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

by J. Thomas Rimer

  “You’ll catch a cold doing that,” she said in a weak voice from the bed. I turned toward her, wanting to make some lighthearted reply. When I met her eyes staring at me anxiously, though, I couldn’t speak the words. I left the window and returned in silence to my room.

  A few moments later, the sick one was struck by a violent spell of unstoppable coughing, as she was every morning. I crawled back into bed and listened with a feeling of inexpressible concern.

  OCTOBER 27

  Today again I spent the afternoon in the mountains and the forest.

  One topic would not leave me throughout the day. A genuine marriage engagement—how much happiness could two people share in too short a lifetime? The image of a young man and a young woman, their heads bowed quietly before a fate that was hard to contest but standing together and sharing the warmth of their heads and their bodies; the image of us as a couple, desolate yet not without some happiness, I could clearly see that before me. Now if I tried, what could I really depict?

  In the evening as always, I returned quickly past the sloping margin of allyellow larches along the broad base of the mountain. Then at the edge of the woods behind the sanitarium, I saw in the distance the tall figure of a young woman, her hair glowing in the light of the setting sun. I stopped for a moment. It looked like Setsuko. Staring at the solitary figure there and wondering if it could be Setsuko, I speeded up my steps. As I neared, I saw it was indeed Setsuko. “What’s happened?” I asked, breathless, as I rushed up to her.

  “I was waiting for you here,” she said, laughing and blushing slightly.

  “Is it OK to be so rash?” I asked, glancing sideways at her face.

  “It doesn’t matter just this once. I felt so good today.” She spoke as vivaciously as possible and looked toward the mountain I had come from. “I could see you coming all the way.”

  I stood next to her and gazed speechless in the same direction.

  She spoke again in the same cheery manner. “Coming this far, you get a good view of Mount Yatsugatake.”

  “Yes,” I replied offhandedly. I stood by her shoulder and gazed with her at the mountain. I was strangely confused. “This is the first time I’ve looked at that mountain with you, and yet by myself, I feel I’ve looked at it so many times.”

  “That’s not how it should be, is it?”

  “No. You’re right. I see that now. We looked at that mountain together long ago from the other side. No, in the summer when we looked for it, the mountain was always hidden by clouds, and we could see almost nothing. But in the autumn when I went there alone to see it, the mountain was always visible on the horizon from the opposite side. I didn’t know what the distant mountain was, but surely this was it. That seems to be the right direction. . . . Do you remember that luxuriant meadow of pampas grass?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s really strange—to have been living with you at the foot of that mountain without ever noticing it.” Two years ago on the last day in the autumn when I first stared at those mountains far away, visible sharply above the horizon from that luxuriant field of pampas grass, I felt a happiness that was almost sad. I remembered vividly and with such yearning the image of myself dreaming of when we could live together.

  We fell into silence. We looked at the ranges of mountains and watched as flocks of birds flew silently across the sky. We lingered there, our shoulders touching, feeling our love as we did on those first days. Our shadows crept across the grass, lengthening gradually.

  A light wind came up and the forest behind us rustled with the sudden breeze. “Let’s head on in,” I said to her as if it had just occurred to me.

  We went into the forest of falling leaves. I stopped from time to time to let her walk ahead. It wrung my heart to remember how that summer two years ago I let her walk two or three steps ahead through the woods so that I could see her better.

  NOVEMBER 2

  At night a single lamp stood near us. Under the light and accustomed to the silence of saying nothing, I wrote diligently at the story of our happiness in a life together. Setsuko lay in her darkened bed shaded from the lamp, so quiet that one would not have known that she was there. When I looked up from time to time, she would be staring at me as if she had been staring for a long time. “I like to be by your side like this,” her glance filled with love seemed anxious to tell me. Oh, how that helped, made me believe in the happiness we possessed, and gave clear form to my efforts.

  NOVEMBER 10

  Winter came. The sky widened; the mountains came closer. Snowy clouds lay motionless across the upper slopes. Were they driven down from the mountains by this morning’s snow, those unfamiliar birds crowding the balcony? When the snow clouds melted away, the upper slopes remained pale white for a day. The summits were now permanently and conspicuously covered with snow.

  I remembered how years ago I had longed in my frequent dreams to live in a lonely mountain area with a sweet girl, far from the world and sharing a life of heartfelt love. Since I was small I could envisage in those endless dreams a life of imperishable sweetness, a life without the least harm amid a fearsome and rigorous nature. For that reason, this now had to be it, in this true winter, in these lonely mountains.

  —Near dawn I rose quietly while the sick girl slept briefly, and in high spirits I slipped out of the mountain hut into the snow. The mountains were bathed the color of rose in the dawning light. I went to a neighboring farmhouse for goat’s milk, and while returning, I became thoroughly chilled. I put more wood on the fire. Soon the fire began to flame up with a crackling sound; the noise awakened the girl and I waved a benumbed hand. Thus do I write of our happy life in the mountains. . . .

