by Неизвестный
Every Sunday Atsuko came up from Ashiya. To comfort an old man working alone, she always brought wrapped in a kerchief some bread she said she had baked herself, and laid it carefully on my desk with two or three apples. Apples were not easy to find in those days.
I became rather fond of the seventeen-year-old Atsuko. There was something modest and withdrawn about her, quite the opposite of Haruko’s gaudiness, and yet she was bright and open. I am not capable of affection for my grandchildren, but I felt a strange warmth, a father’s affection almost, for a girl who was not even one of the family. Atsuko for her part seemed to like the old man well enough.
I was walking in the garden that morning. Generally I went to work immediately after breakfast, but that morning was different. I paced the garden fretfully. The spring sun found its way through the trees to warm the earth, but I felt only a rough, harsh chill that could not be called simple anger or loneliness. I could think of nothing to do for myself but walk around the garden.
The Imperial Culture Awards had been announced with much fanfare that morning. Six men from the humanities and the natural sciences had been awarded the Culture Medal, the highest honor the nation can give its scholars.
I stared for a time at the photographs of the recipients, each with a medal on his chest, and I thought how I too would like to have a medal. I thought how I would like to be thus commended, to have my achievements written of, to have centered on me the respect and interest and understanding of the country and the people. I had never in my life envied anyone for worldly honors, but just this once, I thought, I would like to feel the weight of popular acclaim on my thin shoulders.
Was not my work greater than the work of these six men? I laid the newspaper down, went to my study, and sat at my desk. I stood up again and went out to the garden. Was my work not worth a national commendation, in all probability the last it could expect? Was my work not fit to be praised by the government, admired and respected by the people, protected? I wanted honor, now, today, I thought, however slight the honor might be. However subdued the acclaim, I wanted something to turn to.
The name Miike Shuntarō must be inscribed on men’s hearts. Every last individual must be made to see the value of Miike Shuntarō’s work. But there I was, at the end of my life, with the country on the verge of collapse. My thousands of pages of manuscript must be given up to no one could foresee what fate. Perhaps they would go up in smoke before my work could be recognized for what it was. Professor Schalbe—the name of the man to whom I owed so much came to my lips, and tears came to my eyes.
There was a telephone call from the administrative office at the university. The university was to give a reception the next day for Dr. K, one of the six honored scholars, and it would be appreciated if I could say a few words of congratulation on behalf of the professors emeritus. I refused.
Not five minutes later there was a call from Professor Yokoya, one of my students, with the same request.
“I have no time to write messages of congratulations about other people,” I said. “I have more than enough work of my own to fill my time. I am at an age when no one need be surprised if I die tomorrow.”
Yokoya was very polite and did not press the point.
I had no sooner hung up than there was a call from a newspaper reporter. He wanted a few remarks on one of the medal holders.
“I am interested in nothing except my own work. It was good of you to call, but it will not be worth your trouble to see me.” With that I hung up. Since I would of course be having more calls, I left the receiver off the hook.
I went down into the garden again. For very little reason, I was overcome with a mixture of anger and sorrow and loneliness. As I paced the garden, Atsuko came in through the shrubbery. She was dressed in the drab, baggy trousers that were standard, and her face, with its young smile, was like a flower (she was indeed a flower to me then). She took out a few groceries she said had been sent by her family.
“Would you like to go to Lake Biwa?” she asked.
“Lake Biwa?” I was a little startled.
“Let’s go to Lake Biwa and have a boat ride.”
Even in wartime, the warmth of spring seemed to stir the young to more than everyday brightness. I found myself strangely unresisting.
“Very well. Will you take me to Lake Biwa?”
I can do nothing else today, but I can at least do what this girl wants me to. I can at least follow her—such, if I am to put them honestly, were my feelings.
We let train after train pass until finally one came with a few empty seats. We rode to Ōtsu. It was nearly twenty years since the Keisuke affair. While I was in the university and even after I retired I had chances enough to go to Ōtsu for banquets and such, but with the Keisuke affair I had come to dislike Lake Biwa and I avoided the place.
