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I

Sosuke had carried a cushion out to the veranda a while ago and settled himself comfortably cross-legged in a spot that looked sunny, but before long he tossed aside the magazine he had been holding and stretched out flat on his side.

It was fine enough weather to be called a perfect autumn day, and the clack of clogs from people passing in the street carried cheerfully into the quiet neighborhood.

Propping his head on his elbow and looking up past the eaves, he saw a beautiful sky, clear and blue from end to end.

Compared with the cramped dimensions of the veranda he was lying on, that sky was immensely vast.

Even just lying here on a rare Sunday and taking a long look at the sky makes quite a difference, he thought, and he stared for a while at the glaring sun with his brows drawn together; but it grew too bright, so he rolled over and turned toward the paper doors.

Behind the doors his wife was doing needlework.

"Hey, it's fine weather."

he called to her.

His wife said only,

"Yes,"

and nothing more.

Sosuke, it seemed, had not particularly wanted to talk either, and he fell silent again.

After a while it was his wife who spoke.

"Why don't you go out for a little walk."

she said.

But this time Sosuke only gave a vague grunt in reply.

Two or three minutes later his wife put her face close to the glass pane of the door and peeked out at her husband lying on the veranda.

For some reason he had drawn up both knees and folded himself into a cramped shape like a shrimp.

And he had laced his hands together and thrust his black head into them, so that his face was hidden between his elbows and could not be seen at all.

"You'll catch cold sleeping there, you know,"

his wife warned.

Her way of speaking had a certain quality shared by the schoolgirls of the day, sounding like Tokyo speech and yet somehow not quite.

Blinking his large eyes inside the cage of his elbows, Sosuke answered in a low voice,

"I'm not asleep. I'm fine."

he said quietly.

Then it grew quiet again.

After the bell of a rubber-tired cart rang two or three times outside, the crowing of a rooster came from somewhere far off.

Sosuke, savoring beneath his shirt the warmth of the sunlight soaking of its own accord into the back of his newly made cotton robe, was half listening to the sounds from the street when, as if it had suddenly come to him, he called through the paper doors to his wife.

"Oyone, how do you write the character kin, the one in kinrai, meaning of late?"

he asked.

His wife showed no particular surprise, nor did she let out the shrill laugh so common in young women.

"Isn't it the same character as the O in Omi?"

she answered.

"It's that O of Omi I can't remember."

His wife slid the closed door halfway open, put a long measuring stick out past the threshold, and with its tip wrote the character on the veranda floor.

"Like this, isn't it,"

she said, and then, leaving the tip of the stick where the character ended, she gazed for a time at the perfectly clear sky.

Without looking at his wife's face, Sosuke said,

"So that's it after all,"

and since he had apparently not meant it as a joke, he did not laugh.

His wife, too, seemed to have lost all interest in the character.

"It really is lovely weather,"

she said, half to herself, and leaving the door open she took up her sewing again.

At this Sosuke lifted his head a little from between his elbows.

"Characters really are strange things,"

he said, looking at his wife's face for the first time.

"Why?"

"Why? Because no matter how easy the character is, once you start thinking it looks odd and begin to doubt it, you can't make it out anymore. The other day I got badly stuck on the character kon, the one in konnichi, today. I wrote it out properly on paper and stared at it, and somehow it began to look wrong. In the end, the more I looked the less it looked like the character at all. Haven't you ever had that happen?"

"Certainly not."

"Then it's only me."

said Sosuke, putting a hand to his head.

"There's something wrong with you."

"Maybe it is my nerves after all."

"That's what it is."

said his wife, looking at his face.

At last her husband got to his feet.

Stepping over the sewing box and the scraps of thread as if leaping across them, he opened the sliding door of the sitting room, and just beyond it lay the parlor.

Since the south side was blocked off by the entrance hall, the paper door at the far end looked chilly to eyes coming in suddenly out of the sunlight.

When he slid it open, a cliff rose from the edge of the veranda at a slope that seemed to press against the eaves, so that even the morning sun, which ought to have reached the house, was slow to cast its light there.

Grass grew on the cliff.

Since not a single stone had been laid up from below, there was always the uneasy sense that it might collapse at any moment; and yet, strangely, it never had, and perhaps for that reason the landlord had left it just as it always was for years.

It had originally been a solid bamboo grove, they said, and when it was cleared the roots alone had been left unturned and buried in the embankment, so the ground is firmer than you would think, the greengrocer who had lived in the neighborhood for twenty years had once explained at some length at the kitchen door.

At the time Sosuke had asked back: but if the roots are still there, wouldn't the bamboo grow again and turn it back into a grove?

To which the greengrocer replied: well, you see, once it's been cleared like that, it doesn't work out so neatly.

But the cliff itself is safe.

No matter what happens it will never come down, he insisted, as if defending something of his own, and went off.

Even with autumn come, the cliff showed no sign of taking on any particular color.

Only the smell of green grass had faded, leaving it shaggy and uneven.

As for anything elegant, such as pampas grass or ivy, there was none to be seen at all.

In their place, left over from the old days, two tall bamboos stood straight up halfway along the slope and three more near the top.

They had turned somewhat yellow, and when the sun struck their stems, one could put one's head out past the eaves and feel as though one were looking at the warmth of autumn on the embankment.

Sosuke was a man who left in the morning and came home after four, so in these days of shortening light he rarely had a chance to look up at the top of the cliff.

Coming out of the dark privy and catching water from the basin in his hands, he happened to glance up beyond the eaves, and only then did he remember the bamboo.

At the top of each stem the fine leaves gathered so that they looked like a shaven head.

Drunk on the autumn sun, they hung heavily downward, and not one of the quietly overlapping leaves stirred.

Sosuke shut the paper door, went back into the parlor, and sat down at his desk.

It was called the parlor only because guests were shown into it; in fact it would have been more accurate to call it a study, or a living room.

Since there was an alcove on the north side, an odd scroll hung there for form's sake, and in front of it stood a clumsy flower vase the color of red clay.

There was no framed picture or anything else above the lintel.

Only two brass hooks gleamed there.

Besides that there was one bookcase with glass doors.

But nothing especially fine enough to catch the eye was kept inside it.

Sosuke opened the drawer of the desk with its silver fittings and began rummaging through it, but before finding anything in particular he shut it again with a snap.

Then he took the lid off the inkstone box and began to write a letter.

He wrote one, sealed it, thought for a moment, and then called through the sliding door to his wife.

"Say, what was the house number for the Saekis in Naka Rokubancho?"

he asked.

"Isn't it number twenty-five?"

his wife answered; then, just as Sosuke was finishing the address, she added,

"A letter won't do. You have to go and talk it over properly."

she added.

"Well, even if it won't do, let me send one letter first. If that doesn't work, then I'll go."

he declared; and when his wife did not answer, he pressed the point.

"Come now, that will do, won't it?"

he said again.

His wife seemed unable to say it would not do, and she argued no further.

Sosuke took the letter and went straight from the parlor to the entrance hall.

Hearing her husband's footsteps, his wife finally rose from her place, going out to the entrance by way of the veranda from the sitting room.

"I'm just going for a walk."

"Enjoy yourself,"

his wife answered with a smile.

About half an hour later the lattice door rattled open, and Oyone once again set down her sewing and went out along the veranda to the entrance, only to find, instead of the Sosuke she had expected, his younger brother Koroku coming in wearing his higher-school cap.

Unfastening the buttons of a long black woolen cloak that left only five or six inches of his trousers showing, he said,

"It's hot."

he was saying.

"Well, that's hardly surprising. Going out in something that heavy in this weather."

"No, I thought it would be cold after dark."

said Koroku, half in excuse, and followed his brother's wife into the sitting room, where his eye fell on the half-finished garment.

"Hard at work as always, I see,"

he said, and with that sat down cross-legged in front of the long brazier.

His brother's wife pushed the sewing off into a corner, came and sat opposite Koroku, lifted the kettle aside for a moment, and began adding charcoal.

"I've had plenty of tea, thank you,"

said Koroku.

"You don't want any?"

Oyone pressed him in her schoolgirl manner, then said,

"Then what about cake?"

and smiled at him.

"Is there any?"

asked Koroku.

"No, there isn't,"

she answered honestly; then, as if remembering, "Wait a moment, there may be some after all,"

she said, and as she rose she pushed aside the charcoal scuttle beside her and opened the cupboard above the closet.

Koroku looked at Oyone from behind, at the place where her jacket rode up over her sash.

Whatever she was hunting for seemed likely to take some time.

"Never mind the cake, then. More to the point, where has my brother got to today?"

he asked.

"He stepped out just now,"

Oyone answered without turning around, still searching inside the cupboard.

Presently she shut the door with a clap.

"It's no use. Your brother has eaten every bit of it without my noticing,"

she said, coming back to sit across the brazier from him.

"Then give me something good for dinner instead."

"Yes, I will,"

and glancing at the wall clock she saw it was already close to four.

Oyone said, "Four, five, six,"

counting off the hours.

Koroku sat silently watching his brother's wife.

In truth he could take little interest in her cooking.

"Has my brother gone to the Saekis for me yet?"

he asked.

"He has been saying he will go, ever since the other day. But he leaves in the morning and doesn't get back till evening, you know. By the time he comes home he is worn out, and even going to the bathhouse seems too much for him. So it really is rather hard to press him about it."

"I'm sure my brother is busy, but until that is settled I can't put my mind at rest or study properly."

and as he spoke Koroku took up the brass tongs and began tracing something over and over in the ashes of the brazier.

Oyone watched the moving tips of the tongs.

"That is why he sent a letter a little while ago,"

she said, as if to console him.

"Saying what?"

"I didn't happen to see it. But I'm sure it was about that. Ask him when he gets back. I'm certain that's what it was."

"If he really did send a letter, then it must have been about that."

"Yes, he really did send it. He has just gone out with that very letter to post it."

Koroku did not want to listen to any more of his sister-in-law's words, half excuse and half consolation.

If he had time to go out walking, he might just as well have taken himself there instead of writing, Koroku thought, and the thought left him in no pleasant mood.

He went into the parlor, took a red-bound foreign book from the shelf, and sat turning its pages here and there.

II

Sosuke, who had noticed none of this, had gone as far as the corner of the street and bought stamps and a packet of Shikishima cigarettes

at the same shop, and had posted the letter at once; but since it seemed somehow unsatisfying to turn straight back the way he had come, he strolled along with the smoke of his cigarette wavering in the autumn light, and presently took it into his head to go somewhere far off, stamp firmly on his mind the impression of what Tokyo was like, and carry that home as the souvenir of this Sunday before he went to bed.

He was not only a man who had lived for years breathing the air of Tokyo; he took the streetcar to and from his office every day and so passed twice through the busy quarters as a matter of habit. But since neither his body nor his mind had any room to spare, he always went through them absently, and lately the awareness that he was living in the middle of those busy streets had simply never come to him.

