Similarly, in this phase of his life he considered the role assigned to him by his father in the annual airing of the family heirlooms a particularly fascinating opportunity. Seated on a damp rock in front of the storehouse, feeling the cool breeze that blew through the building, he pored with great curiosity over illustrated maps of famous places in Edo and a gazetteer entitled The Fine-Grained Sands of Edo[59] that had passed through several generations of his family. Then, sitting cross-legged in the middle of the parlor, where even the mats were hot, he would pack the camphor crystals[60] brought to him by the maid into little paper cones of the sort doctors use to dispense medicinal powders. From childhood Sōsuke had a fixed set of associations linking the strong aroma of camphor with the sweaty dog days of summer, earthenware moxa burners, and long-winged, fork-tailed kites lazily circling overhead in a clear blue sky.
While thus caught up in one thing or another, Sōsuke was overtaken by the approach of autumn.[61] Leading up to the traditional watershed mark, the two hundred and tenth day in the old calendar,[62] the winds blew and rains fell. Clouds looking like splotches of thin black ink moved ceaselessly across the sky. In the space of two or three days the temperature fell precipitously. The time had come for Sōsuke to bind up his wicker trunk with strong hemp rope and prepare to return to Kyoto.
In the meantime, however, he had not forgotten the travel plans agreed to with Yasui. When he arrived in Tokyo two months earlier he had at first simply bided his time, but as the departure date approached and there was still no word from Yasui, he became concerned. Since they had parted ways in Kyoto, Sōsuke had not received so much as a postcard. He sent off a letter to Yasui’s old home in Fukui; there was no reply. He then thought of making inquiries in Yokohama, only to realize he had neglected to ask Yasui for his address there. And so his hands were tied.
On the eve of Sōsuke’s departure his father took him aside and, after handing him a sum of money that included, as his son had requested, something extra for the side trip on the way back to Kyoto, counseled him, “Now, be sure to watch your spending.” Sōsuke had listened to this well-worn piece of parental advice in the fashion typical of young sons. “I won’t be seeing you until you come home again next year,” his father added. “Take very good care of yourself.”
But when the time for him to return came around the next year, it was no longer possible for Sōsuke to go home. And the next time he did return to Tokyo his father already lay cold in death. Even now, Sōsuke could not recall the scene of their final parting without feeling a stab of remorse.
At the very last moment before he left for Kyoto, he had received a proper, sealed letter from Yasui, who wrote to the effect that while he had fully intended to stick to their plan of traveling together, something had come up that required him to return right away. He concluded with the hope that they could get together again in a leisurely fashion back in Kyoto. Sticking the letter into his suit pocket, Sōsuke boarded the train.
When he reached Okitsu, where the two friends were to have stopped together, Sōsuke exited the station and walked alone straight down the town’s single thoroughfare toward Seikenji. Now that it was September and the summer season over, the flow of vacationers had ebbed, leaving the inn relatively tranquil. Sōsuke stretched out prone in a room with a view of the sea and wrote a few lines on a postcard to Yasui, which included the words: “Since you did not join me, here I am all by myself in this place.”
The following day, still sticking to their original plan, he went, again by himself, to view the pines of Miho and to visit Ryūgeji, a temple associated with the Tokugawa family, making an effort all the while to store up impressions that could later be revived in conversation with Yasui. Perhaps it was the weather, or perhaps it was the absence of the companion he had counted on, but Sōsuke found little pleasure in viewing the pine-covered beaches or making the ascent to the temple. Lounging about at the inn was even more tedious. Stripping off the yukata provided by the inn and draping it along with the short sash over a railing, he quickly left Okitsu.
On his first day back in Kyoto, Sōsuke, tired from the overnight train trip and busy with tidying up afterward, did not so much as step into the sunlit streets. When, on the following day, he got around to visiting the campus, he found the faculty not much in evidence and the students still few and far between. Strangest of all, Yasui, after so emphatically announcing his intent to return to Kyoto on a date that fell some days earlier, was nowhere to be seen. Perplexed, Sōsuke made a detour on his way home to Yasui’s lodgings, which were located next to the well-wooded and well-watered precincts of Kamo Shrine. Before the vacation, in resorting to this out-of-the-way retreat, which might as well have been a country village, Yasui had stressed the need for some quiet backwater where he could properly study. The house he had chosen was flanked on two sides by weathered earthen walls that lent it an old-fashioned aura. The owner, Sōsuke learned from Yasui, had been a cleric on the staff of Kamo Shrine. His wife, a forty-year-old woman who wielded the Kyoto dialect quite expressively, saw to Yasui’s needs.
“‘Seeing to my needs’ consists in her dropping off a lousy meal three times a day,” Yasui had complained to Sōsuke shortly after moving in. Sōsuke was already acquainted from previous visits with the landlady responsible for the so-called lousy meals, and she, for her part, remembered who he was. No sooner had she caught sight of him than, after an elaborate greeting in her mellifluous Kyoto idiom, she took the words out of his mouth by asking him about Yasui’s whereabouts. Evidently she had heard nothing from him since he left for home at the beginning of summer. Sōsuke mulled over this surprise all the way back to his lodging.
