硝子戸の中 English

I

Looking out from inside my glass doors, the things that catch my eye at once are the banana plant wrapped against the frost, the branch of a spindle tree hung with red berries, and the telegraph pole standing there without the least reserve; beyond these there is scarcely anything else worth counting that comes into view.

The field of vision open to me here in my study is extremely monotonous, and extremely narrow besides.

What is more, I have had a cold since the end of last year and have hardly gone outside at all, sitting day after day here behind these glass doors, so that I have no idea what is happening in the world.

I feel unwell, so I do not read much either.

I merely sit or lie down and pass one day after another.

And yet my mind does stir now and then.

My mood, too, shifts a little.

However narrow the world, within its narrowness things do happen.

And into these glass doors, which separate my small self from the wide world outside, people come from time to time.

They are, moreover, people I did not expect, saying and doing things I did not expect.

There have even been times when I greeted such people, and saw them off again, with eyes full of interest.

I think I shall try setting down a little of that sort of thing, one piece after another.

I am uneasy about how trivial writing of that kind must appear to the eyes of busy people.

On the streetcar, before a subscriber who pulls a newspaper from his pocket and fixes his eyes only on the large type, I think it a rather shameful thing to lay out on the page the sort of idle words I write and fill the columns with them.

For these people have no time to spare — none, except for whatever event of the day they judge important, be it a fire, a burglary, a murder, or some other, or else some biting article sharp enough to give their nerves a proper jolt; beyond that they see no need even to pick up a newspaper at all.

They buy a paper while waiting for the streetcar at the stop, and in the time it takes to ride it they learn of whatever change came over society the day before, and by the time they arrive at their office or their company they are so busy that they must have forgotten entirely about the paper tucked away in their pocket.

It is in defiance of the contempt of people who now have only so much time to spare, cut down as it is, that I write this.

Since last year a great war has been under way in Europe.

And there is no telling when that war will come to an end.

Japan too has taken on a small portion of that war.

No sooner was that done than the Diet was dissolved.

The coming general election has become a matter of great moment to the men of the political world.

Rice has grown too cheap, so that money does not come into the farmers' hands, and everywhere people complain of hard times.

As for the annual round of events, the spring sumo tournament is about to begin before long.

In short, the world is a very busy place.

I, sitting quietly here behind my glass doors, feel that I can hardly show my face in the newspaper at all.

If I write, it means writing my way in ahead of politicians, military men, businessmen, and sumo enthusiasts, pushing them aside.

I myself can hardly summon that much nerve.

It is only because I was told to write something for the spring issue that I set down trifling matters of little concern to anyone but myself.

How long this will go on depends on the convenience of my pen and the convenience of the editors laying out the page, so I cannot say now with any certainty.

II

Called to the telephone, I put the receiver to my ear and listened to what was wanted, and it turned out to be a man from some magazine company, saying he would like to have my photograph, and asking me to let him know when it would be convenient for him to come and take it.

"A photograph is a bit awkward,"

I answered.

I had no connection whatsoever with this magazine.

Even so, I recalled having had one or two issues of it in my hands over the past three or four years.

Beyond thinking that its distinguishing feature was filling its pages with any number of laughing faces, nothing else of it remained in my mind now.

And yet the unpleasant impression left on me by the many faces laughing there so artificially had still not faded.

And so I meant to decline.

The man from the magazine explained that, since this was the New Year's issue for the Year of the Rabbit, he wanted to line up the faces of people born in the Year of the Rabbit.

I was indeed, as he said, born in the Year of the Rabbit.

And so I said this:

"For a photograph to run in your magazine, I suppose one has to be smiling?"

"No, not at all,"

the man on the other end answered at once.

As though I had, until now, been under some misunderstanding about the magazine's distinguishing feature.

"If an ordinary expression will do, I don't mind letting you run it."

"No, that will be quite fine, so please."

I arranged a date with the man and hung up the telephone.

A day in between, at the appointed time, the man who had telephoned came into my study wearing a smart Western suit and carrying a camera.

I talked with him for a while about the magazine he worked for.

After that he took two photographs of me.

One was my ordinary self, seated before my desk; the other was my usual bearing, standing out on the frost-covered ground before the house on a cold day.

Since little light passed through the study, he set up his equipment and burned magnesium.

Just in front of that burning flame, he turned half his face toward me and said, "I know we agreed otherwise, but might you not smile just a little?"

he said.

At that I felt a faint touch of the comic all of a sudden.

But at the same time I also thought what a foolish thing the man was saying.

I said, "This will do, won't it,"

and paid no attention to his request.

When he stood me before the trees in the garden and turned his lens toward me, he repeated the same words in the same courteous tone as before: "I know we agreed otherwise, but might you just a little…"

the very same words, once again.

I felt even less inclined to smile than before.

About four days later, he delivered my photograph by mail.

But in that photograph I was, sure enough, smiling exactly as he had requested.

At that I stared at my own face for a while, like a man whose expectations have been thrown off.

For to me it looked, beyond any doubt, like something touched up and made to appear as if smiling.

To be sure, I showed the photograph to four or five people who came to the house.

They all, just as I had, delivered the verdict that it did indeed look like a contrived, forced smile.

From the day I was born up to the present, there have been any number of occasions when I smiled before people though I had no wish to smile at all.

It may be that this falseness of mine has now been avenged upon me by this photographer.

He sent me the photograph in which I wore an unpleasant, forced smile, but the magazine that was to run it never did arrive after all.

III

When I think of the time I received Hector from Mr. H, it is already, before I know it, three or four years in the past.

It feels somehow like a dream.

At that time he was still a puppy just weaned from his mother.

A disciple of Mr. H's wrapped him in a cloth bundle, carried him on the streetcar, and brought him all the way to my house.

That night I laid him down in a corner of the storehouse out back.

After spreading straw so that he would not be cold, and making the bed as comfortable as I could, I closed the storehouse door.

At that he began crying from the early evening on.

In the middle of the night he clawed at the storehouse door, trying to scratch his way out.

He must have been lonely sleeping all by himself in the dark, for by all appearances he did not sleep a wink until the next morning.

This restlessness continued the following night.

And the night after that as well.

For a week or more, until he finally settled into peaceful sleep on the straw we had given him, I found myself worrying about him without fail whenever night came.

My children, finding him a novelty, made a plaything of him at every spare moment.

But since he had no name, they could never call out to him.

And yet, dealing as they did with a living creature, it was absolutely necessary for them to be able to call his name in order to play with him.

And so they set upon me, pestering me to give the dog a name.

In the end I gave this companion of my children's the grand name of Hector.

It was the name of the foremost brave general of Troy who appears in the Iliad.

When Troy fought its war with Greece, Hector was in the end struck down by Achilles.

Achilles took revenge for the friend of his whom Hector had killed.

When Achilles rose in fury and charged out from the Greek side, Hector was the only one who did not flee into the city.

Hector circled the walls of Troy three times, dodging the point of Achilles' spear.

Achilles too circled the walls of Troy three times, chasing after him.

And in the end he ran Hector through with his spear and killed him.

After that he bound the corpse to his own chariot and dragged it three times more around the walls of Troy…

I gave this magnificent name to a little dog that had come wrapped in a cloth bundle.

Even my children, who could not have known any better, said at first what a strange name it was.

But they soon grew used to it.

And the dog, too, wagged his tail happily every time he was called Hector.

In the end even so grand a name came to carry no more classical resonance for me than some ordinary Christian's name like John or George.

At the same time he came, little by little, to be prized less by the household than he had been at first.

Hector was once hospitalized for a time with distemper, the illness that afflicts most dogs sooner or later.

At that time the children went often to visit him.

I went to visit him too.

When I went, he wagged his tail with what seemed like great joy, and turned toward me eyes full of affection.

I crouched down, brought my face close to him, and stroked his head with my right hand.

In return he kept trying, without letting up, to lick my face wherever he could reach.

It was then, before my very eyes, that he drank for the first time the small amount of milk the doctor had recommended.

Even the doctor, who had been shaking his head over him until then, said that at this rate he might well recover after all.

And Hector did indeed recover.

He came home again and bounded about full of spirit.

IV

Before many days had passed, he had made two or three friends.

Among them the one he was closest to was a mischief-maker of about his own age who lived at the doctor's house just in front of ours.

This one bore the name John, fitting enough for a good Christian, but his nature seemed far inferior to that of Hector the heathen.

He had a habit of biting people without any provocation at all, and in the end he was killed for it.

He would lead this bad companion of his into our garden and get up to all sorts of mischief there, causing me no end of trouble.

The two of them took constantly to digging around the roots of trees, delighting in gouging out great holes for no purpose at all.

They would lie down deliberately on top of the pretty flowering plants, scattering the blossoms and snapping the stems without the least mercy.

After John was killed, Hector, with nothing to occupy him, took to wandering about both night and day.

When I went out for a walk I often saw him sunning himself beside the police box.

And yet as long as he was at home he was always ready to bark fiercely at anything that struck him as suspicious.

Among these the one who drew his most ferocious attacks was a boy of about ten, a kakubee-jishi acrobat's apprentice who came from around the Honjo district.

This boy always announced himself with "Good day, a blessing for the house,"

as he came in.

And he had made up his own mind never to go home until someone in the house had given him a crust of bread and a one-sen copper coin.

So no matter how much Hector barked at him, he never ran off.

If anything it was Hector who, barking all the while, would tuck his tail between his legs and beat a retreat toward the storehouse — that had become the usual pattern.

In short, Hector was a coward.

And as for his conduct, he had sunk to a state scarcely distinguishable from that of a stray dog.

And yet he never lost that affectionate, people-loving nature common to dogs of his kind.

Whenever our eyes happened to meet, he would without fail wag his tail and leap up at me.

Or else he would rub his back against my body without the least restraint.

I could not begin to count the number of times his muddy feet soiled my clothes or my overcoat.

Falling ill from last summer into autumn, I passed a month or so without ever once having the chance to see Hector.

When my illness had finally eased enough that I could get up from bed, I stood on the veranda of the sitting room for the first time and made out his white shape in the dusk.

I called his name at once.

But he, crouched motionless at the foot of the hedge, gave not the slightest response to my affection no matter how much I called.

He neither turned his head nor wagged his tail, but simply clung to the hedge like a white lump.

Not having seen him for about a month, I could not help thinking he had already forgotten his master's voice, and I felt a faint pang of sorrow at that.

It was still early autumn, so that the storm shutters in none of the rooms had yet been closed, and it was the kind of evening when starlight could be seen clearly from inside the open house.

On the veranda of the sitting room where I stood there were two or three members of the household.

But even when I called Hector's name, not one of them so much as turned around.

Just as I had been forgotten by Hector, so it seemed that they too had given no thought to Hector at all.

I went back to my room in silence and lay down on the bedding spread out there.

Still recovering from my illness, I was wearing a meisen dressing gown with a black hachijo silk collar, unsuited to the season.

Finding it too much trouble to take it off, I lay down on my back just as I was, folded my hands on my chest, and stared up at the ceiling in silence.

V

The next morning, standing on the veranda of my study and gazing out over the face of the early-autumn garden, I happened once again to make out his white form on the moss.

Loath to repeat the disappointment of the evening before, I made a point of not calling his name.

And yet, standing there, I could not help watching his behavior closely.

He had thrust his head into the stone water basin set at the foot of a standing tree, and was lapping noisily at the rainwater collected there.

