And Then

by Sōseki Natsume

  Daisuke felt that he could guess at the substance of the marital relations hidden behind the financial problems and refrained from asking too many questions. On his way out, he tried to encourage her, saying, “You mustn’t get so downhearted. Try to be cheerful, the way you used to be. And come over and visit sometimes.”

  “Yes, you’re right,” Michiyo smiled. Each saw the past in the other’s face. Hiraoka had not come home after all.

  Three days later, Hiraoka came without warning. That day, a dry wind fanned the cheerful blue sky, and the weather was hotter than usual. The morning papers carried iris-viewing reports. The large potted clivia that Daisuke had bought had finally shed its petals on the verandah. In their place, the green leaves, almost as wide as a broad sword, were pushing through the stems and growing long. The old, now blackened leaves lingered to glisten in the sun. One of them had by chance been folded in two and drooped sharply about six inches from where it left the stem. It was unsightly to Daisuke. He went out to the verandah with the scissors, cut the leaf just before the fold, and threw it away. The thick edge seemed to ooze, and as Daisuke watched, a drop sounded on the verandah floor. A thick, heavy green fluid had gathered at the cut edge. Wanting to smell it, Daisuke poked his nose into the tangled leaves. He left the drip on the verandah just as it was. Then he stood, and pulling a handkerchief from his sleeve, was beginning to wipe the blades of the scissors when Kadono came in to announce that Mr. Hiraoka was here. At that moment, neither Hiraoka nor Michiyo had any part of Daisuke’s thoughts. He was under the spell of the strange green fluid, moving in an atmosphere quite apart from the outside world. The moment he heard Hiraoka’s name, the feeling was dispelled. And he somehow did not feel like seeing him.

  “Shall I show him in this way?” Prompted by Kadono, Daisuke only said “Hm” and stepped inside. Hiraoka, who was shown in after him, was already wearing a summer suit. Not only were his white shirt and collar new, but he also had on a kind of knit tie that was much in vogue. He was so fashionably put together that no one would have guessed he was unemployed.

  After some talk, it became clear that Hiraoka’s situation had not progressed at all. Lately, it was useless even to try; that was why he played around like this every day. Or else he stayed at home and slept, he said, making a point of laughing loudly. Daisuke said that was probably good, too. After that they passed the time in innocuous gossip. But since it was not so much gossip that came up naturally as gossip designed to skirt a particular problem, they both felt a certain tension at the bottom of their stomachs.

  Hiraoka would bring up neither the money nor Michiyo. Consequently, he also said nothing about the visit Daisuke had made in his absence three days before. At first, Daisuke had also deliberately avoided the topic and tried to appear nonchalant, but as Hiraoka persisted in maintaining his distance, Daisuke became uneasy.

  “By the way, I went over to your place two or three days ago, but you weren’t there,’’ he began.

  “Hm. So I heard. I have to thank you for that. Thanks to you . . . oh well, we could have managed without bothering you, but she worried so much, we ended up inconveniencing you.” Hiraoka offered his chilly thanks. “I guess, in a way, I’ve come today to thank you, but she’ll probably come herself one of these days,” he added, quite as if Michiyo were an entirely separate entity from himself.

  Daisuke simply answered, “There’s no need to go to such trouble.” There the conversation came to a halt. Then again it slid into areas common to both but of no great interest to either, until Hiraoka said suddenly, “There’s a chance I may quit business altogether. The more I learn about the inside workings of the business world, the more I get sick of it. Besides, I’ve made a few stabs at it since I got here and I’ve lost all my nerve.” It sounded like a confession from the heart.

  Daisuke only said, “Of course.”

  Hiraoka seemed startled by the extreme coolness of the response, but he continued, “As I mentioned a while back, I’m thinking of going into the newspaper business.”

  “Is there an opening somewhere?” Daisuke asked. “There’s one right now. It looks like I can get it.”

