The Columbia Anthology of Modern Japanese Literature: From Restoration to Occupation, 1868-1945: vol. 1 (Modern Asian Literature Series)

by J. Thomas Rimer

  “No, on the contrary. I should be able to do my work there in the mountains. . . .”

  We talked about the mountain district where the sanitarium was located. Before we knew it, our conversation dropped to Father’s tree pruning. Our sympathy for each other was enhanced by such discursive talk. . . .

  “Is Setsuko up, I wonder?” I asked casually after a bit.

  “Yes. I think she’s up. Go ahead. Don’t worry about me. That way, . . .” he said, pointing at the garden gate with the hand holding the clippers. I pushed through the shrubbery and, with some difficulty, pushed open the ivy-tangled gate. From the garden I went toward the annex housing the sickroom that until recently had served as a studio.

  Setsuko seemed to know that I had come to the house, but she did not expect me to enter from the garden. She wore a brightly colored jacket over her nightgown. She was lying on a couch, her hands toying with an unfamiliar hat, a hat with a narrow ribbon on it.

  As I came through the French doors and saw her, she noticed me. Automatically she started to rise but then fell back and lay there, turning her face to me, watching and smiling a bit sheepishly.

  “Are you up?” I called out from the door as I dropped my shoes unceremoniously.

  “I thought I would get up, but I got tired right away.”

  She spoke, but with a feeble gesture betraying her fatigue and without another word, she tossed the hat she had been toying with offhandedly at the dressing table beside her. The hat fell short of the table and onto the floor. I approached, bent over to pick it up, and my head almost collided with her toes. Taking the hat in my hands, I toyed with it as she had done.

  “What were you doing with the hat?” I asked.

  “Dad bought it for me yesterday, but I don’t know when I’ll be able to wear it. . . . Funny of Father, wasn’t it?”

  “That’s your father’s diagnosis? He’s really a good father, isn’t he? . . . Try it on, won’t you?” Half in jest I made as if to put it on her head.

  “Don’t do that. . . .”

  As she spoke she rose up halfway, trying in her annoyance to ward it off. With a weak smile of apology and as if she had just thought of it, she started to smooth her disheveled hair with her conspicuously emaciated hands. These gestures, so natural and casual to a young woman, gave me a breathless sense of sensual charm as if she were caressing me. Without thinking, I had to look away.

  I put the hat that I held in my hands onto the dressing table, but I had to keep my eyes averted in silence as if I had thought of something.

  “Are you angry?” she asked, looking at me anxiously.

  “No,” I said and looked back at her without continuing the conversation, but then I added abruptly, “Although your father said so, do you really want to go to a sanitarium?”

  “Well, even if I do, I don’t know when I will get any better. If I can get better quickly, I’ll go anywhere. But . . .”

  “What’s that? What are you trying to say?”

  “It’s nothing.”

  “Even if it’s nothing, can’t you try to say it? . . . You won’t say it in any case. Shall I say it? How about it if I can go with you?”

  “That’s not it,” she said quickly, interrupting me.

  Despite this, I continued talking in a rather anxious tone, becoming more serious than at first. “. . . No, you say it’s all right if I don’t come, but I’ll come along anyway. It’s how I feel. It’s that I’m worried. . . . Since before we met, I’ve dreamed of a life together with a sweet girl like you somewhere in the lonely mountains. Didn’t I confide my dream to you long ago? When we talked about the mountain hut and I asked whether we could live there together in the mountains, didn’t you laugh innocently? . . . Now with the talk of your going to a sanitarium, I thought your heart was unwittingly moved by that very idea. . . . Isn’t that so?”

  She smiled broadly as she listened in silence.

  “I don’t remember anything about that,” she said flatly. Then staring at me with a sympathetic glance, she added, “Sometimes you think of the most outrageous things.”

  For a few minutes the two of us gazed quietly out through the French doors in wonderment at the grass that had now become green and at the shimmering waves of heat.