This water basin, a hexagonal thing, no one knew when or by whom it had first been brought, and it had simply been lying about in a corner of the back garden; at the time we moved in I had had the gardener move it to its present position, and by then moss had grown all over it so that the characters carved into its side could no longer be read at all.

But I had a memory of reading it clearly once, before it was moved.

And that memory had not stayed with me as characters at all, but lingered even now in my chest as a strange kind of feeling, coming and going.

There drifted about it the scent of temples, of Buddhas, of the impermanence of all things.

Hector had his tail drooping, looking listless, and had his back turned toward me.

When he left the water basin, I saw drool running from his mouth.

"Something has to be done for him. He's sick,"

I said, turning to look at the nurse.

At that time I still had a nurse in the household.

The following day too I caught a single glimpse of him lying among the scouring rushes.

And I repeated the same words to the nurse.

But from that time on Hector simply vanished from sight and never came home again.

"I meant to take him to the doctor and looked everywhere, but he's nowhere to be found."

So said someone in the household, looking at my face.

I said nothing.

But inwardly I found myself recalling even the circumstances of when we first took him in.

There floated faintly to mind, too, the small absurdity of the registration form, where under "breed" I had written "mixed" and under "color" I had written "reddish-mottled."

About a week or so after he disappeared, a maidservant came as a messenger from a certain house one or two blocks away.

She had come to inform us, she said, that the corpse of a dog was found floating in the pond in that house's garden, and when they pulled it out and examined the collar, our family's name was engraved on it.

The maidservant asked, "Shall we go ahead and bury him here?"

she asked.

I sent a rickshaw man at once to bring him back.

I did not know where the house was that had gone to the trouble of sending a maid to tell us.

I only supposed it must be somewhere near the old temple I remembered from my childhood.

That was the temple where Yamaga Soko's grave lay, and just before its gate stood a single old hackberry tree, like a memento of the old shogunal era, which I could see clearly from the north veranda of my study, over the many rooftops in between.

The rickshaw man wrapped Hector's corpse in a straw mat and brought him home.

I made a point of not going near it.

I had a small unpainted wooden grave marker bought and had written on it a single line: "I have buried him in earth where the autumn wind is never heard."

that single line.

I handed it to someone in the household and had it set up over the ground where Hector lies sleeping.

His grave lies to the northeast of the cat's grave, roughly a ken apart, but when I go out onto the north veranda of my study, where no sun falls on cold days, and peer through the glass doors at the back garden ravaged by frost, I can see both of them clearly.

Compared to the cat's grave marker, already darkened and beginning to rot, Hector's still gleams with a raw, fresh look.

But before long both will have weathered to the same color and will alike go unnoticed by anyone's eye.

VI

I met that woman four or five times in all.

The first time she called, I was out.

When the person who received her mentioned that she ought to bring a letter of introduction, she is said to have replied that she had no place to obtain such a thing, and went home.

About a day later, the woman wrote to inquire directly about when it would be convenient for me.

From the envelope of that letter I learned that the woman lived quite close by, practically within sight.

I wrote back at once and set a day for her to call.

The woman came without fail at the appointed time.

What caught my eye first was that she wore a showy crepe haori marked with the three-oak-leaf crest.

The woman seemed to have read most of what I had written.

And so our talk stretched on, mostly in that direction.

But to receive nothing but praise for one's own writings from a person one has only just met is a thing which, however gratifying, is also extremely uncomfortable.

To tell the truth, I found it a trial.

A week later the woman came again.

And once more she praised my writings.

But my own heart, if anything, wished to avoid that subject altogether.

The third time she came, the woman seemed to have been moved by something, for she drew a handkerchief from her sleeve and repeatedly wiped away tears.

And she asked whether I would not write down the sad history of her life up to now.

But not having heard the story, I could give her no answer of any kind.

I asked the woman whether, even supposing I did write it, someone might not turn up who would find it troublesome.

The woman answered, in a tone unexpectedly clear and firm, that it would not matter so long as her real name did not appear.

And so I set aside time specially, in any case, to hear her story.

But when the day came, the woman brought along another woman who wished to meet me, and said she would like to put off the promised story to another time.

I of course had no intention of reproaching her for breaking her word.

I made ordinary conversation with the two of them and we parted.

The last time she sat in my study was the evening of the following day.

Poking at the ash in the paulownia hand-warmer set before her with a pair of brass fire chopsticks, she said this to me before beginning her sad story, while I remained silent:

"The other day, carried away, I asked you to write about me, but I would like to take that back now. I only want you to listen, so please understand it that way…"

To this I answered as follows.

"Without your permission, no matter what material might arise that I wished to write about, you may rest assured I would never do so."

Having received this full assurance from me, the woman said, "Well then," and began to tell of her life over the past seven or eight years.

I watched the woman's face in silence.

But the woman kept her eyes lowered for the most part, gazing only into the brazier.

And with her fine fingers she would grip the brass fire chopsticks and jab them into the ash.

From time to time, when something did not quite make sense to me, I put a short question to her.

The woman answered simply, and in a way that satisfied my understanding.

But for the most part she spoke entirely on her own, and I sat still, doing little more than a wooden statue would.

Before long the woman's cheeks grew flushed and red.

Perhaps because she wore no powder, the color of those flushed cheeks struck my eye all the more sharply.

With her head bowed as it was, the abundance of her black hair, too, naturally became something that drew my attention.

VII

The woman's confession was, in its extremity of grief, enough to leave me who listened to it short of breath.

She put this question to me:

"If you, Sensei, were to write this as a novel, what would you do with that woman in the end?"

I was at a loss for an answer.

"Do you think it better for the woman to die, or would you write her as going on living?"

I answered that it could be written either way, while trying, without showing it, to read the look on her face.

The woman seemed to want a clearer answer from me than that.

Having no other choice, I answered as follows.

"If one takes living itself as the central point of a human being, then there should be no harm in leaving things as they are. But if one values human beings first of all by what is beautiful or noble in them, the question may come out differently."

"Which of the two would you choose, Sensei?"

Again I hesitated.

There was nothing for me to do but listen in silence to what the woman said.

"I am so afraid, unbearably afraid, that this beautiful feeling I have now will gradually fade away with the passing of time. When I imagine a future in which this memory has vanished and I am living on aimlessly, like an empty shell with no soul in it, the thought is a torment, a torment, and I find it unbearably frightening."

I knew that the woman now stood entirely alone in the wide world, in a position where she could not stir so much as an inch.

And I knew, too, that it was a plight so desperate that it lay quite beyond any power of mine to do anything about it.

I found myself placed in the position of a mere bystander to a suffering I had no way to touch, and could only sit still.

I had a habit, unashamed even before guests, of keeping a pocket watch beside my cushion in order to time the taking of my medicine.

"It's already eleven o'clock, so you should be going home,"

I said to the woman at last.

The woman rose without showing any displeasure.

I said further, "It's gotten late, so let me see you home,"

and stepped down to the entryway together with her.

At that moment a beautiful moon was shining without a single shadow left unlit across the quiet night.

Once out on the road, the sound of our clogs striking the hushed earth could scarcely be heard at all.

With my hands tucked in my sleeves and no hat on my head, I followed along behind the woman.

At the street corner the woman gave a small bow of the head and said, "It's far too kind of you, Sensei, to see me home,"

she said.

"There's no reason it should be too kind. We are the same sort of human being,"

I answered.

At the next corner the woman said again, "It's an honor to be seen home by you, Sensei,"

she said once more.

I asked in earnest, "Do you truly think it an honor?"

I asked her seriously.

The woman answered simply and clearly, "I do,"

she answered plainly.

I said, "Then live on, and do not die,"

I said.

I do not know how the woman took those words.

After going on about another block, I turned back toward home.

Having been made to listen to a story so choking and painful, I found that night, of all nights, that I experienced for the first time in a long while a good and truly human feeling.

And I realized that it was the very same feeling one gets after reading some precious work of literature.

The shadow of my own past self, once so pleased with myself going off to the Yurakuza or the Imperial Theater, struck me now as somehow shabby.

VIII

As I trudge wearily along this life so full of unpleasantness, I find myself constantly thinking about death, that condition which I must someday reach.

And I have come to believe, quite simply, that death is an easier thing than life.

At times I even think it the highest and noblest state a human being can attain.

"Death is nobler than life" —

such words have of late come constantly to pass through my mind.

And yet at present I am, here before my own eyes, still alive.

Since I cannot, in the span of a single lifetime, free myself from habits instilled over a hundred years, two hundred years, or even a thousand or ten thousand years, going back through my parents, my grandparents, my great-grandparents, and on in succession before them, I remain, as ever, attached to this life.

And so it seems to me that whatever advice I give another person must after all be given within the bounds that this life allows.

I think that only within that narrow compass — how one is to go on living — must I, as one human being, face another human being.

For once one recognizes oneself as active within life, and recognizes another as breathing within that same life, it is only natural to conclude that the fundamental terms between the two, however painful or however ugly, must be set upon this ground of life.

"If living is painful, then perhaps it would be better to die" —

words like these could surely not be spoken even by the most heartless person who ever looked upon this world.

Doctors, even for a patient about to slip into a peaceful sleep, will deliberately set a needle to him, devising every means to prolong the sufferer's agony by so much as a single moment.

When one sees such conduct, so close to torture, permitted as a matter of human virtue, one understands just how deeply and stubbornly we cling to that single word, life.

In the end I could not bring myself to counsel that person toward death.

That person had been wounded in her own heart so deeply that there was scarcely any prospect of recovery.

And at the same time, that very wound had become the seed of a beautiful memory such as ordinary people never experience, and it lit up her face.

She wanted to go on holding that beautiful thing, like a jewel, close and safe forever in the depths of her heart.

Unhappily, that beautiful thing was, at the very same time, nothing other than the wound itself, the very thing that tormented her more than death would.

The two things were like the front and back of a single sheet of paper, utterly impossible to pull apart.

I told her to yield herself to the flow of "Time,"

which heals all things, and let it carry her along.

She lamented that, if she did so, this precious memory of hers would gradually be worn away.

Impartial "Time,"

even as it takes that precious treasure from her hands, will also, little by little, tend to the wound itself.

Even as it blurs, dreamlike, the fierce joy of that intense life, it never neglects the means of removing, too, the raw and vivid pain that accompanies that present joy.

Even taking up the ardent memory rooted in a deep love, I sought to have "Time"

wipe away the blood still dripping from the wound in her heart.

For however ordinary a life it might be, going on living seemed to me, looking at her, more fitting for her than dying.

And so my hopes and my counsel, though I have always believed death nobler than life, could not in the end rise above this life so full of unpleasantness.

And moreover it seemed to me, try as I might, that this only proved me, in practice, to be nothing more than a commonplace naturalist.

Even now I gaze steadily at my own heart with eyes half doubting, half believing.

IX

Among the friends I kept relatively close company with when I was at the higher school, there was a man called O.

Since I did not have very many friends in those days, there was naturally a tendency for me to go back and forth with O rather often.

I visited him, for the most part, at a rate of about once a week.

During one summer vacation, I recall, I called every single day without fail on him, lodging as he did in Masago-cho, and took him along with me to the swimming spot on the Okawa river.

O was a man from the Tohoku region, so that his manner of speech had a slow, unhurried tone quite different from mine.

And that tone seemed to me to represent his character remarkably well.

Although I recall arguing with him any number of times, I never once, in the end, saw his face grow angry or heated.

On that alone I already regarded him as an elder worthy of my respect and affection.

Just as his temperament was generous and unhurried, so his mind, too, was far larger than my own.

