三四郎 English

I

He had been dozing, and when he woke the woman had somehow struck up a conversation with the old man beside her.

The old man was certainly the countryman who had boarded two stations back.

He had come running in just as the train was leaving, letting out a shrill cry, and then stripped to the waist at once, revealing a back covered with moxa scars — which was why Sanshiro remembered him.

Sanshiro had watched him closely all the way through: wiping off his sweat, straightening his clothes, and sitting down next to the woman.

He had shared the carriage with the woman since Kyoto.

She had caught his eye from the moment she got on.

First of all, her skin was dark.

Sanshiro had changed to the Sanyo line from Kyushu, and as he drew nearer to Kyoto and Osaka the women's skin had grown steadily fairer, so that he had felt, without quite knowing it, the loneliness of leaving his home country behind.

So when this woman came into the carriage he felt somehow that he had found an ally of the opposite sex.

Her coloring really was the coloring of Kyushu.

The same as Omitsu of the Miwata family.

Right up until he left home, Omitsu had been a nuisance of a girl.

He had been thoroughly glad to get away from her.

And yet, seen from here, a girl like Omitsu was by no means bad.

Only, as far as features went, this woman was a good deal finer.

Her mouth was firm.

Her eyes were clear.

Her forehead was not broad and flat like Omitsu's.

Somehow the whole face was pleasantly made.

So about once every five minutes Sanshiro would raise his eyes and look at her.

Now and then their eyes met.

When the old man sat down beside her he had watched her most attentively, and for as long as he could.

At that moment she had smiled and said, Please, do sit here, and given the old man her seat.

Then, a little later, Sanshiro had grown sleepy and fallen asleep.

While he slept the woman and the old man had evidently grown friendly and begun to talk.

Sanshiro opened his eyes and listened to them in silence.

The woman was saying something like this. —

Toys for children really are cheaper and better in Kyoto than in Hiroshima.

She had got off at Kyoto on a small errand and, while she was there, bought a toy near the Takoyakushi temple.

It was a joy to be going home after so long and to see her child.

But her husband's remittances had stopped, and she was going back to her parents' house because there was nothing else to do, and that worried her.

Her husband had been at Kure, working a long time as a navy shipyard hand, but during the war he had gone off toward Port Arthur.

When the war ended he came home once.

Soon afterward he said there was better money to be had over there, and went off again to work in Dairen.

At first there were letters, and the monthly money came regularly, which was all very well, but for the past half year neither letters nor money had come at all.

He was not the dishonest sort, so she was not afraid on that score, but she could not go on living idle forever, and so, until she knew he was safe, there was nothing for it but to go back to her parents and wait.

The old man knew nothing of the Takoyakushi and clearly had no interest in toys; at first he only grunted his replies, but the talk of Port Arthur suddenly moved him, and he said that was a great pity indeed.

His own son had been taken as a soldier during the war and had died over there in the end.

What on earth wars are fought for, he did not know.

If times got better afterward that would be something, but as it was, your precious sons were killed and prices went up.

There was nothing so absurd.

In the good old days there had been no such thing as going away to work.

It was all thanks to the war.

At any rate, faith was what mattered.

He was surely alive and working.

Wait a little longer and he would certainly come home. —

The old man said such things, comforting the woman at length.

Presently the train stopped, and he bade her take care of herself and went off briskly.

Four or so people got off after the old man, but only one got on in their place.

The carriage had not been crowded to begin with, and now it grew suddenly lonely.

Perhaps it was because the sun had gone down.

A railwayman tramped across the roof and lowered a lighted lamp in from above.

As if remembering it, Sanshiro began to eat the boxed meal he had bought at the last station.

About two minutes after the train started moving again, the woman rose quietly, passed by Sanshiro, and went out of the carriage.

It was then that the color of her sash first came to Sanshiro's notice.

With the head of a simmered sweetfish in his mouth, Sanshiro watched her retreating figure.

She has gone to the lavatory, he thought, and went on eating steadily.

Presently the woman came back.

This time he saw her from the front.

Sanshiro's meal was nearly finished.

He kept his head down and worked his chopsticks hard, taking two or three more mouthfuls, but the woman did not seem to be going back to her seat.

Wondering, he glanced up, and there she was, standing right in front of him.

But the moment he raised his eyes she began to move.

Instead of simply passing him and returning to her seat, she came right up in front of him, turned sideways, put her head out of the window, and quietly began to look out.

The wind struck her hard, and Sanshiro noticed the hair by her ears fluttering.

At that moment Sanshiro flung his empty lunch box out of the window with all his strength.

Her window and his were separated by only one.

When the lid of the box, thrown against the wind, seemed to come whirling back in a flash of white, Sanshiro realized he had done something dreadful, and looked at the woman's face.

Her face was unluckily outside the train.

But she quietly drew her head in and began carefully wiping her forehead with a printed cotton handkerchief.

Sanshiro decided that apologizing was the safer course.

"I beg your pardon."

he said.

The woman said, "Not at all."

in reply.

She was still wiping her face.

Sanshiro, having nothing else to do, fell silent.

The woman fell silent too.

Then she put her head out of the window again.

The three or four other passengers all wore drowsy faces under the dim lamp.

No one was speaking.

Only the train went on making its terrific noise.

Sanshiro closed his eyes.

After a while he heard the woman's voice say, "Will Nagoya be soon now?"

So he heard her say.

He looked, and found that she had turned around at some point, leaned forward, and brought her face close to his.

Sanshiro was startled.

"I suppose so,"

he said, but as this was his first trip to Tokyo he had no idea at all.