  April came. Setsuko’s illness seemed to enter a period of remission. The slower her recovery was, the more we thought that every impatiently awaited step confirmed the certainty of its indescribable promise.

  One afternoon when I went there, her father was out and Setsuko was alone in her sickroom. She seemed to be in great spirits that day. She had changed the nightgown she almost always wore for a seldom-worn green blouse. When I saw her like that, I thought about enticing her out to the garden. There was a very light breeze, gentle in feeling. She laughed without much confidence, but she consented to my proposal. Placing her hand on my shoulder, she went timidly and unsteadily through the French doors and onto the lawn. Proceeding along the hedge and dodging among the branches of various exotic species we could not tell apart, we pushed our way toward a tangle of luxuriant shrubbery. Here and there on the branches, little white and yellow and pale purple buds were about to burst open. I stopped in front of one of the bushes that I happened to remember that she had identified for me—last fall, I think it was.

  “This is a lilac, isn’t it?” I said, half in question as I turned toward her.

  “No, I don’t think that’s a lilac,” she answered apologetically, placing her hand lightly on my shoulder.

  “What? You misled me then, did you?”

  “No, I didn’t lie. I got it from someone who said it was. . . . But it’s not a very nice flower.”

  “What? You confess to such a thing now when the flowers are about to blossom? How about that one? . . .”

  I pointed at the neighboring bush. “What do you call this one?”

  “Isn’t that Scotch broom?” she responded. We moved over in front of it. “This is true Scotch broom. There are two kinds, aren’t there, with yellow and white buds? This is the white one. They say it’s rare. . . . Father’s proud of it.”

  During this silly quibble Setsuko leaned against me, keeping her hand on my shoulder. She seemed more abstracted than tired. We stood silently for a bit, almost as if we could even briefly detain our life like this, like the fragrance of this beautiful flower. The gentle breeze blew intermittently, a breath of air checked in squeezing through the hedge. It barely rippled the leaves of the shrubbery in front of us. It blew past us, rooted firmly as we were.

  Suddenly she buried her face in the hand resting on my shoulder. Her heart was beating faster than normal, I noticed.

  “Are you tired?” I asked tenderly.

  “No,” she replied in a weak voice. I felt more of her gentle weight on my shoulder.

  “I’m so weak. It’s such a shame for you.” She whispered, but I felt more than heard the words.

  “Why don’t you understand that what you call your frailty instead makes me love you all the more?” I spoke impatiently from the bottom of my heart. She appeared on the face of it not to hear me at all. She stood fixed, without moving, then turned away and lifted her head, slowly pulling her hand off my shoulder. “Why do I feel so weak these days? Still, I tend not to think of how sick I really am at times. . . .” She murmured in a low voice almost to herself. Silence strung out her words in anxiety. Suddenly she raised her head to look at me, then looked down again and said in a low hollow voice, “Somehow, suddenly, I want to live. . . .”

  Then she added in a tiny, hardly audible voice, “Thanks to you. . . .”

  I spoke the words unexpectedly that summer two years ago when first we met. After that, I liked to hum them silently to myself.

  The wind has risen. Now we must try to live.

  The verse that I had forgotten came suddenly back to us now. It brought day after day of happiness, taking precedence over life, making us more lively than life itself, even to the point of pain.

  We prepared to
go at month’s end to the sanitarium at the foot of Mount Yatsugatake. I was slightly acquainted with the director of the sanitarium, and taking advantage of one of his periodic visits to Tokyo, I got him to examine Setsuko before we left for the sanitarium.

  The sanitarium director came one day to Setsuko’s house in the suburbs. After that first examination, he left hurriedly, saying to the invalid and her family, “It’s not so serious. A year or two of patience in the mountains is what it will take.” I went to the station to see him off. I wanted to hear a more precise report of her condition.

  “Don’t tell this to the patient. I presume her father will want me to say more about it, though.” With that introduction the sanitarium director, looking morose, described Setsuko’s condition in some detail. Then, peering at me as I listened in silence, he added as if in sympathy, “Your facial color is very poor, isn’t it? You ought to have a physical examination.”

