One Morning Like a Bird

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He is squatting in his room in the High City, an open book in one hand, the fingers of the other hand stretched towards the glazed blue belly of a brazier. The room is small, the old sewing room, only four and a half mats, and made even smaller by the clothes that hang from the beading along the walls, by the piled books, by the bedding still unrolled from the previous night, though it is already past seven o’clock and pitch dark outside, this last evening of the year.

It has been his room ever since he was sent to sleep there on his return from Uncle Kensuke’s after the Great Earthquake. The first room he ever slept in on his own and where, in his twenty-first year — the eleventh of the Showa Era — he wrote, between the February coup attempt and the end-of-the-summer cicadas, all the poems in Electric Dragonfly, a miraculous season, but one that has never returned . .

He sighs, withdraws the hand he was warming, turns the page of his book, transfers the book to the warmed hand and holds out the other to the charcoal. He is reading in French — not his beloved Rimbaud, but a tale by André Gide he read in Professor Komada’s class at Nihon — a strange romance he did not quite understand then, and which now, for entirely different reasons, he is failing to understand for a second time. For how is he to concentrate on the adventures of Gérard Lacase when so many other matters — matters that cannot simply be pushed aside — turn the words on the page into marks as meaningless as the light reflected in the panels of the drying-platform door beside him?

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