I recalled the way my father had looked and acted on my previous visit, when he had made such an effort to be out of bed and shaved. Your mother shouldn’t go exaggerating things, he had said, but I couldn’t entirely blame her. I was about to suggest that she should at least keep an eye on him but thought better of it. I just told her everything I knew about his disease, although most of it was only what I had learned from Sensei and his wife.
My mother did not seem particularly affected as she listened. She merely remarked, “Well, well, the same illness, eh? Poor thing. What age was she when she died?”
I gave up pursuing the matter with her any further and went directly to my father.
He listened to my warnings with more attention. “Absolutely. Just as you say,” he responded. “But after all, my body’s my own, you know, and naturally I know best how to look after it, with all my years of experience.”
When I repeated this remark to my mother, she smiled grimly. “There you are, I told you so.”
“But he’s thoroughly aware of the problem. That’s exactly why he was so overjoyed to see me after I graduated. He told me so. He said he’d thought before that he might not be alive, so he was happy he’d survived in good health till I could bring back the diploma for him to see.”
“Well, he’s just saying that, you know. In his heart of hearts he’s convinced he’s still fine.”
“You really think so?”
“He plans to live another ten or twenty years. Mind you, he does talk rather mournfully sometimes. ‘I may not have much longer to go,’ he’ll say. ‘What will you do when I die? Will you stay on here alone?’ ”
I found myself imagining this big old country house with my mother left alone here after my father’s death. Would she be able to keep it going on her own? What would my brother do? What would she say? And in the face of this knowledge, could I turn my back on the situation and go back to my carefree life in Tokyo? Now, with my mother before me, Sensei’s warning sprang into my mind—that I must make sure the property division was seen to while my father was still well.
“But there you are,” she continued. “People can carry on about dying and never show any sign of actually doing it, you know. That’s how your father is; he’ll talk of death like this, but who knows how long he’ll go on living? So don’t worry. There’s actually more cause to worry with someone who seems healthy and never talks like that.”
I listened in silence to these trite sentiments, unsure whether they sprang from mere speculation or hard facts.
CHAPTER 39
My parents discussed together the idea of inviting guests over for a special celebratory meal in my honor. I had had a gloomy premonition that this might happen ever since I arrived.
I was quick to reject the idea, begging them not to go making an unnecessary fuss.
I disliked the kind of guests you got in the provinces. They came over with the sole intention of eating and drinking, happy for any excuse to get together. Since childhood I had suffered at having to be present at the table with these people—I could well imagine how much more painful it would be if I was the cause of the gathering. But I couldn’t very well tell my parents not to invite such vulgar people over for a noisy get-together, so I contented myself with stressing that I didn’t want all this fuss about nothing.
“But it’s far from nothing,” my mother responded. “It’s a once-in-a-lifetime event. It’s only natural that we should have a party to celebrate. Don’t be so modest.” She seemed to be taking my graduation as seriously as she would a marriage.
“We don’t have to invite them,” my father put in, “but if we don’t, there’ll be talk.” He was concerned about what would be said behind his back. And true enough, these people were inclined to gossip and criticize at the slightest provocation if things weren’t done as they believed they should be in such situations.
“It’s not like Tokyo, you know,” he went on. “Here in the country people make demands.”
“Your father’s reputation is at stake too,” my mother added.
I couldn’t press my own position. I decided simply to go along with whatever suited them.
“I was just asking you not to do it for my sake. If you feel there’d be unpleasant talk behind your back, that’s a different matter. There’s no point in insisting on having my way if it’s going to cause problems for you.”
“You’re making things difficult with that argument,” my father said unhappily.
“Your father wasn’t saying he’s doing it for your sake,” my mother broke in. “But surely you must be aware yourself of your social obligations.” Woman that she was, my mother’s reasoning grew rather incoherent at such times, though when it came to talking, she could easily outdo my father and me combined.
All my father said was “It’s a shame that an education just gives people the means to chop logic.” But in this simple comment I read all my father’s dissatisfaction with me. Unaware of my own stiff and chilly tone, I thought only of how unfairly he was seeing me.
His mood improved that evening, and he asked me when it would suit me to invite the guests. No time was more suitable than any other for me, since I was just hanging around the old house doing nothing but sleeping and waking, so I took this as an indication that my father was being conciliatory. Seeing him so mild and gentle, I could only bow my head in acquiescence. We discussed the question and came up with a date for the invitations.
But before the day arrived, something important occurred: it was announced that Emperor Meiji was ill. The word spread quickly around Japan via the newspapers.
The plans for the celebratory party had already upset our provincial household. Now, just when the matter seemed settled, this news came to scatter those plans like so much dust upon the wind.
“Under the circumstances I think we’d better call it off.” So said my father as he sat, bespectacled, reading the newspaper. He seemed to be silently thinking also of his own illness.