Ordinarily, of course, he was too driven by busyness to give it a thought; but when the holiday came round once in seven days and he had a chance to let his mind settle, his everyday life suddenly looked restless and superficial.

And when he arrived at the conclusion that, living in Tokyo though he was, he had never yet really seen Tokyo, he always felt a strange loneliness in it.

At such times he would go out into the streets as if the idea had just struck him.

Moreover, if he happened to have a little money about him, he sometimes thought of going off on a grand spree.

But his loneliness was never fierce enough to drive him to any real extreme, so before he could rush that far he would think better of it and give it up as absurd.

Not only that: as is usual with such men, the bottom of his purse was in most cases just full enough to warn him against rashness, so that rather than devise some troublesome plan it was easier in the end to thrust his hands in his sleeves and wander home.

And so Sosuke's loneliness could be soothed until the next Sunday by no more than a walk or a look around the bazaar.

On this day too, Sosuke boarded a streetcar, thinking he might as well.

But in spite of the fine Sunday weather there were fewer passengers than usual, so the ride was unusually comfortable.

What was more, every passenger wore a peaceful face, and all of them looked easy and unhurried.

Sitting there, Sosuke looked back on his own lot, fighting every morning at the same hour for a place on the car bound for the Marunouchi district.

Nothing is bleaker than one's fellow passengers on the commuting car.

Whether hanging from a strap or sitting on the velvet seat, he had never once felt any warm human feeling stir in him.

He had thought that quite enough, and had simply shared the ride to wherever he was going as though sitting knee to knee and shoulder to shoulder with machinery, then abruptly got off.

Watching an old woman opposite him put her mouth to the ear of a granddaughter of about eight and say something, and a woman of thirty or so who looked like a shopkeeper's wife sitting nearby taking a fancy to the child and asking her age and her name, he felt for the first time in a long while as if he had come into another world.

Above his head advertisements were hung in frames all along the car.

Ordinarily Sosuke did not even notice them.

Reading the first for no particular reason, he found it was a handbill for a removal firm: moving house made simple.

The next set out three lines, for those who understand economy, for those who take care of their health, for those who value fire safety, and after them urged the use of a gas range, with a picture of flames coming out of one.

The third announced the masterpiece of the great Russian writer Count Tolstoy, Snows of the Ages,

and a rough-and-ready comedy troupe under one Kotatsu, printed in white on a red ground.

Sosuke spent about ten minutes carefully reading through every advertisement some three times over.

There was nothing he particularly wanted to go and see and nothing he wanted to buy; but the mere fact that these advertisements registered clearly in his mind, that he had time enough to read each one to the end, and that he had the mental leisure to take them all in, gave Sosuke no small satisfaction.

His life was such that on any day but Sunday, going and coming, he could not be calm enough even to take pride in so small a leisure as this.

Sosuke got off the car at Surugadai-shita.

As soon as he stepped down his eye was caught by the foreign books arranged handsomely behind a window on the right.

He stood before it a while, looking at the gold lettering stamped brightly on red and blue and striped and patterned bindings.

He understood the titles well enough, of course, but not the slightest curiosity stirred in him to pick one up and look inside.

A time when he could not pass a bookshop without wanting to go in, and could not go in without wanting to buy something, belonged, from Sosuke's point of view, to a life a whole age ago.

Only a volume called The History of Gambling, especially handsomely bound and displayed right in the middle, added some odd touch of novelty to his thoughts.

Smiling to himself, Sosuke crossed the busy street to the other side and this time peered into a watchmaker's window.

Gold watches and gold chains were laid out in numbers, but these too registered on his eye merely as beautiful colors and shapes and did not go so far as to make him want to buy.

Even so, he read each price tag hung on its silk thread and compared it with the article.

And he was genuinely surprised at how cheap gold watches were.

He paused briefly in front of an umbrella shop too.

At a shop selling Western notions his eye was caught by a necktie hanging beside a silk hat.

The pattern was far better than the one he wore every day, and he had half stepped inside to ask the price when it struck him that changing his necktie from tomorrow would come to nothing, and, suddenly unwilling to open his purse, he walked on.

He stood looking a good while at a draper's as well.

He learned a great many names he had gone through life until now without knowing: quail silk, and kokiori, and seiryo weave.

In front of a branch of a Kyoto shop called Erishin, he pressed the brim of his hat almost against the glass and gazed a long time at the exquisitely embroidered collar-pieces for women's kimonos.

Among them was a tasteful one that would have suited his wife exactly.

No sooner had the thought of buying it for her stirred in him than the thought that such things belonged to five or six years ago came after it and rubbed out the pleasant impulse at once.

Sosuke turned from the window with a wry smile and walked on, but for the next fifty yards or so he felt vaguely flat and paid no particular attention to the street or the shopfronts.

Then he noticed a large magazine shop on the corner, with new publications advertised in big characters under its eaves.

Paper was stretched over long narrow frames like ladders, and painted boards were colored like picture designs.

Sosuke read them one by one.

The authors' names and the titles of the works seemed both to be things he had seen once in newspaper advertisements and to be entirely new to him.

In the shadow at the corner of this shop, a man of about thirty in a black bowler hat sat comfortably cross-legged on the ground, calling out, here you are, amusement for the little ones, as he blew up a large rubber balloon.

When it swelled it naturally took the shape of a Daruma doll, and Sosuke was impressed that eyes and a mouth had been drawn on it roughly in ink.

What was more, once it was blown up it stayed inflated indefinitely.

And it would sit upright on the tip of a finger or the palm of a hand, wherever you liked.

Then, when something thin like a toothpick was pushed into the hole at its base, it shrank away all at once with a hiss.

Any number of hurrying passersby went by, but not one of them stopped to watch.

The man in the bowler sat coolly cross-legged in a corner of the busy street, and as though he felt nothing of what was going on around him, kept calling out, here you are, amusement for the little ones, and blowing up his Daruma.

Sosuke paid one sen five rin for one of the balloons, had it squeezed flat with a hiss, and put it in his sleeve.

He felt like going to a clean barbershop for a haircut, but before he could find where such a clean shop might be the sun had begun to sink, so he took a streetcar again and headed home.

By the time Sosuke reached the end of the line and handed his ticket to the conductor, the color was already fading from the sky and the dark shadows were deepening on the damp street.

As he gripped the iron pole to get down, he felt a sudden chill.

The people who got off with him all scattered and walked away briskly as though they had business to attend to.

Looking toward the edge of the town, he could see faint white smoke stirring in the air from the eaves and roofs of the houses on either side.

Sosuke too quickened his pace toward the direction where the trees were thick.

To think that this Sunday and its easy weather were over already brought on a certain mood, part fleeting sadness and part loneliness.

And when he considered that from tomorrow he would be a man who must work away again exactly as before, this half day of life suddenly seemed precious, and the six and a half unspiritual days remaining seemed utterly dreary.

Even as he walked, all that came before his eyes was the big room with poor light and few windows, the face of the colleague sitting next to him, and the figure of his superior saying, Nonaka, a moment please.

Passing the fish shop called Uokatsu and turning five or six doors farther on into what was neither quite an alley nor quite a side street, he came to a high cliff at the far end, with four or five rented houses of identical build ranged to left and right of it.

Until quite recently there had been among them, behind a thin cedar hedge, one weathered old house that looked as though some minor retainer of the shogun had lived out his days in it; but once a man named Sakai, who lived at the top of the cliff, bought the property, the thatch was pulled down and the hedge torn out in no time, and it was rebuilt into the new houses that stood there now.

Sosuke's house stood at the very end of the side street, the last one on the left, right at the foot of the cliff, so it was somewhat gloomy; but in exchange, being farthest from the main road, it would presumably be a little quieter, and after talking it over with his wife he had deliberately chosen it.

Since this once-in-seven-days Sunday was already drawing to a close, Sosuke thought he would get to the bathhouse quickly, have a haircut if there was time, and then take his dinner at leisure; and he hurriedly opened the lattice door.

From the kitchen came the sound of plates and small bowls.

As he was stepping up, he set his foot without noticing on the clogs Koroku had kicked off.

He was bending down to set them straight when Koroku came out.

From the kitchen Oyone called,

"Who is it? Is that you?"

she asked.

Sosuke said,

"Ah, so you're here,"

and stepped up into the parlor.

From the time he had posted the letter, through his walk in Kanda and his ride home from the streetcar, not the faintest thought of Koroku had crossed Sosuke's mind.

When he saw Koroku's face he felt awkward, as though he had done something wrong.

"Oyone, Oyone,"

he called his wife from the kitchen.

"Koroku is here, so make us something good to eat."

he told her.

His wife came out busily, leaving the kitchen door standing open, and stood at the entrance to the parlor; but the moment she heard this perfectly obvious instruction she said,

"Yes, right away,"

and made to go back; then she returned once more.

"In exchange, Koroku, I'm sorry to trouble you, but would you close the shutters in the parlor and light the lamp. Neither Kiyo nor I can spare a hand just now."

she asked.

Koroku said simply,

"All right,"

and got to his feet.

From the kitchen came the sound of Kiyo chopping something.

There was the sound of hot water or cold being poured out into the sink.

"Ma'am, where shall I move this to?"

came a voice.

"Where are the scissors for trimming the lamp wick?"

came Koroku's voice.

There was a hiss as the water boiled over onto the fire of the charcoal stove.

Sosuke sat silently in the dark parlor holding his hands over the little brazier.

Only the lump of fire showing above the ashes had color and glowed red.

Just then the daughter of the landlord's house at the top of the cliff behind them began to play the piano.

As if reminded of something, Sosuke got up and went out to the veranda to close the shutters of the parlor.

Above the tall bamboo, which broke the color of the sky with its faint blackness, one or two stars twinkled.

The sound of the piano came from behind the bamboo.

III

By the time Sosuke and Koroku came back from the bathhouse with their towels hanging from their hands, a square dining table had been set in the middle of the parlor with Oyone's cooking neatly laid out on it.

The fire in the little brazier burned a deeper color than when they left.

The lamp was bright too.

When Sosuke drew the cushion in front of his desk toward him and settled himself comfortably cross-legged on it, Oyone took his towel and soap and asked,

"Was the water good?"

she asked.

Sosuke answered with only a single word,

"Mm,"

and his manner, rather than curt, looked like that of a man whose spirit had gone slack after a hot bath.

"It was very good water,"

said Koroku, turning to Oyone to help things along.

"Still, that crowd is more than one can bear,"

said Sosuke wearily, resting his elbow on the edge of the desk.

Sosuke always went to the bath after the office let out and he had come home, which meant exactly the crowded hour of dusk before the evening meal.