"Shall we be late, at this rate?"

"I expect we shall."

"And you get off at Nagoya too …"

"Yes, I get off."

This train terminated at Nagoya.

The conversation was of the most ordinary kind.

Only, the woman had now taken a seat diagonally opposite Sanshiro.

And so for a while there was nothing again but the sound of the train.

When the train stopped at the next station, the woman at last said to Sanshiro that when they reached Nagoya she hoped he would not mind showing her to an inn.

It gave her an uneasy feeling to be alone, she said, and she pressed him again and again.

Sanshiro thought this reasonable enough.

But he could not bring himself to agree with any good grace.

After all she was a stranger, and though he hesitated a great deal, he had not the courage to refuse outright either, so he gave a series of vague half-answers.

Meanwhile the train reached Nagoya.

His big wicker trunk had been sent ahead to Shimbashi, so there was nothing to worry about.

Sanshiro went through the ticket gate carrying only a serviceable cloth bag and an umbrella.

On his head he wore his higher school summer cap.

But, to mark his graduation, he had torn off the badge.

By daylight the color showed fresh in that one spot.

The woman came along behind him.

Sanshiro felt a little awkward about the cap.

But since she was following him there was nothing to be done.

To the woman, of course, the cap was simply a dirty cap.

The train, due at half past nine, had been some forty minutes late, so it was already past ten.

But it was the hot season, and the town was as lively as if the evening had only just begun.

There were two or three inns right in front of them.

Only, they struck Sanshiro as a little too grand.

So he walked past a three-storied place lit with electric lights, looking unconcerned, and strolled on.

Of course he did not know the town, so he had no idea where he would come out.

He simply went toward the darker streets.

The woman followed without saying anything.

Then, two doors from the corner of a comparatively quiet side street, he saw a signboard that read Lodgings.

It was a dirty signboard, suited to Sanshiro and the woman alike.

Sanshiro glanced back and asked her in a word what she thought; she said it would do very well, so he made up his mind and went straight in.

He had meant to explain at the entrance that they were not together, but they were met with a stream of Welcome — please come up — show them the way — Plum Number Four, and so on, so that in the end the two of them were shown into Plum Number Four without a word.

While the maid went to fetch tea, the two of them sat facing each other blankly.

When the maid brought the tea and said the bath was ready, he no longer had the courage to say that this woman was not his companion.

So he took up a towel, said he would go first, and went out to the bathroom.

The bathroom was at the end of the corridor, next to the lavatory.

It was dim, and looked rather unclean.

Sanshiro undressed, jumped into the tub, and thought a little.

This is a nuisance, he thought, splashing about, when he heard footsteps in the corridor.

Someone seemed to have gone into the lavatory.

Presently they came out.

Washed their hands.

And when that was done, the bathroom door creaked half open.

From the doorway the woman asked, "Shall I scrub your back for you?"

she asked.

Sanshiro said in a loud voice,

"No, thank you, that won't be necessary,"

refusing her.

But the woman did not go away.

On the contrary, she came in.

And began to untie her sash.

She clearly meant to bathe together with Sanshiro.

She showed no sign of embarrassment.

Sanshiro leapt out of the tub at once.

He dried himself hastily, went back to the room, sat down on a cushion, and was still considerably shaken when the maid brought the register.

Sanshiro took the register and wrote honestly, Ogawa Sanshiro, twenty-three, student, of Masaki village, Miyako district, Fukuoka prefecture — and then, coming to the woman, was utterly at a loss.

He wished he had waited until she came out of the bath, but it was too late.

The maid was sitting there waiting.

So he had no choice but to write, in the same prefecture, district, and village, same surname, Hana, twenty-three — a complete invention — and hand it back.

Then he kept fanning himself hard.

Presently the woman came back.

"I am so sorry to have troubled you,"

she was saying.

Sanshiro answered, "Not at all."

in reply.

He took a notebook out of his bag and began to write his diary.

There was nothing to write.

If the woman had not been there, it seemed to him, there would have been a great deal to write.

Then the woman said, "I shall step out for a moment,"

and left the room.

Sanshiro found it still harder to write his diary.

He began to wonder where she had gone.

Just then the maid came to lay out the bedding.

She brought only one wide mattress, and when he said that two beds must be laid, she said the room was small, the mosquito net was small, and got nowhere.

She looked as though she thought it a bother.

In the end she said the clerk had just stepped out, and she would ask him when he came back and bring another — and stubbornly spread the single mattress to fill the mosquito net, and went away.

A while later the woman came back.

I am sorry to be so late, she said.

While she was doing something behind the mosquito net there came a rattling sound.

It must have been the toy she had bought for her child.

Presently she seemed to have tied up her cloth bundle again as before.

From the other side of the net came the words, "I shall go first, then."

came a voice.

Sanshiro only said, "Yes,"

and, with his weight on the threshold, went on fanning himself.

He half thought of spending the whole night just like that.

But the mosquitoes came whining at him.

Outside the net it was more than he could bear.

Sanshiro got up, took a white cotton shirt and drawers out of his bag, put them on next to his skin, and tied a dark blue sash over them.

Then, holding two towels, he went inside the mosquito net.

The woman was still moving her fan in the far corner of the mattress.

"Forgive me, but I am a nervous sort and I dislike sleeping in another person's bedding … so I shall arrange a little protection against the fleas. Excuse me."

Saying this, Sanshiro took the spare edge of the sheet and began rolling it up toward the side where the woman lay.

In this way he made a long white partition down the middle of the bed.

The woman turned over to face the other way.

