This story in the original Japanese can be found here.
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An Eastern Autumn
I had been walking in Hibiya Park.
Thin clouds overlapped in the sky, leaving a faint blue only just above the trees close to the ground. Perhaps for that reason, before night had fallen, the sand, stones, and dead grass along the path in the autumn trees all appeared rather damp. No, even on the plane trees, their branches criss-crossing from the left and right over the road, there was a dim glow as if they had been washed with dew. The dim glow, mixed with the faint shadows on each and every leaf, still yellow, hung listlessly.
Cane under my arm, with an extinguished cigar hanging from my mouth, I continued my lonely walk with no particular destination in mind.
Apart from me, nobody was walking on the brisk path. The plane trees intruding on the path were shedding their leaves silently. From the space in between the trees on my path, which was tinged with faint fog, there came the faint, unchanging, bubbling of a fountain, as if it had not changed in hundreds of years. And in addition, for some reason today the sounds of the neighborhood outside the park, as though I were on a silent sea, seemed to die before reaching the bleak grove—but just as I thought so, the piercing cry of crane overtook the gentle fountain, rising up once then twice into the sky from within a distant forest.
Though I continued my walk, I felt an unspeakable fatigue and weariness weighing heavy upon my soul. A hack writer’s work is never done! Must I wait, alone, for the futile approach of dusk in the sky of my seductive creativity.
While immersed in that, dusk gradually approached. To the left and right of my path, the scent of moss and the scent of leaves, mixed, cold and damp, and stirred with the scent of earth. The faint sweet smell within may have been the smell of some rotting flower or fruit unseen among the trees. Come to think of it, in a puddle on the side of the road there was a single rose, as if somebody had picked it and let it fall. Its smell was not sullied by the earth. If I could only lose my fatigued, fatigued self completely in these autumn scents—
Without thinking, I came to a stop.
In my path were two men, moving their straw brooms quietly, clearing the brightly scattered plane leaves from the path. I could not think that the two men, their bird’s nest-like hair, the torn black clothes which barely covered skin, or the nails so long they could be mistaken for a beast’s scarcely worth mentioning, were the kind of workers who would tidy this park. Besides, the other mysterious thing was, while I was standing there watching, two or three crows which had flown in from somewhere rapidly traced a large circle, and then descended silently on the two broom men, fighting to land on their heads and shoulders. But the two men were still clearing the fallen leaves, as before.
Slowly turning to leave, with my unlit cigar hanging out of my mouth, I set off on my original lonely course through the plane trees.
And yet, in my heard, the fatigue and weariness which had been there until now had at some point been replaced with a pale overflowing of quiet joy. There is no doubt that the thought that those two were dead would be enough to make my pitiful self lose his way. Hanshan and Shide live. Though the circle of life turns, for today they are sweeping up the leaves in this park. As long as those two shall live, there is no way the dream of a charming Eastern autumn can completely pass from the neighborhoods of Tōkyō. A dream of autumn which I, exhausted by my life as a hack writer, may be allowed to have again.
With my cane still in my armpit, whistling cheerfully, I exited the gates of the gorgeous, plane leaf-covered Hibiya Park. “Hanshan and Shide live,” I muttered to myself.
(March 1920)