For the past two or three months he had not once looked at the color of the water in daylight.

That would be one thing, but as often as not three or four days went by without his crossing the threshold of the public bath at all.

When Sunday comes, he was always thinking, he would get up early and before anything else soak up to his neck in clean water; but when the Sunday actually came, it would strike him that today was the only day he could sleep late for once, and while he dawdled in bed the hours would pass without mercy, until he thought: oh, what a nuisance, I'll skip it today and go next Sunday instead. It had become almost a matter of inertia.

"Somehow or other I'd like at least to get to the morning bath,"

said Sosuke.

"And yet on the days you could go to the morning bath, you always oversleep,"

his wife said in a teasing tone.

Koroku had made up his mind that this was his brother's inborn weakness.

Although he was living the life of a student himself, he could not understand how precious his brother's Sunday was to his brother.

Six days of dark mental labor his brother tried to make good with the warmth of this one day, throwing a great many hopes into its twenty-four hours.

So there was too much he wanted to do, and he could carry out only two or three things out of ten.

No, even of those two or three, once he set about them the time they cost began to seem too precious, so he would draw back his hand, and while he sat still the Sunday would somehow come to an end.

That Sosuke, whose circumstances forced him to cut back even his own diversion and rest and amusement and taste to this degree, did not exert himself for Koroku not because he would not but because his mind had no room left to exert itself, was something Koroku could in no way accept.

He thought of his brother as simply a selfish man who idled away whatever free time he had playing with his wife, who was no support and no help at all, and who was really cold at heart.

But Koroku had begun to feel this only recently, and to be exact only since the business with the Saekis had begun.

Being young and therefore impatient about everything, Koroku had been convinced that if he asked his brother the matter would be settled today or tomorrow; and when it dragged on with no end in sight, and his brother had not even gone to see them yet, he grew quite resentful.

But today, having waited for his brother to come home and met him, brothers being brothers, there was something warm in his brother's manner even without any special courtesies, so Koroku put off what he had meant to say, went to the bath with him, and found himself able to talk quietly and openly.

The brothers sat down to the table at their ease.

Oyone too took a corner of the table without ceremony.

Both Sosuke and Koroku emptied two or three little cups of sake.

Before starting on the rice, Sosuke said with a laugh,

"That reminds me, I have something amusing,"

and taking the rubber Daruma balloon he had bought out of his sleeve, he blew it up large for them.

Then he set it on the lid of a bowl and explained its special features.

Both Oyone and Koroku were delighted and watched the floating ball.

At last Koroku gave it a puff, and the Daruma fell from the table onto the matting.

Even so it did not tip over.

"You see?"

said Sosuke.

Oyone, being a woman, laughed aloud, but as she opened the rice tub and served her husband she turned to Koroku.

"Your brother is a carefree soul,"

she said, half in his defense.

Sosuke took the bowl from his wife and began to eat without a word of excuse.

Koroku too formally took up his chopsticks.

The Daruma was not mentioned again, but with that for a start the three of them went on with innocent, easy talk until the meal was over.

At last Koroku changed the subject.

"By the way, a terrible thing has happened to Prince Ito,"

he said.

Five or six days earlier, when Sosuke saw the extra edition announcing Prince Ito's assassination, he had come out to the kitchen where Oyone was working and said, listen, this is dreadful, Ito has been killed;

and with that he had laid the extra he was holding on his wife's apron and gone into the study; but from his tone of voice he had sounded, if anything, quite calm.

"You say it's dreadful, but your voice doesn't sound the least bit as if it were."

Oyone had even gone out of her way to point that out to him afterward, half in jest.

After that not a day passed without five or six columns about Prince Ito in the newspaper, but Sosuke seemed so unconcerned about the assassination that one could not tell whether he was reading them or not.

Sometimes, when he came home at night and Oyone was serving his rice, she would ask, was there anything about Ito again today;

and since he would only answer, yes, a good deal,

she could not know what had been in that day's paper unless she took the unread morning edition folded in her husband's pocket out afterward and read it herself.

And since in the end Oyone brought up Prince Ito only as material for conversation after her husband came home, she did not want to drag the talk by force in a direction he had no heart for.

So between these two, from the day the extra came out until Koroku raised it this evening, a question that was shaking the whole country had not been received with any special interest.

"Why in the world was he killed?"

Oyone asked Koroku the very same thing she had asked Sosuke when she saw the extra.

"Someone fired a pistol at him again and again and the shots hit him,"

Koroku answered honestly.

"Yes, but why in the world was he killed?"

Koroku looked as though he could not make out what she meant.

Sosuke said in a calm tone,

"It comes down to fate, I suppose,"

and drank the tea in his cup with relish.

Oyone was evidently still not satisfied.

"And why did he go off to Manchuria in the first place?"

she asked.

"Indeed, why."

said Sosuke, looking full and thoroughly content.

"They say he had some secret business with Russia,"

said Koroku with a serious face.

Oyone said,

"I see. Still, it is horrid. To be killed."

she said.

"A cheap salaried man like me would hate to be killed, but for a man like Ito it is better to go to Harbin and be killed,"

said Sosuke, warming up for the first time.

"Oh, why?"

"Why? Because being killed is what makes Ito a great man in history. Just try dying an ordinary death. It doesn't come out like that."

"I see. Perhaps that's how it is,"

Koroku said, seeming somewhat impressed; then presently,

"At any rate, Manchuria and Harbin sound like dangerous places. I can't help feeling there is something perilous about them,"

he said.

"Well, all sorts of people end up drifting together there."

At this Oyone gave a strange look at the face of the husband who had answered so.

Sosuke seemed to notice it.

"Well then, you may as well clear the table,"

he said, urging his wife along; and picking up the Daruma from the matting again and balancing it on the tip of his forefinger, he said,

"It really is odd. To think they can make a thing work so neatly."

he was saying.

After Kiyo came out from the kitchen and carried off the table with its scattered plates and small bowls, Oyone too went into the next room to make fresh tea, so the brothers were left facing each other.

"Ah, that's better. A table after a meal is an ugly thing,"

said Sosuke, with the face of a man wholly done with dining.

In the kitchen Kiyo was laughing away.

"What is so funny, Kiyo?"

came Oyone's voice through the paper door.

Kiyo said, oh dear, and laughed all the more.

The brothers said nothing, half listening to the maid's laughter.

After a while Oyone came out again with a cake dish in one hand and a tea tray in the other.

From a large teapot with a wisteria-vine handle she poured coarse tea, easy on the stomach and the head, into cups as big as rice bowls and set them before the two men.

"What is she laughing at like that?"

her husband asked.

But he did not look at Oyone's face; instead he peered into the cake dish.

"It's because you bought a toy like that and sit there balancing it on your fingertip as if it were great fun. And with no children of our own."

As if it did not touch him at all, Sosuke said lightly, "Is that so,"

but then he added slowly,

"Even so, we did have a child once,"

savoring his own words as he said them, and raised lukewarm eyes to his wife.

Oyone fell utterly silent.

"Won't you have some cake?"

she said after a while, turning to Koroku; but she let his answer,

"Yes, I will,"

go past her and rose abruptly for the sitting room.

The brothers were left facing each other again.

This being the far end of the hill district, nearly twenty minutes on foot from the last stop of the streetcar, the neighborhood was quieter than one would expect, though the evening had only begun.

Now and then the clear clack of thin-soled clogs passed in the street, and the cold of the night steadily deepened.

Sosuke sat with his hands in his sleeves.

"It's warm in the daytime, but the moment night falls it turns cold. Have they got the steam on in your dormitory yet?"

he asked.

"No, not yet. At school they won't light the steam until it gets a good deal colder."

"Is that so. Then it must be cold."

"Yes. Though the cold itself is nothing I mind,"

he said, and hesitated for a moment; but at last he brought himself to it.

"About the Saekis, what is going to happen? I heard from your wife just now that you sent a letter today."

"Yes, I sent it. They'll answer something within two or three days. After that I'll go myself, or do whatever else is needed."

Koroku looked at his brother's unruffled manner with dissatisfaction in his heart.

But since there was nothing in Sosuke's bearing sharp enough to provoke anger, nor anything mean enough to look like self-defense, he could not summon the courage to fly at him.

He only said,

"So you've left it as it was until today?"

merely confirming the fact.

"Yes, I'm sorry to say it has been left as it was. I only just managed to write the letter today. It can't be helped. My nerves have been bad lately,"

he said in earnest.

Koroku smiled bitterly.

"If it comes to nothing, I'm thinking I may leave school and go off to Manchuria or Korea while I still can."

"Manchuria or Korea? That is drastic. Didn't you say a moment ago that Manchuria was dangerous and you didn't like it?"

The discussion went back and forth like this and came to nothing in the end.

At last Sosuke said,

"Well, never mind, don't worry so; it will work out somehow. In any case, as soon as the answer comes I'll let you know at once. Then we'll talk it over again,"

and with that the matter was brought to a close.

When Koroku looked into the sitting room on his way out, Oyone was leaning against the long brazier doing nothing.

"Good night,"

he called; and "Oh, are you going,"

she said, finally rising to come to him.

IV

From the Saekis, over whom Koroku had been fretting, an answer came after two or three days as expected; but it was an extremely brief one, no more than a note in his aunt's own hand, put politely into an envelope with a three-sen stamp when a postcard would have served.

Coming home from the office, awkwardly changing out of his tight-sleeved work clothes, and sitting down before the brazier, Sosuke caught sight of an envelope deliberately left protruding an inch from the drawer; and with one sip of the coarse tea Oyone poured for him, he broke the seal at once.

"Well, well, so Yasunosuke has gone to Kobe,"

he said as he read.

"When?"

Oyone asked, still in the posture she had taken when setting the teacup before her husband.

"She doesn't say when. At any rate she writes that he is bound to return to the capital ere long, so I suppose he'll be back soon."

"Ere long, indeed. That's your aunt for you."

Sosuke showed neither agreement nor disagreement with Oyone's remark.

He rolled the letter up when he had read it, tossed it down beside him, and ran his hand uneasily over a chin four or five days unshaven.

Oyone picked the letter up at once, but made no particular move to read it.

Holding it on her lap, she looked at her husband's face.

"He is bound to return to the capital ere long, and then what?"

she asked.

"It means: once he is back, I shall consult Yasunosuke and give you some sort of answer."

"Ere long is vague. Doesn't she say when he is coming back?"

"No."

For form's sake Oyone opened the letter on her lap for the first time.

Then she folded it as it had been.

"The envelope, please,"

she said, holding out her hand toward her husband.

Sosuke took the blue envelope that lay wedged between himself and the brazier and handed it to his wife.

Oyone puffed it open to make it round and slipped the letter inside.

Then she rose and went to the kitchen.

