野菊の墓 English

When the season of the Later Moon comes round again, I cannot help but think of it, try as I might not to.

I know it was but a childish matter, yet somehow I have never been able to forget it.

It is already more than ten years past now, so I no longer remember the particulars in detail; but the feeling of it remains as vivid as yesterday, and whenever I dwell on those days I am carried wholly back into the heart I had then, and the tears well up without end.

It is a state at once sorrowful and sweet, and though there have been times I meant to forget it, more often I turn it over again and again in my mind, indulging in its dreamlike charm.

For that reason I have come to feel I ought to set a little of it down in writing.

My home lies about two ri downstream from Matsudo, across the Yagiri ferry to the east, on a low rise of ground in a place likewise called Yagiri village.

The Saito of Yagiri are an old family in these parts; I have heard from my grandfather that when the Satomi house fell, two or three of its scattered men drifted here and turned farmer, and one of them was named Saito.

On the west side of the house stand four or five chinquapin trees, each some fifteen or sixteen feet around, crowding close together.

It is the finest sacred grove in the village, and the envy of the whole countryside.

They say that from ancient times, however fierce the storms that blew, thanks to this chinquapin grove our house alone never once had its roof torn off.

The house itself is very old as well; every one of its pillars is chinquapin wood.

These, moreover, are so blackened with soot and grime that one can hardly tell what wood they are; even in the inner room, farthest from the smoke, the ceiling boards are black as if coated with lampblack, so that the very grain cannot be made out.

Yet the house stands comparatively high, with plain transoms here and there, and copper nail-covers set into the beams.

Those nail-covers were absurdly large, shaped like wild geese.

So old were they, indeed, that at a glance one could hardly tell whether they were wood or metal.

My mother, too, took great pride in this old house, a relic as it were of the age of civil wars, handed down from our ancestors.

In those days my mother had long been ailing with a woman's complaint, and that black, lacquer-dark inner room always served as her sickbed.

Next to it, in the south corner of the ten-mat room, there was a small two-mat chamber.

When I was away it served as a weaving room, but while I was home it was made into my study.

If one slid open the paper screen of the railed window and put one's head out, the branches of the chinquapins blocked the blue sky, shutting off the view to the north.

Because my mother had long been unwell, a girl named Tamiko — a distant cousin of mine among relatives in Ichikawa — had come to help with the housework and to nurse her.

What I cannot forget, even now, is the bond between that girl Tamiko and myself.

By "bond," I do not mean that anything unseemly passed between Tamiko and me.

I had just finished primary school and was fifteen — counting the months, no more than thirteen years and some — while Tamiko was seventeen, though as she was born late in the year she was really little more than fifteen herself.

She was slender, yet her face was rather round, her skin so fair it seemed almost translucent, touched with a flush of red — a girl of truly lovely bloom.

She was always lively and full of spirit, and yet for all that she was gentle-hearted, without a trace of unkindness in her.

Of course she and I were the greatest of friends. On the pretext of sweeping the room she would peep in on me; on the pretext of dusting the screens she would come into my room; she would say she too wanted to read a book, or to practice her writing, and now and then she would poke me in the back with the handle of her feather duster, or pinch my ear, and then run off.

For my part, whenever I caught sight of Tamiko I would call her to come, come, and there was nothing I enjoyed more than the two of us playing together.

She was forever being scolded by my mother.

"There you go again, Tami, slipping into Masao's room. Now then, finish your sweeping at once. From now on you mustn't disturb Masao's studying. And you older than he is, too..."

So she would scold on and on, but in truth my mother was very fond of Tamiko herself, so the scolding never took any effect at all.

Let me do a little writing practice too, Tamiko would sometimes coax, pouting.

And my mother's scolding on such occasions was always the same.

"You need sewing more than writing practice. If you cannot sew a kimono properly, you will never go to a husband as a woman fit to be called grown."

That at this time I harbored not the slightest impure thought goes without saying, and I am certain there was not the least unworthy notion in Tamiko's mind either.

Yet however often my mother scolded her, Tamiko would still come to call me, saying it was time for breakfast, or time for the noon meal.

Each time she came to call me she would hurry in and, saying show me your book, or lend me your writing brush, would linger and play a while.

And in between, whenever she came back from carrying my mother's medicine or running some errand for her, she would always come in to my room.

I too felt somehow lonely and unsatisfied on any day Tamiko did not look in on me.

The moment I found myself wondering what Tamiko might be doing today, I would drift, almost without meaning to, out of my study.

It was not that I set out with any thought of going to see Tamiko, but if her figure so much as crossed my eye, my mind would settle.

What is this, have I come out here just to see Tamiko after all — I would often mock myself with such a thought.

Even when the neighborhood girls urged her, saying a blind minstrel had put up at such-and-such a house, wouldn't she come and listen, or a wandering psalm-singer had come, wouldn't she go and hear him, Tamiko would always find some excuse and never once leave the house.

When there was a festival in the next village with fireworks and decorations, and Ohama across the way and Osen next door and the rest made a great fuss about going to see it, and even our own household told Tamiko she ought to go along and have a look, Tamiko pleaded my mother's illness and would not go.

I too disliked going out to such places, and so I stayed home.

Tamiko would slip quietly into my room and say in a low voice, smiling, that staying home was what she liked best of all.

For my part, too, I somehow did not want to see Tamiko go off to such places.

Every three or four days I went to Matsudo to fetch my mother's medicine.

Sometimes I came home late.

They said Tamiko would go out to the top of the back slope three or four times to watch for me at the ferry, and the whole household was forever teasing her about it.

Tamiko would turn quite serious and explain that it was only because my mother worried and kept saying go and look, go and look.

They told me everyone in the house went about snickering over it.

For that reason, Omasu the hired girl took a peculiar dislike to Tamiko, and whenever the chance arose she would say,

"Tamiko can't wait to go running to Masao's room — the moment she has a spare minute she's stuck fast to him."

She seemed to go on saying such things quite often, until even Osen next door and Ohama across the way took up the gossip.

My sister-in-law must have caught wind of this and passed word to my mother, for one day my mother, wearing an unusually severe face, called the two of us to her bedside and delivered a scolding heavy with meaning.

"A boy and a girl of fifteen or sixteen are children no longer. People are saying this and that because you two are far too close. You must be careful. It is worse of you, Tamiko, being the elder. From now on you are not to go to Masao's room at all. I do not mean to excuse my own child, but Masao is still a boy. Are you not seventeen, Tami? If idle talk gets started, it is your good name that will be stained. And you too, Masao, be careful... Are you not going up to the middle school in Chiba next month?"

Perhaps it struck Tamiko that, being the elder, and going to my room as she did, people might read some meaning into it, for she looked utterly ashamed, her face crimson, her head bowed.

Ordinarily, even the smallest scolding from my mother would set her pouting and arguing, but that day she only pressed both hands to the floor, bowed her head, and said not a single word.

I, who had nothing whatever to be ashamed of, felt thoroughly aggrieved, and said,

"Mother, that is really too unreasonable. Whatever people may say, there is nothing at all between us, so why must you scold us as if we had done something terribly wrong? Haven't you always said yourself that Tamiko and I are as good as brother and sister, that in your eyes there is no difference at all between her and me, that we should get along well together?"

My mother's worry had its own good reason, but as we had never dreamed anyone would say such distasteful things of us, my grievance too had some justice in it.

My mother softened all at once and said,

"Your mother knows quite well there is nothing at all between you two. It is only that people's tongues are tiresome, and so I am telling you to be a little careful from now on, that is all."

Even on her pale face, before I knew it, there had come to rest a smile of true affection for the two of us.

Presently she went on,

"Tami, go and fetch that medicine again, and finish sewing the lined kimono today, won't you... Masao, while you're up, cut some flowers and set them on the family altar, would you. Are the chrysanthemums not out yet? Then cut some asters instead."

The two of us had meant nothing at all by it, and yet, because others chose to make something of it, we could no longer be so simply innocent with each other.

As for me, my mother's scolding stayed in my mind no more than a single day.

Two or three days later I found myself wondering why Tamiko had not come by lately, but for Tamiko herself, everything had changed utterly from that day on.

Not only did Tamiko never again show her face in my room, but even when we met within the house she would scarcely speak a word if others were about.

She would hurry past, looking somehow embarrassed, as though dazzled by too bright a light.

When she was obliged to speak to me at all, gone was her old easy manner of no reserve at all; she spoke now with a stiff and studied politeness.

At times, when I laughed at how suddenly formal she had become, Tamiko would end by hiding her own laughter behind her sleeve and fleeing, and in this way it came to feel as though a single hedge had grown up between us.

Even so, one day past four in the afternoon, as I was out at my mother's bidding picking eggplants in the eggplant patch behind the house, Tamiko came up behind me with a basket in her hand before I knew it.

"Masao..."

She called out abruptly, laughing.

"I was sent by Mother too. She said your shoulders must be stiff from sewing all day, so come pick eggplants a while as a rest, and tomorrow I'll make the malted pickles, that's what she said, so I came running."

Tamiko seemed unusually happy, full of spirit, and I said,

"So you didn't know I was already out here when you came?"

At this Tamiko said,

"Why, no, I didn't know at all."

And, smiling, she began picking eggplants.

The eggplant patch lay through a single stretch of thicket below the chinquapin grove, a kitchen garden behind the house, off to the northwest of it.

Being up on the bluff, one could see not only the Tone River but faintly even the Naka River, and the whole plain of Musashi spread out before the eye.

One could see the mountains from Chichibu to Ashigara and Hakone, and even the high peak of Fuji.

What was said to be the forest of Ueno in Tokyo could be made out as well.

The autumn sky was clear as water; the sun, sunk to about a fathom and a half above the horizon, shone straight into the eggplant patch where the two of us stood.

All around lay hushed and utterly distinct, and the two of us seemed truly like figures in a painting.

"Oh, what a lovely view this is."

Tamiko too stopped her hands a while and stood looking.

I confess it here: I was, at that moment, certainly no longer the boy I had been ten days before.

The two of us were, at that moment, by no means the innocent playmates we had been.

I myself had not the least idea when such feelings had first arisen, but it must have been around the time my mother scolded us that a number of small eggs of love began to hatch in my breast.

That my state of mind had somehow changed before I knew it is a fact I cannot hide.

That this was the first day I ever thought of Tamiko as a woman is the surest proof that the seed of impure feeling had sprouted in me.