Sanshiro spread out the towels, laid them end to end down his own territory, and lay down narrow along them.

That night neither Sanshiro's hands nor his feet strayed the least bit beyond the narrow width of those towels.

The woman did not say a single word.

She too lay facing the wall and did not stir.

At last the night grew light.

When they had washed and sat down to breakfast, the woman smiled and said, "No fleas last night, I hope?"

she asked.

Sanshiro answered gravely, "No, thank you, none at all,"

or something of the sort, and, keeping his head down, began poking hard at the boiled beans on the little dish.

When they had paid the bill, left the inn, and reached the station, the woman told Sanshiro for the first time that she was going toward Yokkaichi on the Kansai line.

Sanshiro's train came before long.

Because of the timetable the woman had to wait a while.

She came with him as far as the ticket gate and said,

"Thank you for all your trouble … Well then, good-bye,"

and bowed politely.

Sanshiro, holding bag and umbrella in one hand, took off his old cap with the other and said only one word,

"Good-bye."

he said.

The woman gazed steadily at his face, and then said, in a composed tone,

"You are a man with very little nerve, aren't you."

and gave a faint smile.

Sanshiro felt as if he had been flung out onto the platform.

Once inside the carriage, both his ears began to burn worse than ever.

For a while he sat very small and still.

Presently the guard's whistle rang from one end of the long train to the other.

The train began to move.

Sanshiro quietly put his head out of the window.

The woman had gone off somewhere long before.

Only the big clock caught his eye.

Sanshiro quietly went back to his seat.

There were a fair number of passengers.

But not one of them paid any attention to how Sanshiro looked.

Only the man sitting diagonally opposite glanced at him as he returned to his seat.

Being looked at by this man made Sanshiro feel somehow awkward.

Thinking he would read a book to take his mind off it, he opened his bag, and found last night's towels stuffed in at the top.

He pushed them aside and pulled out, from the bottom, whatever his hand happened to touch — and out came a volume of Bacon's essays that he could not understand even when he read it.

It was a thin, shabby, temporarily bound thing, hardly worthy of Bacon.

He had never meant to read it on the train at all; he had simply failed to get it into the big trunk, and while tidying up had thrown it into the bottom of his handbag along with two or three others, and now, by ill luck, it had come to hand.

Sanshiro opened Bacon at page twenty-three.

He did not feel like reading any other book either.

Bacon, of course, he felt still less like reading.

Nevertheless Sanshiro opened page twenty-three respectfully and let his eyes wander evenly over the whole page.

In front of page twenty-three he meant, for the moment, to go over last night again.

What on earth was that woman?

Could there really be such women in the world?

Could a woman be so calm and unconcerned?

Was she uneducated, or was she bold?

Or was she simply innocent?

In short, since he had not gone as far as he might have, he had no way of telling.

He should have taken the plunge and gone a little further.

But it was frightening.

When she said at parting that he was a man with little nerve, he had been startled.

It felt as though twenty-three years of weakness had been exposed all at once.

Not even a parent could have hit the mark so well. —

Having got this far, Sanshiro grew still more dejected.

He felt as though he had been beaten down, past all hope of raising his head, by someone whose origins he did not even know.

He felt he owed page twenty-three of Bacon a considerable apology as well.

It really would not do to lose his head like that.

So much for learning, so much for being a university student.

It reflected badly on his character.

There must have been a better way of handling it.

And yet, if the other party always came at one like that, then for a man with his education there seemed to be no other way of receiving it.

Which meant that one must not go carelessly near women.

It seemed somehow spiritless.

It was terribly confining.

It was rather like having been born crippled.

And yet …

Sanshiro suddenly changed his mood and thought of another world. —

He was going to Tokyo.

He would enter the university.

He would meet famous scholars.

He would associate with students of taste and character.

He would do research in the library.

He would write books.

The world would applaud.

His mother would be delighted.

Thinking loosely of a future like that, he recovered his spirits so thoroughly that there was no longer any need to keep his face buried in page twenty-three.

So he suddenly raised his head.

And found that the man diagonally opposite was again looking his way.

This time Sanshiro looked back at him.

He wore a thick mustache and beard.

He was a long-faced, lean man, somehow suggesting a Shinto priest.

Only the straight line of his nose looked Western.

Sanshiro, still in the middle of his schooling, always turned such men into teachers.

The man wore a white splash-patterned kimono with a white undergarment carefully layered beneath it, and dark blue socks.

From this attire Sanshiro judged him to be a middle school teacher.

Seen from his own position, with a great future ahead of him, the man seemed somehow unimpressive.

He must be forty already.

From here on there seemed little prospect of his rising further.

The man kept smoking steadily.

Blowing long streams of smoke from his nostrils and folding his arms, he looked extremely at ease.

Then again, he was forever getting up to go to the lavatory or somewhere.

Sometimes he gave a great stretch as he rose.

He looked thoroughly bored.

When the passenger beside him laid down a newspaper he had finished reading, the man did not even think of borrowing it.

Sanshiro found himself in a curious mood and shut the volume of Bacon.

He thought of taking out a novel and reading it in earnest, but that seemed too much trouble, so he gave it up.

Instead he wanted to borrow the newspaper from the man in front of him.

Unluckily that man was fast asleep and snoring.

Sanshiro reached out, put his hand on the newspaper, and deliberately asked, "Is this free?"

he asked the man with the beard.

The man said, with a perfectly unconcerned face, "I expect so. Do read it."

he said.

It was Sanshiro, newspaper in hand, who felt less than unconcerned.

