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Part One: Sensei and I

I

I always called him Sensei.

So here too I will write only Sensei, and not reveal his real name.

This is not so much out of deference to the world as because it feels more natural to me that way.

Whenever I call up my memory of him, I want at once to say "Sensei."

That is what I want to say.

The feeling is the same when I take up my pen.

I could never bring myself to use some cold, distant initial.

It was in Kamakura that I came to know Sensei.

At the time I was still a young student.

A friend who had gone to the seaside for the summer holidays sent me a postcard insisting that I come, so I scraped together a little money and decided to set out.

It took me two or three days to raise the money.

But before three days had passed since my arrival in Kamakura, the friend who had summoned me suddenly received a telegram from home telling him to return.

The telegram said his mother was ill, but my friend did not believe it.

For some time his parents at home had been pressing him into a marriage he had no heart for.

By the customs of today he was far too young to marry.

Worse, the prospective bride herself was not to his liking.

So instead of going home for the summer as he should have, he had deliberately stayed away and amused himself near Tokyo.

He showed me the telegram and asked what he should do.

I did not know what to tell him.

But if his mother really was ill, he certainly ought to go.

And so in the end he went.

Having come all that way, I was left behind alone.

There were still many days before classes began, and since I was free either to stay in Kamakura or to go home, I resolved to remain for the time being at the same lodging.

My friend was the son of a wealthy family in the Chugoku region and had no want of money, but because of the school we attended and our age, his way of living was hardly different from mine.

So, left on my own, I was spared the trouble of looking for cheaper quarters.

The lodging stood in an out-of-the-way part of Kamakura.

To reach such fashionable things as billiards or ice cream, one had to cross a long stretch of road through the rice fields.

Even by rickshaw it cost twenty sen.

Private villas, however, had been put up here and there in any number.

And since the sea was very close, the place was extremely convenient for bathing.

Every day I went out to swim.

Passing between the old, soot-blackened thatched houses and down to the shore, I found the sand alive with men and women who had come for the summer, so many that I wondered whether this many city people could really live in these parts.

At times the water itself was as crowded with black heads as a public bath.

Though I had not a single acquaintance among them, it was pleasant to be wrapped in all that liveliness, to sprawl on the sand or to let the waves beat against my knees while I splashed about.

It was in that very crowd that I found Sensei.

In those days there were two tea stalls on the beach.

By some chance I had grown accustomed to going to one of them.

Unlike the people who kept large villas around Hase, the summer visitors in this area had no changing rooms of their own, and so some such shared changing place was indispensable.

There they drank tea and rested; there they had their bathing suits washed, rinsed the salt from their bodies, and left their hats and umbrellas.

I had no bathing suit, but I too risked having my things stolen, and so each time I went into the sea I left everything at that stall.

II

When I saw Sensei at that tea stall, he had just taken off his clothes and was about to go into the sea.

I, on the contrary, had just come up out of the water and was letting the wind blow over my wet body.

Between us many black heads moved, blocking my view.

But for one particular circumstance, I might well have missed him altogether.

Crowded as the beach was, and vacant as my mind was, I picked him out at once because he had a Westerner with him.

The extraordinary whiteness of that Westerner's skin caught my attention the moment he entered the stall.

He was wearing a proper Japanese yukata, but he had flung it down on the bench and stood with his arms folded, facing the sea.

He wore nothing but the sort of drawers we ourselves wore.

That struck me as stranger than anything else.

Two days before I had gone as far as Yuigahama and squatted on the sand, watching for a long while the Westerners going into the sea.

I had sat down on a slight rise of ground, just beside the back entrance of a hotel, and while I sat there a good many men came out to bathe, but not one of them left his torso, arms, and thighs bare.

The women were even more careful to keep themselves covered.

Most of them wore rubber caps on their heads and floated their maroon, navy, and indigo colors among the waves.

To my eyes, so lately filled with that sight, this Westerner standing before everyone in nothing but a pair of drawers looked remarkable indeed.

Presently he turned to the person beside him and said a word or two to the Japanese man crouching there.

That man was picking up a hand towel that had fallen on the sand, and as soon as he had it he wrapped his head in it and started off toward the sea.

That man was Sensei.

Out of simple curiosity I watched the two figures as they went down the beach side by side.

They walked straight into the waves.

Passing through the crowd shouting and splashing in the shallows near the shore, they came to a relatively open stretch of water and both began to swim.

They headed out to sea until their heads looked small.

Then they turned and came straight back to the shore.

Back at the tea stall they did not even rinse themselves with well water, but dried off, dressed, and went briskly off somewhere.

After they had gone I sat down again on the same bench and smoked.

Vacantly, I found myself thinking about Sensei.

I could not shake the feeling that I had seen that face somewhere before.

But no matter how I tried, I could not remember when or where we had met.

At that time in my life I was less carefree than simply suffering from boredom.

So the next day too I judged the hour at which I had seen him and went out to the tea stall on purpose.

The Westerner did not come; Sensei arrived alone, wearing a straw hat.

He took off his glasses and set them on the stand, wrapped his head at once in a towel, and went briskly down the beach.

When he had passed as he had the day before through the noisy bathers and begun to swim alone, I suddenly wanted to follow him.

I splashed through the shallows, sending water over my head, and when I reached a fair depth I struck out with him as my mark.

But unlike the day before, Sensei described a kind of arc and began to return toward the shore from an unexpected direction.

So my purpose came to nothing after all.

When I came out on the sand and entered the tea stall shaking the water from my hands, Sensei was already dressed and went out just as I came in.

III

The next day I went to the beach at the same hour and saw Sensei's face.

The day after that I did the same again.

But no chance to speak, no occasion for greeting, arose between us.

Besides, Sensei's manner was rather unsociable.

He came at his fixed hour, aloof, and went away again aloof.

However lively his surroundings, he seemed to pay them almost no attention.

The Westerner who had come with him at first never appeared again.

Sensei was always alone.

One day, when Sensei had come briskly up out of the sea as usual and was about to put on the yukata he had left in his usual place, he found for some reason that it was covered with sand.

To shake it off he turned his back and gave the garment two or three shakes.

At that the glasses he had put beneath his clothes fell through a gap in the boards.

Sensei tied his sash over his white kasuri kimono, and then, noticing that his glasses were missing, began hurriedly to look about for them.

I at once thrust my head and arm under the bench and retrieved them.

Sensei said thank you and took them from my hand.

The next day I plunged into the sea after Sensei.

And I swam off in the same direction as he did.

When we were a couple of hundred meters out, Sensei turned and spoke to me.

On the broad blue surface of the sea there was nothing else afloat nearby but the two of us.

And the strong sunlight lit up the water and the hills as far as the eye could reach.

I moved my muscles, full of freedom and delight, and danced wildly about in the water.

Sensei stopped moving his arms and legs and lay on his back upon the waves.

I did the same.

The color of the blue sky flung itself glaringly, piercingly, into my face.

"This is splendid," I called out in a loud voice.

That is what I called out.

After a while Sensei righted himself as though standing up in the water and said, "Shall we go back now?"

That was how he urged me.

Being of a fairly robust build, I would have liked to stay longer in the water.

But when Sensei suggested it, I answered readily, "Yes, let's go back."

That was my cheerful answer.

And so the two of us returned along the same course to the shore.

From then on Sensei and I grew close.

But I still did not know where he was staying.

Two days later, on what I think was the afternoon of the third day, I met him at the tea stall.

Sensei turned to me abruptly and asked, "Do you intend to stay here much longer?"

That was his question.

Thoughtless as I was, I had nothing prepared in my head with which to answer such a question.

So I said, "I don't really know."

That was my answer.

But when I saw the faint smile on Sensei's face, I felt suddenly embarrassed.

"And you, Sensei?"

I could not help asking in return.

That was the beginning of the word Sensei on my lips.

That evening I called at his lodging.

It was called a lodging, but unlike an ordinary inn it was a villa-like building within the broad grounds of a temple.

I also learned that the people living there were not his family.

When I addressed him again and again as Sensei, he smiled wryly.

I explained that it was simply my habit with older men.

I asked him about the Westerner of the other day.

Sensei talked of various things: how eccentric the man was, how he had already left Kamakura, and he remarked that it was strange he should have become friendly with such a foreigner when he kept up so little acquaintance even with Japanese.

Finally I told Sensei that I felt I had seen him somewhere but could not for the life of me remember where.

Young as I was, I secretly supposed that he might feel the same about me.

And in my heart I anticipated his answer and waited for it.

But after brooding a while, Sensei said, "I have no recollection of your face. Aren't you mistaking me for someone else?"

When he said that, I felt a strange disappointment.

IV

At the end of the month I returned to Tokyo.

Sensei had left the seaside long before that.

When we parted I had asked, "May I call on you at your house from time to time?"

That was my question.

Sensei answered simply, "Yes, do come."

That was all he said.