He was forever, on his own, turning over questions that lay quite beyond my grasp at that time.

Although he had intended from the start to enter the science course, he took pleasure in opening books of philosophy as well.

I still have not forgotten borrowing from him, on one occasion, a copy of Spencer's First Principles.

On clear autumn days, with the sky washed utterly clean, the two of us would often walk along together, talking idly of whatever came to mind, wherever our feet happened to lead us.

At such times we often saw, from some tree branch reaching out over a fence into the road, small leaves dyed yellow scattering and fluttering down though there was no wind at all.

When that scene happened to catch his eye, he once cried out in a low voice, "Ah, I understand it now."

he cried out, low.

To me, who had no skill beyond taking in the beauty of the autumn colors stirring against the sky, his words came to my ear only as some strange sound, like a sealed-off cipher hiding a secret.

"Enlightenment is a curious thing, isn't it,"

when he went on to explain it afterward, half to himself, in that same unhurried tone as always, I still could not manage so much as a word in reply.

He was a poor student.

In the days when he rented a room near the Great Kannon and cooked for himself, he would often grill dried salmon and have me sit down with him at his humble table.

On one occasion, instead of rice cakes, he bought simmered beans, and the two of us picked at them together straight out of the bamboo-bark wrapping.

Not long after graduating from the university, he took up a post at a middle school out in the provinces.

I felt this was a shame, for his sake.

But to a university professor who did not know him, it may well have seemed only natural.

He himself, of course, did not mind in the least.

Some years after that, on what I believe was a three-year contract, he went off to teach at a certain school in China, and as soon as his term was up and he returned, he became a middle school principal back home.

From there he was transferred from Akita to Yokote, and now he is serving as a principal in Karafuto.

Last year, when he came up to Tokyo and took the occasion to call on me after a long absence, I received his card from the person who announced him and went straight to the sitting room, taking my seat, as always, ahead of my guest.

Then, coming down the corridor to the doorway of the room, he took one look at me sitting properly upright on my cushion and said, "Looking pretty composed, aren't you,"

he said.

Before his words were even finished, a reply of "Mm"

had somehow already slipped out of my mouth before I knew it.

How was it that this answer of mine, which amounted to agreeing with his little jab at my own expense, slid so naturally, so effortlessly, so unguardedly, right down my throat?

At that moment I felt a clear, pleasant feeling.

X

O and I, having taken our seats facing one another, first of all looked back into each other's faces, and found there, still, something of the old features lingering, like the token of a dear old dream.

But it was much as if an old heart had been dimly woven into a new mood, and the whole thing lay clouded over in a faint haze.

To resist the fearsome power of "Time"

and return once more to our former selves was, for the two of us, no longer possible.

Neither of us could help but look back on that strange thing called the past, which lay wedged between our parting and this present meeting.

O had once had cheeks red as apples, eyes larger and rounder than most men's, and a face wrapped in an outline soft and full enough to suit a woman.

Even now, looking at him, he is still the owner of those same red cheeks and round eyes and that same soft, unangular outline, but it is somehow different from what it once was.

I showed him my mustache and my side-whiskers.

He, in turn, rubbed his own head for me to see.

Mine had gone white, while his was thinning and starting to go bald.

"Once a man's gone as far as Karafuto, there can't be much farther left to go, can there,"

I teased, and he answered, "Well, that's about the size of it,"

and went on to tell me all sorts of things about Karafuto, a place I had never seen for myself.

But I have forgotten all of it by now.

I only remember that summer there is supposed to be a very pleasant season.

For the first time in years, I went out the front door together with him.

Over his frock coat he wore a great puffy cape-coat, the kind called a tonbi.

And on the streetcar, hanging from a strap, he took out of his pocket something wrapped in a handkerchief and showed it to me.

I asked, "What's that?"

I asked.

He answered, "Chestnut buns,"

he answered.

The chestnut buns were the sweets that had been served earlier, while he was at my house.

When I wondered just when he had managed to wrap them up in a handkerchief, I found myself a little startled.

"Did you take those chestnut buns with you?"

"I suppose I might have."

He said this in a tone that seemed to make light of my surprise, and put the handkerchief bundle back into his pocket.

That evening we went to the Imperial Theater.

When, having noted the instruction written on the two tickets I had gotten to enter from the north side, I mistakenly started to go around to the south side instead, he warned me, "Not that way,"

he warned me.

I stopped for a moment to think it over, and said, "So it seems your sense of direction is more reliable than mine, coming all the way from Karafuto,"

and turned back toward the designated entrance.

He had claimed from the start that he knew the Imperial Theater well.

But after dinner, when he tried to return to his seat, he did what anyone might do and confused the doors for the second floor and the first floor, and I had a laugh at his expense.

Every so often he would take a pair of gold-rimmed spectacles from his pocket to read a printed program he held in his hand, and then, without ever removing those spectacles, he would go right on calmly watching the distant stage.

"Aren't those reading glasses? You can see all the way over there with those?"

"Oh, it's all chabudo,"

I had no idea at all what this word chabudo meant.

He explained to me that it was a Chinese expression meaning roughly "not much difference either way."

That night, once he parted from me on the streetcar going home, he went off again to that cold, distant northern edge of Japanese territory.

Whenever I think of him, I find myself thinking of his given name, Tatsujin — the Adept.

And when I do, I feel as though that name had been granted to him from heaven expressly for his sake.

And I think to myself that this Adept is, even now, still serving as a middle school principal out at that northern extremity locked in snow and ice.

XI

A certain married lady introduced a certain woman to me.

"She says she'd like you to look over something she's written."

These words of the lady's set off any number of thoughts turning over in my head.

There have been any number of people, up to now, who have come to me asking me to read something they had written.

Among them were some bulky pieces, an inch or two thick in manuscript paper.

I read as many of these as my time allowed.

And being a simple sort of man, I was content to believe that, so long as I read the thing, I had fulfilled whatever duty had been asked of me.

But as a rule, the other party would afterward go on to ask me to get it into a newspaper, or beg me to have it placed in some magazine.

Among them there were not a few cases where it seemed that having me read it was only a means, and the real aim all along was to turn the manuscript into money.

I had gradually come to dislike reading, out of pure good will, the hard-to-read manuscripts of people I did not know.

To be sure, compared with my days as a teacher, I had no doubt gained a certain amount of tolerance for it.

Even so, once I turned to my own work, my mind inside was kept quite busy enough as it was.

Even a manuscript I had kindly agreed to look over could, on occasion, drag on without ever reaching any conclusion.

I told the lady exactly what was on my mind, just as I had thought it.

The lady seemed to grasp well enough what I meant, and went home.

It was not long after that when the woman we had agreed upon came to my sitting room and sat down on the cushion.

Gazing through the glass doors at a dark sky that looked ready to let loose a dreary rain at any moment, I said this to her:

"This is not a social visit. If we go on saying only the sorts of things that sound well to each other, no amount of time will ever bring you any enlightenment or any benefit at all. You must make up your mind to be thoroughly honest, or it is no use. Only once you have exposed yourself fully will I be able to see clearly where you actually stand and which way you are actually facing. Only then may I consider myself, for the first time, to have been given by you the qualification to guide you. So when I say something, if you have some answer sitting in your gut, you must never keep silent about it. If you hold back for fear of being laughed at, of being embarrassed, of being scolded as rude for saying such a thing, and take care to show the other person only a version of yourself painted over in black, then no matter how anxiously I strain to be of some benefit to you, every arrow I loose will simply fly wide of its mark.

"This is what I require of you, but in return I too will not hide this self of mine. There is no other way to teach you except by laying myself bare, just as I am. So if there is some gap somewhere in my thinking, and you should see through that gap, then I, in the sense that you would have hold of my weak point, will have fallen into a kind of defeat. It is a mistake to think that only the one receiving instruction bears the duty of opening himself up. The one who teaches, too, lays himself open before you. Both sides step outside ordinary social exchange and see straight through one another.

"For that reason, when I look over what you have written from now on, I may well say some quite harsh things without holding back, but you must not be angry over it. I do not say them to wound your feelings. In return, if there is anything on your side that does not sit right with you, you must press right in on it, however far. So long as you understand my intent in this, there is no reason I should ever be angry.

"In short, this is something altogether different from the kind of social exchange whose only aim is to preserve the present state of things, valuing above all a smooth, superficial harmony. Do you understand?"

The woman said she understood, and went home.

XII

There are people who write asking me to write out a poem strip, or to compose a verse.

And they send along the strip of paper or the smooth silk before I have even agreed to it.

At first, thinking it a pity to let their hopes come to nothing, I would go along with whatever they asked and write it out, poor as I knew my calligraphy to be.

But such goodwill, it seems, is not easy to keep up indefinitely, and I gradually found myself growing more and more inclined to let the requests of many people come to nothing.

There are even times when I think that all human beings were born only to go on making fools of themselves day after day, so it is not as though I could not bring myself, if I really tried, to send off some clumsy piece of calligraphy to someone.

But when such requests keep coming one after another at times when I am ill, or busy with work, or simply have no wish to do that sort of thing, it really does wear me down.

Most of these people are complete strangers to me, and moreover they seem to give not the slightest thought to the trouble it costs me even to send their own poem strips back to them.

Among all of these, the one who left me most unpleasantly disposed was a man named Iwasaki, living in Sagoshi in Banshu.

This was a man who, some years before, had often written to me on postcards asking me to compose haiku for him, and I recall having, each time, written out whatever he asked and sent it along.

Some time after that, he sent me a small, flat, square parcel.

Finding it too much trouble even to open it, I left it just as it was and tossed it aside in my study, whereupon the maid, while cleaning, ended up tucking it in between some books, so that it was, in effect, tidily lost from sight.

Around the same time as this parcel, a tin of tea arrived from Nagoya addressed to me.

But I had not the least idea who had sent it or for what reason.

I drank up the tea without the slightest hesitation.

Then, before long, the man from Sagoshi wrote asking me to return his picture of an ascent of Mount Fuji.

Having no memory whatsoever of receiving any such thing from him, I let the matter drop.

But he kept demanding, three times, four times, that I return the Mount Fuji picture, without letting up.

In the end I began to doubt this man's state of mind.

"He must be out of his senses."

Having settled this in my own mind, I decided to pay no attention at all to his demands from then on.

Two or three months passed after that.

I believe it was around the beginning of summer, though I am not certain — I had grown weary of sitting in a study left in such disorder, and so I began, on my own, tidying things up bit by bit.

While putting my books in order, going one by one through the dictionaries and reference books that had been carelessly stacked up, I came unexpectedly upon that very parcel the man from Sagoshi had sent.

Seeing before my own eyes a thing I had entirely forgotten about, I was startled.

I opened the wrapping at once and examined the contents, and found inside a single picture, folded small.

When I saw that it was, indeed, a picture of an ascent of Mount Fuji, I was startled all over again.

Inside the parcel, along with this picture, was a letter as well, asking me to add an inscription to the picture, and mentioning that the tea had been sent as a token of thanks.

My astonishment only grew.

But at that time I could not possibly summon the nerve to inscribe such a thing as a picture of an ascent of Mount Fuji.

My state of mind was so far removed from anything of that kind that I had no leisure to think up a haiku that would suit the picture.

But all the same, I felt ashamed of myself.

I wrote a courteous letter apologizing for my negligence.

After that I thanked him for the tea.

And finally I returned the picture of the ascent of Mount Fuji as a parcel.

XIII

Thinking this had brought the matter to a proper close, I put the man from Sagoshi entirely out of my mind after that.