When he opened it, there was nothing in it worth looking at.

He read it right through in a minute or two.

As he folded it neatly and put it back in its place, he made a slight bow, and the man bowed lightly in return and said,

"Are you a higher school student?"

he asked.

Sanshiro was pleased that the mark left by the badge on his old cap had caught the man's eye.

"Yes,"

he answered.

"In Tokyo?"

When he was asked this in return, he said for the first time,

"No, in Kumamoto. … But …"

and then fell silent.

He wanted to say he was now a university student, but decided there was no real need to say it, and held back.

The other man only said, "Ah, I see,"

and went on smoking.

He did not ask why a Kumamoto student should be going to Tokyo at this time of year, or anything else.

He seemed to take no interest in Kumamoto students.

At that moment the man asleep in front of Sanshiro said, "Yes, quite so."

he said.

And yet he was certainly asleep.

It was not talking to himself or anything of the sort.

The bearded man looked at Sanshiro and smiled.

Taking this as an opening, Sanshiro asked,

"And where are you going?"

he asked.

"Tokyo,"

the man said slowly, and nothing more.

Somehow he was beginning to seem less and less like a middle school teacher.

But since he was riding third class, it was clear he was nobody of consequence.

So Sanshiro let the conversation drop.

The bearded man kept his arms folded and from time to time beat time on the floor with the front teeth of his clogs.

He looked extremely bored.

But his boredom was the kind that does not want to talk.

When the train reached Toyohashi, the sleeping man sat up abruptly, rubbed his eyes, and got off.

How conveniently he manages to wake up, Sanshiro thought.

Watching from the window and half afraid the man had woken up muddled and mistaken the station, he saw that this was not so at all.

He passed safely through the gate and went out like a man in his right mind.

Reassured, Sanshiro moved to the seat across the way.

This put him next to the bearded man.

The bearded man, in his turn, put his head out of the window and bought some peaches.

Presently he set the fruit down between them and said,

"Won't you have some?"

he said.

Sanshiro thanked him and ate one.

The bearded man seemed fond of them and ate a great many.

He told Sanshiro to have more.

Sanshiro ate another.

As the two of them ate peaches they grew quite friendly and began to talk of all sorts of things.

According to the man's theory, the peach is the most hermit-like of all fruits.

It has somehow a foolish taste.

For one thing, the shape of the stone is clumsy.

And on top of that, he said, it is full of holes, which makes it a most amusing construction.

Sanshiro had never heard such a theory, and thought the man said remarkably trivial things.

Next the man began to say this.

Shiki was extremely fond of fruit.

And he was a man who could eat any amount of it.

Once he ate sixteen big barrel-ripened persimmons.

And it did him no harm at all.

As for himself, he could never imitate Shiki. —

Sanshiro listened, laughing.

But the talk of Shiki, at least, seemed to interest him.

He was thinking of drawing the man out a little more on Shiki when the man said,

"One's hand does go out of itself toward what one likes. There's no helping it. A pig, now, cannot put out a hand, so it puts out its nose instead. Tie a pig up so it cannot move, they say, and set food out in front of its snout, and since it cannot move, the snout gradually grows longer. It goes on growing until it reaches the food. There is nothing so terrible as a fixed desire."

he said, and smiled.

It was a way of talking in which one could not easily tell earnest from joke.

"Well, we may be thankful we are not pigs. If one's nose went stretching out toward whatever one wanted, by now it would be so long one could not even get on a train — a great nuisance."

Sanshiro burst out laughing.

But the other man was unexpectedly calm.

"It really is dangerous. There was a man called Leonardo da Vinci who injected arsenic into the trunk of a peach tree to test whether the poison would spread into the fruit. And someone ate that peach and died. Dangerous. If you don't take care, it's dangerous."

And as he spoke he wrapped up the stones and skins of the peaches he had scattered about, all together in the newspaper, and threw them out of the window.

This time Sanshiro did not feel like laughing.

He was a little put out at hearing the name Leonardo da Vinci, and on top of that he found himself thinking of the woman of the night before and grew oddly uncomfortable, so he held his tongue and said nothing.

But the other man seemed entirely unaware of any of this.

Presently he began to ask,

"Where in Tokyo are you going?"

he asked.

"To tell the truth it is my first time and I don't know my way about … for the moment I thought I would go to the dormitory for men from my province,"

he said.

"Then Kumamoto is already …"

"I have just graduated."

"Ah, indeed,"

he said, but added neither congratulations nor a word of approval.

He only asked, "So you will be entering the university now,"

as though it were the most ordinary thing in the world.

Sanshiro found this a little unsatisfying.

Instead, he disposed of his answer with

"Yes,"

in a single word.

"Which faculty?"

he was asked again.

"The first."

"Law?"

"No, letters."

"Ah, indeed,"

he said again.

Every time Sanshiro heard this "Ah, indeed" he felt strange.

Either the man was very great indeed, or he greatly looked down on people, or else he must be someone with no connection whatever to the university.

But since Sanshiro could not tell which of these it was, his own manner toward the man remained thoroughly vague.

At Hamamatsu the two of them, as if by agreement, ate boxed lunches.

Even when they had finished, the train showed no sign of leaving.

Looking out of the window, Sanshiro saw four or five Westerners walking up and down in front of the train.

One pair among them appeared to be husband and wife; hot as it was, they walked arm in arm.

The woman was dressed all in white, top and bottom, and was very beautiful.

In all his life until that day Sanshiro had seen only five or six Westerners.

Two of them were teachers at the higher school in Kumamoto, and one of those two had the misfortune to be hunchbacked.