But now, brought to the lake again by Atsuko, I saw only its beauty. Time is a fearful thing. The pain of the Keisuke affair had quite faded away. The surface of the lake shimmered like fish-scales spread out in the noonday sun. Atsuko had said she wanted a boat ride, and indeed there were little rowboats and sailboats scattered over the lake. Here at least the shadow of war did not seem to fall.
As I looked out and saw Hira rising from the water, I suddenly wanted to go to Katada. A steamer was leaving just then, and the two of us climbed aboard.
A half hour later we were in Katada. We rested for a time at the Reihōkan. I saw no one I knew from the innkeeper’s family, the place apparently being occupied by a single sullen maid. The windows along the hall were broken, and the inn was plainly run-down, as indeed inns were everywhere.
Atsuko helped me into a boat not far from the pier where the steamer had come in. It was my first ride in a rowboat. She borrowed a thin cushion from the boathouse for me, and showed me how to hold the sides of the boat.
There was not another boat in sight as we floated out over the water. Atsuko arched her back and strained at the oars. Perspiration broke out on her face.
“Are you enjoying yourself?” she asked.
I was in fact less than delighted, with the spray from the oars hitting me in the face and my life entrusted to a flimsy little boat.
“Thoroughly,” I said. I forbade her to go into deep water, however. Cherries were blooming along the shore. The April sun carried just a touch of chill, and the clear air, free from the dust of the city, had not yet taken on the sourness of summer. Hira was beautiful.
A fish jumped up near the boat. “A fish,” said Atsuko, turning to gaze with wide eyes. She slapped industriously with the oars and pulled the boat to the spot where the fish had been. I suddenly thought of the girl I had seen for but an instant halfway down the stairs at the Lakeside Hotel, the girl who had died with Keisuke. There was a trace of her in Atsuko. The exaggerated, childish surprise at the fish, the quick agility with which Atsuko brought the boat around—whatever it was, a giddiness came over me as the images of Atsuko and the girl merged. Perhaps the girl too was fresh and clean like Atsuko. Strangely, I no longer felt angry at the girl who had taken Keisuke. Rather I was conscious of something very like affection for her, an affection which I could not feel for Keisuke himself.
I stared down into the water that buried everything, the water into which Keisuke and the girl had sunk. I pushed my hand down the side of the boat. The water slid through five thin old fingers, colder than I would have expected it to be.
Atsuko is gone. Much too soon, she died in the typhus epidemic at the end of the war. Misa is gone. Kyōko’s father-in-law, whom I so disliked, is dead too. Tanio Kaigetsu died the year the war ended. Good people and bad, they all are gone.
When Kaigetsu died there was a query from the Tanio family on the matter of the dissection, and it would seem therefore that Kaigetsu still meant to honor his promise of thirty years before. The times being what they were, however, there was little I could do. I finally had to let the contract I had made with Kaigetsu in Leyden come to nothing.
It is drawing
on toward evening, and the wind from the lake is chilly. It is especially chilly at the collar and knees. Here it is May, and I feel as if I should be wearing wool. The roaring in my ears is especially strong today. Exactly as if the wind were blowing. And indeed the wind has grown stronger.
I suppose the house will be in a turmoil by now. It will be good for them all. It will bring them to their senses. Maybe Yokoya and Sugiyama at the university have been told of the crisis, and the two of them have come running to hear the worst about their old benefactor, their faces suggesting suitable concern. They cut a considerable swathe as professors at the university, but have they inherited in the slightest degree my qualities as a scholar? They seem to have no real understanding for my work. “Professor Miike, Professor Miike,” they say with great shows of respect when I am around. You would think they could find better things to do. No doubt it is “old fogey, old fogey” when I am out of sight—I feel quite certain it is. I remember well enough how those two were during the war. “Let’s get the university out in the country, let’s get the students organized for the war effort.” Off they went and forgot all about their studies. I didn’t say anything then, but I saw their limitations as scholars, and I was very sad. Whatever they are, they cannot be called scholars.