At that time I fancied we had grown quite close, and I had hoped for something warmer from him.

So this unsatisfying reply wounded my confidence a little.

Sensei often disappointed me in such ways.

Sometimes he seemed aware of it, and sometimes wholly unaware.

Yet though these small disappointments repeated themselves, they never made me want to withdraw from him.

Quite the reverse: each time I was shaken by uneasiness, I wanted to press further forward.

If I pressed further, I thought, something I was waiting for would one day reveal itself fully before my eyes.

I was young.

But I did not imagine that my young blood would move so readily toward every human being.

I did not understand why such feelings arose in me toward Sensei alone.

Only now, after his death, has it begun to come clear to me.

Sensei had not disliked me from the first.

The occasional curt greeting, the seemingly cold gesture, were not expressions of displeasure meant to hold me off.

Pitiable man, he was warning anyone who tried to come near him to keep away, since he was not worth coming near.

He who would not answer the affection of others had, it seems, despised himself before he despised them.

Of course I came back to Tokyo intending to visit him.

There were still two weeks before classes began, and I meant to go once within that time.

But as two days and three days passed after my return, the mood of Kamakura gradually faded.

And over it the air of the great city, with the strong stimulus it gave to memory, stained my heart deeply with its own colors.

Whenever I saw a student's face in the street I felt hope and tension at the new academic year.

For a while I forgot about Sensei.

About a month after classes began, a certain slackness came over my heart again.

I began to walk the streets with a somehow dissatisfied face.

I looked around my room as though wanting something.

Sensei's face rose again in my mind.

I wanted to see him again.

The first time I called at his house, he was out.

The second time was, I remember, the following Sunday.

It was fine weather, with a clear sky that seemed to soak into one's body.

That day too he was out.

In Kamakura I had heard from his own lips that he was almost always at home.

I had even heard that he disliked going out.

Having come twice and missed him twice, I remembered those words and felt somewhere a groundless dissatisfaction.

I did not leave the entrance at once.

Looking at the maid's face, I hesitated and stood there.

The maid, who I remembered had taken in my card before, made me wait and went inside again.

Then a woman who seemed to be the mistress of the house came out in her place.

She was a beautiful woman.

From her I was politely told where Sensei had gone.

It was his habit, she said, to go on that day each month to place flowers on a grave in the cemetery at Zoshigaya.

"He went out only just now, hardly ten minutes ago," she said.

She told me so with an apologetic air.

I bowed and went out.

After walking a hundred meters or so toward the lively part of town, I took it into my head to go to Zoshigaya myself, by way of a walk.

Curiosity about whether I might meet him also stirred in me.

So I turned back at once.

V

I entered from the left side of the nursery garden that lies before the cemetery and went on into the interior along a broad path lined on both sides with maples.

Then out of a teahouse visible at the end of it, a man who seemed to be Sensei came suddenly.

I went close enough to see the rims of his glasses glint in the sun.

And then abruptly I called out in a loud voice, "Sensei!"

That is what I called.

Sensei stopped short and looked at my face.

"How... how..."

He repeated the same words twice.

They were repeated with a strange tone in the hushed stillness of the noonday.

Suddenly I could find nothing to say.

"Did you follow me here? How..."

His manner was, if anything, composed.

His voice was, if anything, subdued.

But in his expression there was a kind of shadow that I cannot quite describe.

I told him how I came to be there.

"Did my wife tell you whose grave I had gone to visit? Did she give the name?"

"No, she said nothing of that sort."

"I see. No, of course she would not have said it, not to you, whom she had just met. There would be no need."

Sensei seemed at last satisfied.

But I did not understand his meaning at all.

Sensei and I passed among the graves on our way out to the road.

Beside markers reading "Grave of Isabella So-and-so" and "Grave of Login, Servant of God," there stood wooden tablets inscribed "All living beings possess the Buddha nature."

There was also one for a minister plenipotentiary.

Before a small grave carved with the characters An-toku-retsu, I asked, "How is this read?"

That is what I asked Sensei.

"They probably meant it to be read Andre," he said.

And he smiled wryly.

He seemed to feel neither the absurdity nor the irony of these various styles of memorial as keenly as I did.

When I pointed to a round gravestone or a long slab of granite and went on making my remarks, he listened in silence at first, but at last he said, "You have never yet thought seriously about the fact of death."

That is what he said.

I fell silent.

And Sensei said nothing more either.

At the edge of the cemetery a great ginkgo stood as if to hide the sky.

When we came beneath it, Sensei looked up at the high branches and said, "In a little while it will be beautiful. This tree turns entirely yellow, and the ground about here is buried in golden leaves."

That is what he said.

Once a month, without fail, he passed beneath that tree.

Off in the distance a man leveling the uneven ground to make a new plot rested his hoe and watched us.

We turned left from there and came out at once onto the highroad.

Having no particular destination, I simply walked in whatever direction Sensei walked.

He spoke less than usual.

Even so I did not feel especially constrained, and strolled along beside him.

"Are you going straight home?"

"Yes, there is nowhere else I need to stop."

In silence we went down the slope to the south.

"Is your family's plot there in that cemetery?"

That is what I asked, breaking the silence.

"No."

"Whose grave is it, then? A relative's?"

"No."

Sensei answered nothing beyond that.

I too let the subject drop there.

But after we had walked another hundred meters, he came back to it unexpectedly.

"There is a friend of mine buried there."

"And you visit your friend's grave every month?"

"That is so."

That day Sensei said nothing more than this.

VI

After that I began to call on Sensei from time to time.

Each time I went, he was at home.

The more often I saw him, the more frequently my feet carried me to his door.

Yet his manner toward me hardly changed from the day of our first greeting to the days after we had grown close.

He was always quiet.

At times he was so quiet as to seem lonely.

From the beginning I had felt that there was something unapproachable and mysterious about him.

And yet a feeling that I could not help drawing near him worked strongly somewhere within me.

Perhaps I was the only one among many who felt this way about him.

But since in my case alone this intuition was afterward borne out by fact, I am glad of it and think it trustworthy, however childish others may call me, however foolish they may laugh at me for having foreseen it.

A man capable of loving others, a man who cannot help loving, and yet a man who cannot open his arms to embrace one who tries to enter his heart. That was Sensei.

As I have said, Sensei was always quiet.

He was composed.

But at times a strange shadow crossed his face.

Like the shadow of a black bird falling across a window.

It fell, and then it was gone again at once.

The first time I noticed that shadow between his brows was in the cemetery at Zoshigaya, when I called out to him so abruptly.

In that strange instant the pleasant tide of blood in my heart slowed for a moment.

But it was no more than a passing disturbance.

Within five minutes my heart had recovered its usual elasticity.

After that I forgot the dark shadow of that cloud entirely.

I was reminded of it unexpectedly one evening not long before the mild days of late autumn came to an end.

As I was talking with Sensei, the great ginkgo he had gone out of his way to point out to me suddenly rose before my eyes.

Counting the days, I found that the day on which he went each month to visit the grave fell exactly three days later.

That third day was an easy one, when my classes ended at noon.

So I said to him:

"Sensei, has the ginkgo at Zoshigaya already lost its leaves?"

"It will not be quite bare yet."

As he answered, he gazed at my face.

And he did not take his eyes from it for some while.

I said at once:

"When you next go to visit the grave, may I come with you? I should like to walk about that neighborhood with you."

"I go there to visit a grave, not to take a walk."

"But if you happened to take a walk as well, wouldn't that be just as good?"

Sensei made no reply.

After a while he said, "With me it is really nothing but a visit to a grave."

He seemed determined to keep the visit and the walk entirely separate.

Whether it was an excuse for not wanting me along or something else, Sensei struck me at that moment as oddly childish.

That only made me press him harder.

"Then let it be a visit to the grave; only take me with you. I will visit the grave too."

In truth the distinction between a visit to a grave and a walk seemed to me all but meaningless.

At that, Sensei's brow clouded a little.

A strange light came into his eyes as well.

It was something faint and uneasy that could not be dismissed as annoyance, or dislike, or fear.

At once I recalled vividly how he had looked at Zoshigaya when I called out "Sensei!"

That was the memory that came back to me.

The two expressions were exactly the same.

"I have," he said.

That is how he began.

"I have a reason that I cannot explain to you, and so I do not want to go there with anyone to visit that grave. I have never even taken my own wife."

VII

I thought it strange.

But I had not been going in and out of that house in order to study him.

I simply let it be and went on as before.

Looking back now, I think my attitude then was one of the things in my life most to be valued.

It was entirely thanks to it, I believe, that I was able to have a warm, human friendship with him.

If my curiosity had turned even a little toward his heart with the intent of studying it, the thread of sympathy that bound us would have snapped at that moment without mercy.

Young as I was, I was wholly unconscious of my own attitude.

Perhaps that is precisely why it was valuable; but if I had blundered the other way, what results would have fallen upon our relations?