Then the man sent me another poem strip, sealed up.

And this time he wanted me to write a verse having to do with the loyal retainers.

I wrote back saying I would get to it before long.

But the occasion to write it never quite came, and the matter was simply left as it was.

But this persistent man, it seemed, had no intention whatsoever of letting the matter rest there, and began sending demand after demand.

These demands came, without fail, at a rate of once a week or once every two weeks.

They were, without exception, on postcards, and their opening line was, without exception, fixed as "I beg your pardon for the intrusion, but…"

invariably the same.

Seeing this man's postcards grew, little by little, more and more unpleasant to me.

At the same time, his demands began taking on a strange quality I had not expected at all until then.

At first there appeared the line that he had, after all, sent me tea.

When I paid this no attention, his wording changed this time to demanding that I return that tea.

I felt like telling him that returning it was easy enough, but the trouble of it was such a bother that he might as well come to Tokyo and pick it up himself if he wanted it back.

But sending such a letter to the man from Sagoshi felt as though it would touch on my own dignity, and I could not quite bring myself to do it.

Receiving no reply, the man on his end pressed his demands all the more.

If I would not return the tea, that was fine too, he said, but then I should send him one yen as its price instead.

My feelings toward this man grew steadily more embittered.

In the end I quite lost my composure.

I wrote back that the tea had already been drunk, the poem strip had already been lost, and that from now on there was no need whatsoever for any more postcards.

And inwardly I experienced a very bitter feeling indeed.

For it seemed to me that it was this man from Sagoshi who had driven me into a corner where I had no choice but to write such an ungentlemanly reply.

For it struck me as a sorry thing indeed to have to endure some measure of degradation, whether of dignity or of character, on account of such a man.

But the man from Sagoshi remained quite unmoved.

To say that the tea had been drunk up and the poem strip lost was really going too far, he wrote again on another postcard, and…

and at its head, as ever, the same phrase, "I beg your pardon for the intrusion, but…," repeated with perfect regularity.

At that point I resolved that I would no longer have anything to do with this man.

But my resolve could hardly have had any effect at all on his behavior.

He went on with his demands as unrelentingly as before.

And this time he wrote saying that if I would only write it out once more, he would send me more tea besides — what did I say to that?

And since the matter concerned the loyal retainers, however humbly, he added, surely I might go ahead and compose a verse.

After the postcards fell silent for a while, this time they changed to sealed letters.

These envelopes, to be sure, were of the extremely cheap gray sort used at ward offices and the like, and he made a point of never affixing a stamp to them.

Nor did he write his own name on the back before posting them.

On account of this I was made to pay double postage on two occasions.

In the end I gave the postman his name and address and had the letter sent straight back to him, still sealed.

Perhaps having been made to pay six sen for that, he seemed at last to have resigned himself and dropped his demands.

But about two months later, with the turn of the new year, he sent me an ordinary New Year's greeting card.

This impressed me somewhat, and I found myself of a mind to write out a verse on a poem strip and send it to him.

But this gift was not enough to satisfy him.

Claiming that the poem strip had gotten bent, or soiled, he kept relentlessly demanding that I write it out again.

In fact, this very New Year, another request beginning "I beg your pardon for the intrusion, but…"

arrived around the seventh or eighth of the month.

This was the first time in my life I had ever come across a person like this.

XIV

Just the other day I heard, in fairly full detail, the story of how a burglar once broke into our house long ago.

It is said to have happened at a time when neither of my elder sisters had yet married, which, reckoning the years, was probably around the time I was born, in any case during that turbulent period when rough words like "loyalist" and "shogunate partisan" were on everyone's lips.

One night, my eldest sister, having gotten up in the middle of the night to relieve herself, opened the side gate to wash her hands, and saw, glowing sharply bright, the base of the old plum tree standing in the corner of the narrow inner garden with such force that it seemed to press against the wall.

Without even a moment to think it over, my sister shut the side gate at once, but even after shutting it, she stood there wondering about that strange brightness she had just seen before her eyes.

This sister's face, as it was reflected in my childish mind, is still so vivid that it rises before my eyes whenever I try to recall it, even now.

But that image of her is already from after she had married and blackened her teeth, so it is rather difficult for me now to picture in my mind the young woman in the full bloom of her youth, standing there on the veranda, thinking.

A broad forehead, dark-tinted skin, a small but clearly defined nose, eyes with double eyelids larger than most people's, and the gentle name Osawa — I can only put these together and imagine what my sister must have looked like at that moment.

Standing there thinking for a while, it occurred to her that this might perhaps be a fire.

And so she made up her mind to open the side gate again and peer outside, but just as she did, a single gleaming drawn blade came sliding out of the darkness, straight through the square-cut opening of the gate.

My sister, startled, stepped back.

In that instant, a masked man carrying a dark lantern, sword drawn, is said to have come in through the small side gate, followed by a whole crowd of others, into the house.

I heard the number of burglars was, I believe, eight men.

They pressed my father, saying they had not come to harm anyone, and that so long as everyone stayed quiet, no one in the household would come to any harm, but that in exchange he should lend them war funds.

My father refused, saying he had none.

But the burglars would not accept this at all.

They would not budge, saying they had just come from the sake shop Kokuraya on the corner, where they had been told as much, so it was no use hiding it.

My father, most reluctantly, finally laid out a number of gold coins before them.

Perhaps thinking the sum too small, they still showed no sign of leaving, whereupon my mother, who had until then been lying in bed, called out advice: "Give them what's in your purse too, why don't you."

she advised.

There is said to have been about fifty ryo in that purse.

After the burglars had gone, my father is said to have scolded my mother, saying, "What a woman, saying such an unnecessary thing."

so he scolded her, they say.

Ever since that incident, our household devised a way of hollowing out a pillar and hiding whatever spare money we had inside it, but we never came to have enough property worth hiding in the first place, and no burglars in black ever came again after that, so that by the time I grew up, I had no idea at all which pillar it was that had been hollowed out.

As they were leaving, the burglars are said to have remarked in praise, "This is a very well-secured house."

but Hanbei of Kokuraya, who had told the burglars about that well-secured house, ended up the next day with any number of scrapes on his head.

This, they say, was because every time he insisted he had no money, the burglars, saying there was no way that could be true, kept poking the top of his head with the point of their drawn blades.

Even so, Hanbei stubbornly held his ground, insisting, "There's really nothing here, no matter what — go to the Natsume place out back, they have plenty,"

and in the end he had not a single coin taken from him.

I heard this story from my wife.

And she in turn had heard it from my elder brother, over tea, as idle conversation.

XV

When I gave a lecture at the Peers' School last November, they later had delivered to me a paper packet marked "small token of thanks."

A handsome ceremonial cord was tied around it, and when I removed it and looked inside, I found two five-yen notes.

I thought of giving that money to a certain artist, an acquaintance of mine, whose circumstances had long struck me as pitiable, and I quietly waited for him to come by.

But before that artist ever appeared, various needs for donations came up here and there, and before I knew it I had spent both notes.

To put it plainly, this money was by no means useless to me.

By the ordinary reckoning of the world, there is no way to describe it except as having been quite properly spent on myself.

And yet, from my own private point of view — mine, who had once even thought of giving it away to someone else — it was certainly not money that carried much sense of gratitude attached to it.

To speak frankly of my own feelings, I felt a good deal cleaner and freer on the occasions when I received no such token of thanks at all than when I did.

When Mr. Kuroyanagi Kaishu came to see me about a lecture for the Chogyu Society, I took the occasion, in the course of our conversation, to explain my reasons in full.

"In a case like this, I have not gone there to sell my labor. Since I agreed to the request purely out of goodwill, I would think it only right that the other side repay me with goodwill alone. If it were to become a matter of compensation, then surely they ought to have discussed with me from the very start how much they would pay and whether I would come on those terms."

At that Mr. K wore an expression suggesting he could not quite accept this.

And he answered as follows.

"But consider this. Rather than meaning that they had bought your labor, could that ten yen not be seen simply as one means of expressing their gratitude toward you? Is it not possible to look at it that way?"

"If it were an object, one could interpret it that clearly, but unhappily this token of thanks is in the form of money, the very thing ordinarily used in commercial buying and selling, so it can be taken either way."

"If it can be taken either way, then wouldn't it be better, in this case, to interpret it in the more generous sense?"

I thought there was something to what he said.

But I answered further as follows.

"As you know, I live off my manuscript fees, so I can hardly claim to be a man of wealth. And yet somehow or other I manage to get by on that alone, day to day. So when it comes to anything outside my own profession, I would like, as far as possible, to work for others out of pure goodwill. And having that goodwill understood by the other party is, to me, a reward more precious than anything else. Accordingly, when I accept money, I feel as though that room I have for working for others out of goodwill — and at present this room of mine is already extremely narrow — that precious room is being eaten away."

Mr. K still did not seem to accept what I was saying.

I too remained stubborn.

"Suppose one asked a great man of wealth like Iwasaki or Mitsui to give a lecture — would one afterward bring him ten yen as a token of thanks, or would one, thinking it rude, confine oneself to a simple word of gratitude instead? To my mind, I rather doubt money would be brought at all."

"Well now,"

was all Mr. K said, giving me no clear answer.

I still had a little more to say.

"I don't know if it's conceit on my part, but though my own mind may not be as wealthy as one might compare to Mitsui or Iwasaki, I do believe it is, without question, a good deal richer than that of the ordinary student."

"That's certainly true,"

Mr. K nodded in agreement.

"If it would be rude to bring ten yen as a token of thanks to Iwasaki or Mitsui, then it must surely be just as rude to bring ten yen to me. Now if that ten yen brought some truly significant material comfort to my own life, one might look at the question from a different angle, but as it stands I even thought of giving it away to someone else — my present economic circumstances are hardly affected, even noticeably, by that ten yen one way or the other."

"I'll give it some more thought,"

said Mr. K, and went home, smiling a wry sort of smile.

XVI

Going down the gently sloping road in front of my house, there is a bridge crossing a small stream about a ken wide, and just to the left on the far side of that bridge stands a small barbershop.

I had my hair cut there exactly once.

Ordinarily a white calico curtain hangs so as to keep the interior behind the glass door hidden from the street, so that I had no idea at all what the proprietor's face looked like until I stood on the earthen floor of that barbershop and took my seat before the mirror.

When the proprietor saw me come in, he tossed aside the newspaper he had been holding and greeted me at once.

At that moment I could not shake the feeling that I had surely met this man somewhere before.

And so, timing it for when he had come around behind me and begun clicking his scissors, I ventured to bring up the matter myself.

And sure enough, just as I had guessed, it turned out that he had once kept a shop near the post office in Teramachi, making his living in the same trade of cutting hair as he does now.

"Master Takada and the others were quite kind to me in those days too."

That Takada being my cousin, I was quite taken aback.

"What, you knew Takada?"

"Knew him is putting it mildly. He was always calling me 'Toku, Toku' and looking out for me something kind."

His manner of speech was, for a craftsman of this sort, rather more courteous than one might expect.

"Takada's dead now, you know," I said,

and he let out a startled "Well I never—"

he cried out.

"He was a fine gentleman, and what a shame it is. When did he pass away, if I may ask?"

"Why, just recently. It'll be two weeks today, or thereabouts, I should think."

After that he told me all sorts of things he still remembered about this cousin of mine who had died, and in the end he said, "Time does fly when you think about it, sir. It feels like it was only yesterday, and yet it's been close to thirty years now."

he said.