  This morning I recalled these dreams of some years ago. I saw in my mind’s eye the winter scenery like a wood-block print of some improbable place. I rearranged the placement of furniture in the log cabin, consulting myself about how to do it. Then the background fragmented and faded away. All that remained from my dreams was the reality of the mountains covered lightly in snow, the bare trees, the cold air. . . .

  After finishing my meal by myself, I slid my chair over to the window and sat there absorbed in my recollections. I turned suddenly to look at Setsuko, who was staring blankly at the mountains, sitting up in bed and looking tired after finishing breakfast. With greater than usual pity I stared at her haggard face and straggly hair.

  “I wonder whether it was my dreams that brought you here?” I had a feeling close to regret but did not put my thoughts into words. That is, I thought to myself, “Even if that were so, I have been so absorbed in my work recently. While I have been by your side, I haven’t been thinking of you here and now. As I work, though, I really am thinking about you more and more, and I’d like you to know that as well as I do. So in good spirits I am spending my time more on my little dreams than on you. . . .”

  Whether she read in my glance what I wanted to say, she looked up at me seriously, not smiling, from her bed. From then on, our custom became more and more to fasten our gaze upon each other’s eyes.

  NOVEMBER 17

  I thought I could finish my notes in two or three more days. If I wrote about our life together like this, there might be no end to it. Anyway, in order to finish it, I would have to give it some kind of conclusion, but as of now I did not want to assign any ending to our continuing life. No, I would not have it end. The best thing would be to stop with our present life in its current aspect.

  In its current aspect? . . . I remember reading in some story the words, “The more you remember happiness, the fewer the impediments there are to happiness.” How does what we two now have differ from the happiness we previously shared? It resembles that happiness, but it differs, too. How much more painful and heart wrenching it is. Couldn’t I find a more appropriate ending to our story of happiness if I pursued the truth in what is not fully revealed on the surface of our life? I don’t feel there is anything hostile to our happiness concealed in that side of our life which, for s
ome reason I do not understand, I cannot yet make fully clear.

  I had an unsettled feeling about that, and turning out the light, I started to walk past the sleeping invalid. I stopped to stare at the pale white face in the darkness. Her sunken eyes seemed to twitch occasionally, but I did not find that to be at all threatening. Was it no more than my unspoken unease that made me feel that way?

  NOVEMBER 20

  I read over carefully the notes I had already written. I thought they might to some extent fulfill my intentions.

  Actually, as I read over the notes, I found to my surprise and distress that they failed to carry the full flavor of the story’s main theme: our happiness together. My thinking had somehow diverged from the topic of my story.

  The two of us at the center of this story, savoring that modest joy in life that had been granted to us, had come to believe that joy in itself had made our mutual happiness unique. In that respect, at least, it bound our hearts together, we thought. Had we aimed too high? Did I underrate our craving for life? For that reason, could these bonds of the heart be torn loose? . . .

  “Poor Setsuko,” I thought, without straightening up the notes spread out on my desk. “In silence she saw through my will to life, that I pretended not to recognize, and she did not appear to share the feeling.. That torments me. Why couldn’t I have concealed it from her? Am I that weak?”

  I turned to look at the sick one, her eyes half closed in the shadows on the bed. I felt stifled. I left the lighted area and walked slowly toward the balcony. The night showed a small crescent moon. Moonlight set out dimly the outlines of the cloud-covered mountains, the hills, and the woods. Almost all else melted into the dull blue darkness that spread over everything. What I saw was not those things. Vividly revived in my heart were the mountains and hills and woods that lingered in my memory with nothing lost, the mountains and hills and woods that the two of us had seen in sorrowing sympathy that early spring evening with the feeling that our happiness would last until the end. In this way, the momentary scene that we had become part of had been revived so many times that it had entered into our very existence. As the scene changed with the seasons, its current appearance had become almost invisible to us. . . .

  “The fact that we enjoyed that moment of happiness, doesn’t that in itself give value to our life together like this?” I asked myself.

  Light footsteps resounded behind me. No doubt they were Setsuko’s. I remained rooted to the spot, not turning around. She said nothing but stood there a little apart from me. I felt her to be so near I could sense her breathing. Now and then a cold breeze swept silently over the balcony. Somewhere in the distance the wind tore at the bare trees.

  “What are you thinking?” she said at last.

  I did not answer right away. Then suddenly I turned to her and laughed uncertainly.

  “You understand, don’t you?” I asked.

  She looked at me cautiously, fearing a trap. Seeing her like that, I spoke. “Aren’t we thinking about my work, after all?” I said slowly. “I can’t think of a good ending, no matter what. I don’t want to have it end with us living our lives in vain. Don’t you feel that way, too?”

  She smiled at me. There was a sense of unease to her smile, however. “But then, I might not know what you have written,” she said weakly.

  “Maybe so,” I said, again smiling doubtfully. “Maybe I should have you read it one of these days. But then the first part isn’t ready for anyone to read yet.”

  We went back to the middle of the room. I sat down again next to the lamp and picked up my notes that were spread out there. She stood behind me, put her hand gently on my shoulder, and looked down at me over my shoulder. I turned to her abruptly.