Among the women he knew one missionary.

She had a very pointed face, like a whiting or a barracuda.

So a Westerner as gay and lovely as this was not merely a rarity to him.

She looked altogether of a superior order.

Sanshiro gazed at her with all his might.

No wonder they give themselves airs, he thought.

He even went so far as to think how small he would feel if he himself went to the West and found himself among such people.

As they passed the window he listened hard to their talk, but could not understand a word.

The pronunciation seemed utterly different from that of his Kumamoto teachers.

Just then the man put his head out over Sanshiro's shoulder and said,

"Still no sign of our leaving, is there."

and, glancing at the Western couple who had just gone by, said

"Ah, beautiful,"

in a low voice, and immediately gave a great yawn.

Sanshiro realized how thoroughly like a countryman he must look, drew his head in at once, and sat down.

The man followed and returned to his seat.

And then he said,

"Westerners really are beautiful, aren't they."

he said.

Sanshiro could think of no particular reply, so he merely said yes and smiled.

Then the bearded man said,

"We are a pitiful lot, you and I."

he began.

"With faces like ours and bodies as feeble as this, it is no good however many Russo-Japanese wars we win or however much of a first-class power we become. Look at our buildings, look at our gardens — everything is of a piece with our faces. — If this is your first time in Tokyo, you will not yet have seen Mount Fuji. You will see it before long; look out for it. That is the finest thing in Japan. There is nothing else to boast of. And the trouble is that Mount Fuji has been there in nature since ancient times. It is not something we made."

he said, and smiled again.

Sanshiro had never dreamed of meeting such a man after the Russo-Japanese war.

He hardly seemed Japanese.

"But from now on Japan will develop steadily, surely,"

he said in its defense.

At which the man said, with a straight face,

"It will perish."

he said. —

In Kumamoto, to say such a thing aloud would earn one a blow at once.

At worst one would be treated as a traitor.

Sanshiro had grown up in an air in which there was no room, in any corner of his head, for such an idea.

So he even wondered whether the man might not be making a fool of him, taking advantage of his youth.

The man was smiling as usual.

And yet his way of speaking was perfectly composed throughout.

Since he could make nothing of it, Sanshiro gave up answering and fell silent.

Then the man said this.

"Tokyo is bigger than Kumamoto. Japan is bigger than Tokyo. And bigger than Japan …"

He broke off there, but seeing Sanshiro's face, found him listening.

"Bigger than Japan is the inside of your head, surely,"

he said.

"You must not let yourself be bound. However much you think of Japan's good, you only do it harm by overpraising it."

When he heard these words, Sanshiro felt that he had truly left Kumamoto.

At the same time he realized how cowardly he had been while he was there.

That evening Sanshiro reached Tokyo.

The bearded man never gave his name, right up to the moment they parted.

Sanshiro believed that once he was in Tokyo there would be men like this everywhere, and did not think to ask his name.

II

There were many things in Tokyo that astonished Sanshiro.

First of all he was astonished by the clanging of the streetcars.

Then he was astonished by how many people got on and off in the interval between those clangs.

Next he was astonished at Marunouchi.

What astonished him most was that however far he went, Tokyo did not come to an end.

And wherever he walked, there was timber flung down, stones piled up, new houses set back four or five meters from the street, old storehouses half torn down and standing forlornly in front.

Everything looked as if it were being destroyed.

And everything looked at the same time as if it were being built.

It was a tremendous movement.

Sanshiro was thoroughly astonished.

In short, he was astonished to just the same degree, and in just the same way, as any ordinary countryman standing for the first time in the middle of the capital.

All his learning up to now had been of less use in warding off this astonishment than a patent medicine.

Along with this astonishment, Sanshiro's confidence was reduced by some forty percent.

It was unbearably unpleasant.

If this violent activity was itself the real world, then his own life up to today had not touched the real world at all.

It was the same as taking a nap on Horagatoge, waiting to see which way things would go.

But if he asked whether from today he could stop napping and pay his share of the activity, that was difficult.

He was now standing at the center of the activity.

But he had merely been moved into a position where he had to watch the activity going on to left and right, before and behind him; his life as a student could not change from before.

The world shakes and moves like this.

He watches it shaking.

But he cannot join in.

His own world and the real world lie side by side on one plane, yet nowhere do they touch.

And so the real world shakes along like this and goes off, leaving him behind.

It is deeply unsettling.

Standing in the middle of Tokyo, watching the activity of streetcars and trains and people in white clothes and people in black clothes, Sanshiro felt this.

But of the activity in the world of thought that lay behind student life, he noticed nothing at all. —

Meiji thought was repeating in forty years the three hundred years of activity that appeared in the history of the West.

While Sanshiro was shut up in the middle of a moving Tokyo, brooding alone, a letter came from his mother at home.

It was the first he had received in Tokyo.

There was all sorts of news in it.

It began with the happy news that this year's harvest was good, went on to warn him to take care of his health, said that people in Tokyo were all clever and bad-hearted so he must be careful, told him that his allowance would reach him at the end of every month so he need not worry, and closed by saying that a cousin of Masa of the Katsuta family had graduated from the university and was now at the science college or some such place, so he had better call on him and ask his good offices in everything.

She had evidently forgotten the crucial name, for in what amounted to the margin was written, To Mr. Nonomiya Sohachi.

There were two or three other items in this margin.

Saku's roan horse had died of a sudden illness, and Saku was greatly distressed.

Omitsu of the Miwata family had given them some sweetfish, but as they would spoil on the way to Tokyo, the whole household had eaten them — and so on.