"He was living there, you know, in that side street by the Kyuyutei, wasn't he…"

the proprietor added, picking the thread back up.

"Mm, that house with the second floor, was it?"

"Yes, it had that upstairs room. When he moved in there, there were congratulatory gifts from all sorts of people, and it was quite the grand occasion. Now was it after that, or was it before, that he moved into the temple grounds at Gyoganji?"

This question was more than I could answer.

The truth was, it was all so long ago that I too had simply forgotten.

"Those temple grounds have changed a great deal by now too, I imagine. I've had no reason to go, so I haven't so much as set foot inside since then."

"Changed is putting it mildly, sir — it's nothing but assignation houses in there now."

Every time I passed through Sakanamachi, I noticed the narrow alley leading into those temple grounds, by the corner of the tabi shop, cluttered with any number of square hanging lanterns.

But I had never felt curious enough to actually count them, so I had simply never noticed what the proprietor was talking about.

"Now that you mention it, I suppose one can see all sorts of signs like 'So-and-So's Sleeve' from the street, come to think of it."

"Oh, there's plenty of them now. It's no wonder things changed, when you think about it. It's been getting on thirty years now, after all. As you well know, sir, back in those days there was only the one geisha house on the temple grounds. Azumaya, it was called. It would have been right across from Master Takada's place, wouldn't it — that's where the shrine lantern of Azumaya used to hang."

XVII

I remembered that Azumaya very well.

It stood just across from my cousin's house, close enough that whenever people from either house came and went, if they happened to catch each other's eye they would exchange greetings, that sort of relationship.

In those days my second-eldest brother had taken to lounging about at my cousin's house.

This brother of mine was a great profligate, with the bad habit of often stealing hanging scrolls and swords from our own house and selling them off for next to nothing.

Why he had ended up holed up at my cousin's house I did not understand at the time, but thinking it over now, I suspect it may have been that, as a result of some such misdeed, he had been thrown out of the house for a while.

Besides this brother, there was also a man called Sho-san, a cousin of mine as well on my mother's side, who was forever hanging around there too.

When this crowd would gather in one spot, as they always did, sprawled out or sitting on the edge of the veranda, talking whatever nonsense came into their heads, every so often a voice would call out from the bamboo-latticed window of the geisha house across the way, "Good afternoon,"

or something along those lines.

As if they had been waiting for just that, the crowd would say, "Hey, come on over, we've got something good for you,"

or something to that effect, trying to call the woman over.

And on the geisha's side, since they had time on their hands during the day, one time in three or so they would come over for a bit of amusement, just to be sociable.

That was more or less the pattern of things.

I must have been seventeen or eighteen at the time, and besides that I was known as an extremely bashful sort, so that even when I happened to be present at such times, I said nothing at all and simply kept myself withdrawn in a corner.

Even so, on some occasion or other, I did once go along with this crowd to visit that geisha house and play cards.

Whoever lost had to treat the others to something, and so I ended up eating a good deal of the sushi and sweets other people had bought.

About a week later, I was again taken along by this idle brother of mine to visit the same house, and Sho-san happened to be there too, and the conversation grew quite lively.

At that time a young geisha named Sakimatsu looked at my face and said, "Let's play cards again,"

she said.

I was standing there stiffly in my kokura hakama, without so much as a single sen of pocket money on me.

"I've got no money, so I'd rather not,"

"That's fine, I've got some."

This woman must have had some trouble with her eyes at the time, for as she said this she kept rubbing her faintly reddened double eyelids with the sleeve of her pretty underrobe.

After that I heard, at my cousin's house, the rumor that "Osaku's been taken up by a fine customer."

that rumor, I heard, at my cousin's house.

At my cousin's house they never called this woman by her name Sakimatsu, but always Osaku, Osaku.

When I heard that story, I thought to myself that I would probably never have occasion to meet Osaku again.

But a good while after that, when I went with that same Adept of mine to the arcade on the temple grounds at Shiba, I ran into Osaku there again, quite by chance.

In contrast to my own student getup, she had by then transformed into a refined, well-bred-looking married lady.

A husband, too, was there at her side…

All this old history, buried beneath the name of that geisha house, Azumaya, which had come from the barbershop proprietor's mouth, came rushing back to me all at once.

"Do you know a woman called Osaku who used to be there?"

I asked the proprietor.

"Know her? Why, she's my own niece."

"Is that so."

I was astonished.

"And where is she now, then?"

"Osaku passed away, sir."

I was astonished all over again.

"When was this?"

"When, you ask — why, it's an old story by now. I believe she would have been twenty-three that year."

"Is that so."

"And what's more, she died in Vladivostok. Her husband had some connection with the consulate there, you see, so she went out there with him. It wasn't long after that when she died."

Going home and sitting once more behind my glass doors, it seemed to me that the only ones still living, out of all that, were myself and that barbershop proprietor.

XVIII

A certain young woman who was shown into my sitting room asked, "I'm troubled because things around me never seem to stay properly in order — what should I do about it, do you think?"

she asked.

Supposing that this woman, who was lodging at the house of some relative, must find the place cramped, and the children there a nuisance besides, I gave her an extremely simple answer.

"Perhaps you should look for some tidy sort of place and take lodgings of your own."

"No, it isn't a matter of rooms — I mean that things inside my head never seem to stay properly in order, and that troubles me."

Realizing my own misunderstanding, I found myself, at the same time, no longer sure what the woman meant at all.

And so I asked her for a somewhat fuller explanation.

"All sorts of things come into my head from outside, but they never seem to fit together with the center of my mind."

"And what exactly do you mean by this center of your mind?"

"What do I mean — well, it's a perfectly straight line."

I knew this woman had a great enthusiasm for mathematics.

But of course I could not make out what she meant by saying that the center of her mind was a straight line.

Beyond that, just what this "center" was even supposed to mean was, to me, almost entirely incomprehensible.

The woman said this.

"Doesn't everything have a center of some kind?"

"That's true enough for physical objects, things you can see with your eyes and measure with a ruler. Does the mind have a shape too, then? If so, bring this center of yours out here and let me see it."

The woman, saying neither that she could nor that she could not, looked off toward the garden and rubbed her hands together on her lap.

"Isn't this straight line of yours just a figure of speech? If it's a figure of speech, then whether you call it a circle or a square would come to the same thing in the end, wouldn't it?"

"Perhaps so, but even while shapes and colors are forever changing, there is, without fail, something that does not change at all."

"If the thing that changes and the thing that does not change are two separate things, then in the end you would have two minds, wouldn't you — is that all right with you? Shouldn't the thing that changes have to be, in fact, the very same as the thing that does not change?"

Having said this, I turned back to the woman and brought the question back to where it had started.

"There is probably no one for whom everything from the outside world enters the head and settles at once into some neat, clear order or sequence. I'm afraid, with all due respect, that at your age, with your education and learning, there is simply no way things could be sorted out that tidily. And if that isn't what you mean, and what you really want is to have everything settle thoroughly into place all at once, without relying on any power of learning, then coming to someone like me is no use. You had best go see some Buddhist priest instead."

At this the woman looked at my face.

"When I first had the honor of meeting you, Sensei, I thought your mind, in that respect, must be far more orderly than an ordinary person's."

"There's no reason that should be so."

"But that's how it seemed to me. I couldn't help thinking that even the arrangement of your internal organs must be perfectly in order."

"If my internal organs were arranged that conveniently, I wouldn't be falling ill all the time the way I do."

"I never fall ill."

the woman said suddenly, speaking now of herself.

"That's proof that you're a greater person than I am,"

I answered.

The woman slid down off the cushion.

And saying, "Please do take good care of yourself,"

she went home.

XIX

My old family home stood four or five blocks farther in from where I live now, in a town called Babashita.

Town though it was called, it was in truth so run-down and lonesome-looking that to my childhood eyes it seemed nothing more than a small post-station.

Babashita originally meant "below the riding grounds," below Takada no Baba, so that looking at old maps of Edo, it must surely have lain in some remote corner that one could hardly tell was inside the red boundary line or outside it.

And yet even so, there must have been three or four houses with storehouse-style construction within that narrow stretch of town.

Among them was the herbalist's shop of Omiya Denbei, visible on the right as one climbed the slope.

And at the very bottom of the slope stood the sake shop Kokuraya, with its broad frontage.

This one, to be sure, was not built in storehouse style, but it had a history to its name: Horibe Yasube was said to have stopped in there for a cup of sake on his way to take revenge on his enemy at Takada no Baba.

I had known that story since I was a child, but I never once actually saw the cup that Yasube was rumored to have drunk from, said to be kept somewhere in that shop.

In its place, I heard the nagauta singing of the shop's daughter, Okita, any number of times.

Being a child, I had no idea at all whether she was good or bad at it, but whenever I stood on the paving stones leading from our front entrance out to the street, about to head out somewhere, Okita's voice would come through clearly from over there.

On some early spring afternoons, wrapping my dazed and dreamy soul in the mild sunlight, I would stand there absently, leaning against the white plaster wall of our storehouse, neither quite listening nor quite not listening to Okita's practice.

Thanks to that, I ended up somehow learning, without ever quite meaning to, a line that went, "A traveler's robe of hempen cloth…"

that line, and others like it.

Besides this there was a single shop making wooden poles and handles.

And there was a single blacksmith's shop as well.

A little farther along, toward Hachiman Slope, there was also a produce market with a broad earthen floor enclosed beneath a roof.

My family called the master of that place Wholesaler Sentaro.

I heard that Sentaro was some very distant relation of my father's, but in terms of actual dealings, the two families were practically strangers to one another.

Only when we happened to pass each other on the road would he call out something like "Fine weather we're having,"

and it seems that this was about the extent of the relationship between our two families.

I do recall hearing, secondhand, that Sentaro's only daughter became involved with a storyteller named Teisui, and that there was a great to-do over the two of them threatening to die together, but no coherent memory of it remains anywhere in my head now.

To me as a child, far more interesting than that was the sight of Sentaro himself, seated on a high platform with an ink case and ledger in hand, calling out in a lively voice, "Now then, what am I bid,"

as he surveyed the many faces below him.

From below, twenty or thirty hands would go up all at once, all turned toward Sentaro, calling out figures and code-words in what sounded like a chorus of shouting, and it was thrilling, too, to watch baskets of ginger, eggplant, and pumpkin being hauled off briskly in every direction by those thick, knotty hands.

There was, of course, the sort of tofu shop one finds in any country town.

That tofu shop had a rope curtain soaked through with the smell of oil hanging at its entrance, and the gutter water flowing past its doorway was as clear as if one had gone all the way to Kyoto.

Turning the corner by that tofu shop, one could see, rising slightly some half a block ahead, the gate of a temple called Seikanji.

Behind that gate, painted red, lay a dense bamboo grove covering everything, so that one could not see at all from the street what lay within, but the sound of the bell rung for the morning and evening services deep inside still remains in my ears even now.

Especially from the misty autumn into the winter when the cold winds blew, the clang, clang of Seikanji's bell always chilled my small childish spirit, as though it were driving some sad and cold thing into my heart.

XX

I still remember, as though in a dream, that there was a vaudeville hall standing next to that tofu shop.

Perhaps it is the very unlikelihood of a place for gathering crowds existing in such a backwater that casts a haze over my memory of it, for whenever I recall it, I am struck by a strange sensation, and find myself staring in wonder as I look back on that distant past of mine, as I always do.

The master of that hall was the local fire brigade chief, and I often saw him walking about outside in a blue-striped work apron and a happi coat marked with a red stripe, wearing thonged sandals or something of the sort.