Watching her profile as she bent her body into the shape of the letter ku, plucking eggplants, I realized, as if for the first time, how beautiful and dear Tamiko was.

It was not that I had never before thought her lovely, but that day her beauty struck home to me with real feeling.

The lobe of her ear wrapped in soft, glossy sidelocks, the fullness of her cheek so white and fresh, the dear line where her chin drew in, the pure clean look about her throat, the wisteria-colored under-collar, the flower-dyed sash cord — all of it caught my eye as something exquisite.

And once it comes to that, it is a fearful thing: one can no longer speak one's mind plainly, one grows bashful, one grows awkward — all of it, no doubt, the working of those same eggs.

For these past ten days a hedge had grown up between us and we had scarcely spoken, so that ordinarily I would never have thought to say anything at all, and yet that day I felt as though I must say something.

At first I called out, carelessly, "Tami," but after that the words would not come carelessly on.

My throat closed up absurdly and no voice would come.

Tamiko, an eggplant still in her hand, straightened up and said,

"Masao, what is it..."

"Oh, nothing, only you've been so strange lately, Tami. It's as if you'd come to hate me completely."

Tamiko, being after all a woman, had far sharper feelings than I in such matters.

With a face that looked truly wounded, she came straight up close to me.

"That's too much of you to say, Masao. When have I ever kept my distance from you..."

"No, it's only that lately you've changed completely, Tami, and you don't seem to have any use for me at all. Not that I'm complaining of you, mind."

Tamiko, in a rush of feeling, said,

"It's cruel of you to say such a thing, Masao, it's unfair. Weren't we both scolded so badly by Mother the other day, sitting there side by side? You're a man, so you can stay unconcerned, but I'm the elder and a woman besides, and to be spoken to like that was truly humiliating. That's why I've been trying with all my might to hold myself in check. And now you say I've come to dislike keeping my distance — it's really too much..."

Tamiko gazed fixedly at my face with a look as though she might burst into tears.

I had only said it as a way of starting the talk, and seeing Tamiko so near to tears, I felt sorry and pained for her, and said,

"I didn't say it out of anger, Tami — did you take it as anger?... I only meant that you'd changed so suddenly, and wouldn't even speak when we met, and never came to play, that I'd grown lonely and sad about it. So do come and play sometimes, from now on. If Mother scolds you for it, I'll take the blame myself... what does it matter what people say?"

Say what one will, it was a child's reckless way of talking.

At this reckless speech, worry and joy, joy and worry, struggled together in a tangle within Tamiko's breast, but in the end joy won out over all.

As we exchanged a few words more, Tamiko returned to her old bright, cloudless spirits.

I too, of course, was brimming with happiness... together we came to feel as though the two of us were the only two people in the whole universe.

Presently the two of us fell to competing over who could pick the most eggplants.

It was a large field, but past the middle of October only a scattering of eggplants remained on the vines.

Between the two of us we managed to gather barely two sho apiece.

"Oh, Masao, look — how splendid the setting sun is."

Before I knew it Tamiko had set her basket down and, pressing her two hands together before her face, stood worshipping the sun.

The whole western sky had taken on a color as though blurred with pale violet.

The sun, a deep unbroken red giving off no glare at all, had just begun to sink half below the hills, and the sight of Tamiko worshipping it with such solemn devotion has stayed long in my eyes.

As the two of us came back talking without a care, Omasu stood vacantly outside the four-eyed fence at the back gate, watching us.

Tamiko whispered,

"Omasu will say something again, you'll see."

"Both of us were sent by Mother, so it doesn't matter what Omasu says or anyone else."

With every such small occasion, the eggs of love hatching in the two of us gathered another layer.

Whatever feelings passed between us at such moments went at once to nourish, most richly, those very eggs within each other's breast.

That evening's sunset was certainly one such occasion.

It showed its marks so plainly that it sent a shiver through me.

And yet, say what one will, the bond between the two of us was still only at the egg stage, and altogether without form.

We did nothing that would have looked unseemly to another's eye, nor was there anything, looking back, for either of us to feel ashamed of.

So it was still, on the whole, an easy, carefree thing, and we felt very little need to put on any show before others.

If the bond between Tamiko and me had ended at just this point, it would surely not have become a thing I could not forget for ten years.

Parents are the same the world over: every one of them goes on thinking of their own child as a child forever.

My mother was no exception to this.

After that, Tamiko still came to my study now and then, but she came in a way that showed she was taking great pains to watch for other eyes, and however often she came she was never at ease.

I had thought at first that she only came because I had spoken so pointedly to her, out of a sense of obligation, but that was mistaken.

The inner state of the two of us had undergone, in just two or three days, a change too remarkable for words.

My own change was the more extreme of the two.

Only three days before, I had recklessly told her to come and play, saying I would take the blame myself if my mother scolded her — and yet now I was not nearly so easy about it.

If Tamiko lingered even a little, I would grow so uneasy and worried that I could not bear it.

"Do come again, Tami — but if you stay too long people will start saying pointless things, so..."

Tamiko felt the very same way herself, and yet, being told by me to go, she would fall into a strange sulk.

"Now what was it you said the other day? Didn't you tell me to come and play no matter what people said? I don't care anymore if people laugh at me."

It had become a troublesome business.

The closer the bond between us grew, the more we came to fear other people's eyes.

And once we had come to fear other people's eyes, our hearts grew as timid and uneasy as if we were already committing some wrong.

My mother might say in words that a boy and a girl of fifteen or sixteen were children no longer, but that was only a matter of reasoning; in her heart she still thought of the two of us as nothing but children, so that afterward, when Tamiko came to my room to look at books or talk with me, my mother would pass right by the door without seeming to take any notice at all.

That scolding of the other day, in truth, had come only because my sister-in-law put her up to it, and was not a scolding that came from my mother's own heart at all.

So much for my mother; but my elder brother, my sister-in-law, and Omasu seemed to go on gossiping behind our backs with great relish, and the talk running through the whole village, they said, was all of whether the family meant to take a bride two years older than the boy.

When word of all this reached the two of us, faintly, I was the one to propose it, and for a time we agreed to keep our distance from each other.

The human heart is a strange thing.

It had been an agreement the two of us reached with perfect understanding and no reserve between us, and yet, simply because it was I who had proposed it, Tamiko fell into a strange gloom, lost all her spirit, and went about utterly downcast.

Seeing her so, I too found it unbearably painful.

In this way the ebb and flow of feeling grew tangled together, and things drew ever nearer to danger.

In any case, on the surface at least, the two of us kept our proper distance, and four or five days passed.

It was the thirteenth of the ninth month by the old calendar, the morning of the day they call the Bean Moon, and so cold that it seemed the dew must have turned to frost.

The weather, though, was brilliantly clear.

Since the fifteenth was the village festival, and tomorrow the eve of it, the field work all had to be brought to some kind of order that day, and so the whole household divided up and went out into the fields.

And it was thus that a sweet dispensation fell upon the two of us.

My brother and his wife, Omasu, and one other man had, without fail, to finish cutting what remained of the mid-season rice.

Tamiko, with me to help her, was to go and pick the cotton in the hill field.

This was, of course, my mother's own arrangement, and no one could raise any objection to it.

"Well now, sending those two off to the hill field together — parents really can be blissfully blind sometimes."

So, no doubt, guileless Omasu and my sharp-tongued sister-in-law said together, in one voice.

The two of us were, of course, glad enough of it at the bottom of our hearts, but as things stood, going off together to the hill field made us feel as though people were watching, and we felt greatly awkward about it.

Out of sheer propriety, neither of us could show the least sign of being eager to go.

I did not leave my study before breakfast.

Tamiko too seemed to dawdle over something or other, showing no sign of getting ready.

It galled her to have anyone say she was only too pleased about it.

My mother came out and said,

"Masao, get yourself ready too. Tami, hurry up and get ready and go now. With the two of you together it's an easy day's work, but the way is far, so if you don't start early you'll be coming home after dark. Try to be back before the sun goes down if you can. Omasu, fix up their lunches for them. For the side dishes, use such-and-such..."

It was truly a parent's heart at work.

She had thought that if Tamiko fixed her own lunch, being her own, she would surely not bring anything decent along for herself, and so she had gone and ordered Omasu to prepare it properly instead.

I set out got up in under-trousers, tabi, bare feet, and a straw hat, while my mother told Tamiko to wear both hand-guards and leg-wrappings; Tamiko put on only the hand-guards and dawdled over the leg-wrappings.

Tamiko came to me and asked me to tell my mother it would be fine for her to go without the leg-wrappings.

I told her to say so herself.

While we were going back and forth over it, my mother overheard and said, laughing,

"Is it too embarrassing for a town girl like you, Tami, to wear leg-wrappings? I only said it because I felt sorry to see brambles and pampas grass scratch up your soft hands and legs — but if you don't like it, suit yourself."

And so Tamiko went off dressed in her usual sash cord and apron, with hemp-soled sandals on her feet.

The two of us each carried a bushel basket, and I set out besides with a pair of baskets slung from a carrying pole over my shoulder.

When Tamiko came out afterward wearing a sedge hat, my mother called after her, laughing,

"Tami, when you walk along in a sedge hat like that you look for all the world like some little mushroom sprite toddling along — it's a sight. Better wear the woven bamboo one. There should be a new one somewhere."

The rice-cutting party had already gone out and there was no one else to laugh, but Tamiko hurriedly pulled off the sedge hat, her face, it seemed, gone quite red.

This time she did not put the woven hat on but carried it in her hand, and calling out, well then, Mother, I'm off, she went running out.

Knowing that the village folk had this and that to say about us, I felt it would be embarrassing to be seen walking through the village together, and thinking to hurry through it, I went on ahead by myself.

At the foot of the slope where the village ended, I waited under the great gingko tree for Tamiko to catch up.

Looking down from there, one could see a stretch of paddy fields.

The late rice, ripened to a fine yellow, lay heavy with dew and bowed softly down, and the sight, perhaps only in my own mind, seemed especially fresh and clean, a view to open up the chest.

Before I knew it Tamiko had come up, and was gathering up the two or three gingko leaves that had fallen onto the red earth washed clean by yesterday's rain.

"Tami, you're here already? Isn't this fine weather something? Truly a good morning, isn't it."

"I really am glad the weather turned out so fine. And oh, how pretty these gingko leaves are. Well then, let's be off."

