And Then

by Sōseki Natsume

  “Revenge?” said Michiyo. Her eyes moved as if in fear of the word. “In spite of everything, there hasn’t been a single day since I got married that I haven’t hoped that you would get married as soon as possible,” came her somewhat formal words.

  But Daisuke would not heed them. “No, I want you to take revenge on me as much as possible. That’s what I truly want. Calling you over like this today, and baring my heart to you—I can only think of this as part of your revenge, too. Now, I’ve as good as committed a crime in the eyes of society. But this is the way I was born, so it’s more natural for me that I should commit this crime. Even if society brands me a criminal, if I can do penance to you, then that’s enough. I can think of nothing that could make me happier.”

  For the first time, Michiyo smiled through her tears. Still, not a word came to her lips. Daisuke gained more time to unbosom himself: “I know that it’s cruel of me to tell you these things after all these years. But it can’t be helped, the more cruel I sound to you, the more it means I’ve succeeded with you—that’s what it amounts to. Besides, I have come to the point where I can’t go on living without revealing these cruel facts. In other words, it’s selfishness. That’s why I’m apologizing.”

  “It’s not cruel. So please don’t apologize any more.” Michiyo’s tone had suddenly become clear. It was still subdued, but compared to before, it was very calm. After a pause, she began, “If you had only spoken a little sooner”—and tears gathered in her eyes.

  “Would you have been happier if I had said nothing the rest of my life?”

  “No, that’s not it,” Michiyo denied forcefully. “If you hadn’t spoken, I don’t know if I could have gone on living either.”

  It was Daisuke’s turn to smile. “Then it doesn’t matter.” “It’s not just that it doesn’t matter, I’m grateful. Only . . .” “Only, it’s wrong to Hiraoka—is that what you want to say?” Michiyo nodded uneasily.

  Daisuke asked, “Michiyo-san, tell me honestly. Do you love Hiraoka?”

  Michiyo did not answer. The color drained visibly from her face. Her eyes and mouth became fixed. Everything about her communicated anguish.

  Daisuke asked next, “Then does Hiraoka love you?”

  Michiyo’s eyes were still cast down. Daisuke, trying to supply a decisive conclusion to his own question, had already formed the words in his mouth when Michiyo suddenly lifted her face. The uncertainty of just a moment ago had almost vanished from her face. Even the tears were nearly dry. Her cheeks were pale as usual, but her lips were firm and showed no signs of trembling. From their midst came these low, heavy words, one by one as if they would not link together. “We have no choice. Let’s make up our minds.”

  Daisuke shuddered as if someone had showered him with cold water from behind. They sat facing each other, the two who were sure to be driven from society, and gazed into each other’s souls as if they would bore into them.

  Presently, Michiyo, as if she had suddenly been seized by something, put her hands to her face and began to weep. Daisuke, unable to bear the sight of her weeping, leaned on his elbow and hid his forehead behind his five fingers. There they sat, immobile, a veritable sculpture of love.

  While they were still, they felt a tension of spirit as if they had seen fifty years compressed before their eyes. And together with the tension, they did not lose sight of the realization that they existed side by side. Together they received the punishment and blessing of love, and together they savored each.

  Presently, Michiyo took her handkerchief and carefully wiped her tears away. Then she said quietly, “I’ll be going home now.”

  Daisuke answered, “Yes, go.”

  The rain had become light, but Daisuke of course did not want to send her home alone. He deliberately did not hire a ricksha but saw her back himself. Whereas he normally would have accompanied her all the way to Hiraoka’s house, he now parted from her at the Edogawa Bridge. He stood on the bridge and followed her with his eyes until she had turned the corner. Then, slowly walking back, he pronounced to himself, “It’s all over.”

  The rain lifted toward evening and when night came, the clouds raced through the sky. The moon rose pure and white as if it had been washed. For a long time, Daisuke gazed from the verandah at the moistened leaves in the garden flooded by moonlight, and in the end, he put on his clogs and stepped down. The garden, not a spacious one to begin with, had a surprising number of trees, leaving little room for Daisuke to walk. He stood in the middle and looked up at the vast sky. Then he got the lilies he had bought during the day and strewed them all around himself. The scattered white petals, bathed in the moonlight, became luminous. Some of them glimmered in the dark at the foot of the trees. For some time Daisuke stayed in their midst, huddled over.

  He went in only when it was time to sleep. The scent of the flowers had not completely left the room.

  CHAPTER XV

  After he had seen Michiyo and said to her the things that had to be said, Daisuke found it considerably easier to experience something resembling peace of mind, at least as compared with before. But this was only as he had expected and was in no way a particularly surprising result.

  The day after their meeting, he rose with the conviction of a man who had decisively cast the die he had long held in his hand. He recognized that since the previous day, he had become obligated to bear a certain responsibility for his and Michiyo’s fate. Moreover, it was a responsibility that he himself had taken the initiative to assume. Consequently, he could not find the burden painful. He even felt that pushed by its weight, his feet moved forward more naturally. Bearing the slice of fate he had carved out for himself on his head, he prepared to do final battle with his father. Behind his father stood his brother. And his sister-in-law. After he had fought them, there would be Hiraoka. Even if he made his way through them, there would still be all of society. There would be that machine-like society that would not for one moment make allowances for individual freedoms and private circumstances. That society now appeared to Daisuke as a total darkness. He resolved to fight everything.