There was also a daughter there named Ofuji, and I still have not forgotten how often people in my household spoke of her good looks.

Later on she took in an adopted husband, and I recall being rather startled to find he was a fine-looking man with a mustache.

There was much talk, on Ofuji's side, of what a fine catch her adopted husband was, but I heard afterward that he was some sort of clerk at a ward office.

By the time this adopted husband came along, the vaudeville hall seems to have already closed and become an ordinary shuttered house, but back when its faded sign still hung, forlorn, over the eaves of that place, I would often be given pocket money by my mother and go off to listen to the storyteller there.

The storyteller's name, I believe, was Nanrin.

Curiously enough, it seems no one but Nanrin ever performed at that hall.

I have no idea where this man lived, but wherever he walked from, it must have been quite a feat by the standards of today, with paved roads and rows of houses all in order.

What is more, the number of listeners was always only fifteen or twenty at most, so that however vividly I try to imagine it now, it seems nothing but a dream.

"Oh, courtesan, oh courtesan," she is called, and turns with "Yatsuhashi, at your service" — and at that very instant, the gleam of a blade cutting in.

That odd line — whether I learned it from Nanrin himself back then, or picked it up later from some comic storyteller doing an impression of that sort of tale — I can no longer say for certain; my memory of it has grown too confused by now.

In those days, to get from our house to anything resembling a proper town, one had no choice but to pass through some deserted tea field, or a bamboo grove, or a long path through the rice paddies.

Anything worth calling actual shopping was, as a rule, done all the way out at Kagurazaka, and having grown used to that necessity, it caused me no particular hardship, but even so, that stretch of five or six blocks climbing the Yarai slope, past the Sakai family's fire lookout tower and on toward Teramachi, was gloomy and overgrown even at midday, perpetually dim as though the sky itself were clouded over.

On that embankment stood any number of great trees, each two or three arm-spans around, lined up one after another, with the gaps between them further filled in by dense stands of bamboo, so that there could hardly have been so much as a single hour in the whole day when sunlight actually reached the ground.

If one were foolish enough to set out for the lower town wearing ordinary fair-weather clogs, one was bound, without fail, to come to grief.

The thawing frost of that place has stayed with me as something more fearsome than either rain or snow.

Inconvenient as the place was, it seems there was still some danger of fire, for a tall ladder-frame stood, as it should, at the corner of the town.

And atop it, as was customary, hung an old fire bell.

I often find myself recalling this bygone world just as it was.

That small one-dish rice shop that stood right beneath the fire bell rises naturally before my eyes as well.

Nor can I forget the way the warm smell of simmered vegetables drifted out through the gaps in the rope curtain, along with the smoke, out into the street, and how it seemed to dissolve into the evening haze.

While Shiki was still alive, I once composed a verse touching on a bare winter tree standing tall beside a fire bell,

and that verse was, in fact, written in memory of this very fire bell.

XXI

My memories of my family's old house are, on the whole, rustic in this fashion, all of them.

And somewhere within them lingers a faintly chill and pitiful shadow.

So when, just the other day, I heard from a brother of mine still living about the way things were when my sisters used to go to the theater, I was astonished.

To think that there was once such a splendid, showy way of living in our past leaves me feeling all the more as though it were all some kind of dream.

In those days all the theaters stood in Saruwaka-cho.

With neither streetcar nor rickshaw in those days, to set out early in the morning from below Takada no Baba and reach all the way past Asakusa's Kannon temple was, it seems, no ordinary undertaking.

My sisters would all get up in the middle of the night to make ready.

Since the road was considered dangerous, a manservant would always go along as an escort, for safety's sake.

They would go down through Tsukudo, come out at Ageba by way of Kaki-no-ki Yokocho, and board a roofed pleasure boat that had been arranged for beforehand at the boathouse there.

I try to imagine with what hearts full of anticipation they must have gone drifting slowly along, past the front of the arsenal, past Ochanomizu, all the way to Yanagibashi.

And since their journey could by no means be said to end there, the fact that no one in those days set any limit on the time it took makes it all the more a thing to wonder at, looking back.

The boat, once out on the Okawa river, is said to have gone up against the current, passed beneath Azumabashi bridge, and finally tied up near the Yumeiro teahouse at Imado.

From there my sisters would go ashore and walk to the theater teahouse, and only then be escorted along to the theater itself, to take their reserved seats.

Those reserved seats were, without exception, in the elevated floor section alone.

This was because that spot was so conveniently placed that anyone's eye would naturally fall there, on one's clothing, one's face, one's hair ornaments, so that people who loved to be seen would compete fiercely for it.

Between acts, a man attached to one of the actors would come by to guide them, saying they were welcome to come back and visit the dressing rooms.

And my sisters would follow behind this man, dressed in a crested robe with hakama over it, to the dressing room of some favorite actor like Tanosuke or Tossho, have him paint something on a fan for them, and come home again.

This, I suppose, was their one great vanity.

And that vanity of theirs could be bought only with the power of money.

On the way home, the same boat would row them back by the same route to Ageba.

Since it was considered unsafe otherwise, the manservant would again go out to meet them, carrying a lantern.

They would have arrived home at what would be, by today's clocks, somewhere around midnight.

So it took them from the dead of one night to the dead of the next before they could finally manage to see their play through…

Hearing such a splendid, colorful story, I find myself wondering whether it could really have happened in my own family at all.

It feels somehow more as though someone were telling me of the bygone days of some wealthy merchant house in the lower town.

To be sure, my family was not of samurai rank.

We were a family of town headmen, merchants who nonetheless had to keep up a fairly showy sort of social standing.

The father I knew was a bald old man, but in his younger days, they say, he studied itchu-bushi ballad-singing and had a set of crepe bedding made up for a mistress he was fond of.

I heard there was rice paddy land in Aoyama, and that the rice that came in from it alone was more than enough to feed everyone in the household.

Indeed my third-eldest brother, who is still living, says he heard the sound of that rice being pounded all the time.

As I recall, everyone in the town referred to our house simply as "the Genka," the entrance-hall house.

At the time I had no idea what this meant, but thinking it over now, I believe it was because ours was the only house in the whole town with a formal entrance hall complete with a raised step.

I still remember, from that old time, how a hooked pole, a sleeve-tangler, a two-pronged fork, and an old-fashioned mounted lantern used to hang in a row just past that raised step.

XXII

For the past two or three years I have fallen ill about once a year, as a rule.

And from the day I take to my bed until the day I finally leave it, roughly a month's worth of days ends up wasted away.

My illness is always the same fixed trouble with my stomach, and when it comes down to it, there is nothing to be done except a course of fasting.

It is not only the doctor's orders but the very nature of the illness itself that leaves me no choice but this fasting.

And so I am always thinner and more unsteady on my feet during the recovery period than I was at the very start of the illness.

It seems to be chiefly this weakness that causes the whole business to drag on for more than a month.

Once I am free to move about again, a printed announcement bordered in black finds its way onto my desk from time to time.

And I, like a man wryly smiling at his own fate, put on a silk hat and go along as one of the mourners, hurrying by rickshaw to the crematorium.

Among the dead are elderly men and elderly women, but there are also mixed in among them people younger than myself, people who had always taken pride in their own good health.

Coming home and sitting down at my desk, I think what a truly strange thing the human lifespan is.

I wonder to myself why it is that I, so often ill, should be the one left living.

I think of how it came about that that person died before I did.

It would only be natural, I should think, for me to lose myself in such silent musings.

And yet, as one human being among those who tend to forget their own position, their own body, their own abilities — everything about where the self itself stands — there are many occasions when I go about my life simply assuming, as a matter of course, that I will not die.

Even during the reading of the sutras, even at the moment of offering incense, I am, as a rule, quite unmoved by any sense of wonder at this bodily husk of mine, left behind, living on after the departed soul.

A certain person once said to me, "It seems only natural that other people should die, but the thought that I myself will die is something I simply cannot imagine at all."

that person once said to me.

When I asked a man with experience of war, "Seeing your comrades in the unit fall one after another like that, can you still go on believing that you yourself won't die?"

that man answered, "You can, you know. I suppose most people go on thinking they won't die until the moment they actually do."

he answered.

I also recall an exchange I once had after being told about airplanes by a man connected with the university's science department.

"With planes crashing and people dying all the time like that, wouldn't the next person to fly be frightened? You'd think one would start feeling it's one's own turn next — or wouldn't one?"

"But it seems that isn't how it works at all."

"Why not?"

"Why, it seems one comes to be governed by almost the opposite state of mind. One seems to end up thinking, well, that fellow crashed and died, but I'll be all right."

I too, no doubt, manage to remain relatively unconcerned thanks to something of this same state of mind.

And that is only natural.

For everyone, after all, remains alive right up until the moment they die.

Strangely enough, hardly any black-bordered notices ever arrive while I myself am laid up in bed.

Last autumn too, once my illness had cleared up, I found myself attending three or four funerals.

Among those three or four was Sato-kun from the newspaper office.

I recalled how, at some banquet or other, Sato-kun had brought out a silver cup he had received from the company and urged me to drink from it.

I still remember the odd little dance he did that night as well.

Having gone to the funeral of this lively, sturdy man, I find myself, more often than not, feeling no particular wonder at all that he should have died while I go on living.

But every now and then, thinking it over, it strikes me instead as somehow unnatural that I should still be alive.

And I find myself wondering whether fate is not, perhaps, deliberately making a fool of me.

XXIII

Near where I now live there is a town called Kikui-cho.

Since this is the place where I was born, I know it better than most people would.

But by the time I had left home, wandered about from place to place, and come back again, this Kikui-cho had grown considerably larger, stretching out, before I knew it, all the way toward Negoro.

Perhaps because I grew up hearing the name of this town, to which I have such deep ties, so often that it became too familiar, it gives me not the slightest fond echo drawing my past out of me.

But when I sit alone in my study, chin resting on my hand, letting my mind drift freely like a boat carried downstream, my associations sometimes happen to land squarely on those four characters, Kikui-cho, and linger there a while, wandering back and forth.

This town most likely did not exist back in the days when this place was still called Edo.

Whether it was at the time Edo was renamed Tokyo, or considerably later than that, I cannot say for certain, but in any case it must surely have been my father who invented it.

The story that our family crest was a well-frame with a chrysanthemum, and that the name Kikui-cho — using characters for "chrysanthemum" and "well" — was chosen to match it, is something I still remember hearing, whether from my father's own mouth or taught to me by someone else, I cannot now say.

After the office of town headman was abolished, my father served for a time as ward chief, and it may well have been that this gave him such liberties, but looking now at that vanity of his, so proud of the thing, whatever unpleasant feeling it once stirred in me has long since faded away, leaving only the urge to smile.

My father, moreover, went so far as to give his own surname, Natsume, to the long slope that one absolutely had to climb going south from in front of our house.

Unhappily, this never became as well known as Kikui-cho did, and remains, to this day, nothing more than an ordinary slope.

But recently a certain person came to see me and told me that, having checked a map for the names of places around here, he had found something called Natsume Slope, so it may well be that the name my father gave it is still of some use, even now.

How many years had passed since I left Tokyo, I wonder, by the time I came back to Waseda.

Before I moved to my present house, whether I was out looking for a place to live or simply on my way back from an outing, I happened, after a long absence, to come out beside my old family home.

At that time I could just make out the old roof tiles of the second floor from the street, and thinking to myself that it must still be standing after all, I simply walked on past.

After moving to Waseda, I went and passed by that same gate again.