Held in Tamiko's lovely hand, even the gingko leaves seemed to look especially pretty.

The two of us went down the slope and felt, at last, as though we had come out of some cramped place into open ground.

We walked along talking of how we would hurry and pick the cotton clean that day and then spend the rest of the time having all sorts of fun together.

The middle of the road was dry, but where it ran along the paddies at either side, it lay wet and glistening with dew, and all sorts of grasses had come into flower.

The beggarticks were already withering at the tips, and the water knotweed grew thickest of all.

The wild chrysanthemum-like miyakogusa showed yellow blooms as well.

The wild chrysanthemums stood swaying here and there in bloom.

Look, Tami, wild chrysanthemums, I said, my feet stopping before I knew it, but Tamiko, as though she had not heard, walked briskly on ahead.

I set my things down at the side of the road for a moment and picked a handful of the wild chrysanthemums.

Tamiko had gone on nearly a cho before she noticed and turned around, and the moment she did she cried out and came running back.

"There was no need to come running back like that, Tami — I was coming along anyway..."

"Well, what were you doing, Masao? You gave me such a fright... Oh, how pretty these wild chrysanthemums are. Masao, give me half, won't you — I really do love wild chrysanthemums."

"I've always loved wild chrysanthemums myself. So you love them too, Tami..."

"I feel as though I must have been a wild chrysanthemum myself in some other life. Just looking at the flowers makes me shiver with how much I love them. I wonder myself why that should be."

"You love wild chrysanthemums that much... no wonder, then — somehow you're just like a wild chrysanthemum yourself, Tami."

Tamiko pressed the half of the flowers I had given her against her face, delighted.

The two of us started walking again.

"Masao... why do you say I'm like a wild chrysanthemum?"

"Well, there's no particular reason, but somehow you just have the air of a wild chrysanthemum about you, Tami."

"And so that's why you love wild chrysanthemums..."

"I love them dearly."

Tamiko said from now on you go ahead in front, and let herself fall behind.

That simple exchange, which had come about by pure chance, struck both our hearts with a force full of meaning.

I could tell from her manner that Tamiko felt it the same way.

Once the talk had come this far, neither of us could go on to say what lay beyond it.

The conversation broke off there for a moment.

Say what one will, the two of us, still children as we were, were even now being toyed with by the god of sin, and yet — even at the words that Tamiko was like a wild chrysanthemum, even when I said I loved that wild chrysanthemum so dearly — my own heart had already begun to pound, and I was not nearly bold enough yet to go on and say anything more.

It was the same with Tamiko: at that moment when the two of us felt it so strongly, as though we had run headlong into something, her voice too caught in her throat.

The two of us walked on a while in silence.

Truly, Tamiko was a girl like a wild chrysanthemum.

Tamiko was altogether a country girl in her ways, and yet never in the least coarse.

She was lovely and gentle, and had, besides, a real dignity about her.

There was not so much as a fingernail's worth of anything spiteful or unpleasant in her.

However one looked at her, she had the air of a wild chrysanthemum.

We had been silent a while, but it seemed strange to go on so without talking any longer, and I forced myself to think of something to say.

"Tami, what were you thinking about just now, walking along without even glancing aside like that?"

"I wasn't thinking about anything at all."

"That's a lie, Tami. There's no reason you'd act that way unless you were thinking something over. I don't know what it was, but there's no need to hide it from me, is there?"

"Masao, forgive me. I really was thinking something over just now. I got to thinking hard about it and it made me feel so miserable. Why should I be older than you, of all things? To think I'm seventeen — it really does make me feel wretched..."

"What in the world are you talking about, Tami? You're older because you were born earlier, that's all — you've grown for seventeen years, so you're seventeen. What's wretched about being seventeen? Why, in two more years I'll be seventeen myself. You do say the strangest things, Tami."

I was not so much a child myself that I could not understand what Tamiko meant by what she had just said.

I understood well enough, but I chose to pretend I had taken it as a joke, and when I glanced back at her, Tamiko did indeed seem to be lost in real thought, but on catching my eye she turned suddenly aside, looking embarrassed.

Once things had come to this, whatever either of us said seemed at once to lead straight back to it, and the talk kept coming to a dead stop.

If either one of us had only had a little more boldness, even the smallest amount, the talk would never have stalled so.

We understood each other's hearts down to the very bottom, so that if we had only had the strength to break through a paper thin as Yoshino tissue, we could have carried the talk one step further and laid our hearts open to each other.

But being truly innocent as we both were at the core, we lacked the force to tear through even that thin paper.

Nor, of course, did either of us have any clear awareness that here was the very point at which the surface had to be broken through.

It was, one might say, still a love of the egg stage, formless and undefined, and so whenever the talk came to a place needing a little strength of heart, it simply stalled.

We walked on for several cho, each of us starting to say something and then growing embarrassed at our own words, over and over.

Few as our words were, beneath them each of us carried a boundless weight of feeling, and within that awkward emotion lay a deep, indescribable happiness.

So it was that, our feet scarcely touching the ground, we had crossed the paddies before we knew it and entered the hill path.

This time Tamiko seemed to have recovered her spirits, and said in a bright voice,

"Masao, have we come halfway yet, do you think? You said it was nearly a ri to Onagasaku, didn't you?"

"That's right — they say it's close to a ri and a half, but we must have come more than halfway by now. Shall we rest a bit?"

"I don't need to rest, really, but I've already been punished for it — look, I cut my hand on a blade of pampas grass, just like that. Would you tie it up for me?"

The cut, near the middle of her thumb, was small, but the blood had come surprisingly.

I quickly tore a strip of paper and bound it up for her.

Seeing Tamiko's two hands so reddened, I felt terribly sorry for her.

Rather than rest here in the middle of the hills, we decided to press on and rest once we reached the field, and this time Tamiko went ahead while I hurried along behind.

It was, I think, a little past eight when we reached the field at Onagasaku.

About ten years before, my father, still hale then, had been asked by relatives in the next village and had felt he could not refuse to buy it, so the story went; there were eight tan of field here, and some two cho of woodland besides.

In this whole area the high ground was all woodland, with fields carved out in the clearings between.

To say one held an outlying holding sounded well enough to the world, but my mother always said that this field cost nothing but labor and never paid its way.

It was hemmed in by woods on three sides, open to the south where it joined other fields.

The ground sloped, high to the north and low to the south.

Just as my mother had guessed, the cotton was past its best, but the bolls hung so heavy one felt a puff of wind might scatter them everywhere.

With the morning sun falling on the cotton, dotted white all across the field, it was almost too dazzlingly beautiful to look at.

"Oh, how heavy the bolls hang. We did well to come and pick today."

Being a girl, Tamiko spoke up happily at the sight of the cotton hanging so richly.

Near the middle of the field stood two paulownia trees, thick with leaves.

The leaves had begun to fall, but there was more than enough shade to keep off the October heat.

We gathered the millet stalks lying about and made ourselves a spot beneath the trees.

We hung our lunch bundles from a branch.

Having hurried along the hill path in such fine weather, we were flushed and warm with sweat.

Each of us took off an outer layer.

We let the breeze into our collars and stretched out our legs to rest.

Against the blue-cut sky stood the green of the pine woods, and somewhere a shrike was calling.

The hills were so still that the call carried clear across them.

Between heaven and earth, in the middle of that wide field, the two of us sat talking.

"Really, Tamiko, today of all days feels like a day in paradise, doesn't it."

The sheen left on her face and throat where she had wiped away the sweat — I found myself looking again at Tamiko's profile.

"It does, doesn't it. I feel somehow as though it's all a dream. This morning when I left the house I was so terribly embarrassed... my sister-in-law gave me such a strange look, and Omasu teased me so, my head was fairly spinning. And you looked so unconcerned about it all, Masao, it made me cross with you."

"Do you think I was really unconcerned? I went on ahead by myself just because I hated the thought of meeting people from the village, and waited for you under the gingko tree. But never mind that — Tami, let's really enjoy ourselves today. I'll be off to school next month, and even this month there are only fifteen days left, and after this it will be hard for the two of us to ever talk so freely together again. It sounds a sorry thing to say, but I keep wondering if today might be all there is left between us. Don't you think so, Tami..."

"That's just it, Masao — that's all I've been thinking of the whole way here. When I said just now that it made me feel wretched, you only laughed it off..."

However often we said let's enjoy ourselves, the moment we started talking it always came back round to this.

Tamiko seemed to be wiping away tears.

Just then, very conveniently, a horse came into view.

From the hill path on the west side there came a rustling of bamboo grass being brushed aside, and a man with a towel wrapped round his head emerged, leading a horse loaded with firewood.

Looking closer, to my surprise it was Tsunekichi from the village.

This was the very fellow who had once begged Ohama across the way, again and again, to bring Tamiko out to play with him.

I was just thinking, of all the unpleasant fellows to run into, when he called out,

"Well, if it isn't Masao. Good day to you — fine weather we're having, isn't it. Picking cotton with the wife today, are we? Very fashionable, I must say. Ha ha ha ha ha."

"Oh, Tsune, out earning your day's wage, are you? Working hard so early in the day."

"Ah well, fellows like me have got nothing to look forward to but a day's wage and a cup of drink now and then. Tamiko, you're really flaunting it today, aren't you. That's a downright sin, that is. Ha ha ha ha ha."

I thought, what an insolent fellow, but as we were hardly in a position to put on airs ourselves, we laughed it off and let Tsunekichi go on his way.

"What a fool, really a disagreeable sort. Now then, Tami, let's get started. Do cheer up, really. There's no need to be so downcast. Even once I'm at school, it's only Chiba after all — apart from the Bon and New Year holidays, if I want to I can come home Saturday evening and be back by Sunday..."

"I really am sorry, making such a tearful face. That Tsune — what a disagreeable man he is."

Tamiko with her sash tied up and I with my shirt pulled off one shoulder set to picking in earnest, and in about three hours we had cleared some seven-tenths of the field.

As the rest would be no trouble at all, we decided to eat our lunch, and went back to the shade of the paulownia trees.

I took up the water flask I had brought along and said,

"Tami, I'll go and draw some water — will you mind things while I'm gone? On the way back I'll gather up a good load of ebizuru grapes and akebi as a present."

"I don't want to stay here alone. Masao, please take me with you. If someone like that man just now came along, it would be dreadful."

"But Tami, the spring is over beyond that hill there. There's no proper path at all, and your legs will get scratched all over with brambles and pampas grass. But we can't eat lunch without water, so... oh dear, Tami, can't you wait here a little?"