For my part, I recalled the sight of the emperor when he had so recently come to the university, as was the custom, for our graduation ceremony.
CHAPTER 40
A hush fell over our big old echoing house and its few inhabitants. I unpacked my wicker trunk and tried to read, but for some reason I felt restless. I had been far more happily focused and able to study back in my second-floor room in hectic Tokyo, turning the pages as the distant streetcars rattled in my ears.
Now as I read, I was inclined to drop my head onto the desk and nap; sometimes I brought out a pillow and indulged in a real sleep. I would awaken to the pounding song of cicadas. That sound, which seemed like a continuation of my dreams, suddenly tormented my ears with painful intensity. As I lay motionless, listening, sad thoughts would sometimes settle over me.
Abandoning reading for my writing brush, I wrote brief post-cards or long letters to various friends. Some had stayed on in Tokyo, while others had returned to distant homes. Some replied; from others I heard nothing. Needless to say, I did not neglect Sensei—I sent him three closely written pages describing all that had happened since my return. As I sealed the envelope, I wondered whether he was still in Tokyo.
Customarily, whenever Sensei and his wife went away, a woman in her fifties with a plain widow’s haircut came and looked after the house. I once asked him what relation she was to them, to which he replied, “What do you think?” I had had the mistaken impression that she was a relative of his. “I have no relatives,” he responded, when I told him this. He had absolutely no communication with anyone related to him back in his hometown. The woman who looked after the house turned out to be someone from his wife’s family.
As I slipped my letter into the post, an image of this woman, her narrow obi informally knotted at her back, rose unbidden in my mind. If this letter arrived after Sensei and his wife had left for their summer retreat, would she have the good sense and kindness to send it straight on to him? I wondered. I was well aware that the letter did not cont
ain anything of real importance; it was just that I was lonely and anticipating his reply. But nothing came.
My father was not as keen on playing shōgi as he had been the previous winter. The dust-covered shōgi board had been set aside in a corner of the alcove. Since the news of the emperor’s illness reached us, he had grown thoughtful and preoccupied. He waited each day for the newspaper to be delivered and was the first to read it. Once done he would bring its pages over for me, wherever I happened to be.
“Here, look at this. More details on His Majesty’s condition.” This was how he always referred to the emperor. “It’s a presumptuous thing to say, but His Majesty’s illness is a little like my own.”
My father’s expression was clouded with apprehension. At his words, I felt a sudden flicker of anxiety that he might die at any time.
“But I’m sure it will be all right,” he went on. “Mere nobody that I am, I’m still doing fine, after all.” Even as he was congratulating himself on his state of health, he seemed to anticipate the danger that threatened to descend at any moment.
“Father is actually afraid of his illness, you know,” I told my mother. “He’s not really determined to live another ten or twenty years as you say he is.”
Bewilderment and distress appeared on her face. “Try to interest him a bit in playing shōgi again, will you?” she said.
I retrieved the shōgi board from the alcove and wiped off the dust.
CHAPTER 41
Slowly my father’s health and spirits declined. His big straw hat with its handkerchief, the one that had taken me by surprise when I first arrived, now lay neglected. Whenever I caught sight of it on the soot-blackened shelf I was filled with pity for him. While he still managed to be up and about with ease, I anxiously cautioned him to take things more carefully. Now, seeing him sitting pensive and silent, I realized he had indeed been relatively well before.
My mother and I had many discussions about it.
“It’s his state of mind that’s doing it,” she maintained, connecting his illness with that of the emperor.
But I felt it was not so simple. “I don’t think it’s just his state of mind; I think he’s actually gone downhill physically. It’s his health that’s the problem, not his mood.”
As I spoke, I began to feel it would be wise to call in a good doctor from somewhere else to have a look at him.
“You’re having a very boring summer, aren’t you?” my mother remarked. “We can’t celebrate this fine graduation of yours, and your father so unwell. And then there’s His Majesty’s illness—we really should have had that party as soon as you got home.”
I had returned on the fifth or sixth of July, and my parents had begun to talk about the celebration a week later. The date that had finally been chosen was over a week after this. This leisurely country approach, free of any sense of urgency, had spared me the social occasion I so disliked. But my uncomprehending mother seemed unaware of my relief.
The day word of the emperor’s death arrived, my father groaned aloud, newspaper in hand. “His Majesty has passed away! And I too . . .” He said no more.
I went into the town to buy some black mourning cloth. We wrapped it around the shiny metal ball on the tip of our flag-pole, hung a long three-inch-wide strip from the top of the pole, and propped it at our front gate, pointing at an angle into the street. The flag and the black mourning strip hung listlessly in the windless air. The little roof over our old gate was thatch; long exposure to rain and wind had discolored it to a pale gray, and the surface was visibly pitted. I stepped out into the street to examine the effect, taking in the combination of black strip of cloth and white muslin flag with its red rising sun symbol dyed in the center, and the look of this flag against the dingy thatch of the roof. Sensei had once asked me what sort of street front our house had. “I imagine it looks very different from the gate at the house where I grew up,” he’d said. I would have liked to show Sensei this old house I was born in, but the idea also made me embarrassed.
