The first thing I did when I got to the well was to remove the stones that held the cap on, then take off one of the two wooden half-circles....There was no water. I set down the knapsack, took the rope ladder out, and tied one end of it to the trunk of the nearby tree....If, by some chance, the ladder somehow got loose or came undone, I would probably never make it back to the surface.
No matter how far I went, though, there was no bottom. My descent seemed to take forever.... When I had counted twenty rungs, a wave of terror overtook me....There was no way this well could be so deep. This was the middle of Tokyo....I held my breath and listened, but I couldn't hear a thing....It was a separate world down here, one cut off from the surface, where the sun shone so unstintingly.
Looking directly up, I now could grasp how very deep the well was. I gave the rope ladder another hard tug. As long as it remained in place, I could go back to the surface anytime I wanted.
Taking a breath, I sat on the floor of the well, with my back against the wall. I closed my eyes and let my body become accustomed to the place. All right, then, I thought: here I am in the bottom of a well.
As time passed, my eyes became more accustomed to the darkness....As much as my eyes became used to it, though, the darkness never ceased to be darkness....In it, you could see something. And at the same time, you could see nothing at all.
Here in this darkness, with its strange sense of significance, my memories began to take on a power they had never had before....Every now and then, while searching through my memories, I would reach out to where the rope ladder was hanging against the wall and give it a tug to make sure it hadn't come loose. I couldn't seem to shake the fear that it might simply give way at any moment.
Three p.m....The light up there overwhelmed everything, and yet just below it, down here, there existed such a darkness. All you had to do was climb a little ways underground on a rope ladder, and you could reach a darkness this profound. I pulled on the ladder one more time to be certain it was anchored firmly.
Seven-thirty p.m....Now I was enveloped by a darkness that was total....Staying very still in the darkness, I became less and less convinced of the fact that I actually existed...my body began to lose its density and weight...wordless tug-of-war were going on inside me, a contest in which my mind was slowly dragging my body into its own territory.
Then it occurred to me to grope along the wall for the ladder....The ladder was nowhere....The ladder had disappeared while I was sleeping. It had been pulled up. Taken away....Once it was gone, I stood there, hollow, empty as a gutted animal....Strangely enough, all I felt at that moment was a kind of resignation.
This person, this self, this me, finally, was made somewhere else. Everything had come from somewhere else, and it would all go somewhere else. I was nothing but a pathway for the person known as me.
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