"Masao, please, I beg you, take me along. If it's a path you can walk, I can walk it too. I simply can't stay here alone, I really can't..."

"You've turned into quite the spoiled child now that we're up in the hills, Tami. Well then, let's go together."

We hid our lunches in among the cotton, put our outer clothes back on, and set off.

Tamiko kept smiling the whole way.

To anyone looking on it might have seemed a foolish, unseemly business, but to the two of us ourselves, even in that pointless back-and-forth there was a boundless happiness to be felt.

The way was not high, but there was no path at all, so we pushed through the bamboo grass, clung to tree roots, and scrambled up the bluff.

Again and again I took Tamiko's hand and pulled her along.

Given how our feelings had stood these past two or three days, if Tamiko had asked anything of me I could have refused her nothing, and if I had asked anything of her, she too would surely have refused me nothing.

And yet, for all that, the two of us, timid to the last degree and small of heart to the last degree, had never once taken each other's hand with any meaning behind it.

And yet today, quite by chance, we came to take each other's hand again and again.

The peculiar, indescribable happiness in all this can only be told by one who has known it himself.

"Tami, now that we've come this far, you can see the spring right over there. I'll go on alone from here, so wait for me here. You'll be able to wait, won't you, as long as you can still see me?"

"What a trial I must be to you, Masao... but it's too much of me to go on being so difficult, so I'll wait here. Oh, look, wild grapes."

On my way back with the water, the flask tied at my waist, I searched about a little and gathered forty or fifty akebi,

a whole armful of wild grapes besides, and found five or six lovely blooming gentians before coming back.

Going back was downhill, so the two of us made our way down easily enough.

At the edge of the field I found a fine large spring orchid.

"Tami, I'll just dig up this akkuri here, so would you carry these akebi and wild grapes on ahead for me?"

"What's an akkuri? Why, isn't that a spring orchid?"

"You're a town girl, Tami, so you use a fine word like 'spring orchid.' The farmers here in Yagiri call it akkuri, and use it as a remedy for chapped hands. Ha ha ha ha."

"Oh, how sharp-tongued you are. You really have gotten quite sharp-tongued today, Masao."

A meal eaten out in the hills was, for the people of that country, counted among life's real pleasures.

Whether there was some physical reason for it I could not say, but in any case, everyone agreed that a lunch eaten after working in the hills tasted wonderfully good, for some reason.

And now the two of us, having drawn fresh water from the spring, sat sharing between us a lunch filled with my mother's care.

To say the pleasure of it was out of the ordinary would be putting it far too mildly.

I favored the akebi,

and Tamiko the wild grapes, and we talked a while as we ate.

Tamiko said, laughing,

"Are you going to take that akkuri remedy for chapped hands off to school with you, Masao? It would be funny if your hands chapped there..."

I answered in perfect earnest,

"No, no, this is for Omasu. Her hands must be badly chapped by now. The other day, when I went to bathe, Omasu came to tend the fire and seemed to be in real pain from it, so I told her that when I next went up into the hills I'd bring back some akkuri for her."

"Why, what a kind person you are... Omasu is a girl with no two faces to her, nothing spiteful in her at all, so I've always gotten along well with her, but lately she keeps saying things that seem aimed straight at me, as if she'd taken some dislike to me entirely."

"Ha ha ha, that's just Omasu being jealous. It's a woman's way to get jealous over the silliest things. It's the same as when I say I'll dig up akkuri for Omasu and you say right away, why what a kind person you are, and so on."

"When did you turn so sharp-tongued, I wonder. There's no getting the better of you today, is there. Even I know well enough that Omasu's jealousy hasn't any real cause to it..."

"Omasu is truly a girl to be pitied, you know. If her parents hadn't ended the way they did, she'd never have had to go into service like this. Her father died in the war, her mother grieved herself into a fatal illness over it, her one brother turned out a black sheep, and so it came to this in the end. She's the daughter of a man who died for his country, Tami — we ought to be kind to her. And you know, for all that, she praises you a great deal. Being worked so hard by my sharp-tongued sister-in-law makes it all the more pitiful."

"Oh, Masao, I think just the same. Mother has often said so too. It's little enough I can do, but I try to share what I have with her — though when you're as kind to her as this..."

Tamiko broke off and let the talk trail away again, but then, taking up in her hand the gentian flowers she had wrapped in a paulownia leaf, she suddenly turned the subject.

"When did you pick such beautiful flowers? Gentians really are a lovely flower, aren't they. I never knew they could be so beautiful. I've suddenly come to love gentians. Oh, what dear flowers..."

Loving flowers as she did, Tamiko pressed the deep violet blooms to her fair white face, just as she always did.

Presently, remembering something or other, she began to laugh quietly to herself.

"What is it, Tami, laughing all to yourself like that?"

"You're like a gentian, Masao."

"How so?"

"Well, there's no particular reason, but somehow you just have the air of a gentian about you, Masao."

Having said this, Tamiko hid her face and laughed.

"You've grown quite wicked yourself, Tami. So this is your revenge for earlier, is it? Mimicking my very words back at me, no less. Still, it's a rather charming pair, isn't it — you a wild chrysanthemum and me a gentian. I'll gladly be a gentian, then. And I'm all the happier if it means you've come to love gentians too, Tami."

The two of us went on happily talking such nonsense.

The autumn day being short, the sun had already begun to slant westward.

With a call of now then, we set to picking cotton once more.

There was little enough left for the afternoon, so we finished picking in about an hour and a half.

We bundled everything up and loaded it onto the carrying baskets, and the two of us shouldered the pole together.

With Tamiko in front and me behind, we trudged wearily out of the field just as the sun was about to touch the tops of the pines.

By the time we thought we had come about halfway, the thirteen-night moon was casting its light down through the trees, and the night had grown so still, the plume grass swaying with no wind at all, that one could almost see the dew settling.

I had not noticed it that morning, but on the west side of the road, in a field lying one level lower, the buckwheat flowers showed white as if a sheer silk veil had been drawn across the ground.

Even the crickets, chirping as though half frozen with cold, caught at my heart and would not let it be.

"You must be worn out, Tami. Since we're bound to be late anyway, let's rest a while here where the view is so fine."

"If it was going to be this late, we should have hurried a little more. The people at home are sure to say something. That worries me, Masao, really it does."

"There's no use worrying about it now, it won't get us home any sooner, so let's just rest a bit. A view as fine as this doesn't come along often. We haven't done anything so wrong that we need be ashamed before anyone, so there's no need to worry, Tami."

The two of us sat down on a pine stump at the roadside where the moonlight fell slanting across it.

For some seven or eight ken ahead, the shade of the trees left the way dim, but beyond that the moon poured full across the field, and the buckwheat flowers stood out strikingly white.

"What a beautiful view this is. If you knew how to make poems or verses, Masao, this is just the sort of moment when you could say something wonderful about it. Even someone as unlettered as me forgets all her worries at a time like this. Masao, you really ought to take up poetry."

"Actually I do try my hand at it a little, but it's difficult, and nothing comes easily. Still, moonlight on buckwheat flowers in a hill field, with crickets calling like this — it really is lovely, isn't it. Tami, shall the two of us take up poetry together from now on?"

Now that each of us carried the same single worry within, there was so much on our minds that, oddly, we spoke all the less.

There was something we had wanted to talk over here, about our uncertain future together, vague as it was.

Tamiko, of course, must have wanted to speak of it even more than I did, but young as we both were, with no worldly cunning in either of us, we simply could not bring ourselves to speak of such a thing face to face.

As we sat a while in silence, letting the time pass idly, a line of wild geese flew close overhead, calling, as if urging the two of us onward.

At last, when we had come down into the paddies and the gingko tree came into sight, the same peculiar feeling welled up in both our hearts once more.

It was nothing other than a strange reluctance to go home.

We told ourselves there was no reason to feel reluctant, and yet we could not help feeling it all the same.

There was no time left to hesitate; before we knew it we had come right up near the gate.

"Masao... you go in first, please. I'm too embarrassed, I really can't help it."

"All right then, I'll go first."

I mustered up all my courage, put on a face of perfect unconcern, and went in through the gate.

The family was in the midst of supper, and the talk seemed to be flowing thick and fast.

The rain shutters onto the garden were still open, and the moon shone in as far as the eaves.

The moment I cleared my throat once and stepped into the garden, the talk in the kitchen fell suddenly silent.

Tamiko poked me in the shoulder with her fingertip.

I understood well enough myself just how lively the talk about the two of us must have been at that supper table.

As it was both the festival eve and the thirteenth-night moon, the whole household gathered in the front room, and my mother too rose from the inner room and came out.

My mother scolded us once, briefly, for being so late, without saying much more, but she was quite unlike her usual self.

She seemed to be turning something over in her mind, and would not warm to us at all.

Up until now, though she scolded us with her mouth, in her heart she had never doubted us; but that night, though she said little enough aloud, in her heart she must surely have come to suspect the two of us in earnest.

Tamiko shrank smaller and smaller and would not come fully into the room.

I laid out the akebi and wild grapes I had brought back from the hills all across the room, as if to say, wordlessly, that this was why we had been so late — but it did no good at all.

Not a single person took it for what it was meant to be.

That night, in every conversation, the two of us were left out entirely, as though it had already been silently decided that we were guilty of something.

"Mother is far too soft-hearted. To send the two of them off together to the hill field, carrying on as they are — there's such a thing as being too blind to see. However much the rest of us worry about it, it's no use with Mother the way she is."

This, it seemed, had been the verdict reached at the kitchen conference.

For my mother's part, too, she must have come that night to feel that she had been wrong to go on thinking of us as children for so long, and that the fault lay with her.

There was no use scolding the two of us now, after the fact.

My mother's mind seemed to be made up, that if only Masao were sent off to school, there would be no more trouble about it, and she said,

"Masa, I had meant to send you off to school right at the start of November, but there's no good in you idling about like this any longer, so once the festival is over, go on to school. Let's say the seventeenth... very well? Get your things ready with that in mind."

Going to school had always been my own wish, and ten or twenty days earlier or later made no real difference to me — but given the circumstances, and above all coming as a pronouncement that very night, it felt like a punishment handed down on the assumption that the two of us had already done wrong, and this weighed heavily on my heart, and no doubt on Tamiko's as well.