I shudder even to imagine it.

As it was, Sensei lived in constant dread of being studied by cold eyes.

I came to go to his house without fail two or three times a month.

One day, when my visits had grown frequent, he suddenly asked me:

"Why is it that you come so often to the house of a man like me?"

"Why? There is no special reason. But am I a nuisance?"

"I did not say you were a nuisance."

Indeed there was no sign anywhere in him of being troubled.

I knew that the circle of his acquaintance was extremely narrow.

I knew too that of his former classmates hardly two or three were then in Tokyo.

Now and then students from his own province sat with him in the parlor, but not one of them seemed to feel the intimacy toward him that I felt.

"I am a lonely man," said Sensei.

That is what he said.

"So I am glad that you come. That is why I asked why you come so often."

"But why do you ask that?"

When I put the question back to him, he made no answer.

He only looked at my face and said, "How old are you?"

That was all he said.

This exchange made very little sense to me, but I went home that day without pressing to the bottom of it.

And before four days had passed I called on him again.

As soon as he came into the parlor he began to laugh.

"So you have come again," he said.

That is what he said.

"Yes, I have come," I said, and laughed too.

That is how I answered, laughing.

Had anyone else said such a thing to me, I am sure I would have been angry.

But when Sensei said it, it was quite the opposite.

Not only was I not angry; I was pleased.

"I am a lonely man," he said.

That evening he repeated the words of the other day.

"I am a lonely man, but perhaps you are a lonely man too. I am lonely, but being old I can stay still; you are young, and cannot. You want to move as much as you can move. You want to move and strike against something..."

"I am not lonely in the least."

"There is nothing so lonely as youth. Then why do you come so often to my house?"

Here again the words of the other day came from his lips.

"Even when you see me, you probably still feel lonely somewhere. I have not the power to pull that loneliness up by the roots for you. You will have to turn elsewhere and stretch out your arms before long. Before long your feet will stop carrying you toward my house."

So he said, and smiled a lonely smile.

VIII

Fortunately his prophecy was never fulfilled.

Inexperienced as I was then, I could not grasp even the plain meaning contained in that prophecy.

I went on going to see him as before.

In time, without knowing quite how, I came to take my meals at his table.

As a natural consequence I had to speak with Okusan as well.

As an ordinary man I was not indifferent to women.

But given the circumstances in which I had lived my young life, I had almost never formed anything like a real acquaintance with a woman.

Whether that was the cause I cannot say, but my interest worked mostly upon women I did not know and merely passed in the street.

When I had met Sensei's wife earlier at the entrance, my impression had been that she was beautiful.

And each time I met her afterward, I received the same impression without fail.

But beyond that I felt I had nothing in particular to say about her.

It might be truer to say, not that she had no distinguishing qualities, but that no occasion had come for her to show them.

In any case I always dealt with her feeling that she was a part appended to Sensei.

And she, it seems, treated me with the goodwill due a student who came to see her husband.

So if Sensei, who stood between us, were removed, the two of us fell apart.

Hence of Okusan at the time we first became acquainted, no impression remains with me but that she was beautiful.

One evening I was given sake at Sensei's house.

Okusan came out and poured for me beside us.

Sensei seemed more cheerful than usual.

"You have one too," he said to her, holding out the cup he had drained.

That is what he said, offering her the cup.

"I, well..." she began to decline.

Then she took it with a reluctant air.

Drawing her fine brows together, she lifted to her lips the cup I had filled only halfway.

The following exchange then began between her and Sensei.

"How unusual. You so seldom tell me to drink."

"Because you don't like it. But it does you good to drink now and then. It puts you in a pleasant frame of mind."

"It does nothing of the sort. It only makes me feel wretched. But you do look very cheerful when you've had a little."

"Sometimes it makes me very cheerful. But not always."

"And tonight?"

"Tonight I feel good."

"Then you should have a little every evening from now on."

"That won't do."

"Please do. Then you won't be so lonely."

Sensei's household consisted only of the couple and a maid.

Each time I went, the place was generally hushed.

I never once heard loud laughter there.

At times it seemed as if only Sensei and I were in the house.

"It would be good to have a child, at least," said Okusan, turning to me.

That is what she said, turning toward me.

"I suppose so," I answered.

That was my answer.

But no sympathy stirred in my heart.

Never having had a child, I thought of children then as nothing but a nuisance.

"Shall we adopt one?" said Sensei.

That is what he said.

"An adopted child, though—well, what do you think?"

And she turned to me again.

"We shall never have a child, however long we wait," said Sensei.

That is what he said.

Okusan said nothing.

"Why not?"

When I asked in her place, Sensei said, "Because it is a punishment from heaven."

And he laughed loudly.

IX

So far as I could see, Sensei and Okusan were a couple on good terms.

Never having lived as a member of a household, I of course knew nothing of the deeper circumstances; but when he sat facing me in the parlor, Sensei would sometimes, for one thing or another, call not the maid but his wife.

(Okusan's name was Shizu.)

"Shizu," he would call.

And he always turned toward the sliding door as he did.

To me the way he called sounded gentle.

And her manner as she answered and came out was very obliging.

When I was occasionally given a meal there and she appeared at the table, the bond between them seemed drawn more clearly still.

Sensei sometimes took her to concerts or to the theater.

And as I recall, they had gone off together on trips of a week or less more than two or three times.

I still have the picture postcard they sent me from Hakone.

When they went to Nikko I received a letter with a single maple leaf sealed inside.

Such, roughly, was the relation between Sensei and Okusan as it appeared to my eyes at that time.

There was, however, one single exception.

One day, when I was about to announce myself at his entrance as usual, I heard voices talking in the parlor.

Listening more closely, I found it was no ordinary conversation but seemed rather a quarrel.

Since the parlor of his house lies immediately beyond the entrance, I standing before the lattice door could make out at least the tone of the quarrel.

And from the man's voice, which rose from time to time, I knew that one of them was Sensei.

The other voice was lower than his, so I could not tell clearly whose it was, but it seemed to be Okusan's.

She seemed to be weeping.

I hesitated at the door, wondering what to do, but I made up my mind at once and went straight back to my lodging.

A strangely uneasy feeling came over me.

I lost the power to take in anything I read.

About an hour later Sensei came beneath my window and called my name.

Startled, I opened the window.

He invited me from below to come out for a walk.

I took out the watch I had left tucked in my sash and saw that it was already past eight.

I had come back and was still in my formal hakama.

I went straight out just as I was.

That evening I drank beer with Sensei.

He was by nature a man who could not drink much.

He was not the sort who, having drunk to a certain point without becoming drunk, would venture to drink until he was.

"It is no good tonight," he said, and smiled wryly.

That is what he said, smiling wryly.

"You cannot get into a good humor?"

That is how I asked, with concern.

All the while, what I had heard earlier stuck in my mind.

I suffered as one does with a fishbone caught in the throat.

Wavering between telling him and thinking better of it made me oddly restless.

"There is something the matter with you tonight," Sensei said first.

That is how he began.

"In fact something is a little the matter with me too. Can you tell?"

I could make no answer at all.

"The truth is that I quarreled a little with my wife earlier. It has left my nerves needlessly excited," he said.

That is what he went on to say.

"But how..."

The word quarrel would not come out of my mouth.

"My wife misunderstands me. And when I tell her it is a misunderstanding she will not accept it. So I lost my temper."

"In what way does she misunderstand you?"

Sensei made no attempt to answer this question of mine.

"If I were the sort of man she thinks I am, I should not be suffering like this."

How much he was suffering was another matter beyond my imagining.

X

On the way back, our silence as we walked lasted a hundred meters and more.

Then Sensei suddenly spoke.

"I did wrong. Since I went out angry, my wife must be worrying. When you think of it, women are pitiable creatures. My wife, for one, has nothing to rely on but me."

His words broke off there for a moment, but without seeming to expect any reply from me he went straight on.

"Put that way, the husband sounds very stout of heart, which is a little comical. Tell me, how do I appear to your eyes? Do I look like a strong man, or a weak one?"

"You look like something in between," I answered.

That was my answer.

This answer seemed a little unexpected to him.

He closed his mouth again and walked on without a word.

The way back to his house led right past my lodging.

When we came that far, I felt it would be rude to part from him at the corner.

"Shall I walk with you as far as your door?"

That is what I said.

He at once stopped me with his hand.

"It is late; go home quickly. I too shall go home quickly, for my wife's sake."

The words he added at the end, "for my wife's sake," warmed my heart strangely at that moment.

That is what those words did.

Thanks to them I was able to sleep in peace when I got home.

And for a long time afterward I did not forget those words, "for my wife's sake."

I did not forget them.

From this I understood that the trouble between Sensei and Okusan was nothing serious.

And going in and out of the house constantly afterward, I could guess too that it was a rare occurrence.

