The Columbia Anthology of Modern Japanese Literature (Modern Asian Literature Series)

by Неизвестный

  While the misty rain continued for some days, the seasons changed again. In the sanitarium the patients, who had noticeably grown to a large number, now began to depart by ones and twos, and only the seriously ill remained, those who would have to spend the winter here. The sanitarium reverted to the loneliness that preceded summer. The death of the patient in room no. 17 suddenly made this conspicuous.

  One morning at the end of September, I was gazing casually into the woods from a window on the north side of the hall when I had a strange feeling that someone was out there in the mist, going in and out of the woods. I asked the nurses, but they appeared to know nothing. I forgot about it then, but the next morning two or three workmen appeared and disappeared in the mist as they began to cut down a chestnut-like tree on the side of the hill.

  That day I happened to find out about the events of the day before, with which none of the patients seemed acquainted. It was reported that the weird, mentally disturbed patient had hanged himself in the woods. That big man that I had seen so many times going up and down the hall on the arm of his nurse had suddenly disappeared yesterday, it was noticed.

  “So it was that man’s turn?” I had become very nervous after the death of the patient in room no. 17, but to my surprise, I was relieved at this unexpected death less than a week later. Even though this gloomy death left me with an eerie feeling, it would be correct to say that I hardly felt it at all.

  “You could say this isn’t as bad as the death of that fellow the other day, because that one had no intention of dying,” I told myself cheerily.

  Starting from that odd space where the workmen had cut down two or three chestnut trees in the forest, the men continued leveling the side of the hill. They pushed the soil down the steeper slope north of the ward into a small open space where they began to grade the gentle slope. They were making a flower bed.

  “There’s a letter from Father.”

  I handed Setsuko the letter, one from the packet of mail the nurse had given me. She took it lying in bed, and with a girlish sparkle in her eyes, she read it through.

  “Oh, Father says he’s coming.”

  Father had written that he would drop by the sanitarium quite soon, stopping off on his return from a trip.

  It was a clear October day but with a rather strong wind. Recently Setsuko had lost her appetite from constantly lying in bed, and she had become noticeably emaciated. Now she started trying to eat, and occasionally she would get up or sit up in bed. A sweet smile of remembrance would now and then cross her face. I recognized the likeness to the girlish smile she always showed her father. That was her way, I had to admit.

  One afternoon a few days later her father arrived.

  His face looked somewhat older than before, but more noticeable was the stoop in his back. He rather dreaded the atmosphere of the hospital, it appeared. He came into the room and sat down beside the sick one’s bed where I habitually sat. Because she had been too active for the last few days, she had developed a fever the night before, and the doctor, frustrating her expectations, had ordered her to remain quiet since the morning.

  Although he had been convinced that the sick one was recovering, when Father saw how she kept to her bed, he appeared uneasy. As if looking for the reason, he carefully studied the room, watched every move by the nurses, and went out onto the balcony to look around. He seemed to be satisfied with these observations. When he noticed that the sick one’s cheeks had become rosy from the fever and not from excitement, he remarked, “The color of her face is really good.” He repeated it again as if to convince himself that his daughter was somehow better.

  I left the sickroom on the pretext of being busy, leaving the two of them alone together. When I came back a little while later, the sick one was sitting up in bed. Spread out on the quilt were a box of cakes and other packages her father had brought. They seemed to be things she had liked as a child and that her father thought she would still like. When she saw me, she blushed like a child caught in some mischief. She picked up the things and lay back in bed.

  I was rather embarrassed, and I moved away from the two of them and sat down in a chair by the window. The two resumed their interrupted discussion in lower voices. It was mostly devoted to people and affairs unfamiliar to me. She seemed moved by some of them in ways I could not know.

  I contrasted the two in their happy conversation as if I were looking at a picture. I saw her girlish sparkle revive in the expression on her face and the modulation of her voice that she displayed to her father in this conversation. Her happy childlike manner led me to dream of her life as a girl, before I knew her.

  A little later when we two were alone, I went up to her and whispered in a teasing way.

  “You’re a rosy lass today, a stranger to me.”

  “I don’t know.” She covered her face with her hands like a little girl.

  Father stayed for two days.

  Before he left, he had me show him around the sanitarium. His purpose was for the two of us to talk. The day was completely clear without a cloud in the sky. Even when I pointed out the reddish slopes of Mount Yatsugatake, completely clear that day, he only glanced at them and continued his fervent conversation.

  “This place doesn’t seem to be helping her, does it? It’s already been more than half a year, and I would have thought she might be a little better.”

  “Well, the weather was bad everywhere this summer, wasn’t it? They say that winter is the best time in a mountain sanitarium like this. . . .”

  “Maybe we should just be patient till winter, but it’s not easy to wait until then. . . .”

  “But I expect to be here this winter.” I fretted about how to make Father understand what happiness this mountain isolation brought to us, but when I thought of the sacrifice Father was making for us, I could not speak about it, and our conversation continued at cross-purposes. “Well, since we came to the mountains for a purpose, shouldn’t you leave her here?”