  “You should lie down again,” I said in a dry voice.

  “Yes,” she replied openly. Taking her hand hesitantly from my shoulder, she returned to her bed.

  “I just can’t sleep,” she said to herself in bed two or three minutes later.

  “Well, shall I turn off the light? I don’t need it.” As I spoke, I turned off the light, rose from my chair, and approached the bed. I sat on the edge of the bed and took her hand. The two of us stayed quietly like that in the darkness for some time.

  The wind had become quite strong. The sounds came ripping from here and there in the woods. The wind blew against the sanitarium and rattled the windows now and again, at last making even our own window creak. She held onto my hand as if in fear. With her eyes closed, she seemed to be concentrating on something working inside her. She loosened the grip of her hand. She seemed to have gone to sleep.

  “Now it’s my turn,” I whispered to myself as if to lull myself to sleep, though I was as sleepless as she was. I went into the total darkness of my own room.

  NOVEMBER 26

  These days I was waking up around dawn. Often I would get up quietly and gaze steadily at the sleeping face of the sick one. Although the edge of the bed and the water bottle gradually turned yellow, her face remained pale. “How pitiful she is.” Instinctively I repeated this stock phrase.

  When I awoke near dawn this morning, I gazed for a long time at her sleeping face, and then I tiptoed out of the room and went into the bare, leafless woods behind the sanitarium. On each tree two or three dead leaves held on against the wind. As I came out of that empty forest, even as I watched, the sun near the summit of Mount Yatsugatake began to illuminate in red the clumps of clouds hanging low and motionless over the mountains ranging from south to west. The light of the dawn had not yet reached the ground. Shut in by mountains, the barren winter woods and the fields and moors appeared to be totally forsaken.

  I stopped occasionally at the edge of the forest, stamped my feet without noticing the cold, and then walked around a bit. Thinking hesitantly to myself of I know not what, I happened to look up and notice that the sky had become completely shut in by dark clouds that had lost their morning glow. Anticipating that the beautiful morning glow I had earlier noted might be reaching the ground and suddenly feeling rather cheap, I hastened back to the sanitarium.

  Setsuko was awake. When she saw me returning, she glanced up languidly. She was even paler than before, when she had been sleeping. I approached the bed, patted her hair, and started to kiss her on the brow, but she shook her head feebly. I looked at her sadly without asking why. She looked blankly into space, as if she were asking in sympathy more about my sadness than about me.

  EVENING

  I was the only one to know nothing about it. After the morning medical examination was finished, I was called out into the corridor by the chief nurse. I learned for the first time that Setsuko this morning had coughed up a small amount of blood. Setsuko had not told me about it. It was not a dangerous amount of blood, but as a precaution they would assign a practical nurse for a while, the sanitarium director had said. . . . I had no choice but to agree.

  I moved to a neighboring vacant sickroom for the interval. I am writing my diary alone in a room totally unfamiliar to me but resembling in all respects the room we had lived in together. Although I have been sitting here for several hours, the room still seems empty. It seems like nobody is here; even the light from the lamp is cold.

  NOVEMBER 28

  I left aside the notes I had almost finished, scarcely touching them where they lay on my desk. To finish them, I needed to live apart for a bit, I told the sick one.

  In my current feeling of unease, however, how could I find my way by myself to that state of mutual happiness I had written of ?

  Each morning I go into her room every two or three hours and sit down for a spell at her bedside. Usually I say nothing, because it is bad for her to talk. When the nurse is not there, we hold hands in silence, avoiding each other’s eyes as much as we can.

  When by chance our eyes do meet, she smiles at me with the kind of embarrassment she used to show when we first met. Then she looks away into space, and showing not the least displeasure at the situation she has been placed in, she settles b
ack and goes to sleep. She asked me once if my work was progressing. I shook my head. She looked at me with sympathy but did not ask again. One day is like another, serene and uneventful.

  She refuses even to have me send a letter to her father.

  At night I sit facing my desk until late, doing nothing. The light from the balcony fades from the window until I am enveloped in darkness. It is like the feeling I have in my heart. I take a look, and the sick one is still awake, perhaps thinking of me. . . .

  DECEMBER 1

  Recently it seems that there has been an increase in the number of moths attracted to my lamp.

  At night these moths come flying from somewhere and crash into the windowpane. Injuring themselves in the attack, they pursue life relentlessly in desperately seeking to open a hole in the glass. I was annoyed by them, and I turned out the light and went to bed. The wild beating of wings continued for a bit, then gradually subsided, and settled firmly somewhere. The next morning I was sure to find under the window the dead body of a moth looking like a dead leaf.

  Tonight again a moth flew into the room and raced madly around the lamp in front of me. Soon it fell onto my papers with a flapping sound. It lay there without moving. Then, as if finally remembering it was alive, it suddenly flew away. It appeared not to know what it was doing and soon it fell again, flapping onto my papers.

  Out of a strange fear I did not try to remove it, but affecting nonchalance, I left it for dead on my papers.