On the contrary, he once let fall to me even this reflection:

"In all the world I know only one woman. No woman but my wife appeals to me as a woman at all. And she for her part considers me the only man on earth. In that sense we ought to be one of the happiest couples ever born."

Having now forgotten what came before and after, I cannot say clearly why he made such a confession to me.

But I still remember that his manner was serious and his tone subdued.

What struck my ear strangely at the time was only that last phrase, "we ought to be one of the happiest couples ever born."

That was the phrase.

Why did he not say outright that they were happy, instead of saying they ought to be?

That alone puzzled me.

What puzzled me especially was the force he put into those words.

Was he in fact happy, or was he, though he ought to have been happy, not so happy after all?

I could not help wondering in my heart.

But the doubt was buried somewhere for the time being.

Before long I happened to call while Sensei was out, and had the chance to talk with Okusan alone.

That day he was out, having gone to Shinbashi to see off a friend who was sailing from Yokohama for abroad.

It was the custom then for those boarding ship at Yokohama to leave Shinbashi by the eight-thirty morning train.

Needing to ask him about a certain book, I had obtained his consent beforehand and called at the appointed hour of nine.

His trip to Shinbashi had come up suddenly that day, out of courtesy to a friend who had come the day before expressly to say goodbye.

He had left word that he would be back soon and that I should wait even in his absence.

So I went up into the parlor and talked with Okusan while I waited for him.

XI

By that time I was already a university student.

Compared with when I first came to his house, I felt much more grown up.

I had also grown fairly intimate with Okusan by then.

I felt no constraint with her.

Sitting face to face, we talked of many things.

But it was ordinary talk with nothing remarkable in it, and I have quite forgotten it now.

There was only one thing among it that stayed in my ear.

Before I tell it, however, there is something I want to explain.

Sensei was a university graduate.

That I had known from the first.

But that he did nothing and lived in idleness I learned only some while after returning to Tokyo.

At the time I wondered how he could live in idleness.

He was a man whose name was utterly unknown to the world.

So there could be no one but myself, who stood in close relation to him, to pay any respect to his learning or his thought.

I said again and again that it was a pity.

He merely answered, "It would be presumptuous for a man like me to go out into the world and speak," and would not take up the matter.

That was all he answered.

To me the answer sounded too modest, so much so that it seemed rather to mock the world.

In fact he sometimes took up this or that former classmate who had grown famous and criticized him with great bluntness.

So I openly pointed out the contradiction and said what I thought.

My feeling was less defiance than regret that the world should go on undisturbed in its ignorance of him.

At that Sensei said in a subdued tone, "Whatever happens, I am a man with no right to work upon the world, so it cannot be helped."

That is what he said.

On his face a deep expression of some kind was vividly graven.

Whether it was disappointment, or dissatisfaction, or grief I could not tell, but it was so strong that I could not follow with another word, and after that I had no courage to say anything more.

While I was talking with Okusan, the conversation turned naturally from Sensei to this very point.

"Why does he only sit at home thinking and studying like that, instead of going out into the world and working?"

"He is hopeless. He hates that sort of thing."

"Do you mean he has come to see that such things are worthless?"

"Whether he has seen anything or not I couldn't say, being a woman, but I doubt that is what it is. I think he does want to do something. And yet he cannot. That is what makes it so sad."

"But as far as his health goes, there seems to be nothing wrong with him at all."

"He is perfectly sound. He has no chronic complaint."

"Then why can he not be active?"

"That is just what I do not understand. If I understood it, I should not be so worried. Because I do not understand, I feel wretched about it."

There was great sympathy in the way she spoke.

Even so, a faint smile showed about her mouth.

To an outsider, I must have looked the more serious of the two.

I sat silent with a heavy face.

Then she spoke again, as though something had suddenly come back to her.

"When he was young he was not like that. When he was young he was quite different. He changed completely."

"When he was young—about when was that?"

That is what I asked.

"In his student days."

"You knew him from his student days?"

Okusan's face flushed faintly all at once.

XII

Okusan was a Tokyo woman.

That I had heard before, both from Sensei and from her.

"To tell the truth, I am a half-breed," she said.

That is what she said.

Her father, I believe, came from Tottori or somewhere, while her mother was born in Ichigaya in the days when the city was still called Edo; and so she said this half in jest.

Sensei, on the other hand, was from Niigata prefecture, in quite another direction.

So if she had known him in his student days, it was clearly not through any connection of birthplace.

But since she seemed, with her faintly reddened face, unwilling to say more, I did not press her.

From the time I came to know Sensei until his death, I touched upon his thought and feelings on a great many subjects, but of the circumstances of his marriage I could learn almost nothing.

Sometimes I put a kind construction on it.

Being a man of years, he was deliberately refraining, I thought, from telling amorous reminiscences to a young man.

At other times I took it in a worse sense.

Both he and Okusan, I thought, had been reared in the customs of an earlier age than mine, and when it came to such tender matters they had not the courage to open themselves honestly.

Both, of course, were mere conjectures.

And behind both conjectures I assumed the existence of a splendid love story lying at the bottom of their marriage.

My assumption was not in fact mistaken.

But I had been able to picture only one half of that love.

Behind the beautiful love, Sensei held a terrible tragedy.

And how cruel that tragedy was to him was entirely unknown to Okusan, the other party to it.

She does not know it even now.

Sensei died keeping it hidden from her.

Before destroying her happiness, he destroyed his own life.

I shall say nothing here about that tragedy.

Of their love, which may indeed be said to have been born of that tragedy, I have said what I said above.

Neither of them told me almost anything about it.

She out of modesty; he for some deeper reason still.

There is only one thing that remains in my memory.

Once, in the season of the blossoms, I went with Sensei to Ueno.

And there we saw a handsome young couple.

They walked beneath the blossoms pressed affectionately together.

The place being what it was, many people were staring at them rather than at the flowers.

"They look newly married," said Sensei.

That is what he said.

"They seem very fond of each other," I answered.

That was my answer.

Sensei did not so much as smile wryly.

He turned his steps in a direction that put the couple out of sight.

Then he asked me this:

"Have you ever been in love?"

I answered that I had not.

"Do you not want to fall in love?"

I did not answer.

"It is not that you don't want to."

"No."

"You mocked that man and woman just now. In your mockery there was mixed the voice of a man who seeks love and cannot find its object."

"Did it sound like that?"

"It did. A man who tastes the satisfaction of love speaks in a warmer voice. But—but listen: love is a sin. Do you understand that?"

I was suddenly startled.

I made no reply.

XIII

We were in the midst of a crowd.

Every face in it looked happy.

Until we had passed through and come into a wood where neither blossoms nor people could be seen, there was no chance to speak of it again.

"Is love a sin?"

That is what I asked suddenly then.

"It is a sin. Certainly."

His tone as he answered was as forceful as before.

"Why?"

"You will understand why in time. Not in time—you ought to understand already. Has your heart not been stirring with love for a long while now?"

I looked once into my own breast.

But it was unexpectedly empty there.

There was nothing I could point to.

"There is not a single object of that kind in my breast. I believe I am hiding nothing from you."

"It is because you have no object that you move. You want to move in the hope that with an object you could be at rest."

"I am not moving so much now."

"Did you not move toward me out of dissatisfaction?"

"That may be so. But that is not love."

"It is a step on the stairway to love. As a stage on the way to embracing the opposite sex, you first moved toward me, of your own sex."

"The two things seem to me entirely different in kind."

"No, they are the same. I am a man who cannot possibly give you satisfaction. And for a certain special reason I am all the less able to satisfy you. I am truly sorry for it. It cannot be helped that you will move away from me elsewhere. I even hope you will. And yet..."

I grew strangely sad.

"If you think I shall leave you, there is nothing to be done about it; but no such thought has ever risen in me."

Sensei paid no heed to my words.

"But you must be careful. Love is a sin. With me there is no satisfaction, but there is no danger either—tell me, do you know what it feels like to be bound by long black hair?"

I knew it in imagination.

But I did not know it as a fact.

In any case what he meant by sin was vague and beyond my understanding.

Moreover I grew a little irritated.

"Sensei, please tell me more plainly what you mean by sin. Otherwise let us drop the subject here, until I understand for myself what sin means."

"I did wrong. I thought I was telling you the truth. But in fact I was only tormenting you. I did wrong."

Sensei and I walked at a quiet pace from behind the museum toward Uguisudani.

Through gaps in a hedge, bamboo grass growing thick in part of a wide garden could be seen, still and deep.

"Do you know why I go every month to the grave of the friend buried in the cemetery at Zoshigaya?"

This question of his was wholly unexpected.

And he knew perfectly well that I could not answer it.

For a while I said nothing.

Then, as though he had only now noticed, he said:

"I have said the wrong thing again. Thinking it wrong to torment you, I try to explain, and the explanation torments you all over again. There is nothing to be done. Let us drop this subject. At any rate love is a sin, do you understand? And it is a holy thing as well."