For the next week or so, on every visit to campus, he felt a presentiment as he entered the lecture hall: Would he catch sight of Yasui’s face today? Would he chance to hear his voice? Each day he returned home with the same vague but palpable sense of dissatisfaction. Indeed, by the third or fourth day, viewing himself as having some responsibility concerning such things, since it was to him Yasui had clearly communicated his intention to return early, Sōsuke began to worry about his safety. He made inquiries about Yasui’s movements, asking every classmate who had been at all friendly with him, but no one knew a thing. One of them did say that just the night before, in the midst of the crowds around Shijō, he had seen a man wearing a yukata who looked a lot like Yasui. Sōsuke did not consider it likely that it was, in fact, his friend. The very day after Sōsuke gleaned this bit of information, however, that is, an entire week after he had arrived back in Kyoto, Yasui himself burst in on him at his lodging dressed just as the classmate had described.
As Sōsuke gazed for the first time in a long while at the figure of his friend, not yet dressed for school and with straw hat in hand, he had the sensation that something new had been superimposed on this face since he had last seen it before vacation. His black hair had been slicked down with pomade and parted down the middle with ostentatious precision. In fact, Yasui announced, byway of an explanation for showing up out of the blue, he had just come from a barbershop.
That evening the two of them spent more than an hour engrossed in conversation. The peculiar mannerisms in Yasui’s speech remained unchanged: a certain gravity in his enunciation; a reserved tone, as if holding back from expressing himself too freely in deference to Sōsuke; the verbal tic of “never-the-less . . .” which he overused as before. And yet in the course of their conversation he said not a word about why he had left Yokohama ahead of Sōsuke, nor explained where he had stopped en route, thus arriving in Kyoto later than his friend. He did mention that it was only three or four days ago that he had finally returned, and that he had yet to settle in again at the lodging he had moved into before the summer break.
“Where are you staying, then?” Sōsuke asked. Yasui named an inn in the Sanjō district. It was a third-rate establishment. Sōsuke knew of it.
“What are you doing in a place like that?” Sōsuke pressed him further. “Are you going to
stay there much longer?”
At first Yasui replied vaguely that circumstances made it convenient to stay there for the time being. But then he announced a new development to his astonished friend: “I’m thinking of getting away from boardinghouse life . . . maybe I’ll rent a small house.”
Within the week, as good as his word, Yasui was the master of a house in a tranquil locale close to the university. In addition to the gloomy darkness common to all Kyoto houses, this cramped rental had pillars and latticework painted a darkish red color seemingly calculated to intensify the fusty look of the place. Near the front gate was a single willow tree; on whose property it stood was hard to say. Sōsuke observed its long branches whipping about in the breeze, practically touching the eaves of Yasui’s house. The garden, unlike those of Tokyo, was laid out with some order. Befitting a region where rocks were easy to come by, a good-size boulder had been set in the garden directly opposite the parlor. Around its base spread a cool, luxurious carpet of moss. Behind the house stood an empty toolshed, its threshold rotted out, and beyond that, the neighbor’s bamboo thicket, all of which was visible to anyone visiting the toilet.
Sōsuke first visited the house at the beginning of the term, just a few days shy of October. As he could recall to this day, it had still been so hot that he was carrying a black umbrella around as a parasol. Peering through the lattice door as he closed his umbrella, he had caught sight of the fleeting outline of a woman dressed in a broad-striped yukata. The ground-level area inside, made of hard-packed earth, extended to the rear of the house; from the entranceway, one could dimly see all the way back. Sōsuke stood there until the retreating figure in the yukata vanished through the back door. Then he slid open the lattice. Yasui himself appeared at the entrance to greet him.
The two went into the parlor, where they sat talking for a while, but at no point did the woman Sōsuke had spied so much as look in on them. She did not speak, nor make any kind of noise. The house was not at all large, so she must have been in an adjoining room, yet it had been quite as if there were no one there besides the two of them. This silent wraith of a woman was Oyone.
Yasui chatted volubly about his native region, about Tokyo, and about his courses this term. About Oyone, however, he spoke not a word. For his part, Sōsuke lacked the nerve to ask. And so the subject went unmentioned that day.
When the two met the next day, the woman was still very much on Sōsuke’s mind. Yasui, meanwhile, said not a word about her, and acted as if there were nothing out of the ordinary. For all the unrestrained conversations these two fast friends had entered into, with the easy, trusting candor of youth, Yasui kept the door shut on this one topic. And for all Sōsuke’s curiosity, it was not strong enough for him to try forcing it open. Thus a whole week went by in which the never-mentioned woman remained a barrier lodged between the consciousnesses of the two friends.
That Sunday Sōsuke called on Yasui again. Prompted by some business connected with an organization they both belonged to and having nothing to do with the woman, the visit was intended to be brief. No sooner had Sōsuke been seated in the same spot in the parlor, however, and begun gazing out at the small plum tree next to the garden hedge, were the same sensations he had experienced on his previous visit vividly evoked. Today, too, the house around him was perfectly silent. He could not help imagining the dim figure of the young woman hidden within this silence. At the same time he felt no presentiment that she might actually reveal her presence, something that seemed just as unlikely as before.