Since in truth we had fallen into no such wickedness, to be judged so out of hand left a strange, uneasy feeling in me.

And yet there was no way to defend ourselves, nor, in truth, did we have any real standing to protest strongly.

Had this happened a month before, I would have said at once, in a fit of childish sulking, that Mother was being unreasonable, that going to school was what I wanted, but that to be sent off under a punishment as though I had done wrong was too much to bear — but that night I was no longer innocent enough to say such willful things.

In truth, I had already fallen headlong into love.

Toward the very mother who had loved me so dearly, I now kept things hidden, and had come, without quite meaning to, to build up some distance between us, unable any longer to speak the whole of my heart to her.

Of ourselves, the two of us had grown wary before others, and before others we had come, deliberately, to behave as though we were distant with each other.

With such secretive feeling grown so far within me, how could I possibly have spoken up with a clear conscience?

I only said, in a single word,

"Yes, ma'am..."

and said nothing more, having no choice but to submit blindly to my mother's word.

"It's well enough for me, once I've gone off to school — but what will become of Tamiko afterward?"

The thought struck me suddenly, and glancing softly toward her, I saw, beyond Omasu who was picking over the edamame, Tamiko sitting with her head bowed, silently twisting her sash cord in her lap.

She looked utterly without spirit, and perhaps it was only the night, but her face seemed pale as well.

Seeing Tamiko like that, a sudden sorrow came over me too, and I wanted to weep.

Tears ran down over my eyelids and clouded my eyes.

Just why I had grown so sorrowful, I could not clearly say.

I only felt that I could not bear how pitiful Tamiko looked.

The happy bond between Tamiko and me lasted no further than that night, and with the light of the thirteenth's noon it vanished entirely away.

For all our joy we had never once spoken the whole of our hearts to each other, and of our sorrow and grief we had, of course, shared not even a hundredth part — and now the bond between us passed behind a curtain of darkness.

The fourteenth was the first day of the festival, and the day passed by in nothing but bustle.

Both of us wore a face of indifference, but with our hands kept so busy at work, we could at least find some distraction from our thoughts.

On the fifteenth and sixteenth, having no duties beyond meals, I shut myself up in my study the whole time.

I sat leaning vacantly at my desk, doing nothing at all, not even turning my mind to what should be done about the two of us.

My head was simply full of Tamiko, and beyond that plain, simple thought of her nothing else moved in my mind at all.

In those two days I met Tamiko three or four times, but we could not talk, nor did either of us have the spirit to exchange even a smile; we only appealed to each other with our eyes, in a lonely, forlorn way.

Had the two of us been a little more grown in our feelings, we might well have spoken together of the future in those two days, but being as we were, without a hair's breadth of hardness or cunning in either of us, we simply could not manage such a thing when it came to it.

Even so, on the afternoon of the sixteenth, I found myself writing out something like the following on a roll of paper, and when Tamiko came by for a moment at dusk, I handed it to her, telling her to read it after I had gone.

Ever since morning I have shut myself up in here, and I cannot bring myself to do anything at all.

I have no wish to go outside, no wish to read a book — I only think of you, Tami, over and over again.

When I am with you, it feels as though I were held in God's arms, riding upon the clouds themselves.

How did I ever come to feel this way?

Since it is my duty to study, I will go off to school, but in my heart I do not want to be parted from you.

You seem troubled that you are older than I am, but that is nothing to me at all.

I mean to become whatever you wish me to be, so please believe that of me too.

I leave early tomorrow.

I look forward, as my one joy, to coming home over the winter break and seeing you again.

The sixteenth of October

Masao

To Miss Tamiko

Though it was going off to school, it felt like being sent away early under some cloud of guilt, and so every burst of laughter or talk I heard from others set off some twisted, bitter feeling in me.

It all sounded to my ears like mockery aimed at the two of us.

I came at last to wish I could simply leave for school as soon as possible and be done with it.

Once my mind was made up, my spirits began to recover as well.

That night my head felt somewhat clearer, and I ate my supper with a good appetite.

I talked with my mother about this and that concerning school.

And then, once I had gone to bed, I thought,

"What a fool I've been, really — a boy of fifteen or so, brooding on and on about a girl like this... that's enough, that's enough. Tomorrow morning I'll be off to school without delay. It's a pity about Tamiko, but... I won't think of it anymore, there's no use thinking of it. School, school..."

Talking to myself like that, I seemed to drift off into sleep.

Meaning to go by boat down the river to Ichikawa, on the morning of the seventeenth, in a light fall of rain, I packed all my belongings into a single bag and went down to the Yagiri ferry, Tamiko and Omasu seeing me off.

I was to ride along on a village cargo boat, which was already waiting there.

I meant to say, well then, Tami... but my throat closed up and no voice would come.

Once she had handed me my bundle, Tamiko seemed at a loss for what to do with her hands, stroking her chest, stroking her collar, keeping her eyes cast down all the while.

Turning her body slightly aside so that Omasu would not see the tears standing in her eyes, Tamiko made such a pitiful figure that I too could not hold back my own tears at the sight of her.

As though she thought of this day as a parting, Tamiko had done her hair up cleanly in a gingko-leaf knot and put on a light touch of makeup.

She wore a fine soot-and-navy Benkei check, both her jacket and her under-kimono of the same Yonezawa pongee, with a tasteful yuzen-dyed crepe sash tied about her.

Tamiko with her sash cord on for work had always looked lovely, but that day she seemed to shine out even more than usual.

Whether it was only my own imagination or not, Tamiko had seemed to grow more worn and thin, day by day, ever since the night of the thirteenth, and the sight of her so pitifully worn that day was more than I could bear without weeping.

As if some instinct had given warning, though of course neither I nor Tamiko could ever have dreamed this would prove to be a parting for life, the pain and sorrow of that moment were such that I doubt anyone I told of it would ever quite believe me.

Tamiko's feelings, no doubt, ran even deeper than my own.

I still had four or five years ahead of me before finishing middle school, whereas Tamiko was seventeen, and if her parents should bring forward some proposal of marriage within that very year, she would not be in a position to refuse it lightly — so that, thinking over what lay ahead for her, there was indeed much to worry about.

At the time I gave no thought to any of this, and yet the image of Tamiko's pitiful figure, so vividly impressed upon me then, still rises before my eyes, even after all these years, as vivid as yesterday.

Seen from outside, it might have looked like nothing more than the tiresome, self-indulgent tears young people so often shed, unbecoming enough to watch — but to the two of us ourselves, it was truly a sorrowful and pitiable parting.

We could not even take each other's hands and speak of what was to come; there in the ferry landing under the thin, drizzling rain, mindful of others' eyes even in our tears, we parted forever without exchanging a single word.

The heartless boat went swiftly down the current, and before ten minutes had passed, before we had gone five cho, the two of us were already cut off from each other's sight behind the haze of rain.

How could I ever forget the image of poor Tamiko, unable to speak, standing there so forlorn and downcast?

Even if thinking of Tamiko should call down the wrath of heaven and strike me dead on the spot, I could not help thinking of her still.

Looking back now, in old age, there were no doubt things I might wish I had done differently — but at the time, in the thoughts of two such young people, no plan of any kind ever occurred to us.

Oshichi the greengrocer's daughter, they say, set fire to her own house in the scheme of being able to see her beloved once again, but the two of us never even worked out the wit to slip a single door open in secret.

For all that our love was so innocent, so guileless, that we still feared our parents, still shrank before our elder brother, and could not so much as wipe away our tears before others — what timid, faint-hearted young souls we must have been.

Even after I had gone off to school, I could not help thinking of Tamiko constantly, no matter what.

I scolded and prodded myself, telling myself what good could come of dwelling on such things while at school, but it did no good at all.

No sooner had such words left my mind than thoughts of Tamiko welled up again right behind them.

Being among a crowd of people helped somehow to distract me, so during the day I made a point of never staying alone if I could help it.

At night, too, once in bed there was nothing to be done, so I made a point of staying out among the other boys, making noise with them, until I was tired enough to sleep.

In this way the year finally drew to a close, and the winter recess began.

When I came home on the morning of December the twenty-fifth, I found unhulled rice spread out to dry across the whole garden, and my mother sitting on the veranda in front with a quilt spread out, warming herself in the sun.

She seemed, these days, to be in far better health.

That day, I was told, my elder brother and his wife, the hired man, and Omasu had all gone up into the hills to rake fallen leaves.

The words where's Tamiko rose to my very lips, but I could not bring myself to say them through to the end.

My mother, too, said nothing at all, as though on purpose.

It felt somehow far too awkward to ask after Tamiko the moment I had come home, so I let it be and set about putting my old study in order, settling myself back in.

Even so, telling myself Tamiko would surely be home by evening, I waited on, restless and unsettled.

Everyone came home and it was at last time for supper, and still there was no sign of Tamiko; nor did anyone so much as mention her name.

I concluded that Tamiko must have gone back to Ichikawa, and, too vexed to ask anyone about it, I said nothing further and went straight to my study once the meal was over.

I had come home looking forward, more than to anything else, to the certainty of seeing Tamiko that very day, and to have it end like this left me indescribably discouraged and lonely.

Yet there was no one to whom I could speak of this misery, and even taking out Tamiko's photograph to look at did nothing at all to lift my spirits.

And it galled me to think that people might say, there he goes again, brooding because Tamiko isn't here — so I forced myself to recover my composure and went to sit by my mother's bedside, talking to her of school until late into the night.

The next morning I finally rose about nine o'clock.

My mother was still asleep.

Coming out into the kitchen, I found everyone else had gone up into the hills again, and only Omasu remained alone, tidying up.

I washed my face and, without even eating, went straight out to the field behind the house.

The field where Tamiko and I had picked eggplants that autumn was now thick with green winter greens.

I stood there a while, gazing at nothing in particular, sunk in thought, picturing Tamiko's face in my mind.

"What are you thinking about so hard, Masao?"

Omasu had come up quietly from behind and spoke suddenly, drawing close.

When I gave some vague answer or other, Omasu abruptly took my hand and said, come a little closer, now, and sit down here, and, seating herself on a pile of straw, made me sit down beside her.