Little waves are breaking around the rickety pier where Atsuko rented her boat. There are ripples all over the lake, I see now. The white flags waving from the masts have probably been forgotten. Someone should have taken them in. I have found it more and more annoying these last years to see things that should be put away and are not. Everything has to be where it belongs. In the old days I was not so fussy. The people in the house have made me what I am. Unless I speak to her time after time, Haruko does nothing about the laundry I see from my study, and Hiroyuki leaves stamped and addressed letters lying on his desk for days on end. Kyōko and Sadamitsu too are partly to blame. And it is not only the family. The people at the university are as bad. A year has gone by since I asked for a short report on the lymph gland, and it was the youngest research student of them all who finally came around with an interim report.
I don’t want to think about anything. To think is to exhaust yourself. I don’t want to think about anything except The Arterial System of the Japanese. I have wasted a day on trivialities, and I must work tonight. Work, work, Miike Shuntarō, old scholar, must go on with his work while he lives. Tonight I must write explanations for the illustrations to Part Nine, or if not the full explanations at least the headings. Yes, and I must ask the maid to bring saké so that I can have a drink when I’ve finished work and am ready for bed. Two hundred grams of good saké, in a carefully washed decanter. Work that I could once have finished in an hour now takes a day, sometimes even two days or three. Growing old is a terrible thing.
Fifty years ago when I was in this room I thought only of dying. Youth has no sense of values. Today I want to live even one day more. Professor Schalbe is dead, and Professor Yamaoka of Tokyo is dead. I am sure that neither was ready to die. Both must have wanted to live and work even a day longer. Tanio Kaigetsu too. It was his great ambition to compile a Sanskrit dictionary, but he does not seem to have lived to finish it. Priests and ministers I suppose have their own special views on life and death—but Kaigetsu was not a priest. He was a scholar. It was precisely because he was a scholar among scholars that I liked and admired him. I don’t think Kaigetsu was ready to die. Enlightenment, they call it, but I suspect that enlightenment is in the last analysis a convenient refuge for the lazy. Man was meant to work furiously to the end. Why else was he created? Not to bask in the sun, surely. Not just to be happy.
I wanted to see Hira today. I wanted to see Hira so much that I could not help myself. I sent Haruko from the room and tried to control my annoyance. I made myself a bowl of tea, but the rancor was still there. As I drank from that Hagi bowl and set it on my knee, the image of Hira floated before me. By the time the man from the Ōmoriya was ringing the doorbell my mind was made up. Hira was calling me with a strength I could not resist. I have been sitting here half a day now, and I have looked at Hira enough. The face of Hira, so deep and rich in the daylight, has these last few minutes grown pale, and the sky outlining it has become almost too bright. Another hour and Hira will have melted back into the darkness.
The azaleas were beautiful today as we came past Keage. Possibly, since they belong to the same family, the rhododendrons are in bloom at the summit of Hira. Somewhere high on that slope, the white flowers are blooming. The great white clusters spread over the face of the mountain. Ah, how much more at peace I would be if I could lie there at the summit under those scented clusters! To lie with my legs stretched out and to look up into the night sky—I am happier even at the thought of it. There and only there, I somehow feel, is what could rock me and lull me, give me peace. I should have gone up there, at least once. It is too late now. It is no longer possible for me to climb mountains. I have less chance of climbing Hira than of finishing The Arterial System of the Japanese.
On the snowy day when I came here in a cotton priest’s robe, and at the time of the Keisuke affair, and when I went rowing with Atsuko, I saw Hira. My eye was on Hira. But I did not have the slightest desire to climb it. Why? Because the season was wrong? No, not that. Perhaps until now I have not had the qualifications. That is the point, I am sure of it.