  When he first came in, Hiraoka had said that he was playing around because it wasn’t worth trying to find a job at the moment; now, he was saying there was an opening in the newspaper business that he was considering taking; it was a bit inconsistent, but Daisuke thought it would be too troublesome to press the matter and confined himself to expressing approval with, “That should be interesting.”

  After seeing Hiraoka to the door, Daisuke remained standing on the threshold for a while, drawing close to the shoji.

  As if to keep him company, Kadono also stayed to watch Hiraoka’s retreating figure. Soon he opened his mouth. “Mr. Hiraoka is more fashionable than I thought. He almost puts us to shame, looking like that.”

  “Oh, not really. Nowadays, everybody looks pretty much like that,” answered Daisuke, straightening himself.

  “Well, you sure can’t tell by looks any more, can you? You might be wondering who some gentleman is, then he walks into a shack.”

  Daisuke did not bother to answer and returned to his study. The fluid that had dripped from the clivia had begun to cake. Daisuke deliberately closed the study off from the next room and shut himself in. It was his habit to seclude himself after receiving guests. On a day like today, when he was thrown off balance, the need for this was particularly acute.

  Hiraoka had finally moved away from him. Every time Daisuke saw him, he felt as if he were meeting him from a distance. But in fact, it was not just Hiraoka. He felt like this no matter whom he saw. Modern society was nothing more than an aggregate of isolated individuals. The earth stretched boundlessly, but the instant houses were built upon it, it became fragmented. The people inside the houses became fragmented, too. Civilization took the collective we and transformed it into isolated individuals. This was Daisuke’s interpretation.

  The Hiraoka who had been close to Daisuke had enjoyed having people weep for him. Maybe he was still like that. But since he never gave any indication of it, it was hard to tell. No, in fact, he made a point of behaving so as to repel sympathy. Either he had decided to rely on himself and show that he could get through the world alone, or he had realized that isolation was the true condition of modern society.

  The Daisuke who had been close to Hiraoka had enjoyed weeping for others. Gradually, he had become unable to weep. It was not that it was more modern not to weep. In fact, he would rather assert that he was modern precisely because he did not weep. Daisuke had yet to meet the individual who, as he stood groaning beneath the oppression of Occidental civilization in the seething arena of the struggle for survival, was still able to shed genuine tears for another.

  It was less estrangement than aversion that Daisuke felt for the new Hiraoka. He judged that Hiraoka was developing the same feelings. There had been times when the old Daisuke was surprised to recognize such shadows in his own heart and was extremely saddened. But now that sadness had all but rubbed off. All he did was to stare at the dark shadows. This was the way it really was, he thought. It could not be helped, he thought. That was all.

  Having fallen to the depths of such isolation, Daisuke’s mind was far too lucid to agonize over it. He believed that these were the conditions destined for modern man. Accordingly, when he now considered his estrangement from Hiraoka, he concluded it was nothing more than the result of their having proceeded along the normal course of all men to a particular point. At the same time, he could not help recognizing that they had arrived at this point more quickly than most because of certain circumstances that lay between them. These had to do with Michiyo’s marriage. It was he, Daisuke, who had counseled Hiraoka to marry Michiyo. He was not so weak of will as to have regretted it at the time. Even now, when he looked back, his act appeared as an honorable one that lit up his past. But in the course of the thr
ee years since then, nature had thrust upon the two men consequences peculiar to nature. And the two had had to shed their satisfaction and their glory and bow their heads before this force. Hiraoka came to have fleeting moments of wondering why he had taken Michiyo. Daisuke heard a voice from somewhere asking why he had urged his friend to take her.

  Closeted in his study, Daisuke spent the entire day buried in his thoughts.

  At dinner time, Kadono called, “You’ve been studying all day today, Sensei. How about going for a little walk? Today’s the festival of the tiger, and some Chinese student’s supposed to perform at the auditorium. Why don’t you go see what he has to show? Those Chinese aren’t shy at all, they’ll do anything. It should be fun.” He chattered on by himself.

