Schoolgirl by Osamu Dazai Page B

had been a mutual respect between them. People must have often said about them, What a handsome and untroubled couple, without any unattractive qualities. Oh, I'm so cheeky.
    While the miso soup was warming up, I sat in the doorway of the kitchen and stared idly at the copse of trees out front. At that moment, I had the odd sensation that I had been staring like this for a very long time, and would be staring from now on, just like this, sitting here in the doorway to the kitchen, in the same pose, thinking the same thing, looking at the trees out front. It felt as if the past, the present, and the future had collapsed into one single instant. Such things happen to me from time to time. I'd be sitting there, talking to someone. My gaze would wander to a corner of the table and affix itself there, unmoving. Only my mouth would move. At times like these, a strange hallucination always occurs. I would feel absolutely certain that, at some point before, under these very conditions, I've had the same conversation while, in fact, staring at the corner of the table and that what was happening now would continue to go on indefinitely, in exactly the same manner. Whenever I walk along a country path, no matter how remote it is, I always feel that I have undoubtedly been on the same path before. Whenever I walk along and pluck soybean leaves at the path's edge, I always think that I have surely been on this same path and plucked these leaves before. And I believe that, from then on, over and over again, I will walk along this path, and pull soybean leaves from the exact same spots. Again, these kinds of things happen to me. Sometimes, I'd be soaking in the bath and suddenly glimpse my hand. Then, I would become convinced that however many years from now, while soaking in the bath, I will be transported to this moment when a random glance at my hand turned into a stare, and I will remember how it made me feel. These thoughts always make me rather gloomy. And once when I was putting rice into an ohitsu serving bowl, I was struck by—well, it would be an exaggeration to call it inspiration but I felt something charging within my body—zipping through me like, how shall I say, I would almost call it a philosophical glimpse—and I gave myself over to it, then my head and my chest became transparent all the way through as a sense of my own existence floated down and settled over me and, silently, without making a sound, as pliant as tokoroten before you make them into noodles, I felt at the mercy of these waves, a light and beautiful feeling that I would be able to live on this way. Now, this wasn't a philosophical commotion. But it was frightening, rather, this premonition of living like a kleptomaniac cat, stealthily and quietly, and couldn't lead to any good. To go on like that for any length of time, it seems, you would end up like you're possessed. Like Jesus Christ. But the idea of a female Jesus Christ seems appalling.
    Ultimately though—since I'm just idle most of the time, and I really don't have any troubles to worry about—I wonder if I am just desensitized to the hundreds if not thousands of things I see and hear everyday, and in my bewilderment, those things end up assailing me like floating ghosts, one after another.
    I sat down to eat breakfast by myself in the dining room. I had cucumbers for the first time this year. Summer seems to come from a cucumber's greenness. The green of a May cucumber has a sadness like an empty heart, an aching, ticklish sadness. When I'm eating alone in the dining room, I get this wild urge to travel. I want to get on a train. I opened the newspaper. There was a photo of that actor Jushiro Konoe. I wondered if he was a good guy. I decided I didn't like his face. Something about his forehead. My favorite things in the newspaper are the advertisements for books. It must cost one or two hundred yen for each character on each line, so whoever writes them are all trying their best. Each character,