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after I had conceived of our valley as a sunny place.
    Now, having left the valley for this great city, it occurred to me abruptly as I sat there in that large, impersonal building, holding my head in my hands next to a lamp attached to an even more impersonal cubicle, that my valley was in its way also a dark valley, although it was not only in the negative sense that I was thinking of the word “dark.”
    That Man should Labour & sorrow & learn & forget —the notion that “labour” and “sorrow” were not opposites but two adjacent aspects of life was not unpersuasive; it put me in mind of my mother's labor after my father's death when I was in my late teens. The words that followed struck me as a frighteningly accurate prophecy about my own future.
    I had entered Tokyo University and was just beginning to study French. I had chosen the field after a year of deliberation following my graduation from high school, and I felt no hesitation about continuing it. Even so, I was aware of an undercurrent of incongruity. Now, through the agency of Blake's verse, I sensed I would be able to bring this uneasiness to the surface by thinking about its connection to having left my valley behind me. I had set out from a poignantly familiar place to live a marginal life in a corner of a giant city whose very topography was a mystery to me. I was studying French, but other than that, except for some part-time work, I was being spared from having to “labour” at anything. Which meant that, for the time being, I was also being spared “sorrow” I was living a life on a plane apart from Labour & sorrow, but only temporarily. To be sure, I was learning French, but before long I would forget it, I felt certain of that.
    … & learn & forget —it was as if, in my case, I was learning only in order to forget. I had left the valley as though I were being chased away only to begin a life of seclusion in the giant city and this was the entirety of that life. In the end I would return to the valley. Whereupon the “labour” and “sorrow” I was being spared temporarily in my life in the city would begin in earnest.… & return / To the dark valley whence he came to begin his labours anew.
    Slumped heavily in the chair, I sat without moving, my head in my hands. When it was time for lunch, I bought bread and a croquette at the stand at the entrance to the dorm and made a sandwich like everyone else, dousing the croquette with sauce—the student association had posted a notice at the stand that was a sign of how miserably poor the times were: “If you have not purchased croquettes, please refrain from pouring sauce on your bread!” I ate my sandwich standing among the crowd around the drinking fountain: I didn't have the money to buy milk. I surveyed the prospect of my life and had the feeling I was just now accepting the dismal view for what it was; the students all around me appeared naive as children.
    As I had expected when I read those lines on the page opened next to me, I did after all discover on my own that the poet in question was Blake. To be sure, it was nearly ten years after my experience in the library at the Komaba campus, about a year before the birth of my eldest son. While I was a student of French literature, and for four or five years after I graduated, whatever reading in a foreign language I did was exclusively in French—I continued to feel that I was “learning in order to forget"—and always while sitting at a desk so that I could use a dictionary and make notes in the margins. Somewhere along the way, perceiving that I was not going to be a scholar of French literature—confirming an early sign of where & learn & forget was heading—I began including books in English in my reading once again; and, feeling free to lie sprawled on a couch, I made my way through a wide variety of English literature consulting the dictionary infrequently and writing nothing down. The change was due in part to a new lifestyle