  CHAPTER IX

  DAISUKE WAS SUMMONED by his father again. He could guess quite well what he wanted. Daisuke had always tried to avoid seeing his father. These days, he was more careful than ever to steer clear of the inner quarters of the house, because no matter how politely he addressed his father, inside, he was full of contempt for him.

  Contemporary society, in which no human being could have contact with another without feeling contemptuous, constituted what Daisuke called the decadence of the twentieth century. The life appetites, which had suddenly swollen of late, exerted extreme pressure on the instinct for morality and threatened its collapse. Daisuke regarded this phenomenon as a clash between the old and new appetites. And finally, he understood that the striking growth of the life appetites was, in effect, a tidal wave that had swept from European shores.

  These two forces would have to come to an equilibrium at some point. But Daisuke believed that until the day came when feeble Japan could stand shoulder to shoulder financially with the greatest powers of Europe, that balance would not be achieved. And he was resigned to the likelihood that the sun would never shine upon such a day. Thus, most of the Japanese gentry, confronted with this predicament, had every day to commit crimes that fell just short of running into the law—or failing that, they had to commit crimes in their heads. Among themselves, they had to silently acknowledge each other’s crimes and make them the subject of friendly banter. As a member of the human race, Daisuke could neither bear to receive nor to inflict such insults.

  Daisuke’s father was a complicated case because his reaction to this dilemma was rather unique. He had received the morality-centered education peculiar to the pre-Restoration warrior class. This education was an unreasonable affair that placed the standard of emotional conduct at some distant point beyond the self and refused to eye the truths borne out by immediate facts. Nevertheless, his father remained the captive of habit and clung tenaciously to this education. At the same time, he was engaged in business—that activity so prone to attack by the life appetites. And in fact, over the years his father had been corroded by these appetites. It stood to reason that there should be a vast gulf between his present and past selves. But he would not admit this to himself. He persisted in declaring that he was the same as ever, that he had built his business to its present state with the same attitudes he had always held. But Daisuke thought it impossible to satisfy modern appetites without first limiting the influence of an education valid only in feudal times. Any individual who would dare appease both masters would of necessity suffer great anguish from the ensuing contradictions. One who experienced such anguish and failed to recognize its source was a dim-witted, primitive creature. Each time he faced his father, Daisuke could not help feeling that either the man was a dissimulating hypocrite or a fool deficient in judgment. And Daisuke hated feeling this way.

  Even so, his own cleverness was of no avail before his father. And Daisuke knew it well. That was why he had never yet pushed his father to the limits of his own contradictions.

  It was Daisuke’s conviction that all morality traced its origins to social realities. He believed there could be no greater confusion of cause and effect than to attempt to conform social reality to a rigidly predetermined notion of morality. Accordingly, he found the ethical education conducted by lecture in Japanese schools utterly meaningless. In the schools, students were either instructed in the old morality or crammed with a morality suited to the average European. For an unfortunate people beset by the fierce appetites of life, this amounted to nothing more than vain, empty talk. When the recipients of this education saw society before their eyes, they would recall those lectures and burst out laughing. Or else they would feel that they had been made fools of. In Daisuke’s case it was not just school; he had received the most rigorous and least functional education from his father. Thanks to this, he had at one time experienced acute anguish stemming from contradictions. Daisuke even felt bitter over it.

  When he had gone home to thank Umeko, she had warned him that he had better go to the back and pay his respects. Daisuke had laughed and played the innocent, asking if Father was home. Even when given the unequivocal answer that he was, he said he was in a hurry that day and left.

  Today, however, since he had come for the express purpose of seeing his father, he had no choice. When he went around from the inner vestibule to the living room, he found, to his surprise, Seigo sitting cross-legged and drinking. Umeko was at his side. Seeing Daisuke, Seigo said, “How about a drink?” and grabbed the wine bottle in front of him, waving it at Daisuke. There was still quite a bit left. Umeko clapped her hands and sent for a glass.

