Wordless Winter · Dazaiosamu
Resurrection / After the Songlike Language of Joyce’s Ulysses
And so the telling begins.When that door was slammed with enough force to make one wish to strike back, the air convulsed and dust scattered through an afternoon as though emptied of people; tablecloth and expired mangoes tumbled together, and in the creases of a crumpled wrapper there shimmered the insensate white flowers outside the window—pear blossom, peach blossom, or magnolias poised to fade and not yet fading. If they bloomed on bitterly, they would make no proper answer to any season (none that you or I expected); they had no feeling, no will, no long arms and no legs grown over with hair. With his own eyes he saw an innocent child wrench that white saint from the chill bough.With his tender young fingers he defiled her.Naturally this would not do—the webs of his fingers were soaked a deep dark red, the reek of blood; and so that those harmful lice might no longer bite her swollen, distended head, he found the little things one by one with savage care and crushed them.Only, the lips stayed bloodless. Nothing like the look that leaps alive after a grave illness, or when some interesting subject comes along: his face, sallow and shriveled like a piece of heartbroken wood; he could no longer discover in rainforests, mountain winds, low cool ditches any thought unlike the thoughts of former days.In short, he could take no comfort.Thus have I heard.Wild with joy he ran there, burrowed inside, clambered for three or five minutes, made his way around to the rear of a railway carriage, and his mouth began chanting new poems far removed from the Old Testament, phrases poised to decay and not yet decaying, carrying the corrosive smell of hypochlorous acid. Only one shoe remained to him, and only one fish in the aquarium, red, like an object made to give off heat— —out from that tender bough—the deep-green leaves like bile—thus making her bud—like the exuberant sway of that skirt An old-hued stone wall blocked the way, his gaze shone.With utter devotion he walked forward, then the hand touched it, the forehead touched it, the tip of the nose touched it, the eyes touched it; he felt in full the instant when those hard grains, that lime, coupled deep with his cells—and then On the sea, a burning temple rose.