensation gave him strength again. It must have been a self-indulgent idea, but what can one who is in a closed-off situation in the hellish world do for others? He did not realize it.

The next Wednesday morning, H briskly walked out the upstairs door, went to the third floor, and pounded on the door of N’s room. Feeling his heart pounding, and barely able to keep his legs from shaking, he pounded on the door, trying to open the door that would bring back their spirit and their daily lives. Beyond the door, loud music was playing, but there was no response. As he continued to pound on the door, he suddenly felt uneasy, and he scuttled down the stairs.

When he checked the mailbox on the first floor, he found that N’s name was not there. Standing there in a daze, H looked up the stairs. What was going on? It couldn’t be that she wasn’t at her apartment. When he had knocked on the door earlier, he had heard the beat of music coming from her room. The music that I always heard when I passed by the door on the third floor was an auditory hallucination. The reader must have noticed by now. The beat sound was his own heartbeat. It was so loud that it sounded like an external sound to him. With a confused head in his hands, H stood near the entrance door on the first floor.

The staircase seemed to go up forever, with the wall of the U-shaped staircase at the back of the front glaringly bright due to the diffused reflection of the jalousie. This was also the scene N had seen that day. H looked up at the staircase as if in prayer, trying to see what was beyond the wall. It was similar to what he had once seen in the depths of the earth, whether or not he was aware of it. He was trying desperately to crawl up from the hell world, but there was no way he could afford to do so.

Afterword

The sparkle of the shards of glass bottles depicted in this short story suddenly reminded me of the Korean soju liquor 아침 이슬. It is only natural that this should lead to the song of the same name composed by 김민기, a composer of the same generation as the author. The song, which he sings in a low voice, can be heard from the depths of the earth. It is as if he is asking, “What on earth was the meaning of the 50 years of my life? That question is posed to me as well.

One of the things I tried to draw but was unable to do so this time is the ten worlds of mutually beneficial relationships that form the basis of the theory of life as taught in the Lotus Sutra. If the hell realm is equipped with the ten realms, then even those who are suffering from troubles and are busy with their own affairs there can find a way to save themselves. Furthermore, they should be able to gain the power to influence others.

In addition to the six realms (the hell world, the gaki world, the beast world, the shura world, the human world, and the heavenly world), Shomon, Enkaku, Bodhisattva, and the Buddha world are all equipped with the power to materialize the Buddha world. If I can show even a sliver of hope to people like H by depicting them in my novels, then I will be able to make the world a better place. That is what I am seriously thinking about. I would like to devote my remaining life to presenting a new novel, not a novel, but a novel that is somewhere between a novel and a thesis.