  He was surprised at his own bravery and daring. Until this day he had viewed himself as a perfect gentleman—disliking passion, incapable of risks, avoiding games of chance, cautious, peaceful. Morally speaking, he had never committed a cowardly act in any significant sense, but he still found it difficult to remove from his mind the impression that he was fainthearted.

  He subscribed to a certain popular foreign magazine. In one number he had come across an article entitled “Mountain Accidents” and had been alarmed. The article recounted the injuries and mishaps that befell those adventurers who crawled up high mountains. There was a story of a climber lost in an avalanche whose bones appeared forty years later on the tip of a glacier; another described the plight of four adventurers who, about to pass a flat, vertical rock that stood halfway up the side of a peak, had piled one on top of the other like monkeys; but just as the highest was about to reach for the tip of the rock, it had crumbled, the rope had broken, and the three, doubled one upon the other, had plunged headlong past the fourth into the distance. In the midst of these accounts were inserted several illustrations of human beings glued like bats to a mountainside as sheer as a brick wall. Daisuke, imagining the wide sky and distant valleys that lay beyond the white space beside the precipitous cliffs, could not help reexperiencing the dizziness brought on by terror.

  He discovered that in the world of morality, he stood on the same ground as those climbers. But now that he stood there himself, he had not the slightest intention of recoiling. It would have been infinitely more painful for him to recoil and gain a reprieve.

  He wanted to see his father and talk to him as soon as possible. Fearing that he might be engaged and unable to see him, the day after Michiyo came he called to ask for a convenient time. He was told that his father was out. When he called again the followi
ng day, he was refused on the grounds of a prior engagement. The next time, he was told there was no need for him to come until such time as he should be called. Daisuke waited as he was ordered. In the meantime, there was not a single letter from either his sister-in-law or his brother. At first, Daisuke speculated that the family had plotted to allow him as much time as possible to reflect and reconsider, so he remained nonchalant. He took his meals heartily. At night he dreamt in relative peace. Once or twice, in the intervals of clear sky, he took Kadono for a walk. Still there was neither a message nor a letter from home. Daisuke became uneasy, thinking that the respite granted him midway up the precipice had lasted too long. In the end he made up his mind to go to Aoyama himself. His brother was out as usual. His sister-in-law gave him a pitying look when she saw him. But she would say nothing about the matter at hand. When she heard what had brought him, she said she would go to the back and ask Father if it was convenient for him to see Daisuke. Umeko’s manner suggested that she was protecting Daisuke from his father’s wrath.

  It could also have been interpreted as an attempt to estrange him. Daisuke waited, agonizing over which it might be. As he waited, he repeated over and over to himself that no matter what happened, he was prepared for it.

  It was some time before Umeko emerged from the back. She looked at Daisuke and said, again with pity, that it was not convenient for Father to see him that day. Daisuke had no choice but to ask when he should come again. His former spirit had faded and the query sounded dejected. Umeko, in a tone that suggested that his manner had aroused her sympathy, promised to take it upon herself to let him know of a suitable time within two or three days, and urged him to go home for that day. As Daisuke stepped from the inner entrance, Umeko, who had deliberately come to see him off, warned “You’d really better think it over this time.’’ Daisuke went out the gate without even answering.

  On his way home he felt terribly annoyed. As he walked, the feeling mounted in him that the peace he had discovered since his meeting with Michiyo had been to some extent destroyed by his father’s and sister-in-law’s behavior. He would have told his father everything just as he felt it, his father would have expressed his thoughts without reserve, and whatever the outcome, Daisuke would have accepted it manfully. This was what Daisuke had anticipated. His father’s tactics were unpleasant beyond expectation. And insofar as they reflected his father’s character, Daisuke found them even more disagreeable.

  On the way, Daisuke tried to recall why he had gone to the trouble of hastening the interview with his father. Since it was no more than an effort to respond to his father’s demands in the first place, it should have been advantageous to his father, who was waiting for his answer. If his father was going to avoid him in this studied fashion and postpone their meeting, then it could only result in delaying a solution to his own problems. As far as Daisuke was concerned, he had already taken care of the important aspect relating to his own future. He decided that until his father specified a time and summoned him, he would do nothing more about his family.

  Daisuke came home. Only a faintly dark shadow of annoyance with his father lingered in him. But this shadow was such that it was sure to become more somber in the near future. Other than that, he perceived two currents of fate lying before him. One pointed to the direction in which he and Michiyo would be swept along. The other was a threatening force that seemed determined to swallow both him and Hiraoka. Since his meeting with Michiyo the other day, he had done nothing about Hiraoka. Even if he were to see Michiyo now—and he had no intention of allowing a long period of time to elapse without seeing her again—he was unprepared to take a definite course of action and move beyond their present situation. On this point, Daisuke himself had simply not designed a lucid plan. As for the future that was sure to sweep him along with Hiraoka, all that he had was a readiness to face anything at any time. Of course, he intended to wait for an opportune moment to seize the initiative and appeal to Hiraoka. But he had prepared nothing concrete. The one thing he had promised himself that he would not fail to do under any circumstances was to disclose everything to Hiraoka. Hence, the current of fate that would unite him with Hiraoka was a black and fearful thing. One of his worries was the problem of how he should save Michiyo from this terrifying storm.

