Kokoro

by Sōseki Natsume

  But even in this extremity I could not forget about myself. My eyes fell on a letter lying on the desk. It was addressed to me, as I had guessed. Frantically, I tore open the seal. But I was not prepared for what I read there. I had assumed that this letter would say things deeply painful for me to read, and I was terrified at how Okusan and Ojōsan would despise me if they saw it. A quick glance instantly relieved me, however. Saved! I thought. (In fact, of course, it was only my reputation that was saved, but how others saw me was a matter of immense importance just then.)

  The letter was simple and contained nothing specific. He was committing suicide, he wrote, because he was weak and infirm of purpose, and because the future held nothing for him. With a few brief words he thanked me for all I had done for him. As a final request, he asked me to see to his affairs after his death. He also asked me to apologize to Okusan for the trouble he was causing her and to inform his family. The letter was a series of simple statements of essential matters; the only thing missing was any mention of Ojōsan. I read it to the end and understood that K had deliberately avoided mentioning her.

  But it was the letter’s final words that pierced my heart most keenly. With the last of the brush’s ink, he had added that he should have died sooner and did not know why he had lived so long.

  I folded the letter with trembling hands and slid it back into its envelope. I replaced it carefully on the desk so that it would be clearly visible to the others. Then I turned and at last I saw the blood that had spurted over the sliding doors.

  CHAPTER 103

  Impulsively I lifted K’s head a little, cradling it in both hands. I wanted to take in for a moment the sight of his dead face. But when I peered up at the face that hung there, I instantly released him. It was not simply horror at the sight. His head felt appallingly heavy. I stared down for a while at the cold ears I had touched, and at the closely cropped head of thick hair, so normal and familiar. I had not the least urge to cry. My only feeling was fear. This was not simply a commonplace fright stimulated by the scene before my eyes. What I felt was a deep terror of my fate, a fate that spoke to me from the abrupt chill of my friend’s body.

  I returned to my room in a stupor and began to pace. Pointless though it is, my brain instructed me, for now you must just keep moving. I had to do something, I thought, and simultaneously I was thinking, There’s nothing I can do. I could only turn and turn in the room, like a caged bear.

  A few times I had the impulse to go in and wake Okusan. But this was quickly checked by the thought that it would be wrong to show a woman such a horrifying sight. I was paralyzed by a fierce resolve that I must not shock either her or, above all, her daughter. And so I would return to my pacing and circling.

  At some point I lit my lamp, and from time to time I glanced at the clock. Nothing was more tediously slow than that clock. I had no idea exactly when I had woken, but it was definitely sometime close to daybreak. As I turned and turned in the room, waiting desperately for dawn to come, I was tortured by the sensation that this black night might never end.

  We were in the habit of rising before seven, since many of our lectures began at eight. This meant that the maid got up around six. It was not yet six when I went to wake her that day. My footsteps woke Okusan, who pointed out to me that it was Sunday. “If you’re awake,” I said to Okusan, “perhaps you could come to my room a moment.” She followed me, a kimono coat draped over her nightdress. I quickly closed the far doors to K’s room. Then I said in a low voice, “Something dreadful has happened.”

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “Don’t be shocked,” I said, indicating the next-door room with my chin. She turned pale. “K has committed suicide.”

  Okusan stood as though paralyzed, staring mutely at me. I suddenly found myself sinking to my knees before her, head lowered in contrition. “I’m so sorry. It’s all my fault,” I said. “Now this unforgivable thing has happened to you and Ojōsan.”

  I had had no thought of saying any such thing before I faced her—only when I saw her expression did the words spring to my lips, unbidden. Consider it an apology directed to the two ladies, but it was really meant for K, whom it could no longer reach. Those impulsive words of remorse were spoken beyond my will, directly from my natural being.

  Fortunately for me, Okusan did not read my words so deeply. Though ashen, she said comfortingly, “What could you possibly have done about something so unforeseen?” But her face was carved deep with shock and dread, the muscles rigid.

  CHAPTER 104

  Though I pitied Okusan, I now stood again and opened the sliding doors that I had so recently closed. K’s lamp had burned out, and the room was sunk in almost total darkness. I went back and picked up my own lamp, then turned at the doorway to look at her. Cowering behind me, she peered into the little room beyond. But she made no move to enter. “Leave things as they are,” she said, “and open the shutters.”

  And now Okusan became the levelheaded, practical officer’s wife. She sent me to the doctor’s home, then to the police. She gave all the orders, and allowed no one into the room until the correct procedure was completed.

  K had slit his carotid artery with a small knife and died immediately. It was his only wound. The blood on the paper doors, which I had glimpsed by the dreamlike half-light of his lamp, had spurted from his neck. Now I gazed at it again, in the clarity of daylight. I was stunned at the violent force that pulses the blood through us.

  The two of us set to work and cleaned up his room with all the skill and efficiency we could muster. Luckily, most of his blood had been absorbed by the bedding and the floor matting was not much harmed, so our task was relatively easy. Together we carried his corpse into my room and laid it out on its side in a natural sleeping position. I then went off and sent a telegram to his family.

