In their company I was forced to pretend that I was doing my very best to look for a job. I wrote to Sensei, explaining the situation at home in great detail. I asked if he could recommend me for any position, and I assured him that I’d be happy to do whatever was in my power. As I wrote, I was aware that he was unlikely to take any notice of my request, and that even if he wished to help me, he lacked the contacts to be able to do so. But I did think that the letter would at least elicit a response from him.
Before I sealed it, I said to my mother, “I’ve written to Sensei, just as you wanted. Here, have a look.”
As I’d anticipated, she didn’t read it. “Have you? Well, then, be quick and send it off. You should have done this long ago, without having to be told.”
She still thought of me as a child, and indeed I still felt like one. “But a letter by itself isn’t enough,” I said. “Nothing will happen unless I’m there in person. I really ought to go back to Tokyo around September.”
“That may well be true, but you never know what fine offer may come up in the meantime, so it’s best to put in an early request.”
“Yes,” I replied. “Anyway, I’ll tell you more when Sensei’s answer comes. He’ll certainly reply.” I was in no doubt that he would. Sensei was a meticulous man.
I waited expectantly for a letter from him. But I had assumed wrongly. A week passed, and still nothing arrived.
“He must have gone off somewhere to escape the summer heat,” I told my mother, forced to defend him with some explanation. This justification was intended not only for her but for myself. I needed a hypothesis that would somehow justify Sensei’s silence, to spare myself a growing unease.
From time to time I forgot my father’s illness and felt inclined to escape back to Tokyo early. My father himself forgot that he was ill, in fact. Anxious though he was about the future, he made no moves to deal with the problem. Time passed, and I found no opportunity to bring up the matter of the division of property with him as Sensei had advised.
CHAPTER 44
When September arrived, I was impatient to return to Tokyo. I asked my father if he would continue to send money for a while, as he had for my studies.
“While I’m here, you see, I can’t find myself the position you say I should,” I said. This was my explanation to him for returning to Tokyo. Of course, I added, he need only send the money until I found myself a job.
Privately, I felt that such a thing was unlikely to actually come my way. My father, on the other hand, knew nothing of actual circumstances and firmly believed the opposite.
“Well, then, it’s only for a short while, so I’ll see what I can do. But not for long, you understand. You have to get yourself some good work and become independent, you know. You really should not have to rely on anyone from the day you graduate. Young people these days seem just to know how to spend money and never think of how to make it.”
He had various other things to say on the subject as well, including, “In the old days children fed their parents, but these days they devour them.”
I heard him out in silence. When his lecturing seemed to have run its course, I stood quietly to leave.
He asked me when I was planning to go. The sooner the better, as far as I was concerned.
“Ask your mother to find an auspicious day in her almanac,” he said.
“I will.”
I was extraordinarily meek with him. I hoped to be able to leave without having to stand up to him, but he held me back.
“We’ll be lonely when you’re gone, with just the two of us here. It would be fine if I were well, but as things stand, there’s no knowing what might happen when.”
I did my best to console him and returned to my desk. Sitting among my jumble of books, I thoughtfully turned over in my mind my father’s unhappy words and what lay behind them. As I did so, I heard again the cicada’s song. This time it wasn’t a continuous shrill but the intermittent call of the cicada known as tsutsukubōshi, which sings toward the end of summer. In past summers when I had been home, I had often tasted a strange sadness as I sat quietly in the midst of the seething cicada song. This sorrow seemed to pierce deep into my heart along with the piercing insect cry. Always at such times I would sit alone and still, gazing into myself.
Since returning home this time the sadness had undergone a gradual change. As the summer cicada’s strident song gradually gave way to the more hesitant call of the tsutsukubōshi, the fates of those around me also seemed to be slowly turning through the great karmic wheel. As I pondered my father’s lonely words and feelings, I thought of Sensei, from whom I had received no reply. Since Sensei and my father seemed exactly opposite types, they easily came to mind as a pair, through both association and comparison.
I knew almost everything about my father. When we parted, the emotional bond between parent and child would be all that remained. Of Sensei, on the other hand, I still knew very little. I had had no chance to hear from him the promised story of his past. Sensei was, in a word, still opaque to me. I could not rest until I had moved beyond this state and entered a place of clarity. Any break in relations with him would cause me anguish.
I asked my mother to consult the almanac and fixed on a date for my return to Tokyo.
CHAPTER 45
It was almost time for me to leave—it must have been my second-to-last evening at home—when my father had another fall. I was tying up the wicker trunk packed with my books and clothes. My father had just gone into the bathroom. My mother went in to wash his back, then cried out to me. When I rushed in, my naked father was slumped over, supported from behind by my mother. By the time we brought him back into his room, however, he was declaring that he was all right. Nevertheless, I sat by his pillow cooling his forehead with a damp towel until nine o’clock, when I finally got up to eat a light supper.