His words grew less and less intelligible to me.

But he did not speak of love again.

XIV

Young as I was, I tended to grow single-minded.

At least so it appeared to Sensei's eyes.

To me, his talk was of more use than the lectures at school.

His thought was dearer to me than the opinions of professors.

In the end, he who guarded his solitude and said little seemed to me greater than the eminent men who stood at the lectern and instructed me.

"You must not become so infatuated," said Sensei.

That is what he said.

"I think so as the result of cool reflection," I answered.

When I said that, I had full confidence in myself.

But he would not grant me that confidence.

"You are in a fever. When the fever passes you will grow sick of me. I find it painful to be thought of as you think of me now. But when I try to foresee the change that must come over you hereafter, it becomes still more painful."

"Am I thought so shallow? Am I so little trusted?"

"I am sorry for you."

"You are sorry, but you do not trust me?"

He turned toward the garden with a troubled air.

In that garden not one camellia remained of the flowers that until recently had dotted it with their heavy red, strong color.

Sensei had a habit of gazing at those camellias from the parlor.

"When I say I do not trust, it is not you in particular I do not trust. I do not trust human beings as a whole."

Just then, beyond the hedge, came a voice that seemed to be a goldfish seller's.

Apart from that, nothing at all could be heard.

The little lane, set back a couple of hundred meters from the main road, was quieter than one would expect.

The house was as hushed as always.

I knew that Okusan was in the next room.

I knew too that my voice would reach her ears as she sat silently at her sewing or whatever it was.

But I forgot it entirely.

"Then do you not trust your wife either?"

That is what I asked him.

His face grew a little uneasy.

And he avoided a direct answer.

"I do not even trust myself. Because I cannot trust myself, I have come to be unable to trust others. There is nothing left for me but to curse myself."

"If you think about it so severely, nothing is certain for anyone."

"No, I did not think it. I did it. Having done it, I was appalled. And then I became terribly afraid."

I wanted to follow the same road a little further.

But from behind the sliding door came Okusan's voice twice: "Dear, dear."

That is how she called, twice.

The second time Sensei said, "What is it?"

That is what he said.

"Just a moment," she said.

And she called him into the next room.

What business had arisen between them I did not know.

He came back into the parlor so quickly that I had no time even to imagine it.

"At any rate you must not trust me too much. You will regret it in time. And then, in revenge for having been deceived, you will take a cruel vengeance."

"What do you mean by that?"

"The memory of having once knelt before a man makes one wish afterward to set one's foot upon his head. I want to refuse the respect of today in order not to suffer the insult of tomorrow. Rather than endure a future self lonelier still than now, I would endure my lonely present self. We who are born into this age, filled as it is with freedom and independence and the self, must all taste this loneliness as the price of it."

Faced with a man holding such a resolve, I knew of nothing to say.

XV

After that, I could not help wondering each time I saw Okusan's face.

Did Sensei always take this attitude toward her as well?

And if so, was she content with it?

Her manner gave no means of deciding whether she was content or not.

For I had few chances to come so near to her.

And she was always ordinary when she met me.

And finally, unless Sensei was present, she and I hardly ever met at all.

My doubts went further still.

Where did Sensei's resolve concerning mankind come from?

Was it merely the result of examining himself and observing the age with cold eyes?

He was a man of the sort who sits and thinks.

With a head like his, could such an attitude arise of itself simply from sitting and thinking about the world?

I could not believe it was only that.

His resolve seemed a living resolve.

It was not like the outline of a stone house burnt out by fire and gone cold.

To my eyes he was certainly a thinker.

But behind the principles that thinker had put together, there seemed to be woven some powerful fact.

Not the facts of others, cut off from himself, but facts he had tasted keenly in his own person, facts that had made his blood run hot and his pulse stop, seemed folded up within them.

There was no need for me to guess at this in my own breast.

Sensei himself had already confessed as much.

Only, that confession was like a thunderhead.

It spread over my head something terrible whose true shape I could not make out.

And why it was terrible, even I did not know.

The confession was vague.

And yet it plainly set my nerves trembling.

I supposed some violent love affair at the starting point of this view of life.

(Between Sensei and Okusan, of course.)

Set beside his having once said that love was a sin, this gave me something of a clue.

But he had told me that he did in fact love his wife.

In that case a resolve so close to hatred of the world could hardly have come out of their love.

His words, "The memory of having once knelt before a man makes one wish afterward to set one's foot upon his head," seemed rather to apply to people of the present age in general, and not at all to himself and Okusan.

That is how they seemed to me.

The grave at Zoshigaya, of someone unknown to me: that too stirred in my memory from time to time.

I knew that it was a grave deeply connected with him.

Drawing near to his life yet unable to enter it, I took that grave into my own mind as a fragment of the life within his.

But to me that grave was a wholly dead thing.

It was no key to open the door of life that stood between us.

Rather it was like a demon standing between us, hindering our free passage.

While matters stood so, the time came when I had again to talk with Okusan face to face.

It was in the busy autumn when the days shorten, the season in which everyone notices the chill on the skin.

For three or four days in a row there were burglaries in houses near Sensei's.

They all occurred in the early evening.

Hardly any house lost anything of great value, but wherever the thief entered, something was always taken.

Okusan was uneasy about it.

Just then circumstances arose that obliged Sensei to be away one evening.

A friend from his own province who worked at a provincial hospital had come up to Tokyo, and Sensei had to join two or three others in giving him dinner somewhere.

He explained the matter and asked me to keep the house until he came back.

I accepted at once.

XVI

I arrived at dusk, when the lamps were on the point of being lit, but punctual as he was, Sensei had already gone.

"He said it would be bad to be late, and went out only a moment ago," said Okusan.

And she showed me into his study.

In the study, besides a Western-style desk and chair, there were many books whose handsome spines stood in rows, lit through glass by the electric lamp.

She seated me on a cushion laid before the brazier and said, "Please read one of the books lying about here."

With that excuse she went out.

I felt exactly like a guest waiting for his host to return, and was embarrassed.

I sat stiffly and smoked.

I could hear Okusan's voice talking about something with the maid in the sitting room.

The study lay at the corner where the veranda from the sitting room turned, so that by its position in the house it was actually more remote and quiet than the parlor.

When her voice ceased after a spell, all was still.

With the feeling of one lying in wait for a burglar, I sat motionless and kept my senses alert in every direction.

After about half an hour she looked in at the study door again.

"Oh dear," she said, turning on me the eyes of one mildly surprised.

That is what she said.

And she looked with amusement at me sitting bolt upright like a visitor.

"You must be uncomfortable like that."

"No, I am not uncomfortable."

"But you must be bored."

"No. I am on edge thinking the burglar may come, so I am not bored either."

She stood there laughing with a teacup in her hand.

"This is a corner of the house, so it is a poor place to stand guard," I said.

That is what I said.

"Then, if you will forgive me, please come out nearer the middle. I thought you might be bored and made tea and brought it, but if the sitting room will do I shall serve it to you there."

I followed her out of the study.

In the sitting room an iron kettle sang on a handsome long brazier.

There I was given tea and cakes.

She did not touch her cup, saying it would keep her from sleeping.

"Does Sensei still go out to such gatherings now and then?"

"No, he almost never does. Lately he seems to dislike seeing people's faces more and more."

Since her manner in saying this showed no sign of being especially troubled, I grew bold.

"Then are you the only exception?"

"No, I am one of those he dislikes."

"That is untrue," I said.

That is what I said.

"You say it knowing yourself that it is untrue."

"Why?"

"Because in my view it is precisely because he came to love you that he came to dislike the world."

"You are a scholar, and very clever at it—at handling empty arguments. One might just as well say that because he came to dislike the world, he came to dislike me too. By the same reasoning."

"Both can be said, but in this case I am the one who is right."

"I dislike arguments. Men are always arguing, and seem to enjoy it. I wonder how you can go on tossing an empty cup back and forth without ever tiring of it."

Her words were a little severe.

But so far as their sound in the ear went, they were by no means harsh.

She was not modern enough to make her hearer acknowledge that she had a mind, and to find in that a kind of pride.

She seemed to value something that lay deeper down than that.

XVII

I still had things to say after that.

But fearing she might take me for a man who picked arguments at random, I held back.

Seeing me silent, peering into the bottom of the cup I had drained, and not wishing to leave me so, she asked, "Shall I give you another cup?"

That is what she asked.

I handed her the cup at once.

"How many? One? Two?"

Oddly enough, having picked up the lump sugar, she looked at my face and asked how many lumps to put in.

Her manner was not quite flattering, but it was full of a charm that tried hard to undo the severity of her earlier words.

I drank my tea in silence.

When I had finished I was still silent.

"You have grown very silent," said Okusan.

That is what she said.

"If I say anything, I am likely to be scolded again for picking an argument," I answered.

That was my answer.

"Surely not," she said again.

That is what she said.

Taking that as an opening, we began to talk again.