Sosuke gave the letter no further thought.

He recalled that a colleague at the office had spoken that day of having seen Field Marshal Kitchener, lately come from England, near Shimbashi; and it seemed that a man of that sort was so made that wherever in the world he went he set the world astir, and perhaps he really had been born that way.

When he took the fate he had dragged along out of his own past, and the future that was to open before him as its continuation, and compared them with those of this man Kitchener, they were so far apart that the two could hardly be thought the same kind of creature.

Thinking this, Sosuke smoked one cigarette after another.

Outside, the wind had risen since evening, and it made a sound as though it were attacking deliberately from far off.

Now and then it stopped, and in the intervals everything was so still that it felt lonelier than when the wind raged.

Folding his arms, Sosuke thought that it was about the season when the fire bells begin to ring.

When he went out to the kitchen, his wife had the charcoal stove glowing red and was grilling slices of fish.

Kiyo was crouched at the sink washing pickles.

Neither said a word; each worked away at her own task.

Sosuke stood with the door open and listened for a while to the hiss of juice or fat dripping from the fish; then, still without a word, he closed the door and went back to his place.

His wife had not even taken her eyes off the fish.

When the meal was over and husband and wife sat facing each other across the brazier, Oyone brought it up again.

"The Saekis are a nuisance, aren't they,"

she said.

"Well, it can't be helped. There is nothing to do but wait until Yasunosuke gets back from Kobe."

"Wouldn't it be better to see your aunt and talk it over before then?"

"I suppose so. Well, they will say something before long. Let's leave it until then."

"Koroku will be angry. Will that be all right?"

Oyone pressed the point deliberately, and smiled.

Sosuke lowered his eyes and tucked the toothpick he was holding into the collar of his robe.

After letting a day pass, Sosuke finally sent Koroku word of the Saekis' answer.

This time too he added at the end of the letter, in his usual way, the sense that it would all work out somehow before long.

And he felt as though for the present the burden of the matter had been lifted from his shoulders.

With the air of a man for whom, until events pressed in on him again, it was less trouble simply to forget, he went off to the office every day and came home from the office again.

He came home late, and it was rare for him to undertake anything so tiresome as going out again once he was back.

Almost no visitors came.

When there was nothing to be done, he would even let Kiyo go to bed before ten.

Husband and wife sat facing each other every evening on either side of the same brazier and talked for an hour or so after dinner.

The subjects of their talk were of a level suited to their way of living.

But the painful household question of how they were to manage the rice merchant's bill at the end of the month had never once passed their lips.

Nor, on the other hand, was there any criticism of novels or literature, let alone the sort of brilliant exchange that flits like heat shimmer between a man and a woman.

They were not so very old, yet they looked like people who had already passed through all that and were growing plainer by the day.

Or else they looked like two utterly ordinary, colorless people who had come together from the outset merely to form the customary relation of husband and wife.

On the surface neither of them seemed to fret much over anything.

That much can be guessed from the attitude they took over the matter of Koroku.

Being a woman after all, Oyone did remind him once or twice.

"I wonder whether Yasunosuke isn't back yet. Won't you go over to Bancho this Sunday and see?"

she said; but Sosuke would only answer,

"Yes, I might as well go,"

and when the Sunday on which he might as well have gone arrived, he let it pass as though he had forgotten it entirely.

Oyone saw this and made no move to reproach him.

If the weather was fine she would say,

"Why don't you go out for a little walk,"

she would say.

If it rained or the wind blew she would say,

"How lucky that it is Sunday today,"

she would say.

Fortunately Koroku did not come again even once.

This young man was intensely single-minded and highly strung, and in the way he would push straight on once he had settled on something he resembled Sosuke in his student days; but on the other hand, if his mind happened to change, he would turn right over as though yesterday had never been and wear a perfectly untroubled face.

There too, being brothers, he was the old Sosuke exactly.

Besides that, his head was comparatively clear, and whether he poured feeling into reasoning or set a frame of reasoning around his feelings one could not tell, but at any rate he would not be satisfied until things had been given a logical shape, and once that shape was given he was apt to throw himself in so wholly that he could not leave it unrealized.

On top of that, since his energy held out beyond what his constitution seemed to allow, he would do almost anything in the heat of his young blood.

Every time Sosuke looked at his brother, he could not help feeling that his own former self had come back to life and was moving about before his eyes.

Sometimes it made him anxious.

At other times it left a bitter taste.

On such occasions he thought in his heart that heaven had perhaps set Koroku before his eyes on purpose, so as to call up as often as possible the bitter memory of how single-mindedly he himself had once behaved.

And that frightened him greatly.

When he considered that this boy too might have been born to fall into the same fate as his own, he began, in turn, to be deeply uneasy.

At times it was less uneasiness than plain unpleasantness.

And yet to this day Sosuke had never said anything to Koroku in the way of advice, nor given him any warning about his future.

His manner toward his brother was merely the ordinary, commonplace one.

Just as his present life was so subdued that one could not believe it belonged to a man with such a past, so in the way he dealt with his brother the bearing of an elder with experience worth calling a past did not readily appear.

Between Sosuke and Koroku there had been two more boys, but both had died young, so that although they were brothers there were about ten years between them.

Moreover, since Sosuke had transferred to Kyoto in his first year for certain reasons, they had lived under one roof only until Koroku was twelve or thirteen.

Sosuke still remembered Koroku as a stubborn, contrary little rascal.

In those days his father was still alive and the family's circumstances were not bad, so they kept a rickshaw man of their own housed in the tenement inside the grounds and lived comfortably.

This rickshaw man had a child some three years younger than Koroku, who was always Koroku's playmate.

One blazing summer day Sosuke saw the two of them tying a paper bag to the end of a long pole beneath the big persimmon tree, competing to catch cicadas, and he said, Kane, if you let the sun beat on your head like that you'll get sunstroke; here, put this on, and brought out an old summer hat of Koroku's for him.

Whereupon Koroku, furious that his brother had given away something of his without permission, snatched the hat out of Kane's hands, flung it on the ground, sprang up onto it, and crushed the straw hat flat.

Sosuke leapt barefoot down from the veranda and struck Koroku on the head.

From that time on, Koroku appeared in Sosuke's eyes as a thoroughly hateful little boy.

In his second year Sosuke was obliged to leave the university.

He was also unable to return to the house in Tokyo.

He went straight from Kyoto to Hiroshima, and while he had been living there about half a year his father died.

His mother had died some six years before his father.

So all that remained behind was his father's mistress, a woman of twenty-five or six, and Koroku, who was sixteen.

Sosuke, who came up to Tokyo for the first time in a long while on receiving a telegram from the Saekis, thought he would settle the family's affairs once the funeral was over; but as he looked into things one by one, he was startled to find that the property he had assumed existed was unexpectedly small, and that there were instead a good many debts he had assumed did not exist.

When he consulted his uncle Saeki, he was told that there was nothing for it but to sell the house and land.

It was decided that the mistress should be given a suitable sum and dismissed at once.

As for Koroku, it was arranged that his uncle should take him in and look after him for the time being.

But the house and land themselves, the crucial thing, could hardly be sold on the spot.

There being no help for it, he asked his uncle to raise money for the moment and settle the immediate obligations.

His uncle was a man of enterprise who put his hand to all sorts of ventures and failed at them, a speculator, one might say.

Even in the days when Sosuke was living in Tokyo, his uncle had often talked his father round and got money out of him with fine words.

Perhaps Sosuke's father had his own greed in it too, but at this rate the sums poured into his uncle's ventures were by no means small.

Even now, at the time of his father's death, his uncle's own situation seemed little changed from before; but there were obligations from the past, and as is usual with such men, when it came to a pinch he could manage money comparatively easily, so his uncle cheerfully undertook to settle things.

In exchange, Sosuke left the whole matter of selling his house and land entirely to his uncle.

To put it briefly, it was rather as though he had handed over the land and buildings as payment for raising money in an emergency.

His uncle said,

"At all events, with a thing like this you lose money unless you sell it to the right buyer."

he said.

All the furnishings that were merely bulky and worth nothing were sold off, but as for five or six hanging scrolls and a dozen or so antiques, Sosuke agreed with his uncle's view that one would lose money unless one took one's time and looked for someone who wanted them, and decided to leave them in his uncle's keeping.

When everything had been deducted, about two thousand yen in cash remained in his hands; and Sosuke realized that some part of it would have to go toward Koroku's schooling.

But if he were to send money every month, in those days when his own position was still unsettled it seemed likely to prove extremely hard to carry out; so painful as it was, he made up his mind and handed half of it to his uncle, asking him to do what he could.

Since he himself had failed midway, he felt he would at least like to see his brother set up as a man; and leaving behind the shaky hope that once this thousand yen was gone something could be managed again, or that others would manage it, he went back to Hiroshima.

About six months later a letter came in his uncle's own hand saying the house had finally been sold and he could rest easy; but since it said nothing whatever about the price, Sosuke wrote back to ask, and the answer, some two weeks in coming, said that the sum was quite enough to make good the advance, so there was nothing to worry about.

Sosuke felt no little dissatisfaction at this reply; but since the same letter said, as for the particulars, when next we meet, he felt he would like to go to Tokyo at once, and half in consultation he told his wife that this and this was the case; whereupon Oyone looked sorry for him and said,

"But since you can't go, there's nothing to be done,"

and smiled as she always did.

At that moment Sosuke folded his arms and thought for a while like a man who had just heard sentence pronounced by his own wife; but he was bound by a position and by circumstances from which no contrivance could free him, and so it simply came to nothing.

There being no help for it, he exchanged three or four more letters, but the result was always the same: as if stamped from a seal, the phrase when next we meet came back again and again.

"This is hopeless,"

said Sosuke, looking at Oyone with something like anger in his face.

About three months later, just when he had at last managed to arrange things and was thinking of taking Oyone up to Tokyo for the first time in ages, he caught a cold and took to his bed, which turned into typhoid fever, so that he spent more than sixty days in bed and for another thirty or so was too weakened to do his work properly.

Not long after he had fully recovered, Sosuke found himself obliged to leave Hiroshima and move to Fukuoka.

Before moving he thought it a good opportunity to get up to Tokyo for a little while; but this time too he was held down by various circumstances, and in the end he failed at that as well, and once again entrusted his fate to a train running west.

By that time the money he had carried away with him when the Tokyo house was broken up was nearly exhausted.

His life in Fukuoka, over the whole two years, was a hard struggle.

He often recalled the days when, a student in Kyoto, he had demanded large sums from his father as he pleased under all sorts of pretexts and spent them just as he liked; and comparing that with his present station, he came to dread the bonds of cause and effect.

At times he looked back secretly on that vanished spring and saw, with eyes newly opened, that it had been the height of his prosperity, gazing at a distant haze.