The next day my father was in better shape than expected and insisted on getting up to go to the toilet himself, despite our protests.
“I’m fine again,” he announced, repeating the words he had spoken to me the previous winter, after he had had the first fall. At that time he had indeed been more or less fine, and I hoped that the same would prove to be the case this time. But the doctor just cautioned us to be careful, and even when we pressed him, he would say nothing more definite.
Because of this fresh anxiety, when the day of my departure arrived, I no longer felt inclined to go. “Should I stay a bit longer, just to see how it goes?” I said to my mother.
“Yes, please do,” she begged me.
My mother, who had been unconcerned as long as my father could still go out into the garden or the backyard, now overreacted in the opposite direction and was consumed with worry.
“Wasn’t this the day you were going back to Tokyo?” my father inquired.
“Yes, but I’ve put it off for a while,” I told him.
“Is it because of me?” he asked.
I hesitated. If I said it was, it would only confirm that he was seriously ill. I didn’t want to unnerve him.
But he must have read what was in my heart, for he said, “That’s a shame for you,” and turned away to face the garden.
I went back to my room and looked at the wicker trunk abandoned there. It was securely fastened, ready to leave at a moment’s notice. I stood vacantly before it, wondering whether to untie the straps.
I spent three or four days in a state of awkward suspension, like one half-risen from his seat to leave. Then my father had another fall. The doctor ordered absolute rest.
“What will we do?” my mother murmured to me, in a voice hushed so that my father would not hear. She looked miserable.
I got ready to send telegrams to my brother and sister. But my father was experiencing almost no pain. The way he talked, he might have been in bed with no more than a cold. And he had an even better appetite than usual. He was disinclined to listen to warnings from those around him.
“Since I’m going to die, I intend to
die eating tasty food.”
These words struck me as both comic and tragic. After all, he was not in the city, where really tasty food was actually to be had. In the evening he asked for strips of persimmon-flavored rice cake, which he munched on with relish.
“Why should he hanker so? He must surely still have quite a strong spirit,” said my mother, groping in her despair for anything positive. Interestingly, to refer to his desire for food, she was using an old expression that was once specifically associated with illness.
My uncle paid my father a visit, and as he rose to leave, my father held him back, loath to let him go home. He said it was because he was lonely, but he also seemed to want to complain to someone about how my mother and I weren’t giving him enough to eat.
CHAPTER 46
My father’s condition remained unchanged for over a week. During that time I sent a long letter to my brother in Kyushu and asked my mother to write to my sister. I had a strong feeling that these would probably be the last letters detailing to them my father’s state of health. Our letters included the information that we would telegram when the time came, so they should stand ready to come at short notice.
My brother was in a busy line of work. My sister was pregnant. Neither was in a position to be called until my father was in evident danger. On the other hand, it would be awful if they were asked to make the journey only to arrive too late. I felt a private weight of responsibility about exactly when the telegrams should be sent.
“I couldn’t give you a precise answer on that, but you must understand that the danger can arise at any time,” said the doctor, who had come from the nearby railway station. I talked it over with my mother, and we asked him to arrange for a nurse from the hospital to be hired. When my father laid eyes on this woman, who arrived at his bedside in a white uniform to greet him, he had a peculiar expression on his face.
My father had long known that he was mortally ill. Nevertheless, he was unaware that death was now fast approaching.
“When I’m well again, I might take another trip to Tokyo,” he remarked. “Who knows when you’ll die? You have to do all the things you want while you’re alive to do them.”
My mother could only respond with “I hope you’ll take me along when you go.”
But sometimes he grew deeply dejected. “Do make sure to take good care of your mother when I die,” he said to me.
His “when I die” evoked a certain memory. That evening after my graduation, when I was preparing to leave Tokyo, Sensei had used this same phrase several times in the conversation with his wife. I remembered Sensei’s smiling face as he spoke, and his wife blocking her ears against the inauspicious words. The words had been merely hypothetical then, but now they rang with the certainty that sometime soon they would be fulfilled.
I could not emulate Sensei’s wife’s response, but I did need to find a way of distracting my father from his thoughts.
“Let’s hear you talking a bit more optimistically. Didn’t you say you’d take a trip to Tokyo when you were well again?” I asked. “With Mother. You’ll be amazed when you see it next, at how it’s changed. The streetcars, for instance—there are all sorts of new routes now. And once streetcars go into a neighborhood, of course, the whole look of the area changes. And the city divisions were recently revised—there’s not a moment day or night when Tokyo stands still.” My tongue went prattling on out of control, while he listened contentedly.
The presence of an invalid meant that there were a lot more comings and goings at the house. Every few days one or another of the relatives called to visit my father. Among them were some who lived farther away and were normally not in close contact. One remarked as he left, “I was wondering how he’d be, but he seems quite well. He talks without effort, and I must say, to look at his face, he hasn’t lost a bit of weight.” The household, almost too quiet for comfort when I first arrived, was now filled with increasing bustle and activity.
