“Oh no, this is dreadful!” he exclaimed.
We, of course, knew nothing of what had prompted these words, and they gave us quite a shock. “I really thought he’d turned a bit odd,” my brother said later to me. “It sent a cold shiver down my spine.” My sister’s husband agreed that he’d been alarmed as well.
Just then the paper was filled daily with news that made us country folk eager to read every issue. I would sit beside my father going carefully through its pages, and if I didn’t have enough time, I quietly carried it off to my room, where I read it cover to cover. The photograph of General Nogi in his military uniform, and his wife, who had died with him, dressed in what looked like the clothing of an imperial lady-in-waiting, stayed with me vividly for a long time.
These tragic winds were penetrating even our distant corner of the land, shaking summer’s sleepy trees and grasses, when suddenly I received a telegram from Sensei. In this backwater, where the mere sight of someone dressed in the Western style would set the dogs barking, even a telegram was a major event.
My startled mother was the one to accept its delivery at the door, and she called me over to hand it to me in private.
“What is it?” she said, standing expectantly beside me as I opened the envelope.
The telegram simply stated that he wanted to see me and asked if I could come. I cocked my head in puzzlement.
“It’s bound to be about a position he’s found for you,” declared my mother, leaping to conclusions.
Perhaps she was right, but if so, it seemed a bit strange. At any rate, having called my brother and brother-in-law to come because the end was near, I certainly couldn’t turn my back on my father’s illness and run off to Tokyo.
I talked it over with my mother and decided to send a telegram replying that I was unable to go. I appended a very brief explanation that my father’s illness was becoming critical, but that was not enough to satisfy me. “Letter follows,” I added, and the same day I sent off a letter detailing the situation.
“It’s such a shame it’s come at such a bad time,” my mother said ruefully, still convinced the summons had to do with some position he had found for me.
CHAPTER 49
The letter I wrote to Sensei was a fairly long one, and both my mother and I assumed that this time he would answer. Then two days later another telegram arrived for me. All it said was that I need not come. I showed it to my mother.
“He must plan on sending a letter about it,” she said, still insisting on interpreting things in terms of the position that Sensei was helping me procure. I wondered if she might be right, though it did not fit the Sensei I knew. The proposition that “Sensei would find a position for me” struck me as out of the question.
“Anyway, my letter won’t have reached him yet,” I said firmly. “He clearly sent this telegram before he read it.”
“That’s true,” said my mother solemnly, appearing to ponder the matter, although the mere fact that he had sent the telegram before he read the letter could have given her no fresh information.
That day the doctor was coming with the hospital’s head physician, so we had no more opportunity to discuss the subject. The two talked about my father and gave him an enema, then left.
Ever since the doctor had ordered total rest, my father had needed help to urinate and defecate. Fastidious man that he was, at first he loathed the process, but his physical incapacity meant he had no option but to resort to a bedpan. Then perhaps his illness slowly dulled his reactions, for he gradually ceased to be concerned by excretion difficulties. Occasionally he would soil the bedclothes, but although this distressed those around him, he seemed unperturbed by it. The nature of his illness, of course, meant that the amount of urine lessened dramatically. This worried the doctor. His appetite too was gradually fading. If he occasionally wanted to eat something, it was only to taste it—he actually ate very little. He even lost the strength to take up his accustomed newspaper. The glasses by his bedside lay untouched in their black case.
When he received a visit from Saku-san, a friend since childhood who now lived about two miles distant, my father merely turned glazed eyes in his direction. “Ah, Saku-san, is it?” he said. “Thanks for coming. I wish I was well like you. It’s all over for me.”
“You’re the lucky one,” Saku-san responded. “Here you are with two sons graduated—a little illness is nothing to complain about. Look at me, now. Wife dead, and no children. The best you can say for me is I’m alive. What pleasure’s mere good health, eh?”
A few days after Saku-san’s visit, my father was given the enema. He was delighted and grateful at how much better the doctor had made him feel, and his mood improved. He seemed to regain some of his will to live.
Perhaps swayed by this improvement, or hoping to boost him further, my mother proceeded to tell him about Sensei’s telegram, quite as if a position had already been found for me in Tokyo as my father wished. It made me cringe to sit there listening to her, but I couldn’t contradict her, so I held my peace.
My father looked happy.
“That’s excellent,” my brother-in-law remarked.
“Do you know yet what the position is?” asked my brother.
Now things had gone so far, I lost the courage to deny the story. I prevaricated with some vague reply, incomprehensible even to myself, and left the room.
CHAPTER 50
My father’s condition deteriorated to the point where the fatal blow seemed imminent, only to hover there precariously. Each night the family would go to sleep feeling that tomorrow might well be the day of reckoning.
He was completely free of the kind of pain that is a torture for others to witness—in this way at least, he was easy to nurse. We took care to ensure that someone was always taking his turn by the bedside, but the rest of us could usually settle down to sleep at a reasonable hour.