Back inside, I sat alone at my desk, reading the newspaper and imagining the scenes in distant Tokyo. The images in my mind coalesced into a scene of the vast city stirring everywhere with movement in the midst of a great darkness; I saw Sensei’s house, a single point of light in the seething, anxious throng that struggled blindly through the blackness.
I could not know that even then the little light was being drawn irresistibly into the great soundless whirl of darkness, and that I was watching a light that was destined soon to blink out and disappear.
I reached for my writing brush, thinking I would write to Sensei about the emperor’s death, but having written about ten lines, I stopped. I tore the page into shreds and threw it in the bin—it seemed pointless to write these things to Sensei, and besides, judging from previous experience, I would receive no reply. I was lonely. This was why I wrote letters: I hoped for a response.
CHAPTER 42
In mid-August I received a letter from one of my friends, saying that a certain middle school in the provinces had an opening for a teacher and asking me if I would like to take it. This friend was himself actively searching for such a position, from financial necessity. The offer had originally been directed to him, but he had found a position in a better part of the country, so he’d kindly offered it to me. I quickly sent back a refusal, saying that a number of other people we knew were doing their best to find teaching positions, and he should offer it to one of them.
After I sent the letter, I told my parents about it. Neither seemed to object to the fact that I had declined the offer. “There’ll be other good jobs. You don’t need to go off to a place like that,” they both said.
Behind these words I read their exaggerated expectations for my future. Unthinkingly, they seemed to assume I would be able to find a position and salary far above what I could hope for as someone freshly graduated.
“It’s actually very difficult to find a decent position these days, you know. I’m in a different field from my brother, remember, and we’re different generations. Please don’t go assuming it will be the same for me as for him.”
“But you must at least get yourself some independent means now that you’re graduated, or it makes things awkward for us too,” my father said. “How do you think I’d feel if people asked, ‘What’s your son doing now that he’s through university? ’ and I couldn’t reply?” He frowned unhappily.
His view of life was firmly confined to the little world where he’d spent his life. Inquisitive locals had been asking him how much salary a graduate could expect to earn, guessing at princely sums of around a hundred yen a month. That made him uncomfortable, and he very much wanted to get me settled into a position that would save his face.
My own point of view, based as it was on the great cosmopolitan world of Tokyo, made me seem to my parents as bizarre as someone who walked upside down. Even I found myself on occasion considering myself this way. My parents were so many light-years from my own position that I couldn’t begin to confess what I really thought, so I held my tongue.
“Why don’t you go to this Sensei you keep talking about and ask for his assistance?” my mother suggested. “This is surely the very moment he could help.”
These were the only terms in which she could comprehend Sensei. But this was the man who had urged me, when I got home, to ensure that I got my share of the property before my father’s death. He was hardly likely to try to find me a position.
“What does your Sensei do for a living?” my father inquired.
“He doesn’t do anything.” I thought I had told them this long ago. Surely my father remembered.
“So why doesn’t he do anything, eh? I’d have thought someone you respect so much would be in a profession.” My father was gently taunting me. To his way of thinking, useful people must be out in the world, engaged in something suitably impressive. There you are, he was insinuating, the fellow’s worthless, that’s why he’s lazing about doing nothing. “Look
at me, now. I don’t get a salary, but I’m far from idle, you know.”
I remained silent.
“If he’s as fine a person as you say, he’ll surely find you a position,” my mother said. “Have you tried asking?”
“No,” I replied.
“Well, what’s the good of that? Why won’t you ask? Go on, just write a letter at least.”
“Mmm,” I replied vaguely, and stood up.
CHAPTER 43
My father was clearly afraid of his illness, yet he wasn’t the type to plague the doctor with difficult questions when he came to visit. For his part, the doctor kept his opinions to himself and made no pronouncements.
My father was apparently giving some thought to what would happen once he died, or at any rate he was imagining the posthumous household.
“Giving your children an education has its good and bad points, I must say. You go to the trouble of training them, and then they don’t come home again. It seems to me an education is the easy way to split up a family.”
Thanks to my brother’s education, he was living far away, and my own education had resulted in my decision to live in Tokyo. My father’s grumblings were perfectly understandable. He must certainly have been feeling forlorn at the thought of my mother left all alone in this big old country house they’d lived in so long together.
My father was of the firm belief that there could be no change in the house, and that my mother would remain there until the day she died. The thought of leaving her to live out her lonely existence in this echoing shell of a place filled him with anxiety, and yet he was insisting I find a job in Tokyo. I found this contradiction rather funny, but it also pleased me, since it meant I could go back to live in the city.
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