Resting one arm on the armrest of the couch, Tsuda lifted his hand to his brow. In this attitude, as though he were offering to god a silent prayer, he was led to memories of two men he had encountered unexpectedly in this doctor’s house since the end of last year.
One was actually none other than his sister’s husband. Recognizing his figure in this dark room, Tsuda was astonished. Normally easygoing about such things, if not entirely unconcerned, his brother-in-law had seemed nonplussed, as if the intensity of Tsuda’s surprise had reverberated in him.
The other man was a friend. Supposing that Tsuda was afflicted with the same sort of illness as his own, he had spoken up without any hesitation or reserve, as if to do so were perfectly natural. Exiting the doctor’s gate together, they had engaged over dinner in a complex debate about sex and love.
Whereas the encounter with his brother-in-law amounted to little more than momentary surprise and had resulted in no repercussions, his conversation with his friend, which he had expected would be a one-time-only event not to be resumed, had later produced a rift between them. Obliged to reflect on his friend’s words in the past and their connection to his circumstances in the present, Tsuda shuttered his eyes open and dropped his hand from his brow as if he had received a sudden shock.
Just then, a man in a dark blue serge suit who appeared to be about thirty emerged from the examination room and walked to the prescription window. He was paying his bill when the nurse appeared in the open doorway. Tsuda had seen her before; when she had announced the next patient’s name and was about to withdraw into the examination room again, he called out to her.
“I’d rather not wait for a turn; could you just ask the doctor if I could come for my surgery tomorrow or the day after?”
The nurse stepped inside, and her white presence reappeared in the doorway to the dark room almost at once.
“The second floor happens to be vacant so you’re welcome to come when it’s convenient.”
Tsuda left the dark room as though escaping from it. He stepped into his shoes quickly, and as he pushed the large frosted-glass door open, the waiting room, pitch dark until now, lit up.
[ 18 ]
THOUGH TSUDA’S return home was slightly earlier than yesterday, the sun was already low in the western sky, the autumn days having grown abruptly shorter of late, and it was just the hour when the last chilly light, which until minutes ago had illuminated at least the open street, was swiftly fading as if swept away.
Naturally enough, the second floor was dark. But so was the front entrance, pitch-black. Having just now passed the lights shining brightly in the eaves of the rickshaw shop at the corner, Tsuda was mildly disappointed by the darkness shrouding his own house. He rattled open the lattice. But O-Nobu did not emerge. He had not been entirely pleased the night before when she had startled him at this same hour by seeming to lie in wait, but now, obliged to stand alone at the pitch-dark entrance with no one to greet him, he had the feeling somewhere in his chest that what had befallen him last night was in fact less unpleasant. Standing where he was, he called out, “O-Nobu! O-Nobu!” Whereupon his wife replied, “Coming!” from, unexpectedly, the second floor, and he heard her footsteps on the stairs as she descended. At the same time the maid came running from the direction of the kitchen.
“What’s going on?”
A measure of dissatisfaction echoed in Tsuda’s voice. O-Nobu did not reply. However, glancing up at her face, he couldn’t avoid noticing the subtle smile she customarily deployed to beguile him in her silence. It was first of all her white teeth that seized and held his gaze.
“It’s pitch dark up there.”
“I know—I was letting my mind wander and I didn’t realize you were home—”
“You were asleep.”
“Don’t be silly.”
The maid let out a whoop of laughter, and their conversation broke off.
Tsuda was on his way to the public bath, having received from O-Nobu’s hand as always a bar of soap and a towel, when she asked him to wait a minute. Turning her back, she took from the bottom drawer of the tansu a padded flannel jacket edged with silk and laid it in front of him.
“Try it on—it may not be properly flattened yet.”*
With a bemused look on his face, Tsuda stared at the quilted jacket with its broad vertical stripes and black silk collar. This was something he had neither purchased nor bespoken.
“What’s all this?”
“I sewed it. For when you go to the hospital; you have to be careful what you wear in a place like that so as not to make a bad impression.”
“You’ve been working on this?”
It had been only two or three days since he had told O-Nobu that he needed surgery and would have to be away for a week. Moreover, from that day until this moment he hadn’t once noticed his wife sitting at her pattern-cutting board with her needle in hand. He was struck by the oddness of this. O-Nobu on her part observed her husband’s surprise as if it were a reward for her diligence. Accordingly, she provided no explanation.
“Did you buy the cloth?”
“No, I brought this with me—I planned to use it this winter so I just washed and boarded it and put it away for later.”
He saw now that the pattern was decidedly for a young woman: not only were the stripes broad, but the blend of colors was, if anything, on the edge of gaudy. Slipping his arms through the sleeves and flinging them wide open in imitation of a workman kite, Tsuda regarded his own image uncomfortably.
“I arranged to go in tomorrow or the day after,” he said a minute later.
“I see—what about me?”
“About you?”
“Can’t I go with you—to the hospital?”
O-Nobu appeared to be utterly untroubled by the money issue.
* A newly sewn kimono or, as in this case, kimono jacket had to be flattened, usually by placing it beneath the mattress and sleeping on it for a night or two.