  When I returned, incense was burning beside the pillow. As I entered the room, that funereal scent assailed my nose, and I discovered mother and daughter sitting there wreathed in its smoke. This was the first time I had seen Ojōsan since the night before. She was weeping. Okusan’s eyes too were red. I had had no thought of tears until that moment, but now at last I was able to let a sensation of sorrow pervade me. Words cannot express what a comfort that was. Thanks to this grief, a touch of balm momentarily soothed my poor heart, which had been clenched tight around its fear and pain.

  Wordlessly, I seated myself beside them. Okusan urged me to offer incense before the corpse. I did so, then returned to sit quietly again. Ojōsan did not speak to me. Occasionally she exchanged a few words with her mother, but they concerned only the immediate situation. She did not yet have the where-withal to speak of K as he had been in life. I was glad at least that she had been spared the horrible scene of the night before. I trembled to imagine how such a terrible sight could destroy the loveliness of one so young and beautiful. This thought haunted me, even when my own fear raised the very hairs on my head. It brought the kind of shudder one would feel in setting mercilessly upon a beautiful, innocent flower with a whip.

  When K’s father and brother arrived, I told them my own views on where I thought he should be buried. K and I had often walked around the Zōshigaya cemetery together, and he was extremely fond of the place. I had once promised him half-jokingly that if he died, I would bury him there. I did ask myself what good it would do me to fulfill this pledge to him now. But I wanted him buried close by, for I was determined to return to his grave every month for the rest of my life and kneel before it in renewed penitence and shame. They let me have my way, no doubt acknowledging the important role I had played in the care of their estranged brother and son.

  CHAPTER 105

  On the way back from K’s funeral, one of his friends asked me why I thought he had killed himself. This question had been dogging me ever since his suicide. Okusan, Ojōsan, K’s father and brother, acquaintances whom I had informed, even unknown newspaper reporters—all had asked me the same thing. Every time someone asked, my consci
ence smarted painfully, and I heard behind the words a voice say, Quick, confess that it was you who killed him.

  My answer to everyone was the same. I simply repeated the words of his final letter to me and made no further statement. The fellow who had asked me on our way back from the funeral, and received the same answer, now took from his pocket a newspaper cutting and handed it to me. I read the piece he indicated as we walked on. It said that K had killed himself from despair at being disinherited. I folded the page and returned it to him without comment. He told me that another paper had reported that K had gone mad and killed himself. I had been too preoccupied to look at newspapers and so was quite ignorant of all this, although I had all along been concerned about what they might write. Above all, I feared that something unpleasant or disturbing for Okusan and Ojōsan might appear there. It particularly tortured me to think that Ojōsan might be so much as mentioned in passing. I asked this friend if anything else had been written in the papers. These two references were all he had seen, he told me.

  Soon after this I moved into the house where I still live. Both Okusan and Ojōsan disliked the thought of staying in their old house, while every evening I found myself reliving the memory of that night. After some discussion, therefore, we decided to find somewhere else.

  After two months I graduated from the university. Six months later Ojōsan and I finally married. On the face of things I could congratulate myself on all having gone according to plan. Both Okusan and Ojōsan seemed wonderfully happy, and so indeed was I. But a black shadow hovered behind my happiness. This very happiness, it seemed to me, could well be a fuse that drew the flame of my life toward a bitter fate.

  Once married, Ojōsan—but I should now begin to call her “my wife”—my wife for some reason suggested that we visit K’s grave together. This jolted me. Why had she suddenly come up with such an idea? I inquired. She replied that it would surely please K if we visited him together. I stared hard at her guileless face, until she asked why I was looking at her like that.

  I agreed to her request, and together we went to Zōshigaya. I poured water over K’s fresh grave and washed it. My wife placed incense and flowers before it. We both bowed our heads and placed our hands together in prayer. No doubt she wished to receive K’s blessing from beyond the grave by conveying to him the news of our marriage. As for me, the words I was to blame, I was to blame were going around and around in my head.

  My wife stroked K’s headstone and declared it a fine one. It was not particularly impressive, but she probably felt the need to praise it because I had personally gone to the stonemason and chosen it. Privately, I balanced in my mind the images of this new grave, my new wife, and K’s new white bones lying buried at my feet, and a sense of the cold mockery of fate crept over me. I vowed then that I would never come here with her again.

  CHAPTER 106

  My feelings toward my dead friend remained unchanged. I had feared all along that this would be so. Even my wedding, that longed-for event, was not without a secret disquiet. We humans cannot know what lies ahead, however, and I hoped that our marriage might perhaps be the key to a change in my state of mind that would lead to a new life. But as I faced my wife day after day, my fragile hope crumbled in the face of cold reality. When I was with her, K would suddenly loom threateningly in my mind. She stood between us, in effect, and her very presence bound K and me indissolubly together. She was everything I could have wanted, yet because of this unwitting role she played, I found myself withdrawing from her. She, of course, immediately registered this. She felt it but could not understand it. From time to time she would demand to know why I was so morose, or whether I was somehow displeased with her. As a rule, I managed to reassure her by dismissing her doubts with a laugh, but occasionally it led to some outburst. “You hate me, don’t you?” she would cry, or I would have to suffer reproachful accusations of hiding something from her. This was always torture for me.