Reading this letter, Sanshiro felt somehow that it had come from a faded past.

He even thought, though it was unkind to his mother, that he had no time to read such things.

All the same, he read it through twice.

In short, if he was in contact with the real world at all, it was, for the present, through no one but his mother.

And that mother was an old-fashioned person living in an old-fashioned countryside.

Besides her, there was the woman he had shared the train with.

She was a flash of lightning from the real world.

To call it contact, it had been too brief, and too sharp. —

Sanshiro decided, as his mother had told him, to call on Nonomiya Sohachi.

The next day was hotter than usual.

As it was the vacation he thought Nonomiya would not be at the science college even if he went, but since his mother had not told him the address, he decided to go and ask, and about four in the afternoon he passed the higher school and entered by the Yayoicho gate.

The dust on the street lay five or six centimeters deep, and printed neatly on it were the teeth of clogs, the soles of shoes, the undersides of straw sandals.

The tracks of wheels and bicycles were beyond counting.

The road was stiflingly bad, but once inside the grounds, with so many trees about, he felt refreshed.

He tried the door nearest him and found it locked.

Going around to the back was no good either.

At last he came around to the side.

He pushed at it just to make sure, and it opened conveniently.

At a corner of the corridor a caretaker sat dozing.

When Sanshiro stated his business the man gazed for a while at the woods of Ueno, apparently to collect his wits, and then said abruptly, "He may be in,"

and went off into the interior.

It was very quiet.

Presently he came out again.

"He's in. Go on in,"

he said, as though to a friend.

Following the caretaker, Sanshiro turned a corner and went down a concrete corridor.

The world grew suddenly dark.

It was like being dazzled by the blazing sun, but after a while his eyes settled and he could see about him.

Being a cellar, it was comparatively cool.

On the left was a door, and the door stood open.

A face appeared from it.

A broad forehead, large eyes, a face with something Buddhist about it.

Over a crinkled undershirt he wore a Western suit, but the suit was stained here and there.

He was very tall.

His thinness suited the heat.

He bowed, stretching head and back forward in a single straight line.

"Come in."

With that he drew his head back into the room.

Sanshiro came to the door and looked inside.

Nonomiya was already seated in a chair.

Once more he said, "Come in."

he said.

Where he said to come in there was a bench.

It was made of four square posts with a board laid across them.

Sanshiro sat down on the bench and made the greetings proper to a first meeting.

Then he said he hoped for his kind help in everything.

Nonomiya only listened, saying yes, yes.

His manner was somewhat like that of the man who had eaten peaches on the train.

Having made his little speech, Sanshiro found he had nothing more to say.

Nonomiya too stopped saying yes, yes.

Looking around the room, Sanshiro saw a big long oak table in the middle.

On it stood some intricate apparatus covered with thick wire, and beside it a large glass basin filled with water.

Besides that there lay a file, a knife, and a necktie.

Finally, looking into the far corner, he saw a complicated instrument about the size of a pickle tin standing on a granite pedestal a meter or so high.

Sanshiro noticed two holes opening in the side of this tin.

The holes glittered like the eyes of a great serpent.

Nonomiya said with a smile, They shine, don't they.

And he gave this explanation.

"I make preparations like that during the day, and then at night, when the traffic and everything else quiets down, I look at those eye-like things through a telescope here in this quiet dark cellar. That is how I examine the pressure of light. I began about New Year's this year, but the apparatus is a great nuisance and I have not yet got the results I want. In summer it is comparatively bearable, but on cold nights it is very hard to endure. Even in an overcoat and a muffler it is so cold one can hardly stand it. …"

Sanshiro was greatly astonished.

And astonished as he was, he could not at all grasp what pressure light might have, or what use that pressure could be.

Then Nonomiya urged him, "Have a look through it."

he urged.

Half for amusement, Sanshiro went over to the telescope standing four or five meters in front of the stone pedestal and put his right eye to it, but he could see nothing.

Nonomiya asked, "Well, can you see?"

he asked.

"I can see nothing at all,"

Sanshiro answered, and Nonomiya said, "Ah, I hadn't taken the cap off yet,"

and rose from his chair and removed the cover from the end of the telescope.

Now Sanshiro saw, in a bright field with blurred edges, the graduations of a scale.

At the bottom appeared the figure 2.

Nonomiya asked again, "Well?"

he asked.

"I can see the figure 2,"

Sanshiro said, and Nonomiya said, "It will move in a moment,"

and seemed to go around and do something on the other side.

Presently the scale began to move in the lighted field.

The 2 disappeared.

After it came 3.

After that came 4.

Then 5.

At last it reached 10.

Then the scale began to move back again.

The 10 vanished, the 9 vanished, from 8 to 7, from 7 to 6, and so on down to 1, where it stopped.

Nonomiya asked again, "Well?"

he said.

Sanshiro was astonished and took his eye from the telescope.

He did not even feel like asking what the scale meant.

He thanked him politely, came up out of the cellar, and stepped out where people passed, and found the world still blazing with sunlight.

Hot as it was, he took a deep breath.

The sun, leaning westward, shone slantwise down the broad slope, and the glass windows of the engineering buildings on both sides at the top of the slope blazed as if on fire.

The sky was deep and clear, and in that clearness the flame of a burning fire seemed to be blown back faintly red from the western horizon, so that it felt hot even above Sanshiro's head.

With the slanting sun half on his back, Sanshiro went into the woods on his left.

The woods too had the same evening sun half on their back.

Between the darkened green leaves the light was red as if dyed.