When things grew truly hard, he said,

"Oyone, I have left it a long time, but shall I try taking it up with Tokyo again?"

he said.

Oyone of course did not oppose him.

She only looked down.

"It's no use. Your uncle has no confidence in you at all,"

she answered forlornly.

"He may have no confidence in us, but we have none in him either,"

Sosuke began grandly; but when he saw his wife's downcast eyes, his courage seemed suddenly to fail.

At first they repeated this exchange once or twice a month; later it became once in two months, then once in three, until at last he said,

"Never mind, so long as they do something about Koroku. The rest I'll settle face to face when I get to Tokyo. Come, Oyone, let's leave it at that."

he said.

"That will do very well,"

Oyone answered.

After that Sosuke let the matter of the Saekis alone.

A simple request for money was not something he could bring himself to put to his uncle, considering his own past, Sosuke thought.

And so he had never once set that side of the business down on paper.

Letters came from Koroku now and then, but they were mostly very short and formal.

Since Sosuke remembered only the Koroku he had met in Tokyo when their father died, he still thought of him as a mere harmless child, and it naturally never occurred to him to have the boy negotiate with their uncle in his place.

Husband and wife lived depending upon each other, like two people shut out from the light of the world who, unable to bear the cold, hold each other for warmth.

When things were hard, Oyone always said to Sosuke,

"Still, there's nothing to be done,"

she said.

And Sosuke said to Oyone,

"Well, we must endure it,"

he said.

Between them resignation and endurance were always at work, but the shadow of anything like a future or a hope seemed hardly to fall on them at all.

They did not speak much of the past.

At times it was almost as if by agreement they avoided it.

Occasionally Oyone would say, as if to comfort her husband,

"Something good is bound to happen before long. Bad things can't go on and on forever,"

she would say.

And then it felt to Sosuke like the sharp tongue of a fate that was toying with him, borrowing the mouth of his sincere wife.

On such occasions Sosuke answered nothing and only smiled bitterly.

If Oyone, still not noticing, went on saying something more, he would fling it out.

"We are people with no right to expect anything good, aren't we."

he would say, throwing it out with resolve.

Then his wife would finally understand and hold her tongue.

And as the two of them sat facing each other in silence, before they knew it they had fallen into the dark, wide pit of the past they had made themselves.

By their own doing they had painted over their own future.

So they gave up expecting to find any bright color along the road ahead, and resolved simply to go on hand in hand.

About the land and house his uncle said he had sold, Sosuke had of course no great expectations either.

From time to time, as if remembering it, he would begin,

"But at present prices, even sold for a song, it would be worth twice the money my uncle raised for me then. It's simply too absurd,"

and Oyone would smile sadly.

"The land again? You keep thinking of nothing else. But you did tell your uncle to do whatever he thought best, didn't you,"

she would say.

"That couldn't be helped. In that situation nothing else would have settled it,"

Sosuke would say.

"Exactly. So your uncle may well feel he received the house and land in place of the money,"

Oyone would say.

Put that way, it did seem to Sosuke that there was some reason in his uncle's handling of it, and though aloud he would answer,

"It's that very feeling that isn't right,"

each time the question receded a little further into the background.

At the end of the second year of the couple's lonely, affectionate life together, Sosuke happened to meet a former classmate named Sugihara, with whom he had been very close in his student days.

Sugihara had passed the higher civil service examination after graduating and was already serving in a certain ministry; he had come all the way from Tokyo on official business to Fukuoka and Saga.

Sosuke knew well enough from the local paper when Sugihara had arrived and where he was staying, but looking at himself as a failure he was ashamed of the contrast of bowing his head before a man who had succeeded; and since he had his own reasons for particularly wishing to avoid old friends from his university days, he had not the slightest intention of calling at the inn.

But Sugihara, through some odd connection, had learned that Sosuke was smoldering away here, and pressed so hard for a meeting that Sosuke had to give in.

That Sosuke was able to move from Fukuoka to Tokyo was entirely thanks to this Sugihara.

When the letter came from Sugihara and it was finally settled, Sosuke put down his chopsticks.

"Oyone, we can go to Tokyo at last,"

he said.

"Well, how splendid,"

said Oyone, looking at her husband's face.

For two or three weeks after they reached Tokyo the days went by dizzily.

Driven by the flurry that attends anyone setting up a new household and beginning new work, and by the stimulus of the great city's air shaking violently around them day and night, he had no leisure to think anything through, nor the judgment to settle down and take hold of anything.

When they arrived at Shimbashi on the night train he saw his uncle and aunt's faces for the first time in a long while, but neither of them, whether owing to the lamplight or not, struck Sosuke as looking cheerful.

There had been an accident on the way and the train was unusually late, by some thirty minutes, and they seemed worn out with waiting, as if the fault were Sosuke's own.

The words Sosuke heard from his aunt at this time were the single remark,

"Why, So, how much older you have grown since I last saw you."

that was all.

It was then that Oyone was introduced to his uncle and aunt for the first time.

"This is the one who..."

his aunt began, then hesitated and looked at Sosuke.

Oyone, with no way of framing a greeting, only bowed her head in silence.

Koroku too, of course, had come with his uncle and aunt to meet them.

The moment Sosuke caught sight of him, he was struck by how his brother had grown, until he was somehow taller than Sosuke himself.

At that time Koroku had just left middle school and was about to enter higher school.

Seeing Sosuke, he said neither "Brother"

nor "Welcome home,"

and only made an awkward greeting.

Sosuke and Oyone stayed about a week at an inn and then moved into their present house.

At that time his uncle and aunt took a good deal of trouble over them.

There was no need to buy small kitchen things, they said; if old ones would do, and so they gathered together everything a small household required and sent it over.

On top of that,

"You are setting up a new household, so your expenses must be heavy,"

they said, and gave him sixty yen.

While he was taken up with the house and one thing and another, more than half a month went by, yet he still had not brought up with his uncle the matter of the house and land that had so preoccupied him when he was in the provinces.

One day Oyone asked,

"Have you spoken to your uncle about that?"

she asked.

Sosuke, as though suddenly reminded of it, answered,

"No, I haven't said anything yet,"

he answered.

"How odd, when you worried about it so much,"

said Oyone with a faint smile.

"Well, there is never a quiet moment to raise such a thing,"

Sosuke excused himself.

Another ten days or so passed.

Then this time it was Sosuke who began.

"Oyone, I still haven't said anything about it. Somehow it has become such a nuisance that I hate the thought of it,"

he said.

"You needn't force yourself to say what you hate to say,"

Oyone answered.

"Is that all right?"

Sosuke asked in return.

"All right, you say. It was your affair from the start, wasn't it. For my part it has never mattered,"

Oyone answered.

At that Sosuke said,

"Then, since it would be odd to raise it solemnly out of nowhere, I'll ask when the occasion offers. Never mind, an occasion to ask is bound to come along sometime,"

and so put it off.

Koroku was living at his uncle's house and wanted for nothing.

Since he would have to enter a dormitory if he passed the examination and got into higher school, it seemed that even that had already been discussed and settled with his uncle.

Perhaps because he received no particular help with school expenses from the brother newly come up to Tokyo, he did not bring his own affairs to Sosuke as intimately as he did to his uncle.

With his cousin Yasunosuke, from their long association, he was on very good terms.

If anything, those two were more like brothers.

Sosuke naturally came to visit his uncle's house less and less often.

Even when he did go, the visit generally ended as a mere formality, so that on the way home he always felt flat.

In the end there were times when, having exchanged remarks about the weather, he wanted to leave at once.

At such times it was hard work even to sit half an hour and fill the time with small talk.

On their side too there was an air of constraint and awkwardness.

"Come now, do stay a while,"

his aunt would generally urge him; but that made him feel all the harder to sit still.

Even so, if he did not go at least occasionally he felt an uneasy prick of conscience, so he would go again.

Now and then he would even bow his head and thank them.

"It is good of you to take such trouble over Koroku,"

he would say, thanking them from his side.

But beyond that, it became too much of an effort to open his mouth either about his brother's future school expenses or about the land and house he had asked his uncle to sell for him in his absence.

Yet it was plain that Sosuke's going now and then, reluctantly, to an uncle in whom he had no interest was not merely from a sense of duty to keep up the ordinary bond between uncle and nephew, but simply the result of something he held at the back of his heart and wanted to settle if ever the chance came.

"So has changed altogether, hasn't he,"

his aunt would sometimes say to his uncle.

And his uncle would answer,

"Indeed. After all, when a thing like that happens it goes on echoing for a long time afterward,"

and put on the face of a man who finds cause and effect a fearful thing.

His aunt would go on,

"It really is frightening. He was not such a gloomy boy before. He was lively, almost too high-spirited. And in two or three years, without our seeing him, he has aged into someone else entirely. He seems more of an old man now than you do,"

she would say.

"Surely not,"

his uncle would answer.

"No, apart from his hair and his face, I mean his manner,"

his aunt would correct herself.

Such an exchange had passed between the old couple more than once or twice since Sosuke came to Tokyo.

And in fact, when he came to his uncle's house, he did look exactly like the man the old people saw.

Oyone, for whatever reason, had never once crossed the threshold of the uncle's house since she was introduced to the old couple at Shimbashi.

If they came to her she received them politely as uncle and aunt; but when, as they were leaving, they said,

"Well, why not come and visit us sometime,"

she would only bow her head and say,

"Thank you,"

and never once did she go.

Even Sosuke had once urged her.

"Why not go over to my uncle's house just once,"

he had said; but she gave a strange look and said,

"But..."

so that Sosuke never raised the matter again.

The two households passed about a year in this condition.

Then the uncle, who was said to be younger in spirit than Sosuke, suddenly died.

His illness was a grave one, something called spinal meningitis; he had been in bed with a slight cold for two or three days, and on his way back from the privy, as he was about to wash his hands, he collapsed with the ladle still in his grip, and before a day had quite passed he was cold.

"Oyone, my uncle has died with the matter never spoken of,"

said Sosuke.

"Were you still meaning to ask about that? You are persistent,"

said Oyone.

About a year after that, his uncle's son Yasunosuke graduated from the university and Koroku became a second-year student at higher school.

His aunt moved with Yasunosuke to Naka Rokubancho.

In the summer vacation of the third year, Koroku went to the sea at Boshu to bathe.

While he stayed there more than a month it began to turn to September, so he cut across from Hota to the far side, followed the coast of Kazusa along the Kujukuri shore as far as Choshi, and then, as if suddenly remembering, went back to Tokyo.

He turned up at Sosuke's house on an afternoon of fierce lingering heat, only two or three days after his return.

With only his eyes shining out of a face burned black, and grown wild-looking enough to be mistaken for someone else, he had gone into the comparatively shaded parlor, lain down at once, and was waiting for his brother's return; but the moment he saw Sosuke's face he sat bolt upright.