  “Yes, but can you stay with her until winter?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “That’s really inexcusable to do to you. . . . Are you able to work?”

  “No . . .”

  “Don’t you have to do a little work without concern only for a sick one?”

  “Yes, a little, from now on,” I stammered.

  “I’ve had to abandon my work for a long time. I’ll have to start it up again soon. . . .” My emotions were brimming as I thought about this. We remained silent for a while and stopped to linger on top of a hill. We gazed at the countless clouds of a mackerel sky spreading rapidly in from the west.

  Then we walked through a forest where all the leaves had turned yellow and so returned to the hospital from the rear. Two or three workmen were still leveling the slope that day. I said casually as we passed, “I hear you’re making a flower bed here.”

  I went to see Father off at the station in the evening, and when I returned, I found the sick one in bed, lying on her side and choking with violent coughs. She had never before coughed so violently. I waited until the outburst had subsided a bit and asked her:

  “How are you?”

  “It’s nothing. . . . It’ll stop right away.” That’s all she said. Then, “water, please.”

  I poured some water from the pitcher into a glass and held it up to her mouth. She took a sip, then rested quietly for a bit until she was attacked by another more violent outburst. I almost jumped on her bed, but I could do nothing for her writhing body except to ask:

  “Shall I call the nurse?”

  “. . .”

  When the spasm had subsided but her body was still twisted in pain, she covered her face with her hands and nodded.

  I went to call the nurse. I followed the nurse, who, ignoring me, raced ahead into the room. With the nurse supporting her by both hands, the sick one regained a somewhat happier attitude. She opened her eyes vacantly. The coughing spell seemed to have ended for the moment.

  The nurse gradually r
eleased her hands.

  “It’s stopped. . . . Stay like that, please,” the nurse said, beginning to straighten the mussed-up blankets. “I’ll get you an injection.”

  As the nurse went out, she whispered in my ear as I stood tensely at the door, not knowing what else to do. “A little bloody phlegm came up with the coughs.”

  I returned to the bedside.

  She had her eyes wide open, but I had to think she was asleep. With one hand I pushed up a loose curl of hair on her pale forehead and gently stroked her brow, moist with cold sweat. The hint of a smile flitted across her lips, as if she felt my warm presence.

  Days of absolute quiet followed.

  The yellow window blind of the sickroom was pulled all the way down; the room was dark. The nurses walked on tiptoe. I remained constantly by her bed. I alone watched over her through the night. Now and then the sick one would look my way and start to speak. Immediately I put my finger to my mouth to signal to her not to talk.

  The silence plunged us each into the depths of our own thoughts. Each clearly felt pain at the other one’s thoughts. I sensed acutely that in this event she had sacrificed herself for me and that as I brooded on how she changed before my eyes, she seemed to regret how as an invalid she had destroyed in a moment with her own rashness what we two had so carefully nurtured.

  My heart was torn at how she so sweetly seemed to blame only her own rashness without making it into a sacrifice. While the sick one had to make appropriate compensation even to the point of sacrifice, this had, we believed, brought us the most sublime happiness, a joy in life that I savored together with the sick one, even here at what might become her deathbed. Would it really satisfy us, though? What we thought was our happiness, wasn’t it more a passing fancy, a thing of the moment, than it was the happiness we believed it to be?

  Tired as I was with night nursing at the side of the dozing invalid, I felt an unease, a hesitant thought that something there and then was threatening our happiness.

  The crisis passed in only a week.

  One morning the nurse threw back the blinds and opened the window partway. Brilliant autumn sunshine streamed through the window.

  “I feel good,” the sick one said with renewed vigor from her bed.

  With my newspaper spread out next to her pillow, I thought how events that shocked people seemed in their aftereffects to be quite remote affairs. I glanced at her and spoke in unthinking jest.

  “When your father comes again, it would be better not to get too excited.”

  She accepted my jest openly, showing her feelings with a blush. “I’ll keep it cool next time Dad comes.”

  “If you can.”

  While we joked together, consoling each other’s feelings, we, like children, pushed all responsibility onto her father.

  Without seeming to will it at all, we came lightly through the crisis, which had so recently assailed us in spirit and in body, as if we were cheered that the events of the last week were no more than an aberration. At least, it seemed so to us. . . .

  One evening as I was reading by her side, I suddenly slammed the book shut, went to the window, and stood there, thinking deeply. Then I returned to her side. I picked up the book and started reading again.

  “What’s up?” she asked, looking up at me.

  “It’s nothing,” I replied casually, buried briefly in my book. Then I broke the silence.

  “I haven’t done much of anything since we came, and I was thinking I ought to start working.”

  “That’s right. You ought to do your work. Father was worried about that, too.” She spoke with a serious look on her face. “You shouldn’t think only of me. . . .”

