“More tea? More rice? You certainly eat, don’t you?” she would say teasingly, completely unabashed at her own directness.
But that day, with the summer heat beginning, my normally large appetite deserted me.
“So that’s all? You’ve begun eating like a bird lately.”
“No, it’s just that I can’t eat a lot when it’s hot like this.”
She called the maid and had her clear the table, then ordered ice cream and fruit to be served.
“I made it myself,” she explained. Sensei’s wife was at such loose ends, it seemed, that she could take the time to make her own ice cream for guests. I had several helpings.
“So now that you’ve graduated,” said Sensei, “what do you plan to do next?” He had half-turned his cushion toward the garden and was leaning back against the sliding doors at the edge of the veranda.
I was only conscious that I had graduated; I had not yet decided on any next step. Seeing me hesitate, Sensei’s wife intervened. “Teaching?” she asked. When I did not reply, she tried again: “The civil service, then?”
Sensei and I both burst out laughing. “To be honest,” I said, “I haven’t any plan at all yet. I haven’t even so much as thought about what profession to enter, actually. I can’t see how I can choose, really, since I don’t know what’s a good profession and what’s not until I try them out.”
“That’s true enough,” she responded. “But after all, you’ll inherit property, so it’s natural that you’d feel relaxed about the question. Just take a look at others who aren’t so fortunate. They’re far from able to be so blithe.”
Some of my friends had been searching for positions as middle-school teachers since well before graduation, so her words were true. I privately acknowledged that but what I said was “I may have been a bit infected by Sensei.”
“Oh dear, he’s not a good influence, I’m afraid.”
Sensei grimaced. “I don’t mind if you’re influenced by me. What I’d like is for you to make sure, while your father is still alive, that you get a decent inheritance, as I said the other day. You mustn’t relax until that’s sorted out.”
I recalled our conversation back in early May in the spacious grounds of the nursery garden among the flowering azaleas. Those forceful words, spoken with emotion as we were walking back, echoed in my mind. They were not only forceful, those words, they were terrible. Ignorant of his past as I was, I could not fully make sense of them.
“Are you very well off?” I asked Sensei’s wife.
“Now why should you ask such a question?”
“Because Sensei won’t tell me the answer.”
She smiled and looked at Sensei. “That would be because we’re not well off enough to make it worth mentioning.”
“I’d like to know, so that when I go home and talk to my father, I’ll have some idea of how much I’d need to live as Sensei does.” Sensei was facing the garden, calmly puffing on his cigarette, so I naturally addressed his wife.
“Well, it’s not really a question of how much, you know . . . I mean, we get by, one way and another . . . Anyway, that’s beside the point. The point is, you really must find something to do in life. You can’t just laze around like Sensei does . . .”
Sensei turned slightly. “I don’t just laze around,” he protested.
CHAPTER 34
That night it was after ten when I left Sensei’s house. I was due to go back to my family home in two or three days, so I said my farewells as I left.
“I won’t be seeing you for a while,” I explained.
“You’ll be back in September, won’t you?” Sensei’s wife asked.
Having graduated, I had in fact no reason to come back to Tokyo in September. Nor did I fancy the idea of returning to the city in August, at the height of the hot summer. In fact, since I felt no urgency to search for work, I could come back or not as I wished.
“Yes, I guess it’ll be around September.”
“Well, then, take good care, won’t you? We may end up going somewhere ourselves over the summer. It promises to be very hot. If we do, we’ll send you a postcard.”
“Where do you have in mind, if you were to go somewhere?”
Sensei was grinning as he listened to this conversation. “Actually, we haven’t even decided whether we’re going or not.”
As I rose to leave, Sensei held me back. “How is your father’s illness, by the way?” he asked.
I had had very little news on the subject, I replied, so I could only assume that he was not seriously ill.
“You can’t make such easy assumptions about an illness like his, you know,” he reminded me. “If he develops uremia, it’s all up with him.”
I had never heard the term uremia and did not know what it meant. Such technical terms had not come up in my discussion with the local doctor back during the winter vacation.
“Do look after him well,” Sensei’s wife added. “If the poison goes to his brain, he’s finished, you know. It’s no laughing matter.”
This unnerved me, but I managed to grin. “Well, there’s no point in worrying, I guess, since they say it’s not an illness you recover from.”
“If you can approach it so matter-of-factly, no more need be said, I suppose,” she replied, and looked down, subdued. I guessed she was recalling her mother, who had died of the same illness many years ago. Now I felt genuinely sad at the thought of my father’s fate.
Sensei suddenly turned to her. “Do you think you’ll die before me, Shizu?”
“Why?”
“No particular reason, I’m just asking. Or will I move on before you do? The general rule is that the husband goes first, and the wife is left behind.”
“That’s not always so, by any means. But the husband is generally the older one, isn’t he?”
“You mean therefore he dies first? Well, then, I’ll have to die before you do, won’t I?”
“You’re a special case.”
“You think so?”