"Brother, I've come because there is something I need to tell you,"

he began formally, so that Sosuke, taken somewhat aback, listened to Koroku without even changing out of his stifling Western clothes.

According to Koroku, two or three days earlier, on the evening he got back from Kazusa, his aunt had informed him that she was sorry but his school expenses could not be provided beyond the end of this year.

Ever since he had been taken in by his uncle right after his father's death, Koroku had been able to go to school, had had clothes made as a matter of course, and had been given a suitable allowance, so that he had lived wanting for nothing just as in his father's lifetime; and out of that inertia the question of school expenses had never once crossed his mind until that very evening. So when his aunt pronounced her sentence he sat blankly and could not even manage a proper reply, he said.

His aunt, looking sorry for him, had spent a full hour, as only a woman would, explaining in detail why she could no longer look after him.

Into it came his uncle's death, the changes in their finances that followed, and Yasunosuke's graduation and the question of his marriage that was to follow it.

"If it were possible, I meant to see you at least through higher school, and I have done my best until today."

His aunt had said this, Koroku repeated.

Then Koroku suddenly remembered that his brother, when he had come to Tokyo years before for their father's funeral and settled everything, had said as he went back to Hiroshima that his school expenses had been left in their uncle's keeping; and when he asked his aunt about it for the first time, she looked as though it were the last thing she expected.

"Well, it is true that So did leave a certain sum at that time, but that is long since gone. Your school expenses have been found for you ever since your uncle was still alive,"

she answered.

Since Koroku had never asked his brother how much his school money amounted to or for how many years it had been entrusted to his uncle, when his aunt said this he had no reply at all.

"You are not alone in the world, and you have a brother, so you had better talk it over with him thoroughly. For my part I shall see So and explain the whole matter to him properly. So has not come to see us much lately, and I too have neglected you all, so I have had no chance to tell him about you,"

his aunt had added at the end.

When he had heard the whole account from Koroku, Sosuke merely gazed at his brother's face and said one thing.

"This is awkward,"

he said.

There was no sign of the old flare of temper, no move to go straight round to his aunt's to have it out; nor any sign that he found it hateful that his brother, who until now had behaved distantly toward him like someone who could do without his help, had suddenly changed course.

Watching Koroku go, his mind in turmoil over the collapse of half the beautiful future he had built for himself, as though the fault lay entirely with those around him, Sosuke stood on the threshold of the dark entrance hall and gazed for a while at the evening sun falling through the lattice.

That evening Sosuke cut two large banana leaves from the back of the house, spread them on the edge of the parlor veranda, and sitting there beside Oyone to cool off, talked about Koroku.

"Doesn't your aunt mean for us to look after Koroku?"

Oyone asked.

"Well, until I see her and hear it I can't tell what she has in mind,"

said Sosuke; and Oyone answered,

"I'm sure that's it,"

fluttering her fan in the darkness as she spoke.

Sosuke said nothing and stretched his neck to look at the strip of sky showing narrowly between the eaves and the cliff.

The two of them stayed silent for a while; then presently Oyone spoke again.

"But that would be too much to ask,"

she said.

"Putting a man through to the university is quite beyond my means,"

said Sosuke, stating plainly what he was capable of and no more.

The conversation moved on from there to other things, and came back neither to Koroku nor to his aunt.

Two or three days later, since it happened to be Saturday, Sosuke stopped at his aunt's house in Bancho on his way home from the office.

His aunt said,

"Well, well, what a rare visitor,"

and received him more warmly than usual.

At that time Sosuke, forcing himself despite his reluctance, put to his aunt for the first time the question he had been storing up these four or five years.

His aunt of course could not help offering what explanation she could.

According to her, when Sosuke's property was sold, the money that came into his uncle's hands had, after repaying the debt raised to tide Sosuke over, left a surplus of four thousand five hundred yen, or four thousand three hundred, she could not remember exactly.

But in his uncle's view, since Sosuke had made the property over to him, however much was left over, the surplus could properly be regarded as his own.

Still, since it would be unpleasant to be said to have profited by selling Sosuke's property, he would hold it in Koroku's name and make it Koroku's estate.

Sosuke was a man who had done such a thing that he had nearly been disinherited, so he had no right to a single sen.

"So, you mustn't be angry. I am only telling you what your uncle said,"

his aunt put in.

Sosuke listened to the rest in silence.

The property that was to have been kept in Koroku's name had unhappily, through his uncle's dealings, been promptly transformed into a building on a busy main street in Kanda.

And before it had been insured it burned down in a fire.

Since Koroku had never been told of it in the first place, it was left at that and he was deliberately kept in ignorance.

"That is how it is, and I am truly sorry for you, So, but since it cannot be undone there is nothing to be done. Think of it as luck and resign yourself. Of course, if your uncle were still alive something could be managed. One boy like Koroku would be no great matter. Even now, with your uncle gone, if only our own circumstances allowed it we would return to Koroku the equivalent of the house that burned, or failing that, we could somehow look after him at least until he graduates,"

she said, and then his aunt went on to tell him another piece of household news.

It concerned Yasunosuke's occupation.

Yasunosuke was his uncle's only son, a young man who had just come out of the university that summer.

Having been brought up warmly at home, and having kept company with hardly anyone but his own classmates, he was if anything unfamiliar with the ways of the world; but with a certain largeness of spirit in that very unfamiliarity he had made his entrance into real society.

His field was mechanical engineering, so even in these days when the fever for new enterprises had died down there were of course one or two suitable openings among the many companies in Japan; but a strain of his father's speculative bent seemed to lurk somewhere in him, and just when he was itching to run a business of his own he happened to meet a senior man from the same department who had built a small factory of his own out toward Tsukishima and was running it independently; and out of that connection he decided, after talking it over with the man, to put in some capital himself and work with him.

That was the news his aunt had to tell.

"And so, since we turned over what few shares we had into that, we are really as good as penniless now. From the outside, of course, with so few of us and a house of our own, it is natural enough that we should look comfortable. Only the other day Mrs. Hara came and said, why, there is no one so free from care as you, whenever I come you are patiently washing the leaves of your evergreens. It is hardly as pleasant as that, though,"

said his aunt.

When Sosuke heard his aunt's explanation he sat blankly and could not readily produce any reply.

He was aware in his heart that this was proof that, as a result of his nervous exhaustion, he no longer had the head to put together a quick, clear judgment as he once had.

As if anxious that Sosuke might not take what she said for truth, his aunt went so far as to name the sum Yasunosuke had put up.

It was about five thousand yen.

For the time being, she said, Yasunosuke would have to live on a small salary and the dividends on this five thousand.

"And even those dividends, there is no telling yet how they will turn out. At best it will be ten or fifteen percent, and if one thing goes wrong there is no guarantee it will not all go up in smoke,"

his aunt added.

Since Sosuke could see no conspicuous crookedness in his aunt's handling of things, he was inwardly at no small loss; yet it seemed absurd to go home without saying a word about Koroku's future.

So, setting the earlier question aside for the moment, he inquired about what had become of the thousand yen he had left with his uncle at the time for Koroku's schooling; and his aunt answered,

"So, that money Koroku really has spent. Since he entered higher school alone it has come to seven hundred yen or thereabouts,"

she answered.

Since he was about it, Sosuke also asked at the same time what had become of the paintings and antiques he had left with his uncle.

At this his aunt began,

"Oh, we were made fools of over that,"

but seeing Sosuke's expression she asked,

"So, do you mean we never told you about that either?"

she asked.

When Sosuke said no,

"Dear me, then your uncle must have forgotten,"

she said, and told him the whole story.

Not long after Sosuke went back to Hiroshima, his uncle had entrusted the selling of them to a familiar acquaintance named Sanada.

This man was said to be knowledgeable about paintings and antiques and to go about brokering such sales as a matter of course; he had taken on the uncle's commission at once, and saying that so-and-so wanted such a thing and would like a look, or that Mr. So-and-so hoped for an item of this kind and he would show it to him, he had carried the pieces off and never brought them back.

When pressed he merely made excuses, that they had not yet come back from the other party, or something of the sort, and not once was anything ever concluded; until at last, evidently unable to hold out, he vanished somewhere.

"Even so, there is still one folding screen left. We noticed it during the recent move, and Yasu said, this belongs to So, so we ought to send it to him the next time there is a chance."

His aunt spoke as if she attached no importance at all to the things Sosuke had left in their keeping.

Since Sosuke had let it go until today, he could not take much interest in that side of it either, so even looking at his aunt's face, which showed no sign of a troubled conscience, he felt no particular anger.

Still, when his aunt said,

"So, we have no use for it here anyway, so why not take it with you. They say things of that sort have gone up a great deal in price lately,"

he did in fact feel like taking it home.

When it was brought out of the storeroom and he looked at it in the light, it was certainly the two-panel screen he remembered.

Below, bush clover, bellflower, pampas grass, arrowroot, and maiden flower were painted without a gap, and above them a perfectly round moon was rendered in silver; in the empty space beside it was written the verse, Field paths and open sky, and within the moon a maiden flower, signed Kiitsu.

Kneeling before it, Sosuke looked closely at everything, from the places where the silver had blackened and scorched, to the dry look of the arrowroot leaves turning their undersides to the wind, to the seal reading Hoitsu in running script inside a great round vermilion outline the size of a rice cake, and could not help recalling the days when his father was alive.

Every New Year his father would bring this screen out of the dim storehouse, set it up as a partition in the entrance hall, place a squared rosewood card tray in front of it, and receive the New Year's callers.

On those occasions, since the season was festive, a pair of tiger scrolls was always hung in the alcove of the guest room.

Sosuke still remembered his father telling him that these were not by Ganku but by Gantai.

There was a smear of ink on this tiger painting.

The bridge of the nose of the tiger drinking from a mountain stream with its tongue out had been slightly soiled, and his father minded it terribly; every time he saw Sosuke he would say, do you remember daubing ink here, this was your mischief when you were small, and put on an expression that was part amusement and part reproach.

Sitting formally before the screen and thinking of the old days when he had lived in Tokyo, Sosuke said,

"Aunt, I'll take this screen with me, then,"

he said.

"Yes, yes, do take it. If you like I'll have a servant carry it over for you,"

his aunt added kindly.

Sosuke made the appropriate arrangements with her and left it at that for the day and went home.

After dinner he went out to the veranda again with Oyone, and in the dark, the two of them in plain white summer robes side by side, they talked about the painting as they cooled off.

"Didn't you see Yasunosuke?"

Oyone asked.

"No, they say Yasunosuke is at the factory until evening, Saturday or not."

"That must be hard work."

Oyone said only that, and offered not a word of comment on the conduct of his uncle and aunt.