  When I returned from the station and entered the sickroom, Father was going over the preparations and date for the departure to the sanitarium with her as she lay in bed. With a rather gloomy expression he included me in the discussion. “But . . .” he said, standing up as if he had just thought of something he had to do. “Since you’re so much better, it’ll be all right to go for just the summer.” Speaking doubtfully, he left the sickroom.

  The two of us, left behind, remained completely silent. It was a springlike evening. I had felt a headache coming on, and because it was becoming worse, I stood up unobtrusively and walked to the glass doors. I opened one of the doors halfway and leaned against it. I gazed out blankly into the shrubbery faintly shrouded in mist, not even knowing what I was thinking and yet thinking, “What a sweet smell. I wonder what flower that is.”

  “What are you doing?”

  The husky voice of the sick one sounded behind me. It wakened me suddenly from my paralyzed condition. I turned toward her and spoke in a forced manner, as if I were thinking of something else.

  “I’m thinking about you, about the mountains, and then about the life we will live there together.” I spoke in fits and starts. As I talked on, I came to feel I really had been thinking those things just now. Yes. I did seem to have been thinking these things. “Yes, if we go there, some things will surely happen. . . . But that thing called life, it’s better just to leave everything to it, just as you always do. . . . Surely there we may be granted what we desire, even beyond our imagination. . . .” While I thought this way in my heart, I was almost unconsciously taken by the idea that all this was a trivial notion, a mere nothing.

  Although it was still faintly light in the garden, I noticed that the room had become quite dark.

  “Shall I turn on the light?” I said suddenly, pulling myself together.

  “No, please leave it off.” Her voice was hoarser than before.

  We stayed a bit in silence.

  “I can’t breathe; the smell of flowers is so strong.”

  “I’ll close this up?”

  Matching her sorrowful mood, I grasped the door handle and pulled the door shut.

  “You,” she said. Her voice sounded empty. “You’ve been crying?”

  I turned toward her in surprise.

  “No, I’m not crying. . . . Look at me.”

  From her bed she made no move to look my way. It was hard to confirm in the darkness, but she seemed to be staring at something. I followed her gaze in apprehension, but there was nothing there.

  “I know. The sanitarium director said something about my condition.”

  I wanted to answer right away, but no words came out. In silence I stared again into the darkening garden as I closed the door.

  Soon I heard a deep sigh behind me.

  “Look,” she said at last. Her voice trembled a bit, but it was more composed than before. “Don’t worry about it. . . .

  Let’s live as best we can. . . .”

  I turned to look. She touched the corner of an eye with her fingertip, and I watched as she held it there.

  One light cloudy morning in late April, her father saw us off at the station. We climbed into a second-class compartment of the train bound for the mountains, as happy as if we were on our honeymoon. The train slipped quietly out of the station. Behind us we left Father, standing there as casually as he could but stooped over and suddenly looking old.

  When we had left the platform completely behind, we closed the window, and with a sudden expression of loneliness we sat down in a corner of the empty compartment. Our knees touched as if to warm each other’s heart. . . .

  The Wind Has Risen

  Our train climbed through countless mountains, ran along deep ravines, and passed extended tablelands of vineyards that opened out suddenly. We continued our persistent and seemingly endless climb into the mountains. Before we knew it, the black clouds that had completely shut in the lowering sky began to scatter. They hung heavily over us. The air became chilly. I turned up the collar of my coat and stared uneasily at Setsuko, who was wrapped in a shawl with her eyes closed. Her face looked more excited than tired. She opened her eyes now and then to gaze vacantly my way. We would smile at first as our eyes met. Exchanging uneasy glances, we both would look away. She would close her eyes.

  “It’s gotten cold. I wonder if it will snow.”

  “Would it snow in April?”

  “You can’t rule out snow in a place like this.”