Peering in from the street, it somehow seemed to me not much changed from before, but hanging on the gate was a boarding house sign I had never expected to see there.

I wanted to see the old Waseda rice paddies once more.

But that place had already become a town.

I wanted just a single glimpse of the tea fields and bamboo groves of Negoro.

But I could find not the slightest trace of them anywhere.

I could not even be sure whether my guess that it must have been somewhere around here was right or wrong.

I stood there in a daze.

Why was it, I wondered, that my old house alone remained standing, like some leftover carcass of the past?

I found myself thinking, inwardly, how much better it would be if it would just hurry up and fall to ruin.

"Time"

was a power unto itself.

Last year, taking the occasion of a walk out toward Takada, I passed that way again without thinking much of it, and found my old house had been neatly torn down, and a new boarding house was being built in its place.

A pawnshop had also gone up nearby.

In front of the pawnshop there was a sparse fence enclosing a few garden trees planted inside.

Three pine trees, their branches so cruelly trimmed as to be scarcely recognizable, had become almost misshapen little things, and yet they stirred in me some vague feeling that I had seen them somewhere before.

Long ago there was a verse: "Uneven shadows — three pines beneath the moon."

Wondering whether whoever wrote it might not have had these very pines in mind, I made my way home again.

XXIV

"Growing up in a place like that, it's remarkable you've come through to the present day unscathed."

"Well, somehow or other I've managed to come through unscathed."

The word "unscathed" as we used it there meant simply that there had been no stirrings of romance between men and women — the very opposite, one might say, of any love affair — but my own curiosity was not satisfied by so simple an answer.

"People often say, don't they, that no matter how much a man loves sweets, if he goes to work at a confectioner's he ends up sick of the sight of them — you can see it for yourself, even watching them make ohagi at home around the equinox, can't you, the way the ones doing the actual work, just packing the ohagi into the lacquered boxes, already look thoroughly fed up with the whole business. Was it something like that in your case?"

"It doesn't seem to have been quite that. In any case, I remained perfectly unmoved right up until a little past the age of twenty."

This person was, in a certain sense, a rather handsome man.

"But even if you remained unmoved yourself, isn't it true that there's no telling whether the other party might not remain unmoved as well? At such times, wouldn't it only be natural to find oneself drawn in, one way or another?"

"Looking back on it now, I can think of a good many things — that such-and-such an act, or such-and-such a remark, must surely have meant this or that — that occur to me now, though they did not at the time."

"So you really had no idea at all, at the time?"

"Well, that's about right. Although there was one occasion when I did notice something on my own side. But my own heart simply could not be drawn toward that particular person, no matter what."

I thought this must be the end of the story.

Before the two of us sat the New Year's dinner tray.

My guest did not drink at all, and I too scarcely touched my cup, so there was no exchanging of drinks between us whatsoever.

"And is that all that carried you through to the present day?"

I asked, just to be sure, while sipping at my soup.

At this my guest suddenly told me the following story.

"Back when I was still working as a servant, there was a woman I used to see for about two years. She was, of course, no amateur. But that woman is no longer alive. She hanged herself and died. She was nineteen years old. I hadn't seen her for about ten days, and in that time she died. You see, she had two patrons, and the two of them, out of sheer stubbornness, got into a bidding war over the money to buy out her contract. It seems both sides even enlisted an older geisha as an ally, pressing her, out of obligation, to come this way, not to go that way…"

"Wasn't there some way you could have saved her?"

"At the time I was little more than a shop-boy with a bit of fuzz on his chin — there was nothing at all I could have done."

"But didn't that geisha die for your sake?"

"Well… It may have been that she simply couldn't fulfill her obligations to both patrons at once. But there must have been a promise between the two of us, that she wouldn't go to either of them…"

"Then perhaps it could be said that you killed that woman indirectly, in a way."

"Perhaps that's so."

"Doesn't it trouble your sleep?"

"It certainly does."

My sitting room, so crowded on New Year's Day, had grown almost lonesomely quiet by the second.

It was in that lonesome spring, during those first days of the year, that I heard this sad tale from that New Year's caller of mine.

My guest was an earnest, honest man, so that even in telling it he used scarcely a single word one might call lurid.

XXV

This is a story from back when I was still living in Sendagi, so reckoning the years, it is already quite an old one now.

One day, on my way back from a walk toward Kiridoshi, instead of coming out at the corner of Hongo Yon-chome, I turned north down one narrow street short of it.

At that corner, beside what was at the time a beef restaurant, there always hung the sign of a vaudeville hall.

It was a rainy day, so of course I had my umbrella up.

It was a deep, wide, steel-gray one, and the drips seeping down through it, running along its natural-wood handle, had begun to wet my hand.

This narrow lane, with so few passersby, seemed to have had every bit of mud washed clean away by the rain, so that there was scarcely any filth left to catch on the teeth of my clogs.

And yet, look up and it was dark; look down and it was dreary.

Perhaps because I walked that way so often, there was not a single thing around me that caught my eye.

And my own state of mind closely resembled both that weather and those surroundings.

There was, at that time, always some unpleasant lump of feeling eating away at my heart.

I walked along vacantly through the falling rain, my face set in a gloomy expression.

Coming up to the vaudeville hall in Hikagecho, I suddenly found myself face to face with a hooded rickshaw.

There was nothing at all between the rickshaw and myself, so that even from a distance I could tell the person riding inside was a woman.

Since celluloid windows had not yet come into use at that time, the person in the rickshaw showed me her white face clearly, even from far off.

To my eyes that white face looked extraordinarily beautiful.

I walked on through the rain, gazing steadily, entranced by that person's figure.

At the same time, the guess that this must surely be a geisha took hold in my mind, almost as though it were plain fact.

Then, when the rickshaw had come to within about a ken of me, the beautiful person I had been watching suddenly gave me a polite bow and passed on by.

It was only with that greeting, accompanied by a smile, that I realized for the first time that the person was none other than Otsuka Kusuo.

The next time we met, some days later, Kusuo said to me, "I'm sorry about the other day,"

and I found myself of a mind to tell her exactly what had happened, just as it was.

"To tell the truth, I was wondering what beautiful lady it could be, and looking at you. I even thought you might be a geisha."

I do not recall exactly what Kusuo said in reply to that, but she did not blush in the least.

Nor did she show the slightest sign of displeasure.

She seemed to take my words simply at face value, just as they were.

Considerably later than that, Kusuo once went out of her way to call on me at Waseda.

But as it happened, I was, unluckily, in the middle of a quarrel with my wife at the time.

I sat there stiffly in my study, wearing a sour expression.

Kusuo talked with my wife for about ten minutes and then went home.

That was the end of it for that day, but before long I went off to Nishikatamachi to apologize.

"The truth is, we'd been quarreling. My wife must have seemed quite unfriendly. And I thought it would be rude of me to show my sour face, so I made a point of staying out of sight."

Whatever Kusuo said in reply to this has, by now, sunk so deep into that distant past that I can no longer call it up from the depths of memory.

The news of Kusuo's death reached me, I believe, while I was in the stomach and intestine hospital.

I still remember, too, being asked over the telephone whether it would be all right to use my name in the death notice.

In the hospital I composed a farewell verse for Kusuo, something about throwing whatever chrysanthemums there were into her coffin.

That a certain man fond of haiku was so delighted by it that he specially asked me to write it out on a poem strip and took it away with him — that too has already become a thing of the past.

and that too has already become a thing of the past.

XXVI

I have no idea how Masu-san came to fall into such poor circumstances.

In any case, the Masu-san I knew was a postal delivery man.

Masu-san's younger brother Sho-san, too, had ruined his own household and come to live at my house as a hanger-on, but his standing in society was still somewhat higher than Masu-san's.

He used to tell, again and again, how as a boy, working at a sardine shop in Honcho, a Westerner down at the harbor had grown fond of him and offered to take him abroad, and how he had turned it down — a thing he now, looking back, regretted terribly.

Since both men were cousins of mine on my mother's side, on the strength of that connection Masu-san would come calling, about once a month, deep into Ushigome, bringing along a bag of rice crackers or some such gift, both to see his brother and to pay his respects to my father.

At that time Masu-san seemed to be keeping house somewhere out on the edge of Shiba, or perhaps near Shinagawa, living an easygoing bachelor's life on his own, and whenever he came to our house he often ended up staying the night.

On the rare occasions when he tried to head home, my brothers would gang up on him and threaten, "You'd better not go home, or else,"

or something along those lines, to scare him into staying.

At that time my second- and third-eldest brothers were still attending the Nanko school.

Nanko stood on the site of what is now the Higher Commercial School, and it seems to have been set up so that its graduates would go on to the Kaisei School, which is to say, what is today the university.

At night they would set their paulownia-wood desks side by side in the entrance hall and prepare their lessons for the next day.

Preparing lessons, in their case, meant something quite different from what students do today.

They would read some book like Goodrich's History of England a passage at a time, then turn it face down on the desk and recite under their breath exactly what they had just read.

Once this lesson preparation was over, Masu-san would gradually become necessary.

Sho-san too would somehow turn up there before long.

My eldest brother, too, when he was in good spirits, would specially come all the way out from the back of the house to the entrance hall.

And they would all gang up together and start teasing Masu-san.

"Masu-san, I suppose you must sometimes deliver letters to Westerners' houses too, don't you?"

"Well, it's my job, so I can't very well refuse just because I don't like it — I deliver them, sure enough."

"Can you speak English, Masu-san?"

"If I could speak English, I wouldn't be doing this kind of work."

"But surely you have to call out something like 'postal delivery' or the like in a loud voice, don't you?"

"Oh, Japanese does just fine for that. Even the foreigners understand Japanese these days, you know."

"Is that so — do they say something back to you, then?"

"Of course they do. Why, Mrs. Perori even greets me in proper Japanese, saying 'You good, thank you.'"

Having lured Masu-san this far along, everyone would burst out laughing all at once.

And then someone would ask yet again, "Masu-san, what does she say again, that Mrs.?"

asking the very same thing over and over, scheming to keep it a source of laughter forever.

In the end even Masu-san would give a wry laugh and finally give up saying "You good"

altogether.

Then this time someone would say, "Well then, Masu-san, why don't you try that Lone Cedar in the Field piece for us?"

someone would say.

"You say do it, but it's not the kind of thing I can just do at the drop of a hat."

"Oh, come on now, do it. 'And so at last we come to the lone cedar standing in the field…'"

Even so, Masu-san would only grin and refuse to go along.

In the end I never did get to hear Masu-san's Lone Cedar in the Field.

Thinking about it now, I suspect it must have been some passage from a storyteller's tale or a sentimental piece of that sort.

By the time I had grown up, Masu-san had already stopped coming to our house.

He must have died, most likely.

If he were still alive, there would surely have been some word from him.

But even granting that he died, I have no idea when it happened.

XXVII

I have never felt much drawn to the theater.

The old-style kabuki drama in particular I do not understand at all.

I suppose this is because, not knowing the conventions of that art form as it has developed over the ages, I simply lack the capacity to assimilate myself into that special world unfolded upon the stage.

But that is not the whole of it.

What strikes me as strangest of all, watching the old-style theater, is the way the actors go wandering back and forth, neither one thing nor the other, somewhere between the natural and the unnatural.

It is probably only natural, too, that this should stir in me a certain restless, half-risen feeling, unable to settle down.

And yet when some child appears on the stage and, in a high, piping voice, says something pitiful, even I find, before I know it, tears welling up in my eyes.