“Well, look at you. You’re just fine. You’ve almost never had a day’s illness. No, it’s certainly going to be me first.”
“You first, you think?”
“Definitely.”
Sensei looked at me. I smiled.
“But just say it turns out to be me who goes first. What would you do then?”
“What would I do . . .” Sensei’s wife faltered, seeming stricken by a sudden apprehension of the grief she would feel. But then she raised her face again, her mood brighter.
“Well, there’d be nothing I could do, would there? Death comes when it will, as the saying goes.” She spoke jokingly, but her eyes were fixed on me.
CHAPTER 35
I had been about to leave, but once this conversation was under way, I settled back into my seat again.
Sensei turned to me. “What do you think?”
I was in no position to judge whether Sensei or his wife would be first to die, so I simply smiled and remarked, “Who can foretell allotted life spans?”
“Yes, that’s what it amounts to, isn’t it,” Sensei’s wife responded. “We each receive a given span of years, and there’s nothing we can do about it. That’s exactly what happened with Sensei’s mother and father, you know.”
“They died on the same day?”
“Oh no, not quite the same day, of course, but just about the same—one died soon after the other.”
I was struck by this new piece of information. “Why did they die so close together?”
She was about to answer when Sensei broke in. “That’s enough of this subject. It’s pointless.” He gave his fan a few boisterous flaps, then turned to his wife. “I’ll give you this house when I die, Shizu.”
She laughed. “And the earth under it too, if you don’t mind.”
“The earth belongs to someone else, so we can’t do much about that. But I’ll give you everything I own.”
“Thank you. But I couldn’t do much with those foreign books of yours, you
know.”
“Sell them to a secondhand dealer.”
“How much would they come to?”
Instead of replying, Sensei continued to talk hypothetically about his own death. He was firmly assuming he would die before his wife.
Although she had initially treated the conversation lightly, it finally began to oppress her sensitive woman’s heart. “You keep saying ‘When I die, when I die.’ That’s enough talk about the next world, please. It’s inauspicious. If you die, I’ll do everything as you’d have wanted, rest assured. What more could you ask?”
Sensei looked out at the garden and smiled. But to avoid upsetting her further, he said no more on the subject.
I was overstaying my visit, so I hastily rose again to leave. Sensei and his wife saw me to the entrance hall.
“Take good care of your father,” she said.
“See you in September,” said Sensei.
I said my farewells and stepped out past the lattice gate. The bushy osmanthus between the entrance and the front gate spread its branches wide in the darkness as if to block my way. As I pushed the few steps past it, I imagined the scented flowers of the autumn to come, on those twigs where dark leaves now flourished. My mental image of Sensei’s house had always been inseparable from this osmanthus bush.
As I paused there and turned back to look at the house, imagining the autumn day when I would cross that threshold again, the hall light that had been shining through the lattice front was suddenly extinguished. Sensei and his wife had evidently gone back inside. I made my way on alone through the darkness.
I did not go straight back to my lodgings. There were things I needed to buy before my journey, and besides, I had to ease my belly, which was crammed with fine food, so I set off to walk toward the bustling town. It was still full of the activity of early evening. Men and women were casually thronging the streets.
I ran into a friend who had just graduated with me, and he pulled me off to a bar, where I listened to his high-spirited chatter, frothy as the beer we drank. It was past midnight when I finally got home.
CHAPTER 36
The following day I went out again, braving the heat to buy the various things I had been asked to get. It had not seemed much when I received the letter with the list of purchases, but when it came to the point, it proved extremely tiresome. Wiping my sweat as I sat in the streetcar, I cursed these country folk who never spared a sympathetic thought for the time and effort to which they were putting someone else.
I did not intend to spend my summer back at home idly. I had worked out a daily program to follow and set out to gather the books I needed to pursue my plan. I had decided to spend a good half day on the second floor of Maruzen bookshop, looking through the foreign books. I located the shelves particularly relevant to my field and went through them methodically, investigating every book.
The most troublesome item on the shopping list was some ladies’ kimono collars. The shop assistant produced quite a few of them for me to look at, but when the time came for me to decide which ones to purchase, I could not. Another problem was that the prices seemed quite arbitrary. A collar that looked cheap turned out to be highly expensive, while others that I had passed over as expensive-looking actually cost very little. For the life of me I could not tell what made one more valuable than another. The whole mission defeated me, and I regretted not having troubled Sensei’s wife to come along and help me.
I bought a travel bag. It was, of course, only an inferior, locally made one, but its shiny metal fittings would look impressive enough to dazzle country folk. My mother had asked me in a letter to buy a travel bag, to carry all the gifts home, and she had specifically said a new bag. I’d laughed aloud when I read that. I appreciated her kindly intention, but the words somehow struck me as funny.
Three days later I set off on the train for home, as I had told Sensei and his wife I would on the night when I said my farewells. Sensei had been warning me about my father’s illness since winter, and I had every reason to be concerned about it, but for some reason the question did not much bother me. I was more disturbed by the problem of how my poor mother would fare after his death.