[ 19 ]
THE NEXT morning Tsuda woke up much later than usual. The house was hushed, as though it had already been put in order. Moving past the front entrance from the tatami drawing room to the sitting room, he slid open the shoji and discovered his wife sitting erectly alongside the brazier with the newspaper in her hand. The sound issuing from the bubbling kettle seemed to bespeak a tranquil household.
“I didn’t mean to sleep in, it happens naturally when there’s no need to wake up.”
Tsuda might have been offering an excuse; he glanced at the clock hanging on the wall above the calendar and saw that it was just minutes before ten o’clock.
When he returned to the sitting room having washed his face he sat down absently at his usual black-lacquer tray. This morning it seemed less to be awaiting his arrival than exhausted with waiting. He was removing the cloth from the tray when he recalled something abruptly.
“Damn!”
The doctor had advised certain precautions for the day before the surgery but at the moment he couldn’t remember them precisely. He spoke to his wife abruptly.
“I’ll be right back.”
“Where are you going?”
O-Nobu, surprised, glanced at her husband’s face.
“To make a phone call.”
He rose as if with a kick that scattered the composure of the room and left the house at once by the front entrance. Running to the public phone several blocks to the right along the streetcar tracks, he was back in a moment and, halting at the front door, called to his wife:
“Bring me my billfold from upstairs. Or your coin purse, either one.”
“Is something the matter?”
O-Nobu had no idea what her husband was thinking.
“Just bring it.”
With O-Nobu’s purse thrust inside his kimono, Tsuda went back to the main street, where he boarded a trolley.
By the time he returned, carrying a fairly large paper parcel, thirty or forty minutes had passed and it was approaching noon.
“That was some bare cupboard of a purse—I thought you’d have more.”
With this exclamation, Tsuda dropped the parcel he was carrying at his side onto the tatami floor of the sitting room.
“There wasn’t enough?”
O-Nobu’s gaze conveyed her compulsion to concern herself with minute details.
“I’m not saying that—I had what I needed.”
“I had no idea what you were buying—I thought you might be going to the barber.”
Tsuda became aware of his hair, uncut for over two months. He even recalled a sensation he had experienced for the first time yesterday that his hat, already a little small for his head, seemed to rub when he put it on because he had let his hair grow too long.
“You were in such a hurry I didn’t have time to go upstairs.”
“There isn’t that much money in my wallet, either, so it wouldn’t have made much of a difference.”
O-Nobu deftly unwrapped the parcel and removed a tin of tea, bread, and butter.
“My goodness, this is what you wanted? You should have let me send Toki to fetch it for you.”
“What does a maid know? There’s no telling what she would have bought.”
Before long, O-Nobu had prepared some fragrant toast and steaming Oolong tea.
When he had finished his simple Western meal, neither breakfast nor lunch, Tsuda spoke as though aloud to himself.
“I was planning to go to Uncle Fujii’s this morning. I wanted to tell him about my illness and apologize for not visiting while I was at it, but it’s already so late.”
He meant that he intended, having missed the morning, to discharge the obligation of a visit that afternoon.
[ 20 ]
FUJII WAS Tsuda’s father’s younger brother. Obliged by the life of a civil servant to be eternally on the move from one region to the next, three years in Hiroshima, two in Nagasaki, and so forth, Tsuda’s father, burdened by the necessity of dragging his son from post to post and sorely concerned that his education was being compromised as a consequence, had resolved early on to entrust the boy’s care entirely to his younger brother, who had managed to raise Tsuda without going to much trouble. Their relationship as a result went beyond the realm of normal uncle and nephew. To characterize them without reference to the difference in their temperaments and professions, they were more like parent and child than uncle and nephew. Perhaps it would be most appropriate to describe their relationship as, to coin a phrase, “a second father and son.”
Unlike Tsuda’s father, this uncle had lived his entire life without ever leaving Tokyo. In this regard alone, a comparison between them, Tsuda’s father having spent a goodly half of his life on the move, revealed a major difference. In Tsuda’s eyes at least, this appeared significant.
A dawdler along the road of life.
Among the expressions his uncle had employed to describe his father, these words for no particular reason had inscribed themselves in Tsuda’s mind, and he had quickly enough become certain that his father was indeed just such a man. The phrase remained with him even today. At the time, his young mind had failed to grasp its meaning, and even now he was none too clear about what his uncle had intended. It was simply that he recalled the words whenever he looked at his father’s face. It seemed to him that the fleshless, narrow face with a fortuneteller’s scraggily beard on the chin and his uncle’s description corresponded almost perfectly. Ten years ago, like a man suddenly fed up with a long pilgrimage, his father had withdrawn from government service and gone into business. After eight years in Kobe, he had built a house on land he had purchased in Kyoto in the meantime, and two years ago he had finally relocated there. Tsuda hadn’t realized that his father had settled on the secluded old capital as a retreat, or that it had transformed into the ground of his final days. At the time, his uncle had said to him, the sarcasm in his voice causing his nose to wrinkle, “It seems that big brother has managed to salt away some money. If that balloon bag isn’t floating off somewhere, you can bet it’s money that’s weighing him down.”