My father’s illness was the one thing that stood still in the midst of all this coming and going, and it was slowly growing worse. After consulting with my mother and uncle, I finally sent off the telegrams I had prepared. My brother replied that he would soon be there, and my sister’s husband replied similarly—her previous pregnancy had ended in a miscarriage, and her husband had already intimated that they were taking particular care that it wouldn’t become the pattern, so he would probably come in her place.
CHAPTER 47
Amid all this unrest, I nevertheless found time to sit quietly. Occasionally I even managed to open a book and read ten pages or so before I was distracted. The trunk I had packed and closed had been reopened, and I retrieved things from it as the need arose. I reviewed the schedule of study I had set up for myself back in Tokyo. I had not achieved even a third of what I’d hoped to do. The same depressing thing had happened numerous times before, it’s true, but rarely had my study gone less according to plan than this summer. I tried telling myself that this was probably simply the way it goes, but nevertheless my sense of failure oppressed me.
Huddled unhappily in self-castigations, I also thought of my father’s illness. I tried to imagine how things would be after his death. And this thought brought another, the thought of Sensei. At both ends of the spectrum of my misery were poised the images of these two men, so opposite in social standing, education, and character.
Once when I left my father’s bedside and went back to my room, my mother looked in and found me sitting alone, arms folded, amid my jumble of books.
“Why not take a nap?” she suggested. “You must be a bit exhausted.”
She had no comprehension of how I felt. Nor was I childish enough to really expect her to. I simply thanked her. However, she continued standing in the doorway.
“How’s Father?” I asked.
“He’s having a good sleep,” she replied.
Suddenly she stepped into the room and came and sat beside me.
“Has anything come from Sensei yet?”
She had believed me when I assured her there would be a reply. But even when I was writing to him, I had had no expectation that he would send the kind of reply they were hoping for. In effect, I had knowingly deceived her.
“Write to him again, will you?” she urged.
I was not inclined to begrudge the effort of writing any number of useless letters if it would comfort my mother, but having to press Sensei on this matter was painful. I dreaded earning his scorn far more than being scolded by my father or hurting my mother. I already suspected that his lack of response to my previous letter bespoke precisely that reaction from him.
“It’s easy enough to write a letter,” I said, “but this isn’t the sort of matter that gets solved through the mail. I have to go to Tokyo and present myself in person.”
“But with your father the way he is, there’s no knowing when you can go to Tokyo.”
“Exactly. And I’ll be staying here till we know what the story is, whether he gets better or not.”
“That goes without saying. Who on earth would leave someone as ill as he is and take off to Tokyo, after all?”
My first reaction was pity for my innocent mother. But I couldn’t understand why she would choose this hectic moment to bring up the problem. Was there something in her makeup that was equivalent to the oddly casual way I could forget my father’s illness and sit calmly reading, something that allowed her to temporarily forget the invalid in her care and concern herself like this with other matters?
As this thought was crossing my mind, my mother spoke. “Actually,” she said, “actually, it’s my belief it would be a great comfort to your father if you could find yourself a position before he died. The way things are going, it may be too late, but really, the way he talks shows he’s still quite aware of things. You should be a good son and make him happy while you still can.”
Alas, the situation prevented me from being a good son, and I wrote no more to Sensei.
CHAPTER 48
&
nbsp; When my brother arrived, my father was lying in bed reading the newspaper. My father had always made a special point of looking through the newspaper every day, and since he had taken to his bed, boredom had exacerbated this urge. My mother and I held our tongues, determined to indulge him in any way he wanted.
“It’s wonderful to find you looking so well,” said my brother cheerfully as he sat talking with him. “I came expecting you to be in a pretty bad way, but you seem absolutely fine.” His boisterous high spirits struck me as rather out of keeping with the situation.
When he left my father’s side and came to talk to me, however, he was much more somber. “Isn’t it a bad idea to let him read the newspaper?”
“I think so too, but he won’t take no for an answer, so what can we do?”
My brother listened in silence to my justifications, then asked, “How well does he understand it, I wonder?” He had apparently concluded that my father’s illness had affected his grasp of things.
“He understands just fine,” chimed in my sister’s husband, who had arrived at about the same time. “I spent twenty minutes or so at his bedside talking about this and that, and there was no sign of a problem. He may well last a while yet, to judge from how he seems.” He was far more optimistic than we were.
My father had asked him a number of questions about my sister. “You mustn’t let her rock about in trains, in her condition,” he had told him. “It would only be a worry for me if she endangered herself by coming to see me.” And he added, “Don’t worry, I’ll be better in no time, and then I’ll take the trip up there myself for a change and meet the baby.”
When General Nogi committed ritual suicide soon after the emperor’s funeral, stating that he was following his lord into death, my father was the first to learn of it from the newspaper.