A cicada was singing on the thick trunk of a zelkova.

Sanshiro came to the edge of the pond and squatted down.

It was extremely quiet.

There was not even the sound of a streetcar.

He had read in the newspaper while at home that the streetcar line which was to pass in front of the Red Gate had been diverted around Koishikawa because the university objected.

Squatting by the pond, Sanshiro suddenly remembered this.

A university that will not even let a streetcar through is very far removed from society.

And when one happens to go inside it, there are men like Nonomiya, who has been studying the pressure of light down in a cellar for more than half a year.

Nonomiya dressed very plainly; met outside, he would look like an engineer for the electric company.

And to make the bottom of a cellar his base, and throw himself gladly and tirelessly into his research — that was admirable.

But however much the scale in the telescope moved, it clearly had nothing to do with the real world.

Perhaps Nonomiya had no intention of ever touching the real world in his whole life.

In short, it must be because he breathed this quiet air that he could naturally come to be in such a frame of mind.

Perhaps he too should stop letting his mind wander and spend his life with no connection to the living world.

As Sanshiro sat still, gazing at the surface of the pond, he saw any number of great trees reflected in the depths of the water, and beneath them again the blue sky.

At that moment Sanshiro felt further away than streetcars, than Tokyo, than Japan itself.

But after a while a loneliness like thin cloud spread all through that feeling.

And he felt a loneliness such as one might feel sitting all alone down in Nonomiya's cellar.

Even at the higher school in Kumamoto he had many times climbed Tatsutayama, quieter than this, or lain down on the field where nothing grew but evening primroses, and felt he had forgotten the world altogether. But this feeling of solitude had come to him now for the first time.

Was it because he had seen the violent activity of Tokyo?

Or was it — at this Sanshiro flushed.

For he had remembered the woman he had shared the train with. —

It seemed that the real world was necessary to him after all.

And yet the real world felt too dangerous to go near.

Sanshiro thought he would go back to his lodgings quickly and write a letter to his mother.

Happening to raise his eyes, he saw two women standing on the hill to his left.

Just below them was the pond, on the far side a high bank of trees, and behind that a showy red brick building in the Gothic style.

And the sinking sun sent its light sideways past all of it.

The women stood facing this evening sun.

Seen from the low shade where Sanshiro squatted, the top of the hill was very bright.

One of the women, apparently dazzled, was holding a fan up to her forehead.

Her face was not clear.

But the color of her kimono and the color of her sash were vividly plain.

The white of her socks caught his eye too.

Whatever the color of the thongs, he could see she wore straw sandals.

The other was all in white.

She held no fan or anything else.

She only stood with a slight frown, gazing into the depths of an old tree that stretched its branches high over the water as if to lean across from the far bank.

The one with the fan stood a little forward.

The one in white was a step back from the edge of the bank.

From where Sanshiro was, the two figures appeared at an angle.

What Sanshiro felt at that moment was simply that the colors were beautiful.

But being a countryman, he could neither say nor write in what way these colors were beautiful.

He only thought that the one in white was a nurse.

Sanshiro gazed at them again, lost in it.

Then the one in white began to move.

It was not the movement of someone with an errand.

It was as though her feet had begun to move of themselves.

Looking again, he saw that the one with the fan was somehow moving too.

The two came down the slope as if by agreement, walking in a way that had no purpose.

Sanshiro went on watching.

At the foot of the slope there is a stone bridge.

If they did not cross it they would go straight on toward the science college.

If they crossed it they would come this way along the water's edge.

The two crossed the stone bridge.

The fan was no longer raised.

In her left hand she held a small white flower, and came along smelling it.

As she smelled it she walked looking at the flower held under her nose, so her eyes were lowered.

And so she came to within two meters of Sanshiro and suddenly stopped.

"What is this, I wonder,"

she said, and looked up.

Overhead a great chinquapin spread leaves so thick that not a ray of sun came through, jutting out in a round mass as far as the water's edge.

"That is a chinquapin,"

the nurse said.

It was exactly as though she were teaching a child.

"Really. It has no nuts on it."

she said, and as she lowered her upturned face she glanced, in that motion, at Sanshiro.

Sanshiro was distinctly conscious of the instant when the dark pupils of her eyes moved.

At that moment the sense of color vanished altogether, and he met with something he could not name.

That something recalled what he had felt when the woman on the train said, "You are a man with very little nerve, aren't you."

Somehow the two feelings closely resembled each other.

Sanshiro grew afraid.

The two women passed in front of him.

The younger one dropped the white flower she had been smelling on the ground before him as she went.

Sanshiro gazed fixedly after them.

The nurse went ahead.

The younger one followed.

Amid the gay colors he could see a sash with white pampas grass dyed into it.

In her hair too she wore a single pure white rose.

That rose shone out conspicuously in her black hair under the shade of the chinquapin.

Sanshiro sat there vacantly.

Presently he said in a low voice, "A contradiction."

he said.

Whether the contradiction lay between the air of the university and that woman, or between those colors and that look in her eyes, or in the fact that seeing her had made him think of the woman on the train, or in the two contradictory directions of his own plans for the future, or in the fact that he felt fear toward something that gave him such joy — to this young man up from the country none of it was clear.

It was only, somehow, a contradiction.

Sanshiro picked up the flower the woman had dropped.

And smelled it.

But it had no particular scent.

Sanshiro threw the flower into the pond.

It floated there.

Then suddenly someone across the way called his name.

Sanshiro looked away from the flower.

Nonomiya was standing tall on the far side of the stone bridge.

"You are still here?"

he said.