"Masao... Tamiko really has had such a hard time of it, poor thing. That sister-in-law of ours is a truly spiteful woman. What an ill-natured person she is — I've come to hate even staying in this house myself. It was plain as day you'd be coming home yesterday, and yet our sister-in-law kept saying all sorts of things and sent Tamiko back to Ichikawa the day before. She said things like, someone's surely waiting for you, or the person you long to see must be waiting eagerly, needling her with it until she made Tamiko cry, and she said all sorts of things to Mother too, it seems, until at last she sent her home before noon the day before yesterday. If you'd come the day before yesterday, you'd have seen her. Masao, I feel so terribly, terribly sorry for Tamiko. Ever since you left, she's done nothing but spend her days in tears, and she said she wanted to write you a letter but couldn't manage it well, and it made her miserable. She came to my room with an inkstone and paper three nights running and just wept. At first she tried to hide it even from me, but in the end she couldn't hide it any longer. I don't know how many times I've cried over Tamiko myself..."

Looking at her, I saw that Omasu was already letting the tears fall, one after another.

Omasu was, at bottom, a thoroughly good-hearted and kind girl; when she saw Tamiko and me looking so close before her eyes, jealousy would rise in her, but she was by no means a spiteful or grudge-holding sort, so that when Tamiko was alone she got on well with Tamiko, and when I was alone she made a great fuss over me instead.

Omasu went on to tell me, further, of how badly my mother had scolded Tamiko after I had gone.

The gist of it was as follows.

Whatever my spiteful sister-in-law might say, my mother's affection for Tamiko had not changed in the least, but it seemed to have been decided that taking Tamiko, two years my elder, as my bride was simply out of the question — and my sister-in-law, for her part, argued that if she was not to become my bride, then some means had to be found to keep the two of us as far apart as possible.

With both my mother and my sister-in-law of this mind, Tamiko was given to understand, in roundabout hints, that whatever feelings she might still hold for Masao, it could come to nothing in the end.

On top of this, Tamiko went about so downcast, morning and night, that it caught the eye of everyone around her, and she would sometimes forget things, or be slow to answer when called, so that more than once she set off my mother's temper.

About twenty days after I had gone, at the very start of November, when Tamiko too was to go out to the fields with the others, my mother told her to stay a little behind, wipe down the floors around the main room, and then put away the straw mats spread out drying in the garden into the storehouse before going out.

Tamiko wiped the floors down but then absentmindedly forgot about the mats and went out to the field without putting them away, and as ill luck would have it, rain fell that very day and soaked some ten of the mats through.

Tamiko realized her mistake once the rain began, but by then it was already too late.

She came home and at once begged my mother's pardon, but my mother, with the recent troubles weighing on her mind, said,

"It isn't that I mind so much about ten mats. It's that this has happened because you've taken to listening carelessly to what I tell you. The old Tamiko was never like this. You go about lost in your own selfish thoughts, and so what people say to you never even reaches your ears..."

and delivered a scolding sharp enough to sting badly.

Tamiko went close to my mother's bedside and, pressing both hands to the floor, begged her forgiveness, saying it was all her own fault, please forgive her...

At this my mother scolded her further, saying there was no need to apologize so formally as though she were a stranger, and Tamiko, unable to bear it any longer, burst into tears and threw herself down weeping.

Had Tamiko simply stopped crying then, the matter would have ended there without further trouble, but she went on weeping the whole night through, so that her eyes were red the next morning.

My mother too, waking now and then in the night, had heard Tamiko sobbing on and on each time, and this time it was my mother who grew truly angry; calling both Omasu and Tamiko before her, she said, her voice trembling,

"There's no telling what unreasonable things I might say if it's just the two of us, so Omasu, you be a witness to this. Tamiko cried the whole night through last night. It must have been because she couldn't bear the resentment of what I said to her."

At this Tamiko said, through her tears, that it was not so at all, but my mother paid no heed and went on,

"It may well be that I scolded you a little too harshly, but even so, is there any need for you to resent it so bitterly, Tamiko? When I think it over, it really does make me feel wretched. I don't say this to hold my affection over you as some kind of debt, but though we were strangers to begin with, you've been coming to this house ever since you were a nursing infant, so that you and Masao once shared the very same two breasts between you, one apiece; and even after Omasu came, it was just the same — whatever there were two of, you each had one, whatever there were four of, you each had two, and when clothes were made up, it was always one for you and one for the other, never any difference made between you. I thought of you as truly my own child, and you always treated me as your own true mother, so much so that not a soul outside this house ever failed to take the two of you for brother and sister. And after all that, is it really so unbearable that you should weep the whole night through over a single scolding, the only one I've ever given you? If people in Ichikawa heard of it, they'd think old Mrs. Saito must have said some dreadful thing indeed. To think that all these ten-odd years of loving you as my own could be forgotten over one scolding — it truly grieves me. Is that simply how people are? Omasu, listen well and tell me — am I the one being unreasonable, or is it Tamiko? Well, Omasu?"

My mother said all this with her eyes brimming full of tears.

Tamiko, quite beside herself, threw herself at once against Omasu's knees and, weeping and weeping, said,

"Omasu, please explain it to Mother for me. I never had any such presumptuous thought. The reason I cried so last night was entirely my own fault, entirely because I fell short of what I should have been — Omasu, please, explain that to her properly for me..."

At this Omasu said,

"Your anger is quite understandable, Mother, but if I may say so, I think you may be a little mistaken. You've loved Tamiko dearly for so many years now, so surely you know her disposition well. Having had the good fortune to be under your care myself this past year, I can tell you Tamiko truly is a gentle, mild-natured person. She isn't the sort to resent even a scolding from you and weep over it like that. I hope you won't mind my saying so, but ever since she and Masao, who had always been so close, were suddenly separated for some reason or other, Tamiko has been pitifully low in spirits. She sighs at the mere rustle of leaves and grows tearful at a crow's cry, ready to weep at the slightest touch, and coming on top of that, being scolded a little sharply by you must be what set off tears there was no stopping. That's truly how I see it, Mother. Tamiko is not the sort to resent being scolded by you. It seems too pitiful, scolding a gentle soul like Tamiko the way you did just now."

As Omasu wept along with her and made this case for her, Tamiko, who had never in her heart borne my mother any ill will, at once brightened, and my mother said,

"So that's how it is — now that Omasu explains it, I see I was a little mistaken myself. Thank you for telling me so plainly, Omasu. My own heart feels quite eased now. Tami, hush now, don't cry anymore. You poor thing, you've had a hard time of it too. Why, Masao's only gone off to school, isn't he — he'll be home at the end of the year. Now, Omasu, take the day off from your work and make us something good to eat."

That day the three of them gathered together again and again, preparing all sorts of dishes and playing at tea, talking happily the whole day through.

Tamiko, that day, laughed more loudly than usual and played with unusual spirit.

Whatever one might say, my mother came round to understanding things easily enough, but my sister-in-law kept finding one moment or another to say this and that, until at last, before I had even come home, Tamiko was sent back to Ichikawa, so the story went.

The moment Omasu finished her long story, she hurried back to the house.

So that was how it had been — if not only my sister-in-law but my own mother had come to feel that way, then even so slight a hope as ours was as good as extinguished.

There must have been nowhere for Tamiko's helplessness to turn, no relief for her but tears.

To think she had been scolded so by my mother... had cried the whole night through... yes, of course she had, I thought, and hot tears welled up in me again, without end.

For a while I simply stood there vacantly, letting the tears come as they would.

That day I never did eat breakfast, and wandered about near the fields clear until past noon.

Once things had come to this, staying at home became suddenly unbearable to me.

Had it been possible, I would have gone back to school before the year's end, but that could not be managed, and so I endured it somehow, let the year turn over, spent New Year's Day at home, and set out early on the morning of the second, back to school.

This time I went overland to Ichikawa and took the train from there, so that my road passed close by Tamiko's home, but I was far too embarrassed to bring myself to stop at her house.

I thought too that if I did stop, it would only trouble Tamiko, and though the thought of stopping came to me again and again, in the end I never did.

Looking back now, a person's circumstances truly do change.

Only a year before, whenever Tamiko was not staying at our house, I would go to her home every single Sunday.

When I went to Tamiko's house, I had no business with anyone else there at all.

It was always,

"Grandmother, is Tami here?"

and there, "Tami"

had come, they would say, so much so that once, when I arrived, I found Tamiko out in the garden gathering chrysanthemums.

I called out, Tami, come here a moment, and dragged her off, half against her will, to the back of the house, where the two of us carried out a two-ken ladder together, leaned it against the persimmon tree, had Tamiko hold it steady, and I climbed up and picked some six persimmons.

When I tried to give her half, Tamiko said one was quite enough for her, so I took the remaining five and slipped straight out the back way and went home.

They say the whole Tomura household did indeed scold me roundly for this afterward, but Tamiko alone only laughed and smiled and never once said Masao had done anything wrong.

Close as we had once been, without the least reserve between us, once I had come to know love I grew ashamed even of passing through the streets of Ichikawa.

That year I did not go home for the summer recess.

I had meant not to go home at year's end either, but as it was the close of the year, and my mother wrote saying I should come home even for a day or two, I went back on New Year's Eve night.

Omasu, I was told, had left our service for good that year, so that there was no longer anyone left to talk to, and so I meant to leave again on the second, spending only New Year's Day at home, when my mother said, simply, there's something I should tell you too — Tamiko has married. Last November, in Ichikawa again, to a very well-off family, they say.

I only answered, oh, is that so, quite offhandedly, and went on my way.

Tamiko had married.

When I heard those words, my own state of mind struck even me as strangely, almost unaccountably calm.

My feelings for Tamiko did not waver in the least.

There may well have been some proper reason behind this, but whatever the reason, that was simply how it was.

I believed, without any need for reasoning, that whatever circumstances Tamiko might come into, the feeling she held for me would never change at all.

Whether she married or not, Tamiko remained Tamiko still, and it seemed to me that just as my own feeling for her never wavered a hair's breadth, hers for me would surely never waver either; and this conviction sat in me as though I were resting upon solid rock, without the least shadow of doubt.

That was why, hearing that Tamiko had married, I felt not the slightest surprise.

And yet from around that time, a new thought, one I had never had before, began to come to me.

I could not help but imagine Tamiko as utterly without spirit, wasting away, sunk in gloom all the while.

Only the thought of poor Tamiko grew ever stronger within me.

And so, once back at school, I found myself almost the opposite of before: where before I had made a point of throwing myself among others to distract myself from my misery, now I did the opposite, avoiding people as much as I could, and taking a private pleasure in letting my thoughts run to Tamiko when alone.