And immediately afterward I find myself regretting it, thinking, ah, I've been taken in again.

I wonder why I should shed such cheap tears over a thing like that.

"However I think about it, I hate being made to cry by being taken in like that,"

I told a certain person.

That fellow, a great lover of the theater, remarked, "That's probably your true nature showing through, Sensei. Isn't it rather the ordinary you, holding your tears in check, that's the false front you put on for company?"

he remarked.

Not satisfied with this argument of his, I tried in various ways to bring him around to my own view, and somewhere along the way the subject slid over into painting.

That man had been enormously pleased by a certain imperial-collection work of Jakuchu's that had been shown recently as a reference piece at the Art Society, and there was a rumor that he was going to publish an essay about it in some magazine or other.

I, for my part, had found that painting of a rooster thoroughly unappealing, so that here too an argument arose between us much like the one over the theater.

"You've really no business criticizing painting at all,"

I finally said, hurling the insult at him.

At which this single remark of mine set him off arguing for a kind of unified theory of the arts.

To sum up his position, since all the arts spring from one and the same source, it stands to reason that if one thoroughly absorbs just one of them, the rest can naturally be understood as well.

Among the people present, there were not a few who agreed with him.

"So if I write novels, I'll naturally get good at judo too, will I?"

I said, half in jest.

"Judo isn't an art,"

my opponent answered, laughing along with me.

Art does not set out from a view of things as all equal.

Even if it does set out from there, it is only once it enters into a view of things as differentiated that it first comes into flower, so that if one tries to return it to that original, undifferentiated state, painting, sculpture, and writing alike are reduced entirely to nothing.

What common ground could there possibly be in that?

And even supposing there were such common ground, it would be of no practical use whatsoever.

Nor could one possibly discover, in that, any concrete thing shared in common between one art and another.

This, more or less, was the gist of my argument at the time.

And that argument of mine was by no means a fully satisfying one.

There was ample room to take his position further into account and arrive at a more thorough, careful judgment.

But at that point one of the people present suddenly took up my argument on my behalf and turned to face my opponent, and since it was troublesome to intervene, I simply let it be.

But this man who had taken my place was, by then, quite drunk.

And so, though he went on at great length about art this and literature that, he said very little that actually made any sense.

Even his manner of speech had grown rather slurred.

The others, who had at first found it all amusing and laughed along, eventually fell silent.

"Well then, let's break off relations,"

the drunk man finally said.

I cautioned him, "If you're going to break off relations, do it outside — it's a nuisance for the rest of us here."

I cautioned him.

"Shall we go outside and break off relations, then?"

the drunk man proposed to his opponent, but since the other man did not budge, the matter was simply left at that.

This happened on New Year's Day of this very year.

The drunk man has come by now and then since, but he has never said a single word about that quarrel.

XXVIII

When a certain person, seeing my household's cat, asked, "What generation of cat is this one?"

I answered offhandedly, "The second,"

but thinking it over afterward, I realized the second generation had already come and gone, and this was, in fact, already the third.

The first, though he was a stray with no home of his own, became, in a certain sense, quite famous, but in contrast the second one's life was so short-lived that even his own master forgot about him.

I do not rightly know who brought him, or from where.

But I still remember the days when he was so small he could have fit right in the palm of one's hand, crawling about everywhere underfoot.

This pitiable little creature was, one morning, accidentally trampled to death by someone in the household while putting away the bedding.

Hearing a small cry, they pulled him out at once from under the futon where he had burrowed and gave him what care they could, but it was already too late.

He lingered a day or two after that and finally died.

The one who came after him is the very cat, jet black, that we have now.

I neither dote on this black cat nor dislike him.

For his part, the cat does nothing but wander idly about the house, and has never once shown the slightest goodwill by coming to my side.

On one occasion he got into a cupboard in the kitchen and fell into a pot.

That pot was full of sesame oil, so that his whole body began to gleam as though he had been rubbed down with hair pomade.

He then went and lay down on my manuscript paper with that gleaming body of his, and the oil soaked all the way through, causing me no end of trouble.

Shortly before I fell ill last year, he suddenly came down with some skin disease.

The fur on his face and forehead gradually began falling out.

He kept scratching at it constantly with his claws, so that the scabs came off in crumbling flakes, leaving raw bare patches behind.

One day, watching this unsightly sight of his over a meal, I made a face of disgust.

"He's scattering scabs everywhere — if that ends up spreading to the children, it will be a problem, so it would be best to take him to the veterinary hospital and have him treated properly, and soon."

I said this to someone in the household, but privately I thought to myself that, given the nature of the illness, he might well never fully recover.

I remembered well how a Westerner I once knew had been given a fine dog by a certain count and had grown quite fond of it, but when the dog was afflicted with just this kind of skin disease, he found it so pitiable that he had a doctor put it to death.

"Wouldn't it be a mercy to have him put to death with chloroform or something, rather than let him suffer on like this?"

I repeated these same words three or four times, but before the cat could be dealt with as I intended, I myself fell ill and took to my bed.

During that time I never once had occasion to see him.

Perhaps because my own suffering directly governed me, I could not even spare the thought to consider his illness.

By October I was finally up and about again.

And I saw him, black as ever, just as before.

To my surprise, black fur, much like before, had begun growing back over the ugly bare patches of his skin.

"Well now, is he actually recovering?"

During my idle convalescence I kept my eyes fixed on him constantly.

And as my own weakened body gradually recovered, his fur, too, gradually grew thicker.

Once it had returned to normal, he then began putting on more weight than before.

Comparing the course of my own illness with the course of his, I sometimes find myself receiving a hint that there is some strange bond of fate between the two.

And immediately afterward I find the thought absurd and smile at myself.

The cat, for his part, does nothing but mew idly, so that I have not the slightest idea what state of mind he might be in.

XXIX

I am what is called the last child, born to my parents late in their lives.

The story that my mother, at the time of my birth, said she was ashamed to be conceiving a child at such an age, is still repeated, every so often, even now.

It cannot have been for that reason alone, but not long after I was born, my parents sent me off to be fostered by another family.

There can, of course, be no memory left in me of that foster family, but I heard, once I had grown up, that they were a poor married couple who made their living dealing in secondhand goods.

I was, along with the odds and ends of that shop, placed in a small basket and put out on display every night at the night stalls along the main street of Yotsuya.

One night, my elder sister, happening to pass that way on some errand or other, spotted me there, and thinking me pitiable, no doubt, tucked me into her robe and carried me home, but I am told I would not settle down to sleep that night no matter what, and cried without stopping the whole night through, so that my sister was severely scolded by our father for it.

I do not know just when I was taken back from that foster family.

But before long I was again sent off, this time as an adopted child, to another household.

I believe this was when I was, if I recall correctly, four years old.

I grew up there until I was eight or nine, old enough to have some awareness of the world, but eventually some strange trouble broke out in that adoptive family, and matters came to such a pass that I was sent back once again to my birth family.

Moved from Asakusa to Ushigome, I had no idea that I was being returned to the house where I was born, and went on thinking of my own parents simply as my grandfather and grandmother, just as before.

And I went on calling them Grandpa and Grandma, just as I always had, without the least suspicion.

On their side too, perhaps thinking it would seem strange to suddenly change the habit all at once, they kept a straight face and let me go on calling them so.

I was never doted upon by my parents the way an ordinary last-born child usually is.

This came from any number of causes — my own contrary nature, the long estrangement from my parents, and so on.

From my father in particular I still retain the memory of having been treated with something close to harshness.

And yet, at the time I was moved from Asakusa to Ushigome, I felt, for some reason, an extraordinary happiness.

And that happiness of mine showed itself outwardly so plainly that anyone could see it.

How many months and days this foolish child of mine went on spending in that empty state, believing my real parents to be nothing more than an old man and an old woman — if you were to ask me, I could not say at all, but I do recall that something like this happened one night.

I was sleeping alone in my room when someone at my pillow began calling my name, softly, over and over.

Startled, I opened my eyes, but it was pitch dark all around, so that I could not tell right away who it was crouched there.

But being a child, I simply lay still and listened to what the other was saying.

And as I listened, I realized it was the voice of the maidservant in our house.

In the darkness, the maidservant whispered this into my ear, as though sharing a secret:

"The people you think of as your grandfather and grandmother are really your own father and mother. Just now the two of them were talking together, and I overheard them saying it's probably because of that, that you're so fond of this house here, and isn't it strange — so I'm quietly telling you now. You mustn't tell anyone. Do you understand?"

At the time I only said, "I won't tell anyone,"

but inwardly I was overjoyed.

And that joy of mine was not joy at having been told the truth of the matter, but simply joy at the maidservant's having been so kind to me.

Strangely enough, I have entirely forgotten both the name and the face of the maidservant whose kindness pleased me so much.

All that remains with me is her kindness itself.

XXX

Sitting here in my study as I do, most of the people who visit ask me, "Are you fully recovered from your illness now?"

they ask.

Having received this same question countless times, I have hesitated countless times over how to answer it.

And in the end I have come to repeat the same words every time.

They amount to nothing more than the odd little reply, "Well, somehow or other I'm still alive."

nothing more than that.

Somehow or other, still alive —

I made use of this single phrase for a long time.

But every time I used it, it left me with a vaguely improper feeling, so that I myself thought I ought to give it up if I could, and tried to think of something else, but I could never find any other words suited to describing my state of health.

One day Mr. T came to visit, and when I told him about this, saying I could neither call myself recovered nor call myself not recovered, and had no idea how to answer, Mr. T gave me this reply at once.

"Well, you certainly can't say you've recovered. Not if it keeps coming back like that. I suppose it's simply a continuation of the same original illness."

Hearing this word "continuation," I felt as though I had been taught something valuable.

From then on I gave up the phrase "somehow or other I'm still alive"

and changed it instead to, "The illness is still ongoing."

that was how I put it from then on.

And whenever I explained what I meant by this "ongoing," I would invariably bring up the great upheaval in Europe as an example.

"I am fighting a war against my illness, just as Germany is fighting a war against the Allied armies. That I am able to sit here facing you like this now is not because peace has come to the world, but because I have gone down into the trenches and am glaring the illness down, eye to eye. My body is a land at war. There is no telling when some new upheaval might break out."

One person, hearing my explanation, laughed heartily as though finding it amusing.

One person said nothing at all.

And another wore an expression of pity.

After my guest had gone home I found myself thinking further on the matter.

It is probably not only my own illness that is "ongoing" in this way.

Hearing my explanation, the person who laughs, taking it for a joke, the person who falls silent, not understanding, the person driven by sympathy to wear a look of pity — is it not likely that in the depths of all these people's hearts there lie hidden, in whatever numbers, things still ongoing, things unknown even to me, and perhaps unnoticed even by themselves?

If all of that were to burst open at once, with a sound loud enough to echo through their very hearts, what would they think then, I wonder.

Their own memories would, at that moment, surely have nothing left to tell them.

Their awareness of their own past would already have vanished entirely.

Unable to recognize any causal thread running between the present and the past, and between that past and the past still further back, what would they make of themselves, I wonder, once they had fallen into such a state?

Is it not the case that all of us, in the end, go on walking, each embracing whatever explosive charge we ourselves have unwittingly assembled in our dreams, laughing and talking together all the while, toward that distant place called death, one and all, without exception?

It is, no doubt, a mercy that neither others nor we ourselves know just what it is we carry.

When it occurred to me that my own illness was a kind of continuation, I found myself thinking that the war in Europe, too, was probably some continuation dating from who knows what age.