Long ago, as I looked at the picture of the rhododendrons of Hira, I thought that the day must come when I would climb to the top. Perhaps the day was today. But today, however much I may want to, I cannot climb Hira.
Well, back into the room. I must hurry through dinner and get on with my work. How many years has it been since I last had a quiet evening away from the voices of the children? A bell is ringing somewhere. Or is an old man’s ear imagining things? But I do hear a bell, behind the roaring in my ears. No, it is my imagination. I was working in a German mountain lodge (I had gone there to prepare a paper for a discussion with Dr. Steda of the red bones he had found in Siberia), and I heard the cowbells ringing. What a lovely sound it was. Perhaps something has made me hear it again, in my memory, from those tens of years ago.
Hurry with dinner, please. I have work to do. I must go back into the world of red veins, into the coral grove.
KANAI MIEKO
Kanai Mieko (b. 1947) was a precocious author who began publishing at the age of nineteen. Using graphic and fantastic elements, she often uses deconstructionist and postmodern techniques to explore her unusual subject matter. Her story translated here, “Homecoming” (Kikan, 1970), is one of many in which the characters, no longer certain of their own identities, struggle to cope with the growing complexities of contemporary life.
HOMECOMING (KIKAN)
Translated by Van C. Gessel
When she returned from her long journey, a young man came up to her and announced that he had come to the station to meet her. She was very surprised and said to the young man, “I think you must have the wrong person.”
“No, I don’t. I know all about you. Your husband is ill and couldn’t come to pick you up, so I’ve come in his place. Your husband has been very worried about you,” the man said, and then like a magician, he reached into his pocket and with an elegant flourish pulled out a large red silk handkerchief that he used to wipe the sweat from his brow.
“My goodness,” the young man sighed, “it is hot, isn’t it? Here, let me take your bag for you.”
She repeated what she had said before: “I’m sure you must think I’m someone else. You did get my name right, but I don’t have a husband. And besides, nobody knew that I was coming back today. I’ve got to be going; I’m in a hurry.”
The young man smiled, his face all but vocally saying, “You’re teasing me with such a serious face,” and gestured for her to hand him her suitcase. “Your husband is ill, and he wants to see you right away. You received the telegram while you were away (I can tell you what it said; I’m the one who went to the telegraph office, so I remember it well.
It said: ‘RETURN IMMEDIATELY I LOVE YOU ALWAYS ETERNALLY, YOUR HUSBAND’), and we got your reply last night. It read: ‘ARRIVE TWO P.M. ON SEVENTH, YOUR LOVE.’ And so here I am to meet you. Your husband described you, so I recognized you at once. Black hair, black eyes, skin that should be tanned by the seaside sun. . . . I think the image your husband described was right on the mark! I knew you at a single glance!”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about! The person you’re looking for is somebody else. I didn’t receive a telegram from my husband and didn’t send a reply. How could I? I’m single. I don’t have a husband!”
The young man finally seemed to realize that this was no ordinary situation. With a baffled look, he stammered, “Isn’t your address 446 N-machi?” Although she didn’t know why, it infuriated her to have her address announced to her, and in one breath she rattled off: “Yes, it is, but that’s a pretty crummy way to trick someone. Going to all the trouble to look up my address—what are you, a police dog?”
Startled by her demeanor, he quickly replied, “You’re the one who needs to stop this nonsense. Your husband is waiting for you at your home at 446 N-machi. He didn’t want me to tell you this, but he has an incurable disease. So for you to claim that you’re single, even if it’s a joke, is disgusting!”
She was at a loss, unable to grasp what was happening. This fellow was telling her that a man with an incurable disease who claimed to be her husband was at her house at 446 N-machi and that he would love her for eternity! Having never been married or even engaged, how was it that she had a husband, and why was it that he was waiting at her house in N-machi? Her head began to throb, and she started wondering whether she had gone mad or perhaps lost her memory. She felt nauseated, and a feverish chill shook her body as if she had suddenly been propelled into the middle of a nightmare.