And again we made Sensei, our common interest, our subject.

"Okusan, will you let me go on a little with what I was saying? It may sound to you like an empty argument, but I am not speaking idly."

"Then say it."

"If you were suddenly gone, could Sensei go on living as he lives now?"

"How should I know? There is nothing for it but to ask him. That is not a question to bring to me."

"Okusan, I am serious. So you must not run away. You must answer honestly."

"I am honest. Honestly, I do not know."

"Then how much do you love him? This is a question better asked of you than of him, so I ask you."

"Is there any need to ask such a thing so formally?"

"You mean there is no need to ask solemnly, since it is obvious?"

"Well, yes."

"Then if you, so devoted to him, were suddenly gone, what would become of him? He who finds nothing interesting whichever way he turns in the world—what would become of him afterward? Not as he sees it. As you see it. In your view, would he be happy or unhappy?"

"As I see it, that is clear. (He may not think so.) Parted from me he could only be unhappy. He might not even be able to go on living. It sounds like vanity to say so, but I believe that I am making him as happy as a human being can be made. I believe, indeed, that no one else could make him as happy as I do. That is why I can remain so calm."

"I should think that conviction of yours would be reflected clearly in his heart."

"That is another matter."

"You still say he dislikes you?"

"I do not think he dislikes me. There is no reason for him to. But he dislikes the world, does he not. Or rather than the world, lately he has come to dislike human beings. So as one of those human beings, how could I be liked?"

At last I understood what she meant by being disliked.

XVIII

I admired Okusan's powers of understanding.

That her manner was not that of an old-fashioned Japanese woman also gave a kind of stimulus to my attention.

And yet she hardly ever used the so-called new words that were coming into fashion then.

I was a careless youth with no experience of deep intercourse with women.

As a man, out of instinct toward the other sex, I always dreamed of women as objects of longing.

But it was only a vague dreaming, in the mood of one gazing at the wistful clouds of spring.

So when I came before an actual woman, my feelings sometimes changed abruptly.

Instead of being drawn to the woman before me, I felt on the contrary a strange repulsion when the moment came.

With Okusan no such feeling arose in me at all.

Nor did the usual sense of an imbalance of thought lying between man and woman.

I forgot that she was a woman.

I looked upon her simply as Sensei's sincere critic and sympathizer.

"Okusan, when I asked you before why he does not take a more active part in the world, you said something, do you remember? That he was not always like that."

"Yes, I said so. He really was not like that."

"What was he like?"

"He was a dependable man, such as you would wish, and such as I would wish."

"Then why did he change so suddenly?"

"Not suddenly. He gradually became so."

"And you were with him all that while?"

"Of course I was. We are husband and wife."

"Then you ought to know exactly the cause of his changing."

"That is what troubles me. It is truly painful to have you say so, but however I think about it, I can make nothing of it. I cannot tell you how many times I have begged him to tell me everything."

"And what does he say?"

"He only says there is nothing to tell, nothing to worry about, that this is simply the nature he has come to have—and he will not take it up."

I was silent.

She too broke off her words.

The maid in her room did not make the slightest sound.

I had forgotten the burglar entirely.

"You do not think the responsibility is mine?" she asked suddenly.

That is what she asked, suddenly.

"No," I answered.

That was my answer.

"Please tell me without hiding anything. To be thought so is more painful than to be cut," she said again.

That is what she said again.

"Even so, I believe I am doing everything I can for him."

"He acknowledges that himself, so there is nothing to fear. Set your mind at rest; I guarantee it."

She raked the ashes level in the brazier.

Then she added water from the pitcher to the iron kettle.

The kettle at once fell silent.

"At last I could bear it no longer and asked him. If there is anything wrong in me, tell me without reserve; if it is a fault I can mend, I will mend it. And he said, You have no faults; the fault is only on my side. When he says that, I cannot help growing sad. The tears come, and I want all the more to be told what is wrong with me."

Her eyes filled with tears.

XIX

At first I had dealt with her as an understanding woman.

But as I went on talking in that spirit, her manner gradually changed.

Instead of appealing to my head, she began to move my heart.

Between herself and her husband there was no obstruction, nor ought there to be; and yet something was there.

And when she opened her eyes and tried to make it out, there was nothing after all.

That was the point of her distress.

At first she had declared that because his eyes upon the world were the eyes of one who hated it, she too was disliked as a consequence.

Having declared it, she could not rest content there at all.

At bottom she was thinking the very reverse.

She suspected that because he disliked her, he had at last come to loathe the world as well.

But however she labored, she could not press that suspicion home and make a fact of it.

His manner was in every way that of a husband.

It was kind and gentle.

Wrapping her lump of doubt in the affection of each passing day, she had put it quietly away in the depths of her breast; and that evening she opened the parcel and showed me what was inside.

"What do you think?" she asked.

That is what she asked.

"Did he become so because of me, or because of that view of life or whatever it is you speak of? Tell me without hiding anything."

I had no wish to hide anything.

But if something unknown to me existed there, then whatever my answer, it could not satisfy her.

And I believed that something unknown to me did exist there.

"I do not know."

At that moment her face showed the pitiful look of one whose expectation has failed.

I added at once:

"But I can guarantee at least that he does not dislike you. I only tell you what I heard from his own lips. He is not a man who lies."

She made no answer.

After a while she said this:

"To tell the truth, there is something I can think of..."

"About the cause of his becoming as he is?"

"Yes. If that is the cause, then at least the responsibility is not mine, and even that much would be a great relief to me..."

"What sort of thing is it?"

She hesitated and gazed at her own hands lying in her lap.

"You must judge it for me. I will tell you."

"If it is a judgment within my power, I will make it."

"I cannot tell you all of it. If I tell all of it, I shall be scolded. Only the part I shall not be scolded for."

I swallowed hard in my tension.

"When he was still at the university he had a very close friend. That man died just a little before he was to graduate. He died suddenly."

In a small voice, as if whispering into my ear, she said, "In fact he died an unnatural death."

That is what she said.

It was said in a way that made it impossible not to ask, "How?"

That is what one had to ask.

"That is all I can say. But it was after that. It was after that that his nature began to change. Why the man died I do not know. He probably does not know either. But if you suppose that he changed from that time, it is possible to think so."

"Is it that man's grave, the one at Zoshigaya?"

"That too I am not to speak of, so I will not. But can a person change so much merely from losing one close friend? That is what I want so much to know. So that is the point on which I want your judgment."

My judgment inclined rather to the negative.

XX

I tried to comfort her so far as the facts I had grasped allowed.

And she too seemed to want to be comforted by me as much as possible.

So the two of us went on and on discussing the same question.

But I had never grasped the root of the matter to begin with.

Her uneasiness too came in fact out of a doubt like a thin cloud drifting there.

As for the truth of the affair, even she knew little of it.

And of what she did know, she could not tell me everything.

So I who comforted and she who was comforted both floated swaying on the waves.

Swaying, she reached out to the last and tried to cling to my unreliable judgment.

When at about ten o'clock the sound of Sensei's shoes was heard at the entrance, she rose suddenly, as if forgetting all that had gone before, leaving me sitting there.

And she met him almost head-on as he opened the lattice door.

Left behind, I followed after her.

Only the maid, who had evidently been dozing, never appeared at all.

Sensei was in rather good spirits.

But Okusan's spirits were better still.

Remembering the shine of tears that had stood a moment before in her beautiful eyes, and the furrow drawn at the root of her dark brows, I watched the change attentively as something extraordinary.

If it was not a pretense (and indeed it did not seem one), then all her complaint until then might be taken as a meaningless woman's game, got up with me for a partner in order to toy with sentiment.

At the time, however, I had no wish to look at her so critically.

Seeing her manner brighten so suddenly, I was rather relieved.

I reconsidered and thought there had been no need to worry so much.

Laughing, Sensei asked me, "Thank you for your trouble; the burglar did not come?"

That is what he asked me.

Then he said, "Isn't it a letdown that he never came?"

That is what he said.

As I was leaving, Okusan bowed and said, "I am sorry for you."

That is how she bowed and spoke.

Her tone sounded less like an apology for wasting my time when I was busy than like a joke: that it was a shame no burglar had come after I had gone to the trouble.

As she said it she wrapped the rest of the Western cakes she had brought out earlier in a paper and put them into my hand.

I tucked them into my sleeve and hurried, turning corner after corner along the chilly night lanes where few people passed, toward the lively part of town.

I have drawn that evening out of my memory and written it here in detail.

I have written it because it needs writing; but to tell the truth, in the mood in which I went home with her cakes, I did not attach much weight to that night's conversation.

The next day, when I came back from school for lunch and saw the packet of cakes I had left on my desk the night before, I at once took out the brown sponge cake coated with chocolate and stuffed it into my mouth.

And as I ate it, I tasted it conscious that the man and woman who had given me these cakes existed in the world as a happy pair.

