by Mori Ogai
Ishihara said something to me, and I heard it but was not listening. No doubt it was an explanation of his conical volumes and their inspiration in Okada ’s coat. Ishihara also looked at the woman, but she registered as nothing more than a pretty girl, and he did not seem to find much interest in it. He kept on speaking about something. “I explained the knack to it, and it is pretty unassailable, but the two of you really have no practice, and I didn’t think you could pull it off when it came down to it. I had to find a way to distract the two of you from what was happening, and that was the inspiration for the cone. It could have been anything though. It ended up being geometry. Regardless of the topic, though, it worked well enough. The both of you were so concerned with your equations that you were able to get by the police with an air of unbefangen about us. It worked.”
The three of us turned east at the Iwasaki mansion. It was a narrow street, one a cart could barely pass through, so we were out of trouble for the moment. Ishihara unlatched himself from Okada and walked ahead of us, showing us the way. I stole one glance backwards, but the woman was no longer there.
* * *
Okada and I stayed at Ishihara ’s until rather late that night. We had sake and goose, and Ishihara seemed pleased with it all. Okada’s impending journey was a topic the two of us considered private, so the conversation turned instead to Ishihara and Okada’s grade point averages and their competitive spirits.
When we returned to the Kamijo the two of us were exhausted, and slightly drunk, so we split ways there and talked no more that evening. The next day, when I returned from my classes, Okada was already gone.
Like this story of the single protruding nail producing ever larger effects, that miso-braised mackerel showing up on the Kamijo plates ended up forever separating Okada and Otama, and their stares and greetings amounted to nothing.
That is not the whole story, but what remains undisclosed does not belong to “Gan”, and so it will not be spoken of here.
I sit here writing out this story, but, trying now to count it on my fingers, I see that already thirty-five years have passed since its occurrence. I heard half of the story from Okada over the course of our friendship, but the other half was heard much later, after I unintentionally became acquainted with Otama myself. It was similar to a stereoscope, with its two pictures. After having spent much of my life with only one of the pictures, I now possessed the other, and viewed together they became three-dimensional. They became this very book you hold. Now, many of my readers may ask, “How did you come to be acquainted with Otama? How did she come to tell you these things?” My only answer is that such topics lay beyond the concerns of the current story. I would, however, discourage the reader from venturing any unfounded guesses.
GAN
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First published paperback edition by One Peace Books, Inc. in 2013
Author Ogai Mori
Translated by Glenn Anderson
Cover Design Shimpachi Inoue
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