I went over and over again, comforting myself with the memory of the eggplant patch, the cotton field, the lonely feeling of that night of the thirteenth, and the parting at the Yagiri ferry.

Just thinking of Tamiko was always enough to lift my spirits.

Of course there were many times it turned to sorrow, but once I had shed my tears fully, my spirits would always lift again afterward.

With Tamiko always in my thoughts, my schoolwork, if anything, suffered no harm at all.

This too was one more strange thing about it; whatever the reason may have been, that was simply, in truth, how it was with me.

Some months passed in this way, and then, on a day I will never forget, the twenty-second of June, as I sat struggling over an arithmetic problem, the school servant came and said, Mr. Saito, a telegram from home, laying it on the edge of my desk before going off again.

It was the usual come at once, so I spoke to the dormitory supervisor at once and went home that very day.

Wondering with a pounding heart what could have happened, I came home to find the house, in the dusk, unexpectedly quiet.

The whole household was at supper in the kitchen, and nothing at all seemed changed, except that my mother alone was nowhere to be seen.

I did not even show my face in the kitchen, but went straight to my mother's room.

The lamp burned dim, and my mother lay stretched flat upon her pillow.

"Mother, has something happened?"

"Ah, Masao, thank you for coming home so quickly. I'll get up now — if you haven't eaten, go and finish your meal first."

I was consumed with worry over what it could be, but as my mother told me to, I hurried through my meal and came back to her side again.

My mother had tied her sash and was sitting up on her bedding.

Even when I sat down before her, she said nothing at all.

Looking at her, I saw she sat with her head bowed, tears falling like rain.

"Mother, please, what has happened?"

Roused by my words, my mother at last wiped away her tears and said,

"Masao, forgive me... Tamiko has died... it is as though I killed her myself..."

"When was this? How did Tamiko die?"

I asked back, half out of my senses, and my mother, choked with sobs, only pressed her hands to her face.

"When you hear the whole of it, you'll surely think me a heartless mother, but forgive me, Masao... it was I who, without a word to you, pressed Tamiko into that marriage against her own firm refusal, and it has come to this... even if the girl was the elder, if the two of you had truly wished it, there was no need for a parent to meddle so — and yet I, old as I am, went and made myself the interfering parent, and did a thing that can never now be undone. It is as though I killed Tamiko with my own hands. Forgive me, please, Masao... I wish I could follow after Tamiko myself..."

My mother was now weeping aloud, in great heaving sobs.

I understood only that Tamiko was dead, and nothing more than that at all.

Hearing of Tamiko's death was, for me too, enough to leave me nearly senseless, but seeing my mother's grief before my very eyes, so far beyond the ordinary, I could not even bring myself to weep, and stood there helpless and bewildered, when my elder brother and his wife came in.

"Mother, there's no use crying so, now."

At this my mother only said, let me cry, just let me cry, and there was nothing to be done about it.

From what my sister-in-law managed to tell me in fragments, meanwhile, I learned that a certain family in Ichikawa, whose son's character was well known and whose fortune was more than double that of the Tomura household, had earnestly sought Tamiko's hand; the go-between was a man to whom the Tomura family owed obligations, and so it had been settled that she must go, that she absolutely must marry into that family.

Tamiko had refused, whatever happened.

Her reasons for refusing were well enough understood, but since Masao was of a different age and had a long road ahead of him still, it was the wish of everyone in the Tomura household, and of the relatives besides, that she be married into that family no matter what.

And so at last it was decided to ask my mother to reason with her, and when my mother, for all her many attempts to persuade Tamiko, met with nothing but tears and refusal, she said to her, in the end, I know well enough that this stubbornness of yours comes from wanting to come to Masao, but that is a thing I myself will never allow — do you still refuse this marriage, even so?

Spoken to in this way, Tamiko seemed to give up entirely on herself, and in the end consented, saying only, do as you all think best.

From then on she left everything to others' wishes, and the marriage ceremony took place in the middle of November, but as Tamiko's heart had never truly consented to it, the other family too grew somewhat cold toward her, and though Tamiko conceived a child, she miscarried in the sixth month.

Her recovery afterward went very badly, and at last, on the nineteenth of June, she breathed her last.

During her illness there had been talk of sending word to me, but it was felt there was no longer any face to show Masao now, and so no word was sent.

My mother had gone to Ichikawa while Tamiko could still speak, and once Tamiko had failed beyond hope, she wept and wept and wept until there was no more weeping left in her.

Over and over she said only, it is as though I killed Tamiko myself, and, fearing what might become of her if left in Ichikawa, they had sent her home by carriage the day before.

She wept the moment anyone spoke to her, and wept, she said, it was my fault, it was my fault.

There was nothing anyone could do for her, and so they had sent the telegram to Masao.

It was pitiful for Tamiko, and pitiful for Mother too — it had all turned into such a dreadful thing.

Masao, whatever should we do?

From my sister-in-law's account I understood most of what had happened, but I too was left nearly at a loss for what to do.

My mother was by now half out of her mind with grief.

Whatever else, I felt that calming my mother's heart had to come first, and yet there was no way to comfort her.

I myself had thought I might as well simply go out of my mind, and had no strength left over to comfort my mother.

As we sat like this, my mother at last grew a little calmer and began to speak again.

"Masao, listen to me. I have come to be appalled at my own wickedness. Whatever made me say such a cruel thing to Tamiko? There's no use regretting it now, however much I regret it, but Masao... this is what I said to her. I said, this mother will never consent to a marriage between you and Masao, so go and marry elsewhere. Of course, once I had said such a thing to her, Tamiko had no choice left but to give up on herself entirely. Whatever made me say something so cruel? Oh, what a pitiful thing I did to her. It was truly my own wickedness in speaking that killed Tamiko. Masao, as soon as it grows light tomorrow morning, go at once and visit Tamiko's grave, and there, apologize on my behalf for how wrong I was. Will you, Masao?"

At last I too was able to weep.

Whatever the circumstances, once there had truly been no more hope left, they might at least have let us meet — to send word only after she had died was a truly cruel thing.

Tamiko too must surely have wanted to see me.

Once she had married, she may have felt she had no face to show me, and yet, when the end truly drew near, she must surely have wanted to see me all the same.

It was truly a wretched thing.

Thinking it over, I too had been altogether too much of a child about it.

That I had passed through Ichikawa three times afterward without once calling on her was a thing I could not now forgive myself for.

Whether Tamiko married or not made no difference to me at all — I only needed to see her, that was all.

If only I could have seen her once more... thought after thought welled up in me without end.

But if I were to say such things to my mother, it might well end up killing her in turn, this time by my own doing.

I firmly took hold of myself.

"Mother, it truly was a pitiable thing for Tamiko. But there's no use regretting endlessly what can never be undone, so there's nothing left but to tend carefully to what remains to be done. You keep blaming yourself entirely, but your own heart, Mother, was thinking only of Tamiko and of me the whole while — so even if things did not turn out as you wished, how could Tamiko or I ever hold it against you? Your heart was nothing but kindness through and through, and Tamiko surely bears you no grudge for it either. It must all have been fate, working itself out this way. I have already accepted it. Please, Mother, accept it too, from now on. Tomorrow, the moment it grows light, I will go to Ichikawa."

My mother went on, saying,

"It may well be, as you say, that it was all fate working itself out — but this time, this time above all, I have truly, deeply repented. There's a saying about a fool of a parent, doting past all sense, and this fool of a parent went and did something dreadfully wrong. Parents go on thinking they understand everything, right to the end, but that was a terrible mistake. There's no way left for me to be saved except to cling to Amida Buddha and beg to be saved by him. Masao, do take good care of yourself. When I think of it, Tamiko never once, in all these years, went against me — being the mild, obedient child she was makes what I did all the harder to forgive myself for; I cannot help but feel how pitiful it all is. I wish I could tell you what happened at Tamiko's very last moment, but I find I simply cannot bring myself to speak of it."

and her voice clouded over once more.

Since talking only made the grief worse the longer it went on, we forced ourselves at last to go to bed.

I had held myself back from weeping before my mother, before my brother and his wife, holding on as best I could, but once I had gone into my own mosquito netting and thrown myself down onto the bedding, it all came welling up at once, unbearably.

I bit down on a hand towel and wrung the tears from myself.

I could not say how many tears I shed; they did not stop at all until my mother's voice came from the next room, saying it seemed morning had come.

Having slept in my clothes as they were, I rose at once, washed my face, and left the house while it was still dim with the last of the night.

I ran the two ri of road as though in a dream, and by the time the sun had just begun to show above the horizon, I had reached the gate of the Tomura house.

From the garden of that house one could see straight through to where the cooking hearth stood.

Wheat straw crackled and popped, burning for the morning meal.

As I stood at the edge of the veranda, the old grandmother, who had been inside, caught sight of me with sharp eyes and came out.

"Kane, Kane, Tomi — Masao has come. Oh, Masao, thank you for coming, and so early too. Come, come up. You must have come straight from waking. Come now... Kane..."

Tamiko's father and mother came out too, and Tamiko's elder sister as well.

"Oh, thank you for coming. We've been waiting for you. In any case, come up and have something to eat first..."

I neither went up nor sat down, but stood there silent for a while.

At last I managed to say,

"I have come to visit Tamiko's grave."

The depth of feeling in it must have been more than any of them could bear to look at, for all four of them fell silent, unable to speak...

Presently Tamiko's father said,

"Even so, won't you at least eat something first before you go... ah, is that so. Well then, we should all go together... no, there's no need to change your clothes."

The women, already sniffling back tears, rose at once, saying, well then.

They took up water, took up incense, and gathered a great many flowers from the garden.

Columbine, globe amaranth, dahlias — each of them took up a different kind in hand, and so they set out.

Passing from under the persimmon tree out to the back of the house, we went out through the back gate in the hedge of dwarf podocarpus, and there was the pine wood.

Going between the peach orchard and the pear orchard, we came to a small stretch of rice paddy.

Beyond it, in a corner of the pine wood, stood a grove of mixed trees where many graves could be seen.

The Tomura family burial ground, centered on four or five holly trees, was marked off as a plot of some six tsubo.

In a fitting spot within it, the new grave was Tamiko's eternal dwelling place.

No rain had fallen on it since the burial, so it remained quite fresh and new, the paper strength-offerings looking as though they had just been tied on.