  “Guess how old it is,” she said as she poured.

  “Daisuke would never know,” said Seigo, watching his brother’s lips. After one sip, Daisuke put down his glass. Instead of appetizers there were thin wafers on a cake dish.

  “It’s good,” he said.

  “That’s why I told you to guess how old it is.”

  “Does it have an age? You’ve really got something here. I’ll take one with me when I go.”

  “Sorry, this is all there is. It was a gift.” Umeko got up and went to the verandah, where she brushed the wafer crumbs from her lap.

  “What happened today? You seem very relaxed,” Daisuke asked Seigo.

  “Today is a day of rest. I’ve been so busy lately, I had to take a break.” Seigo put a cigar that had just gone out into his mouth. Daisuke found a match beside him and lit it for his brother.

  “Dai-san, you’re the one who’s relaxed,” said Umeko as she returned from the verandah.

  “Have you been to the Kabukiza yet? If you haven’t, you should go, it’s interesting.”

  “You’ve been already? I’m surprised. You really are lazy, aren’t you.”

  “I wouldn’t call it lazy. It’s just that my studies lie in a different direction.”

  “You always talk so big. You don’t understand how others feel.” Umeko turned toward Seigo. Seigo sat with reddened eyelids, blankly blowing the smoke from his cigar.

  “Isn’t that right?” Umeko prompted.

  Transferring his cigar to his fingers with an annoyed look, Seigo answered, “Isn’t it better to have him study hard now so that one of these days, when we’re poor, he’ll be able to save us?”

  “Dai-san, could you become an actor?” asked Umeko.

  Without answering, Daisuke put his glass before his sister-in-law. Umeko was also silent as she lifted the wine bottle.

  “I hear you were terribly busy recently.” Daisuke took the conversation back to the beginning.

  “Oh, it was too much.” Seigo sprawled out on the floor.

  “Did it have anything to do with the Japan Sugar Refinery Incident?”

  “It didn’t have anything to do with Japan Sugar, but I’ve been busy, that’s for sure.”

  Seigo’s answers were never much clearer than this. He probably did not care to be any clearer just now, but to Daisuke’s ears it sounded no different from his habitual laziness in speech. Thus Daisuke had always found it easy to plunge into the heart of his brother’s answ
ers. “Japan Sugar’s in a mess, but wasn’t there anything they could have done before things came to that?”

  “Well, maybe. Actually, you never can tell what might happen in this world. Ume, you have to tell Naoki to take Hector out today so he gets some exercise. It’s not good for him to eat like this and sleep all day.” Seigo repeatedly rubbed his drooping eyelids.

  “I guess it’s about time to go to the back and get a scolding from Father,” said Daisuke, putting his glass before his sister-in-law. Umeko laughed and poured the wine.

  “About a wife?” asked Seigo. “Yes, I suppose so.”

  “Go ahead and take her. Shouldn’t make an old man worry so much,” he said, then continued more decisively, “You’d better watch out. There’s been a low pressure front out these days.”

  Daisuke, who had been about to rise, paused to check, “I hope it’s not a low caused by all this recent activity.”

  His brother, still sprawled out, answered, “Can’t say. Even if we look solid like this, there’s no telling when we might be dragged off like those Japan Sugar executives.”

  “Don’t talk so foolishly,” reproved Umeko.

  “It’s probably a low brought on by my loafing.” Daisuke got up laughing.

  He followed the verandah past the inner garden to his father’s quarters, where he found the old man seated before a Chinese desk reading a Chinese book. His father was fond of poetry, and whenever he had the time would read collections of Chinese poetry. At times, however, this was an indication of his worst moods. On such occasions even Daisuke’s imperturbable brother avoided him at all cost. If an encounter was absolutely necessary, he took the precaution of dragging Seitarō or Nuiko along with him. Daisuke remembered this when he got as far as the verandah, but thinking that he needn’t go to quite such extremes, he passed by one room and entered his father’s sitting room.