Once when I couldn’t get to sleep for some reason, I mistakenly thought I heard my father faintly groaning. I slipped out of bed in the middle of the night and went to check on him. That evening it was my mother’s turn to stay up with him. I found her asleep beside him, her head resting on her crooked arm. My father lay peacefully at her side, like one laid gently down inside a deep sleep. I tiptoed back to bed again.
I shared a bed under a mosquito net with my brother, while my sister’s husband, who was treated more as a guest, slept alone in a separate room.
“Poor Seki,” my brother said. Seki was our brother-in-law’s family name. “He’s caught here day after day, when he ought to be getting back.”
“But he can’t really be so busy, if he can stay on like this,” I said. “You’re the one who must be finding it difficult to stay so long.”
“There’s no help for it, is there? This isn’t an everyday matter, after all.”
So our conversation went as we lay there side by side. My brother believed, as did I, that our father was doomed, and this being so, we longed for it all to be over. Essentially we were awaiting our father’s death, but we were reluctant to express it that way. Yet each of us was well aware of what the other was thinking.
“He seems to be still hoping he’ll recover, doesn’t he?” my brother remarked.
This idea was not entirely unjustified. When neighbors came to visit him, my father always insisted on seeing them. He would then proceed to apologize that he hadn’t been able to invite them to my graduation celebration, sometimes adding that he’d make amends once he was better.
“It’s a good thing your celebration party was canceled, you know,” my brother remarked to me. “Mine was dreadful, remember?” His words prodded my memory, and I smiled wryly, thinking of that event’s alcohol-inflamed disorder. I had painful memories of the way my father had gone around forcing food and drink on everyone.
We two brothers were not terribly close. When we were little, we had fought a lot, and being the younger, I was constantly reduced to tears. In school our different choices of field of study clearly refl
ected our different characters. While I was at the university, and especially once I had come in contact with Sensei, I came to look on my distant brother as rather an animal. We had not met for a long time and lived very far apart, so both time and distance separated us.
But circumstances had at last brought us together again, and a brotherly affection sprang up naturally between us. The nature of the situation played a large part. There at the bedside of our dying father, my brother and I were reconciled.
“What do you plan to do now?” my brother asked me.
I responded with a question of a completely different order. “What’s the situation with the household property?”
“I’ve no idea. Father hasn’t said a thing about it yet. But as far as actual money goes, it won’t amount to much, I’m sure.”
As for my mother, she continued to fret over the awaited letter from Sensei, badgering me with reminders about it.
CHAPTER 51
“Who is this Sensei you keep talking about?” my brother asked.
“I told you about him the other day, remember?” I replied crossly, annoyed that he could so easily forget the answer to a question he himself had asked.
“Yes, I know what you said then.” He was implying that what I’d said didn’t explain it.
Personally, I felt no need to bother trying to explain Sensei to my brother. But I was angry. That’s just like him, I thought.
My brother was assuming that since I so evidently respected this man I honored with the name Sensei, he must be someone of distinction in the world, at the very least a professor at the university. What could be impressive about someone who had made no name for himself and did nothing?
This instinct of my brother was in complete accord with my father’s. But while my father had jumped to the conclusion that Sensei was living an idle life because he was incapable of doing anything, my brother spoke in terms that dismissed him as hopelessly lazing about despite his abilities.
“Egoists are worthless types. It’s sheer brazen laziness to spend your life doing nothing. A man’s talent amounts to nothing if he won’t set it to work and do all he can with it.”
I felt like retorting that my brother didn’t seem to understand the meaning of the word egoist, which he was bandying about.
“Still,” he added as an afterthought, “if this fellow can find you a position, it’s a fine thing. Father’s delighted at the prospect as well, you know.”
As for me, I couldn’t believe Sensei could do such a thing until he gave me a clear answer; nor did I have the courage to claim otherwise. But thanks to my mother’s announcement of her hasty conclusions, I could not suddenly turn around and deny it. My longing for a letter from Sensei needed no urging from her, and I prayed that when it came, it might somehow fulfill everyone’s hopes with word of a position that would make me a living. Faced with the expectations of my father, so close to death, my mother with her urgent desire that he should be somehow reassured, and my brother and his statements that a man wasn’t fully human unless he worked, and indeed all the other relatives, I found myself tormented by an issue that I privately cared nothing about.
Not long afterward my father vomited a strange yellow substance, and I recalled the danger that Sensei and his wife had spoken of.
“His stomach must be upset from being bedridden for so long,” my mother concluded. Tears came to my eyes to see how little she understood.
When my brother and I met in the sitting room, he said, “Did you hear?” He was referring to something the doctor had said to him as he was leaving.
I needed no explanation to understand its import.
My brother looked at me over his shoulder. “Would you like to come back home and manage the place?”
I could make no reply.
“Mother won’t be able to cope with it on her own,” he went on. Apparently he was perfectly happy to let me rot here in the dank and dreary countryside. “You can do all the reading you like in the country, and you wouldn’t have to work. It’d suit you down to the ground.”