Nothing in particular happened between the close of autumn and the coming of winter.

Going in and out of Sensei's house, I asked Okusan to have my kimono washed and restretched and sewn.

It was from that time that I, who had never worn an undergarment of the sort before, began to put a black-collared one over my shirt.

Having no children, she said such tasks served her rather as a diversion from boredom and were in the end good for her health.

"This is hand-woven, isn't it. I have never sewn a kimono of such good cloth before. But it is hard to sew, dreadfully so. The needle simply will not go through. I broke two needles over it."

Even when she complained like this, she never wore a look of being especially put out.

XXI

When winter came, I had unexpectedly to return to my home province.

In a letter I received from my mother she wrote that my father's illness was not taking a good course, and added, as though pleading, that while there was no immediate cause for alarm, his years being what they were, I should manage to come home if I could.

My father had long suffered from his kidneys.

As is often seen in men past middle age, his illness was chronic.

On the other hand he himself and all the family believed without a doubt that so long as he was careful there would be no sudden turn.

Indeed, whenever a visitor came he would spread it about that he had got through until now solely by the grace of taking care of himself.

That father, according to my mother's letter, had suddenly grown dizzy and fallen over while out doing something in the garden.

The household mistook it for a slight cerebral hemorrhage and treated him accordingly.

Only later, when the doctor gave his judgment that it did not seem to be that, but was rather a result of his chronic illness, did they begin to connect the collapse with the kidney disease.

There was still a little time before the winter holidays.

Thinking there would be no harm in waiting until the end of term, I left the matter as it was for a day or two.

But in those one or two days the sight of my father lying in bed and my mother's worried face rose before my eyes again and again.

Each time I felt a kind of pang, and at last I made up my mind to go.

To save the trouble and time of having travel money sent from home, I decided to go to Sensei's both to say goodbye and to have him advance me the sum I needed.

Sensei had a slight cold and, saying it was troublesome to come out to the parlor, had me shown into his study.

Through the glass doors of the study a soft, welcome sunlight, rare in winter, fell upon the cloth of his desk.

He had set a large brazier in that sunny room and kept his breathing from growing painful with the steam rising from a metal basin on the trivet.

"A serious illness is all very well, but a trifling cold is a more disagreeable thing," he said.

He said it with a wry smile, looking at my face.

He was a man who had never had an illness worth the name.

Hearing him, I wanted to laugh.

"I can bear a cold, but anything worse than that I refuse. It would be the same for you. Try it once and you will see."

"Is that so? If I am to be ill at all, I would rather have the illness that kills me."

I paid no particular attention to what he said.

I at once spoke of my mother's letter and asked for the money.

"That must be difficult for you. I should have that much on hand; take it with you."

He called Okusan and had her set out the sum I needed before me.

Bringing it from a drawer of the tea cabinet or something in the back, she stacked it neatly on a sheet of white paper and said, "That must be a worry for you."

That is what she said.

"Has he collapsed more than once?" asked Sensei.

That is what he asked.

"The letter says nothing about it. Does one collapse so many times?"

"Yes."

It was then that I learned for the first time that Okusan's mother had died of the same illness as my father's.

"It is hopeless in any case, I suppose," I said.

That is what I said.

"Well. If I could take his place I would. Is there nausea?"

"I wonder. Nothing is written of it, so probably not."

"So long as the nausea does not come, he is still all right," said Okusan.

That is what she said.

I left Tokyo by the train that evening.

XXII

My father's illness was not as bad as I had feared.

Even so, when I arrived he was sitting cross-legged on his bedding and said, "Everyone worries, so I put up with it and keep still like this. Really, I could get up now."

That is what he said.

But from the next day, ignoring my mother's protests, he had the bedding put away after all.

Folding the coarse silk quilt reluctantly, my mother said, "Your father has suddenly grown bold because you have come home."

That is what she said.

To me his behavior did not seem so much a matter of bravado.

My elder brother held a post in far-off Kyushu.

He was not free to come and see our parents except in an emergency.

My sister had married into another province.

She too was not a woman who could be summoned at short notice in a crisis.

Of the three of us, the most available was I, still a student.

That I had thrown over my classes at my mother's bidding and come home before the holidays gave my father great satisfaction.

"It is a shame to have you miss school for so slight an illness. Your mother is to blame for writing such an exaggerated letter."

So he said with his lips.

And not only said it: he had the bedding he had been lying on taken away and showed his usual vigor.

"If you are too rash you may have a relapse."

My father took this warning of mine cheerfully, but very lightly.

"Nonsense, I am all right, so long as I keep as careful as ever."

Indeed, he seemed all right.

He moved freely about the house, neither short of breath nor dizzy.

Only his color was much worse than an ordinary man's; but this was not a new symptom either, and we paid it no special heed.

I wrote to Sensei to thank him for the money he had lent me.

I said I would bring it when I came up to Tokyo at New Year, and asked him to wait until then.

And I wrote at length that my father's condition was not as bad as I had feared, that at this rate there was no cause for alarm for the present, and that he had neither dizziness nor nausea.

At the end I added a word of sympathy for Sensei's cold.

For I really thought his cold a trifle.

When I sent that letter I did not in the least expect a reply.

After sending it, while gossiping with my father and mother about him, I pictured his study far away.

"When you go up to Tokyo next, take him some dried mushrooms."

"Yes, but I wonder whether he eats dried mushrooms."

"They are not very good, but few people dislike them particularly."

It seemed odd to me to connect dried mushrooms with Sensei.

When his answer came I was rather startled.

I was startled especially because it contained no particular business.

He had written, I thought, purely out of kindness.

Thinking so, that one simple letter became a great joy to me.

It was, at any rate, the first letter I ever received from him.

To say the first may suggest that letters passed often between us, but I want to make clear that this was not at all the case.

In his lifetime I received only two letters from him.

One was this brief reply; the other was the very long one he wrote expressly to me before his death.

Since the nature of his illness obliged my father to avoid exertion, he hardly went outdoors even after the bedding was put away.

Once, on the afternoon of an exceedingly mild day, he went down into the garden, and then, fearing some mishap, I stayed close beside him.

Though out of concern I tried to make him rest a hand on my shoulder, he laughed and would not.

XXIII

To keep my bored father company, I often sat down to the shogi board.

Being both of us lazy by nature, we stayed at the foot warmer and set the board on its frame, taking our hands out from under the quilt each time we moved a piece.

Sometimes we lost a captured piece and neither of us noticed until the next game.

There was the comic business of my mother finding it in the ashes and picking it out with the fire tongs.

"With go, the board is too high and has legs, so you cannot play on the foot warmer; but a shogi board is fine, you can play at your ease like this. It is just the thing for a lazy man. Let's have another game."

When he won he always said, let's have another game.

And yet when he lost he said the same, let's have another game.

In short he was a man who wanted to play shogi at the foot warmer whether he won or lost.

At first the novelty gave this retired man's amusement a certain interest for me too, but as the days passed my youthful energy could not be satisfied by so mild a stimulus.

I stretched my fists, clutching a gold general or a lance, above my head, and now and then yawned enormously.

I thought of Tokyo.

And in the surging blood of my heart I heard a pulse beating, action, action.

Strangely, I felt that the sound of that pulse was strengthened, through some subtle state of consciousness, by Sensei's power.

In my heart I compared my father and Sensei.

Both, in the eyes of the world, were men so quiet that one could hardly tell whether they were alive or dead.

In terms of being recognized by others, both were nothing.

And yet this father who wanted to play shogi did not satisfy me even as a companion in mere amusement.

Sensei, with whom I had never once associated for pleasure, had somehow come to influence my mind beyond any intimacy born of shared amusements.

But mind is too cold a word; let me say heart instead.

To say that his power had eaten into my flesh, or that his life flowed in my blood, seemed to me then not the least exaggeration.

Setting deliberately before my eyes the plain fact that my father was my real father while Sensei was, needless to say, a complete stranger, I was startled as though I had discovered some great truth.

About the time I began to grow restless, I too, who had at first been a novelty, became gradually an ordinary thing in my father's and mother's eyes.

This, I suppose, is the feeling everyone who goes home for the summer holidays experiences alike: for the first week or so one is fussed over and made much of, but once that peak is passed as it always is, the family's ardor gradually cools, and in the end one comes to be treated carelessly, as a thing that might as well not be there.

I too passed that peak during my stay.

Moreover, every time I came home I brought something strange from Tokyo that neither my father nor my mother could understand.

To use an old comparison, it was like bringing the smell of Christianity into the house of a Confucian scholar: what I brought home harmonized with neither of them.

Of course I hid it.

But since it clung to my person, however I tried not to show it, it caught their eyes sooner or later.

In the end I stopped enjoying myself.

I wanted to get back to Tokyo quickly.

My father's illness fortunately remained as it was, with no sign of turning for the worse.