  Last of all, Daisuke had not ordered his thoughts toward the society that surrounded him with a mass of human beings. In point of fact, society possessed the right to sanction him. But, he believed, the right to his deeds and his motives issued strictly from his own natural endowments and from nothing else. He intended to proceed on the assumption that on this point, there were no grounds for debate between himself and society.

  From his position at the center of his small world, Daisuke regarded the situation thus, and having surveyed once again its constituent relationships and their hierarchy, he said, “This should do,” and left the house. He walked one or two blocks to his customary ricksha landing, where he selected a particularly handsome and speedy-looking vehicle and leaped in. With no destination in mind, he named an arbitrary section of town and rode around and around for about two hours before going home.

  The next day, once again in his study, he stood at the center of his world just as he had the day before and looked everywhere, to his left, to his right, in front, and behind, then said “Very well” and went out, this time to roam wherever his feet carried him, again without a goal, and then came back.

  He repeated the same procedure on the third day. But as soon as he stepped out, he crossed the Edogawa River and went to Michiyo’s place. “Why haven’t you come since?” she asked, quite as if nothing had taken place between them.

  Daisuke was rather taken aback by her utter composure. Michiyo deliberately took the cushion from Hiraoka’s desk and thrust it toward Daisuke. “Why are you so restless?” she asked, and made him sit on it.

  As they talked for an hour or thereabouts, Daisuke’s head gradually became calm. It occurred to him that rather than ride aimlessly in a ricksha, he should have come sooner, even if only for thirty minutes. On his way out, Daisuke said, “I’ll come again. It’ll be all right, don’t worry,” as if to reassure Michiyo. Michiyo only smiled.

  That evening there was at last a message from his father. When it came, Daisuke was dining with the old woman in attendance. He put his bowl down to take the letter from Kadono and read the message that he was to come by a certain time on the following day. “Sounds like a government office, doesn’t it?” he said, and showed the postcard to Kadono.

  “Is it from your home in Aoyama?” asked Kadono, looking at it politely. Not having anything to say, he turned it over and resorted to flattery, saying, “Well, one thing’s for sure, you have to admit those old people have a good hand,” and went out. The old woman had been chattering about almanacs. The older brother of the sign of water and the younger brother of gold, the harvest festival, the sportless day, the nail-trimming day, the building day*—it was all terribly bothersome. Daisuke, of course, was only giving half an ear to what she said. She asked again for a job for Kadono. Even if it was only for twenty-five yen, couldn’t he be placed somewhere? Daisuke paid so little attention that he hardly knew how he answered her. But to himself, he thought that it was no time to worry about Kadono; he himself was in danger.

  * Terms used by the practitioners of Onmyōdō (Yin-yang and Taoistic magic).

  Just as he finished his meal, Terao came from Hongō. Daisuke looked at Kadono’s face and thought for a while. “Shall I say no?” asked Kadono carelessly. Since the other day, Daisuke had missed an appointment or two, which was rare for him. When he thought he could get away with it, he had also refused to receive visitors, which had happened about twice.

  Daisuke decided to go ahead and see Terao. As usual, Terao was desperately trying to get something. Seeing this, Daisuke did not feel like leveling his usual barrage of sarcasm at him. Whether it was translation or adaptation, Tera
o was determined to struggle through as long as he was alive, and in this respect he was more a faithful child of society than Daisuke was. If he were to stumble and find himself in Terao’s position, what kind of work would he be able to withstand? When he thought about this, Daisuke felt sorry for himself. Resigned as he was to the not-so-distant, almost certain prospect of falling even harder than Terao, Daisuke could not look upon him with contempt.

  Terao had managed to finish the translation by the end of the month; but the publisher had begun talking about unfavorable circumstances and said he would have to postpone publication until the fall. Unable to convert his labors directly into cash, Terao had turned to Daisuke as a last resort. Had he agreed to the work without a written contract? That did not seem to be quite the case either. But he would not say that the bookseller had disregarded an agreement between them. In other words, Terao was vague. The only sure thing seemed to be that he was in difficulty. But Terao, accustomed as he was to such slips, did not seem to be reproaching anyone for breach of faith. Outrageous, unpardonable, he might say, but that was only with his lips, and his real concerns seemed to be centered on rice and meat.

  Daisuke felt sorry for him and gave him something to help with his immediate finances. Terao thanked him and went home. Before he left, he confessed that he had actually received a small advance from the publisher, but he had used it up long ago. After Terao left, Daisuke thought that this man too showed a certain strength of character. It was not something one could achieve just by living comfortably from day to day, as he himself did. Maybe the literary circles of the day were languishing under such deplorable conditions that they had seen a need for such a type and given birth to him naturally, Daisuke thought, as he stared into space.