"What is to be done about Koroku?"

Sosuke asked, and she only said,

"Well..."

and nothing more.

"In point of argument we have a case, but if I press it, it will only end in a lawsuit, and without evidence or anything else there is no chance of winning,"

said Sosuke, imagining the extreme; and

"We don't need to win any lawsuit,"

Oyone said at once, so that Sosuke smiled wryly and dropped it.

"In short, it all comes of my not being able to get to Tokyo at the time."

"And by the time you could get to Tokyo, none of it mattered anymore."

Talking like this, husband and wife peered again from under the eaves at the narrow strip of sky, discussed tomorrow's weather, and went inside the mosquito net.

The next Sunday Sosuke called Koroku in, told him everything his aunt had said without leaving anything out, and explained.

"Whether your aunt gave you no detailed explanation because she knows your impatient temper, or because she still thinks you a child and deliberately left it out, I cannot tell either; but in any case the facts are as I have just told you,"

he explained.

To Koroku no amount of detailed explanation filled his stomach.

He only said,

"I see,"

and looked at Sosuke with a hard, dissatisfied face.

"It can't be helped. Neither your aunt nor Yasunosuke means any harm."

"I understand that,"

his brother said in a harsh tone.

"Then you mean it is my fault. Of course it is my fault. I am a man who has been nothing but faults from long ago until today."

Sosuke lay down and smoked, and said nothing more.

Koroku too was silent, looking at the two-panel Hoitsu screen standing in the corner of the parlor.

"Do you remember that screen?"

his brother asked presently.

"Yes,"

Koroku answered.

"The Saekis sent it round the day before yesterday. Of all Father's things, this is the only one left in my hands now. If it would pay for your schooling I would give it to you this minute, but one peeling screen won't see you through the university,"

said Sosuke.

And with a wry smile he added the reflection,

"Standing a thing like this up in heat like this is hardly the act of a sane man, but there is nowhere to store it, so there is nothing to be done."

was his remark.

Koroku always found this brother of his, so easygoing, so slow, so utterly unlike himself, unsatisfying; and yet when it came to the point he could never quarrel with him.

This time too, feeling the edge of his temper suddenly blunted, he said,

"Never mind the screen; what am I to do from now on?"

he asked.

"That is the question. At any rate it need only be settled by the end of this year, so think it over carefully. I'll think about it too,"

said Sosuke.

His brother went on urgently complaining that it was in his nature to hate such a state of suspense; that he could not sit calmly through his classes or get on with his preparation; that such circumstances were more than he could bear; but Sosuke's manner remained just as it had been.

When Koroku grew too fretfully full of grievances, his brother said,

"If you can produce that many grievances over so little, then you will do well anywhere. It would make no difference if you left school. You are far more of a man than I am,"

so that the talk broke off there and Koroku at last went back to Hongo.

Sosuke then took a bath, finished his dinner, and in the evening went out with Oyone to a temple fair nearby.

They bought two potted plants of a suitable size and carried one each back home.

Thinking it would be good to let the night dew fall on them, they opened the shutters at the foot of the cliff and set the two side by side in the garden.

When they had got inside the mosquito net, Oyone asked,

"What is to become of Koroku?"

she asked her husband; and

"Nothing is to become of him yet,"

Sosuke answered; but ten minutes later both of them were sleeping peacefully.

The next day he woke and his office life began, and Sosuke had no leisure to think about Koroku.

Even when he was idling at home, he shrank from drawing this problem clearly before his eyes and looking plainly at it.

The brain wrapped inside his hair could not bear the trouble of it.

Remembering that he had once liked mathematics and had the patience to turn quite intricate geometrical problems into clear figures in his head, he found this change, so violent for the number of years that had passed, frightening even to himself.

Still, about once a day Koroku's figure would rise dimly at the back of his mind, and at those moments the thought would come that he must give some consideration to the boy's future as well.

But immediately afterward he would generally cancel it himself with, well, there is no need to hurry.

And so he lived out his days with a heart that felt as though one thread of his breast were caught on a hook.

Then, toward the end of September, on an evening when the Milky Way showed thick as it did every night, Yasunosuke arrived as if dropped from the sky.

He was so rare a visitor that neither Sosuke nor Oyone had expected him, and both guessed the call must be on some errand; and sure enough it concerned Koroku.

Some days before, Koroku had turned up unannounced at the factory in Tsukishima and said that he had heard the details about his school expenses from his brother; but that having studied this far he found it too bitter to end up unable to enter the university, and that he wanted to go as far as he could even by borrowing, and asked whether there might not be some good plan. When Yasunosuke replied that he would talk it over with So, Koroku cut him short at once: his brother was not a man who would ever be any help.

Since he himself had not graduated from the university, he thought it only natural that others should break off midway too.

Indeed, though at bottom his brother was the one responsible for this present business, he was perfectly unconcerned about it, as one could see, and would not engage with anything Koroku said.

So the only one he could rely on was Yasunosuke.

It might look strange to come asking him after being formally refused by his aunt, but he had come because he thought Yasunosuke would understand better than she would; and having said so, he showed no sign of budging.

Yasunosuke had consoled him, saying it was not so, that So was quite worried about him and was due to come and talk it over at the house before long, and had sent Koroku home.

As he was leaving, Koroku had taken several sheets of paper out of his sleeve and asked him to stamp them, since he needed them for absence reports, saying that until it was settled whether he was leaving school or staying he could not study, so there was no need for him to attend every day.

Yasunosuke, being busy, talked for less than an hour and went home; but no concrete plan for Koroku's situation emerged between the two of them.

His parting words were that they should all gather at their leisure sometime and decide, and that if it suited, Koroku might as well sit in with them.

When the two of them were alone, Oyone asked Sosuke,

"What are you thinking about?"

she asked.

Sosuke, with both hands tucked into his sash and his shoulders a little raised, said,

"I should like to be like Koroku once more myself,"

he said.

"Here I am worrying that he may fall into a fate like mine, and there he is with no thought of his elder brother at all. He's a fine fellow."

Oyone took the tea things and went out to the kitchen.

Husband and wife broke off the talk at that, spread their bedding, and went to sleep.

High above their dreams the Milky Way hung cool.

For the next week Koroku did not come and no word arrived from the Saekis, and Sosuke's household returned to its usual uneventfulness.

Husband and wife rose every morning when the dew was shining and saw the beautiful sun above the eaves.

In the evening they sat casting long shadows on either side of the lamp with its smoked-bamboo stand.

When the talk broke off it was so still that often nothing could be heard but the swing of the wall clock's pendulum.

Even so, during this week they did discuss the matter of Koroku.

If Koroku meant at all costs to go on with his studies, then certainly, but even if he did not, it was clear that he would have to give up his present lodging for a time; and in that case there was no course but to send him back to the Saekis or to keep him at Sosuke's.

At the Saekis, although they had once said what they said, if he asked them they might, out of kindness, agree at least to keep him in the house for a while.

But if he was to be educated on top of that, then his fees and pocket money and the rest would have to be borne by Sosuke, or it would not be right.

And that was more than Sosuke could bear on his household budget.

The two of them worked out their monthly income and expenditure in detail.

"It simply can't be done."

"It is impossible however you look at it,"

they said.

Next to the sitting room where they sat was the kitchen, and to the right of the kitchen the maid's room, and to the left a six-mat room.

With only three of them counting the maid, Oyone had little need of this six-mat room, and always kept her own dressing table by the window on the east side.

Sosuke too, when he had got up, washed his face, and eaten, came here to change his clothes.

"Rather than that, couldn't we empty the six-mat room and have him come here?"

Oyone said.

Oyone's idea was that if they took on the room and his meals in this way and got the Saekis to help with some monthly sum for the rest, Koroku could go on to graduate from the university as he wished.

"As for clothes, if we alter Yasunosuke's old ones and yours for him, that should do somehow,"

Oyone added.

In fact something of this idea had already occurred to Sosuke too.

He had simply not spoken of it out of consideration for Oyone, and because he had little heart for it; so when his wife brought the proposal to him from her side instead, he naturally had not the courage to refuse it.

When he wrote to Koroku telling him just this, and asking whether, if the boy had no objection, he should go once more to the Saekis and take it up with them, Koroku came the very evening the letter arrived, right through the rain with the drops beating on his umbrella, and was delighted as though the money were already found.

"No, your aunt only says such things because we have gone on leaving you to yourself and paying you no attention. Your brother would have done something long ago if his circumstances had been a little better, but you know how it is, so it really was unavoidable. Yet if we put it to them like this, neither your aunt nor Yasunosuke will be able to say no even so. It will certainly be managed, so set your mind at rest. I promise you."

With this promise from Oyone, Koroku went back to Hongo with the sound of the rain over his head again.

But after a day's interval he came to ask whether his brother had not gone yet.

And after another three days or so, he came to say that he had been to his aunt's and heard that his brother had still not come, and to urge Sosuke to go as soon as possible.

While Sosuke put off the days saying he would go and he would go, the world had at last turned to autumn.

On the afternoon of one of those bright Sundays, since his going to the Saekis had been delayed so long, Sosuke set the business down in a letter and put it to Bancho that way.

And then the answer came from his aunt that Yasunosuke was away in Kobe.

V

It was past two in the afternoon on a Saturday when the aunt from the Saekis came to call.

That day, unusually, clouds had come up since morning, and it was cold, as though the wind had suddenly shifted to the north.

His aunt held her hands over the round brazier woven of bamboo.

"Really, Oyone. This room must be pleasantly cool in summer, but from now on it will be a little cold, won't it,"

she said.

His aunt had her unruly hair done up neatly in a chignon, and the round old-fashioned cord of her jacket tied at her breast.

Being fond of drink and still taking a little with her evening meal, she had a good color and was plump and well-fleshed, so she looked far younger than her years.

Every time his aunt came, Oyone would remark to Sosuke afterward how young she looked.

And Sosuke always explained that of course she looked young, since she had borne only one child in all those years.

Oyone thought that might really be so.

And after being told this she would now and then slip into the six-mat room and look at her own face in the mirror.

At those times she felt as though her cheeks were growing hollower each time she looked.

For Oyone there was nothing so painful as to think of herself and children together.

When the many small children in the landlord's house behind them came out into the garden at the top of the cliff and she heard them making a racket on the swing or playing tag, Oyone always felt something both fleeting and bitter.

The aunt now sitting before her had borne a single boy, and because that boy had grown up as he should and become a fine graduate, she could wear a face without a want in it even now that her husband was dead, and was so well filled out that her chin looked double.

Yasunosuke was always worrying that his mother was too stout and it was dangerous, and that she must be careful or she might be struck down by apoplexy; but as Oyone saw it, both the worrying Yasunosuke and the aunt worried over shared their happiness between them.