To make sure, we even called in a suitable doctor from a distance and had him examined carefully, but nothing was found beyond what I already knew.

I decided to leave home a little before the end of the winter holidays.

When I said I was leaving, human feeling being a strange thing, both my father and mother objected.

"Going back already? Isn't it too soon?" said my mother.

That is what she said.

"Surely four or five more days would still be in time," said my father.

That is what he said.

I did not change the day I had fixed for my departure.

XXIV

When I got back to Tokyo the New Year pine decorations had already been taken down.

The town lay open to the cold wind, and nowhere was there anything much resembling New Year cheer.

I went at once to Sensei's house to return the money.

I took the dried mushrooms along too.

Since it seemed odd simply to hand them over, I explained that my mother had asked me to present them, and set them before Okusan.

The mushrooms were in a new cake box.

Having thanked me politely, she picked up the box as she rose to go into the next room, and, surprised perhaps by its lightness, asked, "What kind of cakes are these?"

That is what she asked.

Once she had grown familiar with me, she showed in such things an extremely artless, childlike heart.

Among the many anxious questions they both put to me about my father's illness, Sensei said this:

"To be sure, from his condition it does not sound as though anything will happen immediately; but the illness being what it is, one must be very careful."

He knew much about kidney disease that I did not.

"It is characteristic of that illness that a man may have it and go on unconcerned without noticing. An officer I knew was finished by it at last, and died in a way that seemed almost unbelievable. His wife, who was sleeping beside him, had no time at all to nurse him. In the middle of the night he woke her, saying only that he felt a little ill, and by the next morning he was dead. And his wife had thought all the while that her husband was asleep."

I, who had inclined until then toward optimism, grew suddenly uneasy.

"Might my father become like that? One cannot say he will not."

"What does the doctor say?"

"The doctor says it can never be cured. But he also says there is no cause for concern for the present."

"Then it should be all right, if the doctor says so. The case I told you of was a man who had not noticed, and a very reckless soldier at that."

I was somewhat reassured.

Watching the change in me closely, Sensei added:

"But human beings, whether healthy or ill, are fragile things either way. There is no telling when or how a man may die."

"Do you think of such things too?"

"Sound as I am, I am not altogether free of such thoughts."

A shadow of a smile showed about his mouth.

"People often drop dead, do they not. Naturally. And then there are those who die in an instant. By unnatural violence."

"What is unnatural violence?"

"I hardly know myself, but I suppose all who kill themselves use unnatural violence."

"Then those who are murdered also die by unnatural violence."

"I had not thought of the murdered at all. Indeed, now that you say it, that is so."

That day I went home with that.

Even after I got back, my father's illness did not weigh much on me.

His words about dying naturally or by unnatural violence made only a shallow impression at the time and left no hold on my mind afterward.

I began to think that I must at last set to work in earnest on the graduation thesis I had taken up and put down so many times.

XXV

Since I was to graduate that June, I had somehow to finish the thesis by the end of April as the rules required.

When I counted off February, March, April on my fingers and reckoned the days left, I began to doubt my own nerve a little.

Others had long since been gathering materials and piling up notes, and looked busy even to an outsider, while I alone had put my hand to nothing.

I had only the resolve to work hard once the new year came.

With that resolve I set to work.

And at once I found myself unable to move.

Having pictured a great subject and supposed the framework nearly complete, I now held my head and began to suffer.

So I reduced the subject of the thesis.

And to spare myself the labor of ordering my elaborated ideas into a system, I decided merely to set out the materials found in books and add a suitable conclusion at the end.

The subject I chose was closely related to Sensei's own field.

When I had once asked his opinion about the choice, he said it would do.

Somewhat flustered, I went at once to his house to ask what works I must read.

He gladly gave me all the knowledge he had, and offered besides to lend me two or three necessary books.

But he would not undertake in the least to guide me in the matter.

"Lately I read few books, so I know nothing new. You had better ask your teachers at the school."

I suddenly recalled having once heard from Okusan that he had at one time been a great reader, but that afterward, for some reason, his interest in that direction had not worked as before.

Setting the thesis aside, I spoke without much thought.

"Why can you no longer take an interest in books as you once did?"

"There is no particular reason. In short, I suppose it is because I think that however many books one reads, one does not become that much greater. And then..."

"And then—there is more?"

"Hardly enough of a reason to call more, but formerly, when I went among people or was asked something, it embarrassed me like a disgrace not to know; whereas lately not knowing has come to seem no such disgrace, and so I suppose I lost the energy to force myself to read. To put it briefly, I have grown old."

His words were, if anything, calm.

Since they carried none of the bitterness of a man who has turned his back on the world, they made little impression on me.

I went home neither thinking him old nor admiring him as great.

After that I suffered with red eyes, almost like a madman haunted by his thesis.

I asked about various matters from friends who had graduated a year before.

One of them said he had barely made the deadline by racing to the office by rickshaw on the final day.

Another said that because he brought his in some fifteen minutes past five he had nearly had it refused, and only through the goodwill of the head professor was it accepted at last.

Feeling uneasy, I also braced my nerve.

Every day I worked at my desk as long as my strength held out.

Or else I went into the dim stacks and looked over the high shelves this way and that.

My eyes hunted the gilt letters on the spines like a curio hunter digging out antiques.

As the plum blossoms opened, the cold wind gradually shifted to the south.

When that spell had passed, talk of the cherry blossoms began to reach my ears here and there.

Still I looked straight ahead like a carriage horse and was whipped along by my thesis.

Not until late April came and I had finished at last what I had planned did I cross Sensei's threshold again.

XXVI

I became free in the early summer season, when green leaves had begun imperceptibly to spread like a haze on the branches from which the double cherry blossoms had fallen.

With the heart of a bird escaped from its cage, I looked out over the wide world at a glance and beat my wings freely.

I went at once to Sensei's house.

Along the way my eyes were caught by flame-like buds bursting on the darkened branches of a trifoliate orange hedge, and by glossy brown leaves on the withered trunk of a pomegranate reflecting the sunlight softly.

I felt a freshness as though I were seeing such things for the first time in my life.

Seeing my happy face, Sensei said, "So the thesis is done? Splendid."

That is what he said.

I said, "Thanks to you it is finished at last. There is nothing more for me to do."

That is what I said.

Indeed at that moment I felt bright and clear, as though every task I had to perform were already ended, and I might spend the rest of my time in idleness with a swagger.

I had full confidence in the thesis I had written, and was satisfied with it.

Before Sensei I talked on and on about its contents.

He said in his usual tone, "I see," and "Is that so,"

and "Is that so,"

but he added no criticism beyond that.

I felt less unsatisfied than somewhat deflated.

Even so, that day my energy was lively enough to make a counterattack on his sluggish-seeming manner.

I tried to lure him out into the great world of nature that was reviving in green.

"Sensei, let us walk somewhere. It feels very good out of doors."

"Where to?"

It did not matter to me where.

I only wanted to take him out into the suburbs.

An hour later Sensei and I had left the town as I intended and were walking aimlessly through a quiet district that could be called neither village nor town.

I plucked a soft young leaf from a photinia hedge and made it whistle.

Having had a friend from Kagoshima and picked it up naturally by imitating him, I was good at making a leaf whistle.

When I went on blowing it in my pride, Sensei walked on with an indifferent air, looking away.

Presently a narrow path opened beneath a slight rise of ground so overgrown that it seemed shut in by young leaves.

From the nameplate nailed to the gatepost, which read "Such-and-such Garden," it was at once plain that this was no private residence.

Sensei looked at the gently rising entrance and said, "Shall we go in?"

That is what he said.

I said at once, "It is a nursery, isn't it?"

That was my answer.

Turning once through the plantings and climbing into the interior, we found a house on the left.

Inside the wide-open paper doors it was empty, and no one was to be seen.

Only goldfish moved in a large basin set beneath the eaves.

"How quiet. I wonder if it is all right to come in without asking."

"It should be all right."

We went on further into the interior.

But there was no one to be seen there either.

Azaleas were blooming in wild profusion, as though on fire.

Pointing among them to a tall one of a russet color, Sensei said, "That must be a Kirishima."

That is what he said.

Peonies too were planted over some thirty square meters, but the season had not come and not one of them bore a flower.

On an old bench-like thing beside this peony bed Sensei lay down and stretched himself out.

I sat down on the empty end of it and smoked.

He gazed at the sky, blue and seemingly transparent.

My own attention was taken by the color of the young leaves enclosing me.

Looking closely at that color of new leaves, I saw that each was different.

Even among maples of the same kind, not one wore the same color on its branches.

Sensei's hat, which he had tossed over the tip of a slender young cedar, was blown down by the wind.

XXVII

I picked the hat up at once.

Flicking off the red earth that clung here and there with my nail, I called to him.

"Sensei, your hat has fallen."

"Thank you."

Raising himself halfway to take it, and still in that posture, neither sitting up nor lying down, he asked me a strange question.