In the midst of these ruminations Sōsuke suddenly found himself being introduced to Oyone. In contrast to the bold-striped yukata worn last time, her attire today, when she came in from the next room, suggested that she was either on her way out to or just back from an errand. This had taken Sōsuke by surprise. But there was nothing eye-catching in the woman’s dress, either in the color of her kimono or the sheen of her obi, as might turn his surprise into astonishment. Moreover, on this first meeting Oyone showed little of the alluring shyness common among young women. Indeed, she appeared to be a most ordinary person, albeit more tranquil and taciturn than the average. This woman was so composed, Sōsuke could see, that it would make no difference in her behavior whether she was off somewhere by herself or in the company of others, and he concluded it was not necessarily out of shyness that she avoided mingling with people.
Yasui introduced Oyone with the words: “This is my little sister.” As she sat directly across from Sōsuke and took part in a desultory conversation for a few minutes, he could not detect even a hint of provincial speech.
“Have you been in Fukui until recently?” he asked, but before she could reply Yasui broke in, “No, in Yokohama, for a long time now.”
It soon became apparent that Yasui and Oyone planned to go shopping in the city center that day, which was why Oyone had changed out of her everyday clothes and, in spite of the heat, wore a fresh pair of white socks. Sōsuke felt embarrassed at having intruded on them at the moment they were about to leave the house.
“We’ve only just moved in, you see, and we find something else we need every single day,” Yasui said with an apologetic laugh. “We have to go into town a couple of times a week.”
“I’ll walk out to the street with you,” said Sōsuke, immediately getting to his feet. Then, at Yasui’s suggestion, he took a moment to look around the house. After taking in the likes of a square charcoal brazier with a tin ash pan, a cheap-looking brass tea kettle in the next room, and an oddly brand-new wooden bucket next to the ancient sink in the kitchen, he made his way back through the house and out to the front gate. Yasui padlocked the gate and ran off to entrust the key to a neighbor. While Sōsuke and Oyone were waiting they exchanged pleasantries.
Years later, he could still recall the words that had been exchanged during those three or four minutes. These amounted to no more than the simple words of greeting any man might utter to any woman in an effort to be sociable—words that, if one were to describe them, might be said to be like water: pale and shallow. Sōsuke could not even have guessed the number of times he had uttered phrases of just this sort to complete strangers and passersby on the paths of everyday life.
Each time he recalled this exceedingly brief conversation word for word, he had to admit to himself how insipid, how virtually devoid of all color it had been. He could only marvel, then, at how those first, colorless murmurings had led to a future for the both of them dyed with the brightest of reds. All these years later, their lives no longer glowed with such a vivid color; in the natural course of things, the passion that had inflamed them had subsided into darker embers. Whenever he looked back on those early days, he cherished his memory of the brilliant history that had been launched by those innocuous words; at the same time he trembled at the power that fate could wield by transforming so casual an encounter into such a dramatic event.
Sōsuke recalled how, as the two of them stood before a mud wall outside the gate, the upper half of their shadows had been cast at an exaggerated angle against the surface. He recalled Oyone’s shadow there on the wall, topped off by an irregularly shaped cone where her parasol had obscured her head. He recalled how mercilessly the early-autumn sun, already beginning its decline, had beat down on them. He recalled, too, that when Oyone, parasol in hand, moved into the not very cool shade of the willow tree, he had stepped back in order to frame with his gaze both the purple of her parasol with its fringe of white and the only slightly faded green of the willow branches.
Now, whenever he thought back on that day, everything remained clear to him. Nothing extraordinary had happened. They waited until Yasui reappeared from behind the wall, then the three of them headed toward town. The two men walked shoulder to shoulder while Oyone, who was wearing loose-fitting sandals, fell slightly behind. The conversation was more or less confined to the men, and was in any case cut short when a bit farther on Sōsuke parted ways with the pair and returned home.
Yet the impressions made o
n him that day stayed with him for a long while. At home again, in the bath, then later, when seated by the lamp, the image of Yasui and Oyone, like figures in a flat, brightly colored print, repeatedly flashed before his mind’s eye. That was not all; when he bedded down for the night he began to wonder if Oyone was in fact, as she had been introduced, Yasui’s sister. Although, short of putting the question directly to Yasui, there was no way to resolve these doubts, he wasted no time jumping to his own conclusion. Reflecting as he lay there on the way that the two interacted, there was plenty of room for such a conclusion, he decided, and smiled to himself. Then he sensed how absurd it was to prolong his idle speculation on the matter. Finally he got up and blew out the lamp, which he had left burning.
Sōsuke was far too friendly with Yasui to let so much time pass between meetings that his memories could gradually fade away until they left no trace. Besides being together every day on campus, they continued to visit each other, as they had before the vacation. When Sōsuke visited Yasui it did not always happen, however, that Oyone came out to greet him. On roughly one out of three visits she would not appear, reverting instead to the totally silent presence she had maintained on his first visit. But this did not ultimately prevent them from becoming quite friendly; before long they were on good enough terms to joke with each other.
The Gate Page 17