The grandmother went ahead and said,

"Now then, Masao, please do everything with your own hands. For Tamiko's sake, your offering of incense and flowers is truly worth more than a thousand monks' prayers — please, Masao, pray well and fully for her... today, wherever she rests beneath the grasses, Tamiko must surely be glad... ah, if only we could have let her see you, even once, before she closed her eyes for good... if only we could have let the two of you meet, even just the once..."

The three of them seemed to be rubbing at their eyes.

I offered incense, offered flowers, poured water, and then crouched down before the grave and prayed there until my heart was satisfied.

It truly was a wretched thing.

Had it been only her allotted span, that would be one thing — but through that long illness, oh, how I wished to visit her, wished to see her just once.

I had wanted to see Tamiko too, and Tamiko must surely have wanted to see me just as much.

However much she had been forced into it against her will, once she had married, she must have felt she had no face left to show me.

Thinking of it now, that alone was more than I could bear.

Gentle as Tamiko was, how could she ever have refused, pressed as she was by both her parents and the whole of the family besides?

Had Tamiko been a strong-willed person, she would surely have taken her own life, but being so gentle, she could not even manage that.

I wished I could have told her, if only with my own mouth, that my heart had never changed toward her no matter that she had married, before she died.

Was there ever, in all this world, a more wretched thing than this?

I no longer wanted to go on living myself... before I knew it, a cry broke from me, and I dropped down onto both knees and both hands upon the bare earth.

Seeing me like this, how the others standing behind me must have wept.

It was only then that I remembered I was not alone, and at last I rose to my feet.

One of the three — I could not tell which — said,

"Why did Tamiko never once speak Masao's name..."

"If we had known the two of them cared for each other so deeply, we would never have pressed her into it so."

"We had our suspicions all along, and yet we never once asked what was in this boy's heart, and Tamiko herself hated it so much... however young they were, it was too cruel a thing to do... poor, poor Tamiko..."

All three of them, too, offered incense and flowers and poured water.

The grandmother said again,

"Masao, please tie on strength-papers for her. Tie on as many as you can. Tamiko goes to the other world relying on the strength of your love. Namu Amida Butsu, Namu Amida Butsu."

I tied every last scrap of paper I had on me to the pilgrim's staff.

At that moment something struck me suddenly.

Tamiko had loved wild chrysanthemums so dearly — I should have dug some up and planted them here.

No, I would go and dig some up now, at once, and plant them.

Thinking this, I looked about, and to my wonder found wild chrysanthemums already growing thick nearby.

They had been trampled, it seemed, by mourners, and yet still stood up green and thriving.

Tamiko had been buried right in the midst of wild chrysanthemums.

At last, somewhat calmer, I took my leave of the grave together with the others.

I said there was nothing at all I wanted.

Neither a meal nor even tea, I said — please let me take my leave just as I am, I will come again early tomorrow — and as I turned to go, the whole household tried to hold me back.

Tamiko's mother, looking as though she could bear no more, said,

"Masao, if you leave us like this, none of us will be able to bear it. I understand well enough how bitter your feelings must be. Thinking it over, it was our own shortcoming that led to Tamiko's pitiful death, and left nothing to say for ourselves to you either. We will apologize to you in whatever way you wish. If you can find it in your heart to think Tamiko pitiable, please, before you go, hear the story of her last moments too. We had meant to tell you everything the moment you came, and the whole household has truly been waiting, wondering if you would come today, or perhaps tomorrow — so please..."

Spoken to like this, I could not simply leave, and, remembering that my own mother had asked the same of me, I went up into the room.

Tea and food were brought out, but I did no more than go through the motions of taking them.

Presently everyone gathered in the inner room, and the grandmother began to speak.

"Masao, as to the matter of Tamiko, all of us together have truly nothing we can say for ourselves, and no face to show you. You must have a great deal of bitterness in your heart, but please, Masao, let it be a thing of the past, and grant us your forgiveness. Apologizing to you is, more than anything else, what will bring peace to Tamiko's soul."

My heart was so full that I could say nothing at all.

The grandmother went on.

"The truth of it is, none of us — not your mother, nor I, nor Tamiko's own parents — ever knew that you and Tamiko had grown so deeply attached to each other."

Here I spoke up.

"When you say deeply attached, nothing at all ever happened between Tamiko and me."

"No, no, I don't mean to say anything happened between you. It's only that the two of you were always such close friends from the start that none of us ever saw what lay beneath it. And Tamiko, being as shy as she was, never spoke a word of it. I can't say we had no idea at all, though. That is why we owe you this apology..."

I said there was no reason at all for them to apologize to me so.

Tamiko's father said, please let me apologize all the same.

"What you say is quite right, Masao — we acted as we pleased, and now we say as we please to you besides, but Masao, please hear me out, this isn't a matter of reasoning. It may seem strange for a father to say such a thing, but Tamiko gave up a feeling she valued more than her own life in order to follow her parents' wishes. Even if she felt she could not disobey her parents' word, there was surely something unreasonable in expecting her feelings to be crushed down by mere duty. Tamiko's death came entirely from that, and as her parent, I cannot help but feel it bitterly — and since, as you say, neither of you had done anything wrong at all, that only makes it all the more pitiable in a parent's eyes. Gentle as she always was, Tamiko seemed to accept her own death as something owed to her own fate, and never once, to the very end, showed the least sign of complaint. Thinking of all this, however I look at it, it seems to me her parents were somewhat merciless. Masao, please understand — as you can see, this whole household is shut up in a darkness of grief. It may be a foolish thing to ask, but in this moment, having you hear the story of Tamiko seems to us the greatest comfort there could be, so, old as I am to be saying such a thing, please, hear us out."

The grandmother took up the story again.

The account of the marriage negotiations, and how matters grew ever more difficult, matched what my sister-in-law had already told me at home; the account of Tamiko's final day went as follows.

"On the afternoon of June the seventeenth the doctor came and said it was a matter of a day or two more, and that if we meant to notify relatives, we had better do so that very day, and so we sent word to your mother at once, and she came flying over on the morning of the eighteenth. That day Tamiko's color was good, and she spoke to us quite clearly. Your mother came in and said, Tami, you must never lose heart, you must find the will to get well again, do you hear, Tami... and Tamiko even gave a bright smile and said, Mother of Yagiri, thank you for everything, all your kindness. I will never forget, even after death, the debt I owe you for loving me so long and so well. I don't think I have much longer left now... Tami, you mustn't think such faint-hearted thoughts, there's no such thing, you must be strong, your mother said, and after a while Tamiko said, Mother of Yagiri, dying is truly what I wish for — once I am dead, that will be enough for me... and after that she seemed to murmur something more under her breath, something that must surely have been about you, Masao, but none of us could quite make it out. After that she spoke no more, and breathed her last as dawn broke that same night... And then, Masao, this is what happened — after daybreak, as we straightened her pillow, her mother discovered it: Tamiko was holding, in her left hand, a small object wrapped in a scrap of scarlet silk, that hand resting upon her breast. The whole household gathered round and debated what to do about it — it seemed a pitiful thing to disturb, and yet it troubled us to leave it unseen, and in the end her father said we ought simply to open it, and so, with everyone gathered there, we opened it. And Masao, it was your photograph, and your letter..."

The grandmother began to weep, and everyone else in the room wiped away tears as well.

I sat staring fixedly down at the tatami.

Presently the grandmother, with some effort, went on.

"When Tomi read the letter aloud, everyone burst into tears all at once. Even her father, man as he was, wept aloud. Your mother lamented so, over and over, that I feared for her mind — saying, not knowing the two of you cared for each other so deeply, we forced her into that marriage against all reason, it was wrong, oh, it was so wrong, so pitiable, Tami, forgive me, it was my fault, please forgive me. It was such a sudden commotion that the neighbors came round asking what had happened. And your mother simply would not stop weeping, no matter what. Fearing for her health, we sent her home by carriage once the funeral was over. Now that we understand what was truly in Tamiko's heart when she gave herself up to her fate, every one of us feels the same regret over having forced that marriage on her, and it is more than we can bear. The more I think of it, the more pitiful that child seems to me, and I cannot rest, sitting or standing... at the very least, having you come here, and letting all of us apologize to you properly for our wrong, and letting you offer incense and flowers at her grave with your own hands, seemed as though it might bring some small peace to this household... how long we have waited for this day. Masao, please, understand us. Tamiko never once turned against you. Please, think of her with pity..."

Every word of it was drowned in tears, and I too broke down weeping for a time.

Had Tamiko truly said that dying was what she wished for... of course she had said it, and of course my own mother had been driven to blame herself so bitterly, weeping as she had.

I said,

"Grandmother, I understand now, fully. I know Tamiko's heart well. Even when I heard last spring that Tamiko had married, I never doubted her, not the slightest bit. Whatever happens, my feelings for Tamiko will never change. My own mother speaks of nothing else, grieving over it endlessly, but none of it was ever done out of any ill will, and so I, and Tamiko too, I am certain, could never hold it against her. I accept it all as a fate that was already determined. For a while, I will come to her grave every day..."

We spoke and wept, wept and spoke, one word from one of us, one word from another, and however much we wept there seemed no end to it.

Worried about my own mother, I took my leave of the Tomura household when it was nearly noon.

Tamiko's mother, having seen how painfully I had borne myself before the grave, worried over me on the road home, and walked with me herself as far as the entrance to Yagiri.

However much I thought of how pitiable Tamiko's fate had been, the thought would not exhaust itself.

However much I wept, the weeping would not exhaust itself either.

And yet, seeing my own mother before me, tormented by remorse, grieving as though she herself had committed some grave sin, I found I could no longer go on weeping only for Tamiko.

I realized that if I went about in tears, my mother's suffering would only grow the greater for it.

From then on I forced myself, with all my will, to put on a show of spirit, and devoted myself entirely to comforting my mother.

And yet a feeling one does not truly hold cannot be helped; my mother, it seemed, came before long to see through it, and once that had happened, there was nothing left for me but to leave the house.

For seven days running I went each day to Ichikawa, and planted wild chrysanthemums all around Tamiko's grave until they covered it entirely.

On the day after that, having spoken to my mother enough to ease her mind, I set off for school with my resolve made firm.

* * *

Tamiko, forced into a marriage not of her own choosing, passed at last from this world; I too, forced into a marriage not of my own choosing, have lived on.

Tamiko must have kept my photograph and my letter always close against her breast.

However far the worlds of the living and the dead may lie apart, my heart has not left Tamiko's side, not for a single day.