  Although it was only about three o’clock, he noticed that it already was dark outside the train window. Here and there amid the coal black fir trees were countless larches, bereft of needles. We must be passing over the lower slopes of Mount Yatsugatake, we thought, but we could see neither shape nor shadow of the mountain that must be in front of us.

  The train stopped at a tiny mountainside station little different from a freight shed. We were met at the station by an elderly attendant wearing a jacket with the emblem of the highland sanitarium.

  With Setsuko leaning on my arm, we walked to a little old car waiting in front of the station. I felt Setsuko stagger on my arm, but I pretended not to notice.

  “You’re tired, aren’t you?”

  “No, not very.”

  Several local people got off the train with us. They seemed to be whispering about us, but when we got into the car, they faded away in the village, blending indistinguishably into the crowd.

  Our car passed a row of miserable little houses in the village and then came out on a rough slope that opened to what we assumed to be the invisible ridge of Mount Yatsugatake. There before us loomed a large building with a red roof and several wings backed up against the forest.

  “That’s it,” I muttered as I leaned into the lurching of the car.

  Setsuko raised her head, and with a somewhat worried look she gazed blankly at the buildings.

  Upon our arrival at the sanitarium, we were taken to room no. 1 in the second-floor ward at the back of the hospital nearest the forest. After a simple examination, she was ordered to go right to bed. The sickroom had a linoleum floor and a bed, a table, and a chair, all painted white. . . . All there was in addition were some trunks that the porter had just brought in. The two of us were now alone, but I was a little uneasy and did not go to the cramped little room next door that was provided for her attendant. I looked blankly around the room that seemed so bare and then went back and forth to the window to have a look at the sky. The wind was driving the heavy black clouds. Sharp noises crackled now and then from the woods. I stepped out onto the balcony and felt the cold. The balcony extended, without any partitions, past all the sickrooms. Not a soul was on it. I walked along heedlessly, looking into one room after the next. Through the half-open window of the fourth room I saw a patient in bed, so I hurried back.

  The lamp had just been lit. We turned to eat the supper that the nurse had brought. This was the first meal the two of us had eaten alone together, and we felt a bit forlorn. While we ate, it became completely dark outside. We thought how quiet it had suddenly become. Be
fore we knew it, the snow began to fall.

  I stood up and closed the half-open window to a crack. I pressed my nose against the glass, and my breath fogged the window as I stared at the falling snow. Turning back and facing Setsuko, I asked “Well, what do you think . . . ?”

  She looked up from her bed, appealing to me and putting her finger over her mouth as if telling me not to talk.

  The sanitarium stood where the wide, uninterrupted, red ocher lower slope of Mount Yatsugatake began to level off. The building faced south with wings extending in parallel. Two or three small mountain villages perched tilting on the slope that extended downward until completely enveloped in black pine forest. There the slope disappeared into the invisible valley.

  From the south-facing balconies one could look across the tilted villages and the broad sweep of red brown cultivated fields. On a clear day to the south and west and above the surrounding forests of pine, the southern Alps and two or three spur ridges appeared and disappeared amid clouds boiling up from below.

  When I awoke in my little next-door room the morning after our arrival at the sanitarium, I could see through my little window a clear blue sky and many white peaks like cockscombs, looking as if they had sprung unexpectedly out of thin air right before my eyes. The spring sunlight was bathed in mist rising from snow that had fallen unseen on the balcony and the roofs during my sleep.

  Feeling I had overslept, I jumped up hurriedly and ran into the sickroom next door. Setsuko was awake, wrapped in a blanket, her face flushed.

  “Good morning,” I said cheerily, feeling my own face equally flushed. “Did you sleep well?”

  “Yes,” she nodded. “I took some sleeping medicine last night. It gave me a headache.”

  As if to say that was nothing to be concerned about, I threw open the window and the glass doors that led to the balcony. It was so dazzling bright I could barely see at first, but when my eyes became accustomed, I saw a light mist rising from the snow-covered balcony and from the roofs, the fields, and even the trees.