  Again and again I would decide to summon my courage and confess everything to her. But at the last minute some power not my own would always press me back. You know me well enough to need no explanation, I believe, but I will write here what must be said. I had not the slightest urge in those days to present myself to her in a false light. If I had confessed to her with the same sincerity and humility of heart with which I confessed to my dead friend, I know she would have wept tears of joy and forgiven all. So it was not sheer self-interest that kept me mute. No, I failed to confess for the simple reason that I could not bring myself to contaminate her memory of the past with the tiniest hint of darkness. It was agony for me to contemplate this pure creature sullied in any way, you understand.

  A year passed, and still I could not forget. My heart was in a constant state of agitation. To escape it, I plunged into my books. I began to study with ferocious energy. One day, I thought hopefully, I would produce the fruits of this learning for the world to see. But it was no use—I could take no pleasure in deceiving myself like this, in creating some artificial goal and forcing myself to anticipate its achievement. After a while, I could no longer bury my heart in books. Once more I found myself surveying the world from a distance, arms folded.

  My wife apparently interpreted my state of mind as a kind of ennui, a slackness of spirit that came from not having to worry about day-to-day survival. This was understandable. Her mother had enough money to allow them both to make do, and my own financial situation meant I had no need to work. I had always taken money for granted, I admit. But the main reason for my immobility lay quite elsewhere. True enough, my uncle’s betrayal had made me fiercely determined never to be beholden to anyone again—but back then my distrust of others had only reinforced my sense of self. The world might be rotten, I felt, but I at least am a man of integrity. But this faith in myself had been shattered on account of K. I suddenly understood that I was no different from my uncle, and the knowledge made me reel. What could I do? Others were already repulsive to me, and now I was repulsive even to myself.

  CHAPTER 107

  No longer able to forget myself in a living tomb of books, I tried instead to drown my soul in drink. I cannot say I like alcohol, but I am someone who can drink if I choose to, and I set about obliterating my heart by drinking all I could. This was a puerile way out, of course, and it very quickly led to an even greater despair with the world. In the midst of a drunken stupor, I would come to my senses and realize what an idiot I was to try to fool myself like this. Then my vision and understanding grew clear, and I sat shivering and sober. There were desolate times when even the poor disguise of drunkenness failed to work, no matter how I drank. And each time I sought pleasure in drink, I emerged more depressed than ever. My darling wife and her mother were unavoidably witness to all this and naturally did their best to make sense of it as they could.

  I gathered that my wife’s mother sometimes said some rather unpleasant things about me to her, although she never passed them on to me. My wife could not resist being critical herself, however. She never spoke strongly, of course, and I very rarely became provoked to the point where I lost my temper. She would simply ask me from time to time to tell her honestly if there was something about her that bothered me. “Stop drinking,” she would say, “you’ll ruin yourself.” Sometimes she wept and declared, “You’ve become a changed person.” But worst of all was when she added, “You wouldn’t have changed like this if K were still alive.” I agreed that that might well be true, but I was filled with sorrow at the gulf that lay between our separate understandings of this remark. And yet I still felt no urge to explain everything to her.

  Sometimes I apologized to her, the morning after I had come home late and drunk. She would laugh, or else fall silent, and occasionally she wept. Whatever her reaction, I hated myself. In apologizing to her, I was actually apologizing to myself. Finally I gave up drinking, less because of my wife’s admonishments than because of self-disgust.

  I gave up drink, but I remained disinclined to do anything else. I r
esorted to books again, to pass the time. But my reading was aimless—I simply read each book and tossed it aside. Whenever my wife asked what the point of my study was, I responded with a bitter smile. In my heart, though, I was saddened that the person I loved and trusted most in the world could not understand me. But it’s within your power to help her understand, I thought, and yet you’re too cowardly to do so, and I grew still sadder. Desolation filled me. There were many times when I felt I lived utterly alone, remote and cut off from the world around me.

  All this time the cause of K’s death continued to obsess me. At the time it happened, the single thought of love had engrossed me, and no doubt this preoccupation influenced my simplistic understanding of the event. I had immediately concluded that K killed himself because of a broken heart. But once I could look back on it in a calmer frame of mind, it struck me that his motive was surely not so simple and straightforward. Had it resulted from a fatal collision between reality and ideals? Perhaps—but this was still not quite it. Eventually, I began to wonder whether it was not the same unbearable loneliness that I now felt that had brought K to his decision. I shuddered. Like a chill wind, the presentiment that I might be treading the same path as K had walked began from time to time to send shivers through me.

  CHAPTER 108

  Time passed, and my wife’s mother became ill. The doctor who examined her told us it was incurable. I nursed her devotedly, both for her own sake and for the sake of the wife I loved. In larger terms, however, I did so also for the sake of humanity itself. I had long felt an urgent need to act in some way, but I remained at an impasse, sitting idle as the years passed. Isolated as I was from the human world, I felt for the first time that I was doing something of real worth. I was sustained by what I can only describe as a sense of atonement for past sin.