Clearly, something in me had already accepted the fact that he must die. In a letter to my elder brother in Kyushu I had admitted as much, writing that our father could not possibly recover his health. Although no doubt he was tied up with work, I added, perhaps my brother should try to get back and see him over the summer. I rounded it off with an emotional plea that our two aged parents living together alone in the country must surely be lonely, which should lie heavily on the consciences of us children. I wrote those words simply as they occurred to me, but once they were out, I found myself feeling rather different.
In the train I pondered these contradictions, and I soon began to see myself as superficial and emotionally irresponsible. Gloomily, I thought again of Sensei and his wife and recalled our conversation of a few evenings earlier, when I had gone there for dinner.
I pondered the question that had arisen between them then: Which will die first? Who could give a confident answer to that question? I thought. And suppose the answer were clear. What would Sensei do? What would his wife do? Surely the only thing either could do was continue just as they were—just as I too was helpless in the face of my father’s approaching death back at home. A sense of human fragility swept over me, of the hopeless frailty of our innately superficial nature.
PART II
MY PARENTS AND I
CHAPTER 37
When I arrived home, I was surprised to see that my father’s health seemed remarkably unchanged.
“So you’re home, eh?” he greeted me. “Well, well. Still, it’s a fine thing you’ve graduated. Wait a moment, I’ll just go and wash my face.”
He had been engaged in some task out in the garden, and now he went around to the well at the back of the house. As he walked, the grubby handkerchief he had fixed to the back of his old straw hat to keep off the sun flapped behind him.
I considered graduation a perfectly normal achievement, and my father’s unexpected degree of pleasure in it was gratifying.
“A fine thing you’ve graduated”—he repeated these words again and again. In my heart, I compared my father’s joy with Sensei’s reaction at the dinner table after the graduation ceremony. He had said “Congratulations,” but his private disdain was evident in his face. Sensei, I thought, was more cultured and admirable than my father, with his unashamed delight. In the final analysis, what I felt was displeasure at the reek of country boorishness in my father’s innocence.
“There’s nothing particularly fine in graduating from the university,” I found myself responding testily. “Hundreds of people do it every year, you know.”
My father’s expression changed. “I’m not just talking about the graduation. That’s a fine thing, to be sure, but what I’m saying has a bit more to it. If only you’d understand what I’m getting at . . .”
I asked him what he meant. He seemed disinclined to talk about it at first but finally said, “What I mean is, it’s fine for me personally. You know about this illness of mine. When I saw you in the winter, at the end of last year, I had a feeling I might not last more than three or four more months. And here I am, still doing so well. It’s wonderful. I can still get around without any trouble. And now you’ve graduated as well. That’s why I’m happy, see?
“You must realize how it pleases me that this son of mine, whom I raised with such love and care, should graduate while I’m still alive and well to witness it. Having someone make such a fuss about a mere graduation must seem boring to you, with all your aspirations—I can see that. But stand in my shoes, and you’ll see it a bit differently. What I’m saying is, it’s a fine thing for me, if not for you, don’t you see?”
Speechless, I hung my head, overwhelmed by shame that no apology could express. I saw that my father had calmly been preparing to die and had decided it would probably happen before my graduati
on. I had been a complete fool not to think of how my graduation would make him feel.
I took the diploma from my bag and spread it out carefully for my parents to see. Something had crushed it, and it was no longer quite the shape it had been.
My father smoothed it tenderly. “You should have carried such a precious thing home by hand, rolled up,” he said.
“You’d have done better to wrap it around something solid,” my mother chipped in from beside him.
After gazing at it for a while, my father rose to his feet and carried it over to the alcove, where he arranged it so that anyone who entered would immediately catch sight of it. Normally I would have made some remonstrance, but just now I was a very different person than usual. I felt not the slightest inclination to contradict my parents. I sat silently and let my father do as he would.
The warp in the thick, elegant paper refused to respond to his attempts to straighten it. No sooner had he managed to smooth it flat and stand it where he wanted than it would spring back of its own accord and threaten to tip over.
CHAPTER 38
I called my mother aside and asked about his health. “Is it really all right for him to be going out in the garden like this and being so active?”
“There’s nothing wrong with him. He seems on the whole to have recovered.”
She seemed oddly calm. Typically for a woman who had spent her life among fields and woods far from the city, she was completely innocent in such matters. Yet her calmness struck me as peculiar, considering how disconcerted and worried she had been earlier, when my father had fainted. “But back then the doctor’s diagnosis was that it was a very problematic illness, wasn’t it?”
“Well, it seems to me there’s no knowing what the human body’s capable of. The doctor sounded very grim, and yet look at your father today, still so hale and hearty. I was worried for a while and tried all I could to stop him from doing things. But that’s just who he is, isn’t it? He takes care of himself, but he’s stubborn. Once he gets it into his head that he’s well, he’ll ignore me if I try to tell him otherwise.”