  “No, I’d like to think much more about you. . . .” A vague idea for a novel suddenly popped into my head, and pursuing it, I spoke as if to myself. “I’m thinking of writing a novel about you. I can’t think of any other topic right now. This happiness that we share together—the joy of life that flows from what everyone thinks is a dead end—our life that nobody knows, I want to give it shape, make it more certain. Do you understand?”

  “I understand.” She seemed to follow my thinking as if it were her own, and she quickly agreed with me. She laughed with a wry smile.

  “If you are writing about me, do it as you like,” she replied with indifference.

  I, however, took her words seriously.

  “Well then, I’ll write it as I like it. . . . But I’ll need lots of help from you.”

  “What can I do?”

  “While I’m working, I’d like to have you happy from your head to your toes. If you aren’t, . . .”

  Rather than thinking abstractly to myself, I wanted us to think together. I walked around and around in the sickroom, oppressed with thoughts boiling up one after another in a strange feeling of excess activity at work in my brain.

  “You’ll lose your energy if you hang around too much with an invalid. . . . Shouldn’t you go out for a walk?”

  “Yes, if I’m going to work,” I said in high spirits, my eyes shining, “I’ll go for a walk.”

  I came out of the woods. In front of my eyes the lower slopes of Mount Yatsugatake spread endlessly beyond the forest on the far side of the wide valley. In the foreground backed up to the forest lay the small village with its farm fields sloping outward, and there I could see clearly the tiny shape of the sanitarium building, its red roofs spread out in wings.

  From early morning I roamed from one woods to another, letting my thoughts leave my feet to wander as they would. Then at a moment when the tiny shapes of the sanitarium unexpectedly came into my view, appearing close by in the clear autumn air, I had a feeling of suddenly awakening from whatever possessed me. Now for the first time I felt myself drawn apart from the strangeness of that life we lived together so casually day after day, surrounded by all those sick people in the sanitarium. Thus, as the desire to create that had been seething inside me was stimulated, I began to convert our strange everyday life into an extraordinarily sad but serene story. . . . “Setsuko, I can’t believe that two people have ever shared such mutual love. There hasn’t been a you before. Or a me, . . .”

  Our dreams at times rushed by the affairs around us, and at times they stalled as if in permanent pause. When I was far from her, I talked incessantly with her and listened to her answers. Like life itself, our story seemed endless. Before we knew it, the story took on a life of its own, developing on its own without regard to me, leaving me to stagnate there in place. As if wishing for the outcome, the story itself had accomplished the sad death of the invalid heroine. . . . The girl, with a premonition of the end of life, exerts her declining energies to be cheery, to live with nobility. Held up on the arm of her lover, the girl grieves for the grief of the one she will leave behind. The girl who went happily into death, the image of that girl soars clearly as if sketched against the void. . . . “The man, trying to make their love more pure, escorts the sick one to a mountain sanitarium, but when death threatens, the man comes to doubt whether the happiness that they tried to attain and may even have attained to the fullest is really enough to satisfy them. Yet the woman, grateful to the man who has been attending her faithfully to the end in the agony of her death, goes contented to that death. So the man, aided by the nobility of the dying one, comes in the end to believe in their small happiness. . . .”

  The end of the story seemed to lie in wait to trap me there. Suddenly the image of the girl about to die struck me with unanticipated intensity. I was attacked by indescribable fear and shame as if I were being awakened from a dream. To shake off the dream, I stood up brusquely from the beech-tree root I had been sitting on.

  The sun had climbed high. The mountains, the forest, the village, the fields—everything—lay placid on that peaceful autumn day. In the tiny far-off buildings of the sanitarium, all were unmistakably following their daily routine. The image of the lonely Setsuko awaiting me alone in dejection, left behind as always amid all those unknown people, hit me
unbearably, and I hurried down the mountain path.

  Threading through the woods in back, I returned to the sanitarium. Detouring around by the balcony, I approached the farthest sickroom. Setsuko lay in bed without noticing me but fiddling with her hair as usual and staring sorrowfully into space. Dropping the idea of tapping on the window glass with my fingers, I gazed at her. She seemed lost in reverie, looking as if she could at last endure the threat against her, or perhaps unaware that she appeared that way. . . . Feeling a wrench in my heart, I stared at the unfamiliar figure of this woman, when suddenly her face brightened. Raising her head, she smiled. She had seen me.

  I entered from the balcony and came to her side.

  “What are you thinking about?”

  “Nothing.” She spoke in a voice hardly hers.

  When I remained silent and a little depressed, she returned to her normal self and spoke in an intimate voice.

  “Where did you go? You were gone a long time, weren’t you?” she asked.

  “Over there.” I spoke casually and pointed at the forest that could be seen in the distance beyond the balcony.

  “Oh, you went that far? Did you get any work done?”

  “Well, . . .” I replied grumpily and lapsed back into silence. Then suddenly I blurted out:

  “You, are you satisfied with this life?” I asked her in a shrill, nervous voice.

  She seemed to flinch at my crazy question. She stared back at me, nodding as if to verify the question.