“The elder son’s the one who ought to come back,” I said.
“How could I do that?” he said, curtly dismissing the suggestion. He was driven by the powerful urge to work in the wider world. “If you don’t want to do it, I suppose we could ask our uncle to help out, but someone will have to take Mother in.”
“The first big question is whether she’d be willing to leave here or not.”
Even while our father still lived, we were talking at cross-purposes about what would happen after his death.
CHAPTER 52
In his delirium my father sometimes spoke aloud.
“General Nogi fills me with shame,” he mumbled from time to time. “Mortified to think of it—no, I’ll be following His Majesty very soon too.”
These words disturbed my mother. She did her best to gather everyone at his bedside. That seemed to be what my father wanted, as whenever he was fully conscious, he constantly complained of loneliness.
He was particularly upset if he looked around and found no sign of my mother. “Where’s Omitsu?” he would ask, and even when he did not speak the question, it was evident in his eyes. I would often stand and go to call her. She would leave what she had begun to do and come to the sickroom, saying, “Is there anything I can do?” but sometimes he would simply gaze wordlessly at her. At other times he would talk about something quite irrelevant. Or he would surprise her by saying gently, “You’ve been very good to me, Omitsu.” At this my mother’s eyes would always fill with tears. Then, however, she would remember his earlier, healthy self and remark, “He sounds so tender now, but he was quite a tyrant in the old days, you know.”
She told the tale of how he had beaten her on the back with a broomstick. My brother and I had heard the story many times before, but now we listened with very different feelings, hearing in her words a precious recollection of one, as it were, already dead.
Though the dark shadow of death hovered before his eyes, my father still did not speak of how he wished his estate to be managed after death.
“Don’t you think we should ask while there’s still time?” my brother said, looking anxiously at me.
“Yes, I guess so,” I replied. I could see arguments both for and against bringing up the subject when he was so ill.
We decided in the end to take the question to our uncle before making a final decision, but he too scratched his head over the problem. “It would be a great pity if he died leaving things he wanted to say unsaid, but on the other hand, it doesn’t seem right to press things from our side.”
The question ended up bogged down in indecision. And then my father slipped into unconsciousness. My mother, as innocent as ever, mistook it for sleep, and was quite pleased. “It’s a relief for everyone around if he can sleep as well as this,” she said.
Occasionally my father would suddenly open his eyes and ask after one or another of us, always someone who had only just left his bedside. He seemed to have dark and light areas of consciousness, and the light part wove its way through the darkness like a discontinuous white thread, now there, now gone again. It was natural enough that my mother should confuse his comatose state for sleep.
Then his words grew tangled. Sentences he began would end in confusion, so that often his speech made no sense. Yet when he first began to speak, it was in a voice so strong it seemed incredible that it emerged from one on his deathbed. Meanwhile whenever we spoke to him, we had to raise our voices and bring our lips close to his ear.
“Does that feel good, when I cool your head?”
“Mm.”
The nurse and I changed his water pillow, then laid a fresh ice pack on his head, pressing it gently to the bald area above his forehead, until the sharp little fragments of chopped ice inside the bag settled with a harsh rustle.
Just then my brother came in from the corridor and silently handed me a postal item. My right hand on the ice pack, I took it with my left, and as my ha
nd received the weight, I registered puzzled surprise.
It was considerably heavier than the usual letter. It wasn’t in a normal-size envelope; indeed, it was too bulky to fit in one. The package was wrapped in a piece of white writing paper, carefully pasted down. As soon as I took it from my brother, I realized it had been sent by registered mail. Turning it over, I saw Sensei’s name, written in a careful hand. Busy as I was just then, I couldn’t open the letter right away, so I slipped it into the breast of my kimono.
CHAPTER 53
That day my father’s condition seemed particularly bad. At one point, when I left the room to go to the toilet, I ran into my brother in the corridor.
“Where are you off to?” he asked sharply, challenging me almost like a watch guard. “We must try to be constantly with him. He seems in bad shape.”
I thought so too and returned to the sickroom without touching the letter I had tucked away.
My father opened his eyes and asked my mother to tell him who was present. She carefully named us one by one, and at each name he nodded. If he failed to nod, she raised her voice and repeated the name, asking if he understood.
“Thank you all very much,” my father said with careful formality, then sank back into unconsciousness. Everyone gathered around his bed watched him in silence for a while. Finally someone got up and went into the next room. Then another left. I was the third to leave at last and go off to my room. I intended to open the letter I had earlier slipped into my breast. I could, of course, easily have done this at the bedside, but the letter was evidently so long that I couldn’t have read it all then and there, so I stole some special time to myself to devote to the task.
I tore roughly at the strong, fibrous paper that wrapped it. When I got it open, what emerged was a document written in a clear hand on ruled manuscript paper that had been folded in quarters to post. I bent back the kinks of the folds to straighten the pages for ease of reading.
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