Amentia

A young man walks through a city where ordinary encounters become charged with suspicion. A missing cufflink, a policeman’s glance, a friend’s advice, and a girl’s resemblance to a remembered woman draw him into increasingly unstable reflections on identity and persecution. Poverty, books, dreams, and imagined doubles mingle in a life whose familiar shapes no longer hold.

Tominosawa Rintarō’s Amentia moves through abrupt scenes and fragmentary monologues, including a striking circus synopsis whose brief lines turn a duel into a spectacle of sound and motion. Its uncertainty reaches from the protagonist’s perceptions to the narrator’s final account.

This complete English translation preserves the story’s divisions, physical line arrangements, foreign-language fragments, and unresolved contradictions. Notes explain archived readings, special characters, uncertain names, and the historical illness term. AI-assisted translation.