/lit/ - Literature

>>18583146
Forgot my coom image.

>After waking up, I again looked at my brother’s handkerchief. I again read the poem he so carefully scrawled upon it. It is still easily legible; the blue ink has run very little. I believe the composition of this poem was Kazutaka’s last act before turning himself in to the police.

>LONG LIVE THE EMPEROR!
Who would hesitate
to sacrifice his life
for the sake of the
Emperor and the
nation, since the
life of a man is
as transient as
a dew drop on
a blade of grass?

>I do not know if the philosophers of language have yet created a term for how I feel about what my brother did. His actions, like his poem, are at once unfathomable to comprehend, but also entirely sensical. This illusional duality burns in my head like a gushing wound; I cannot continue to live whilst trying to ignore it, because its existence is parasitical to mine. Finding a cure for this wound is what has led me to the pen after a lifetime of resisting turning my mediocrities into manuscripts like so many others do. In so many words, I want to comb back over the life my brother and I spent together to see if I can discover why he did what he did. Of course, it is also possible that there was no why, or that the why is simply closed off to anyone but him. Perhaps the examination of my own mind will allow me to view Kazutaka obliquely, as opposed to the direct manner of my memories, which have so far yielded nothing. Perhaps viewing a landscape through tracing-paper can still produce visual wonders, even if it is unrefined tracing-paper. After all, were he and I not formed in the same womb? Nurtured at the same breast? Admonished by the same aunts? Beaten by the same schoolmasters? Did we not both go to worship each week at the same shrines? Share in each other’s hardships? Salute the same leaders? Cheer the same Emperor? We were two men glued together by fortune and by life, but it was Kazutaka who acted. It was Kazutaka who made his way into the house of a publisher he felt – he knew – had blasphemed his highest authority, with a thirst for blood penance. In this I feel black shame that it was not me. It was also Kazutaka who, unable to find his target, disembowelled a maid and mutilated the publisher’s wife. In this I feel rapturous relief that it was not me. And yet, the two emotions – shame and relief, do not come to me separately. They interweave ceaselessly, churning a sickening amount of liveliness and pain into the wound their confluence has created. Kazutaka may have botched his act, but did he not embark upon it with a solid and incontestable reason? Did he not ultimately avenge honour, that immaterial concept so disdained by modern attitudes, but absolutely unbesmirchable to a man like him?