In his own case, money had never been a weight, no matter how much time passed, and even so he had never moved. He had always been in Tokyo and had always been poor. This was a man who had never to this day received a salary. It wasn’t necessarily that he disliked being paid; it might have been more accurate to say that he was so willful that no one wished to employ him. He was inclined to oppose anything bound by rules and regulations, and even as he aged and his thinking changed somewhat, he continued to assert his characteristic stubbornness. This was because he well understood that amending his attitude at this late date was likely to earn him only the contempt of others and would in no way inure to his benefit.
With no experience of having engaged with the real world, grappling with plain truths, it was only natural that his uncle should have been an unreliable, a slipshod life critic, but at the same time, in another sense, he was an acute observer, and his acuity had its source entirely in his negligence. To put it otherwise, it was negligence that enabled him to speak and act in startling and original ways.
His knowledge was scattered rather than deep. He tended, accordingly, to put in his two cents on a wide variety of subjects. But at no time was he able to free himself from the observer’s attitude. It wasn’t only his status that made this inevitable; it was also the effect of his personality. The man definitely had a head, but he had no hands. Or if he did have hands, he never essayed to use them. They were always thrust inside his kimono. With an inherent indolence to go along with his taste for study, he was destined in the end to make a living with pen and paper.
[ 21 ]
FOR THE past six or seven years, Fujii had been living the sort of life on the outskirts not uncommon to a man like himself in a corner of a plateau in the northwest quarter of the city near Waseda University. There were times when it struck him that the annual addition of houses large and small being erected in a district that, until recently, had been very much like a suburb, was gradually depriving him of the color green, and he would allow the pen in his hand to go idle as he reflected on his elder brother’s circumstances. At such moments he wondered whether he might borrow money from his brother and build a residence for himself. It seemed clear there was no chance a loan would be forthcoming. Not that his temperament would allow him to accept money even if it came to that. The man who had styled his brother a “dawdler on the road to life” was, truth be told, a life traveler with material anxiety. As is readily observed in the majority of people, anxiety about material things was hardly more than a degree of spiritual uneasiness.
To get from Tsuda’s house to his uncle’s place, there was a convenient streetcar that ran alongside the Edo River for half the way. But the distance was short enough to be covered on foot in less than an hour, and Tsuda had the option of combining the visit with a walk rather than relying on crowded and noisy public transportation.
Leaving his house at a little before one, he ambled along the river’s edge, approaching the end of the streetcar line. The cloudless sky was high; the world was drenched in sunlight. The deep green of the trees covering the ridge ahead was distinctly visible as though highlighted.
Along the way Tsuda recalled the castor oil he had forgotten to buy that morning. The doctor had instructed him to take some around four this afternoon; he would have to stop at a drugstore for a bottle. Instead of turning right at the end of the line and crossing the bridge, he began walking in the opposite direction, toward the bustling shopping district. A brutal swath had been cut diagonally across a portion of the road along his route, apparently a project to extend the trolley track beyond the last station. Moving past craters where existing houses had been remorselessly demolished and hauled away, he reached a turning in the new road and saw a group of people gathered at the corner. The modest crowd was standing three or four deep in a semicircle around a man roughly Tsuda’s age. A pudgy fellow, he was wearing a cotton kimono with a narrow obi and clog shoes but had nei
ther an umbrella nor a cap to cover his head. With a willow tree that had not been cut down at his back, he was holding in both hands a large bag with a cotton flannel lining as he surveyed the crowd.
“Good people, we’re about to prestidigitate an egg from this bag. Without fail, from this completely empty bag. Don’t be surprised, the magic is already here, inside my robe.”
He declaimed these words with a cockiness that seemed an extravagance beyond the means of someone of this tribe. Then, clenching one hand into a fist in front of his chest, he flung it at the bag, opening his fingers with a flourish.
“As you can see, I’ve thrown the egg into the bag,” he said, as if to put one over on the crowd. But it wasn’t a deceit: when he thrust his hand into the bag, the egg was waiting there. Gripping it between his thumb and first finger, he held it up for the spectators to see and placed it on the ground.
Tsuda inclined his head slightly, his face a blend of disdain and admiration. All of a sudden he became aware of something poking at his hip from behind. Startled, he spun around almost reflexively and discovered his uncle’s son grinning up at him like a mischievous rascal. His cap with insignia attached, his short pants, and the knapsack on his back were all the evidence Tsuda needed to know whence the boy had come.
“Back from school?”
His nephew grunted an affirmation that was neither “yes” nor even “yeah.”
[ 22 ]
“HOW’S YOUR father?”
“Dunno—”
“Same as usual?”
“I guess—I dunno.”
Tsuda had no memory of his own psychology at around the age of ten and was a little surprised by this response. He smiled uncomfortably and, aware of his own ignorance, said nothing. The child for his part was intent on the magician. The latter, whose outfit appeared to have been stitched together in a single night, was just proclaiming at the top of his lungs, “Watch carefully folks as we conjure up another.”