I was sitting awake in my four-and-a-half-mat room late at night, mind dwelling upon the fact that tomorrow was Christmas Eve. I thought also of Endou with his condescending smile and belly stuffed with happiness to the point of bursting. It aroused in me a bitter ire that swirled and swelled. I glared at the gargantuan maneki-neko still hoarding one corner of my precious room, and it glared back. Its swollen porcelain gut perfectly mirrored my own sensation—insides distended by rage—yet the cat remained infuriatingly aloof.
I began to fire off questions at the cat.
“What in hell’s name is so great about being in love? Why do the infatuated masses insist upon swaggering about, flaunting their happiness for all to see? Just who in the hell do these people think they are?”
Even if the tides of time take to trumpeting tender togetherness, should we not remain alert to the dangers of praising love? Love is irrational. It is a dark passion that swirls in the depths of the human heart. Though we dress it in sweet words, at the end of the day, love casts off all artifice to bare its ugly fangs. And when it does, it forces us to confront our own insanity; we bemoan our shortsightedness, but we are already too far gone.
One sometimes hears the phrase twisted love, but I would submit that love is a thing that is always twisted, from its very conception. That is why I am so bewildered to see young lovers go about so obviously delighted, so obviously high with self-satisfaction.
The people of the world gleefully fling themselves from the precipice of insanity, plunging into the waters below, where they flail and sink in plain sight of all their peers. Those yet to hurl themselves from the cliff think only of when their chance will come to struggle in the water. They bemoan their misfortune. They see their delay as a failure. A thing of shame. Oh, how misguided are their souls! It is the drowning man and the man who yearns to drown whose cheeks should be aflame!
I am proud to have stricken such silly whimsy from my life. Love is an immoral joy. It is a delight we should approach with apprehension and unease, like a forbidden fruit partaken of in secret corners away from prying eyes. It must be recognized as the gravest of sins to treat love as a thing that readily blossoms and blooms for all, to greedily feast upon it with no regard to time or place, gnashing with open maw so that all who observe are splashed with the nectar’s spray.
This I would declare to every man and woman with arms interlocked beneath the sweeping heavens:
Live if you must—but at least have the decency to be discreet about it.
✦ ✦ ✦
Takayabu had been driven from the city, besieged by the mysterious new beauty in his life. Ido remained lodged in his dense quagmire of worldly jealousy. Shikama roamed about town with bandages on his chin, working his schemes. Yushima was stuck in his interminable spiral of self-loathing.
Mizuo continued to ride her phantasmal train. Ebizuka labored away in a shop full of foreign goods. Endou smiled his patronizing smile from paradise on the far bank of the Sanzu. And I lay in sullen silence in my hovering four-and-a-half-mat castle, cell phone clutched loosely in one hand.
A minute ticked past, and the background for my home screen changed of its own accord. The glowing rectangle now proudly displayed the words CHRISTMAS EVE—and in English, no less. It was beginning. One electronic device had already defected from my camp, right on the cusp of our valiant stand.
By the time dawn arrived, a gloomy rain was falling. Christmas Eve was here.