"And Yasunosuke?"

Oyone asked.

"Yes, at last. He came back the night before yesterday. And so my answer was delayed and delayed, which was really inexcusable of me,"

she said; but she left the matter of the answer at that, and the talk came back to Yasunosuke.

"He has at least finished school, thank goodness, but from now on comes the important part, and I do worry. Still, from this September he is going to the factory in Tsukishima, and if only he keeps working at this rate I think things may not go too badly for him hereafter; though with a young man there is no telling how he may change from now on."

Oyone only inserted words such as how splendid and congratulations here and there.

"His going to Kobe was entirely on that business. Something about fitting oil engines, or whatever they are called, onto bonito boats."

Oyone had no idea at all what this meant.

Not understanding, she only answered, I see; and his aunt went straight on.

"I didn't understand a word of it either, and it was only when I heard Yasunosuke's account of it that I said, oh, is that so. Though I still don't understand what an oil engine is,"

she said, and laughed out loud.

"It seems to be a machine that burns oil and moves a boat freely with it, and from what I hear it is a very useful thing. With one fitted, all the labor of rowing is done away with. It makes going ten or twenty miles out to sea very easy, they say. And you know, in all Japan the number of bonito boats must be enormous. Since it would be an immense profit if every one of those boats came to be fitted with this machine, he seems these days to be quite absorbed in nothing else. I said to him only the other day, with a laugh, that an immense profit is all very well, but there is no sense in getting so wrapped up in it that you ruin your health."

His aunt talked on and on about bonito boats and Yasunosuke.

And she looked very well pleased with herself, but she was slow to bring up the matter of Koroku.

Sosuke, who should long since have been home, for some reason had not come back.

That day, on his way home from the office, he had got off the streetcar at Surugadai-shita, walked one or two blocks with his mouth puckered as if he had bitten into something sour, and then passed through the gate of a certain dentist.

Three or four days earlier, sitting at supper across from Oyone and taking up his chopsticks as he talked, he had somehow ground his front teeth hard the wrong way, and they had begun to ache at once.

When he moved them with his finger, the roots were loose.

At meals, hot water and tea stung them.

When he opened his mouth and breathed, the air stung too.

That morning, brushing his teeth and deliberately avoiding the sore spot with the toothpick, Sosuke held his mouth up to the mirror, and the two back teeth filled with silver in Hiroshima and the uneven front teeth worn down as if ground gleamed suddenly cold.

As he was changing into his Western clothes he said,

"Oyone, my teeth must be of very poor quality. Look, when I do this they mostly move,"

and he moved his lower teeth with his finger to show her.

Oyone laughed.

"It's your age, that's all,"

she said, going around behind him to attach the white collar to his shirt.

That afternoon Sosuke had finally made up his mind and stopped at the dentist's.

When he was shown into the waiting room, velvet-covered benches stood around a large table, and three or four people waiting sat with their chins sunk into their collars as though crouching.

All of them were women.

The handsome brown gas stove had not yet been lit.

Sosuke waited his turn, looking obliquely at the color of the white wall reflected in a large mirror; but growing too bored, he turned his attention to the magazines stacked on the table.

Taking up one or two, he found they were all for women.

Sosuke looked over and over at the photographs of women in their frontispieces.

Then he picked up a magazine called

Success.

At the front of it something like the secrets of success was set out in numbered points, and having read one item saying that one must push boldly ahead at all costs, and another saying that it will not do merely to push ahead, that one must push ahead standing on a proper foundation, he closed the magazine and left it at that.

Success

and Sosuke were very distant things.

Sosuke had not even known until that day that a magazine of such a name existed.

So finding it a curiosity again, he opened what he had just closed, and his eye fell on two lines of square characters with no kana among them.

They read: the wind blows across the blue vault and the floating clouds are gone; the moon rises over the eastern hills and its jewel-like light gathers into one.

Sosuke was a man with little interest in poetry or verse to begin with, but for some reason, when he read these two lines, he was greatly struck.

It was not that the couplet was skillfully matched or anything of the sort; it was that his heart stirred at the thought of how glad a man would be if he could come to feel as such a scene feels.

Out of curiosity Sosuke read the essay that preceded these lines.

But it seemed to him entirely unrelated.

Only these two lines went on wandering through his head even after he had put the magazine down.

His life had in fact not met with such a scene in these four or five years.

Just then the door opposite opened, and an assistant with a slip of paper called Sosuke, Mr. Nonaka, into the operating room.

Inside, the room was twice the size of the waiting room.

On two sides of a room built to take in as much light as possible stood some four operating chairs, at each of which a man in a white apron was treating a patient separately.

Sosuke was shown to the chair farthest in and told to take it, so he stepped up onto a kind of footstool and sat down in it.

The assistant carefully wrapped him from the knees down in a thick striped apron.

Laid back so comfortably, Sosuke noticed that the tooth in question was not aching enough to trouble him much.

Not only that, he noticed that his shoulders and back and hips were all easily settled and in comfortable balance.

He simply lay looking up at the gas pipe hanging from the ceiling.

And he worried that with this establishment and equipment he might be charged more than he expected when he left.

Then a stout man whose hair had grown too thin for his face came out and greeted him very politely, so that Sosuke moved his head in the chair as though a little flustered.

The stout man asked about his condition, examined the inside of his mouth, and gave the aching tooth a slight shake.

"I am afraid that once it loosens like this, it can hardly be made firm again as it was. The inside has become necrotic, you see,"

he said.

Sosuke felt this pronouncement like the lonely light of autumn.

He wanted to ask whether he was already of that age, but felt a little foolish, and only said,

"So it can't be cured?"

pressing the point.

The stout man said, with a smile,

"Well, there is nothing for it but to say that it cannot be cured. If it comes to that we pull it out and be done with it, but for the moment it has not got that far, so let us simply stop the pain. At all events it is necrotic. Necrotic may not mean much to you, but the inside is quite rotten."

Sosuke said, I see, and simply let the stout man do as he liked.

Whereupon he whirled his instrument round and round and began drilling a hole into the root of Sosuke's tooth.

Then he thrust something like a long thin needle down into it and sniffed at the tip, until at last he drew out a thread-fine strand and showed it to Sosuke, saying, this much of the nerve has come out.

Then he filled the hole with medicine and instructed him to come again tomorrow.

As he got down from the chair his body straightened, and when his line of sight shifted from the ceiling to the garden outside, Sosuke's eye fell on a large potted pine there, perhaps five feet high.

A gardener in straw sandals was carefully wrapping the base of it in matting.

Since it was the season when the dew hardens gradually into frost, he realized that those with means already made their arrangements at this time of year.

On his way out, when he received a mouthwash in powder form at the dispensary beside the entrance and was told to dissolve it in a hundred parts of lukewarm water and use it more than ten times a day, Sosuke was glad that the fee the cashier asked was unexpectedly low.

If that was so, then even coming four or five times as they said would not be too hard; and as he thought this and went to put on his shoes, he noticed that the soles had worn through at some point.

By the time he reached home he had missed his aunt by a step and she had already gone.

Sosuke said,

"Oh, so that's how it was,"

and changed out of his Western clothes with a great show of reluctance, then sat down before the brazier as usual.

Oyone gathered up his shirt and trousers and socks in her arms and went into the six-mat room.

Sosuke began smoking absently, but when the sound of brushing started in the other room he called,

"Oyone, what did the aunt from the Saekis have to say?"

he asked.

Since the toothache had subsided of itself, the chill feeling of being overtaken by autumn had eased a little; but presently he had Oyone dissolve in lukewarm water the powder she had taken out of his pocket, and began rinsing his mouth again and again.

At that moment, standing on the veranda, he said,

"How short the days have grown,"

he said.

Presently the sun set.

The neighborhood, where even in the daytime one heard few carts, was still from early evening.

Husband and wife drew close to the lamp as always.

In the wide world, only the spot where they sat seemed bright.

And in this bright lamplight Sosuke was conscious only of Oyone, and Oyone only of Sosuke, and they forgot the dark society beyond the reach of the lamp.

Living like this every evening, they had found their own life.

This quiet couple rattled the tin of Yoro seaweed Yasunosuke had brought back from Kobe as a gift, picking out the small pieces tied with pepper in them, and talked over the Saekis' answer at their leisure.

"Still, you'd think they might manage at least his fees and pocket money."

"They say they can't. However you reckon it, the two together come to ten yen. She says it is hard to put out a round sum like ten yen every month as things are now."

"Then isn't it also too much for them to pay twenty-odd yen a month until the end of this year?"

"So Yasunosuke says they will stretch to cover just the next month or two even if it strains them, and asks us to manage somehow in the meantime."

"I wonder if they really can't."

"I have no way of knowing. At any rate that is what your aunt says."

"If they make money on the bonito boats, that much ought to be nothing."

"Indeed."

Oyone laughed in a low voice.

Sosuke too moved the corner of his mouth a little, but the talk broke off there.

After a while he said,

"At any rate there is no course but to settle that Koroku comes here. The rest comes after that. He is going to school at present, isn't he,"

said Sosuke.

"I should think so,"

Oyone answered; and letting that go by, he went unusually into the study.

About an hour later Oyone quietly opened the sliding door and looked in, and he was at his desk reading something.

"Studying? Won't you come to bed?"

When she invited him, he turned around.

"Yes, let's go to bed,"

he answered, and stood up.

As he undressed for bed and wound the tie-dyed sash round and round over his nightclothes, he said,

"Tonight I read the Analects for the first time in ages,"

he said.

"Was there something in the Analects?"

Oyone asked in return, and Sosuke answered,

"No, nothing at all,"

he answered.

Then, "By the way, they say my teeth are the fault of my age after all. It seems the loose ones can't be cured at all,"

he said, laying his black head on the pillow.

VI

It was settled that Koroku would in any case give up his lodging as soon as it could be arranged and move to his brother's house.

Oyone looked at the mulberry-wood dressing table she had long kept in the six-mat room with a slightly regretful face.

"Now that it comes to it, there is nowhere to put things,"

she said to Sosuke almost plaintively.

In fact, if this room were taken from her, Oyone would have no place to do her hair and face.

With no plan coming to him, Sosuke stood there and looked obliquely at the back of the mirror set by the far window.

And by the angle of it, Oyone's collar and one cheek were reflected there.

Startled at how poor the color of that profile was, he said,

"Is something the matter with you? You look very pale,"

and taking his eyes from the mirror he looked at the real Oyone.

The hair at her temples was disordered, and the back of her collar was a little soiled with grime.

Oyone only answered,

"It must be the cold,"

and at once opened the closet on the west side,

a full six feet of it.

Below stood an old, badly scratched chest, and on top of it a Chinese trunk and two or three wicker baskets.

"There is no way at all to put these away."

"Then leave them as they are."