Before answering, Sanshiro got up and walked slowly over.

When he reached the middle of the stone bridge he said,

"Yes."

he said.

It sounded somehow foolish.

But Nonomiya was not in the least surprised.

"Is it cool here?"

he asked.

Sanshiro again said,

"Yes."

he said.

Nonomiya gazed at the water of the pond for a while, then put his right hand into his pocket and began looking for something.

An envelope was sticking half out of the pocket.

The writing on it looked like a woman's hand.

Nonomiya apparently could not find what he was looking for, and drew out his hand as before and let it hang.

Then he said this.

"The apparatus went a little wrong today, so there will be no experiment tonight. I thought I would take a walk toward Hongo and then go home; how about it, will you walk with me?"

Sanshiro agreed readily.

The two of them climbed the slope and came out on the hill.

Nonomiya stopped for a moment near where the women had been standing, and looking out over the red building visible through the green trees opposite and the whole pond, whose water was low for so high a bank, he said,

"Rather a good view, isn't it. Only the corner of that building shows a little. Through the trees. There. Good, isn't it. Have you noticed? That building is really very well made. The engineering building is good too, but this one is better."

Sanshiro was a little surprised at Nonomiya's powers of appreciation.

To tell the truth, he himself could not tell at all which was the better.

So this time it was Sanshiro's turn to say yes, yes.

"And then there is the feeling of these trees and this water. — It is nothing remarkable, but after all it is in the middle of Tokyo — it is quiet, isn't it. One cannot do scholarly work except in a place like this. Lately Tokyo has grown far too noisy, which is a nuisance. That is the Palace,"

he said as he began to walk, pointing out the building on the left.

"That is where they hold the faculty meetings. Yes — no, I need not attend. I do well enough living in my cellar. Scholarship these days moves at a terrific pace, and if one is the least bit careless one is left behind at once. To others it may look as if I were fooling about in a cellar, but the head of the man doing it is working furiously all the same. Perhaps rather more furiously than the streetcars. That is why I grudge even a summer journey,"

he said, and looked up at the wide sky.

There was little sunlight left in the sky.

Over the still surface of the blue sky a thin white cloud floated in a long slant, like the mark of a brush drawn across it.

"Do you know what that is?"

he said.

Sanshiro looked up at the half-transparent cloud.

"That is all powdered snow. Seen from below like this it does not move at all. But in fact it is moving faster than any storm on the ground. — Have you read Ruskin?"

Sanshiro answered, discouraged, that he had not.

Nonomiya only said,

"Indeed."

and nothing more.

After a while he said,

"It would be interesting to sketch this sky. — Perhaps I shall mention it to Haraguchi."

he said.

Sanshiro of course did not know the name of the painter Haraguchi.

The two of them went from in front of the bronze statue of Baelz, past the trifoliate-orange temple, and out onto the streetcar road.

In front of the statue he was asked what he thought of it, and Sanshiro was again at a loss.

The main street was very lively.

Streetcars passed without a break.

"Don't you find the streetcars noisy?"

he was asked again.

To Sanshiro they were less noisy than terrifying.

But he only answered, "Yes,"

and left it at that.

Then Nonomiya said, "I find them noisy too."

he said.

But he did not look in the least troubled by them.

"Unless a conductor tells me, I cannot manage the changes on my own. They have increased so absurdly these past two or three years. The more convenient they get, the more awkward it is. It is just the same as my own field of study,"

he said, and laughed.

As the term was about to begin, a good many students passed by wearing new higher school caps.

Nonomiya watched them with pleasure.

"A good many new ones have come, haven't they,"

he said.

"Young people have spirit; that is good. By the way, how old are you?"

he asked.

Sanshiro gave the same age he had written in the inn register.

At which Nonomiya said,

"Then you are about seven years younger than I am. In seven years a man can do most things. But time passes easily. Seven years is nothing at all,"

he said.

Which of the two he meant, Sanshiro could not tell.

As they came near the crossing there were many bookshops and magazine shops on both sides.

In two or three of them people were swarming like a black mountain. And reading the magazines.

And going away without buying.

Nonomiya said,

"What a cunning lot they are,"

and laughed.

Though he too opened a copy of The Sun for a moment.

At the crossing there was a shop for Western sundries on the near left and one for Japanese sundries on the far side.

Between them the streetcars swung around the curve and went by at a tremendous rate.

The bells went clang, clang, clang, clang.

It was so crowded that crossing was difficult.

Nonomiya pointed to the shop on the other side and said,

"I have a small purchase to make there,"

and dashed through the clanging.

Sanshiro stuck close and crossed over with him.

Nonomiya went straight into the shop.

Waiting outside, Sanshiro noticed that combs and flower hairpins and such were laid out in the glass case at the front.

Sanshiro thought this strange.

Wondering what on earth Nonomiya was buying, he went into the shop, and was shown a ribbon like a cicada's wing dangling from his hand, with the words,

"What do you think of this?"

he was asked.

At that moment Sanshiro thought of buying something himself and sending it to Omitsu of the Miwata family in return for the sweetfish.

But he thought that Omitsu, on receiving it, would certainly not take it as thanks for the sweetfish but would put some willful construction of her own upon it, and so he gave up the idea.

After that Nonomiya treated him to a Western dinner in Masagocho.

According to Nonomiya it was the best place in Hongo.

But to Sanshiro it simply tasted like Western food.

He ate it all, however.

He parted from Nonomiya in front of the restaurant, and though his way lay toward Oiwake, he politely went back to the crossing and turned left.

Thinking of buying clogs, he peered into a clog shop, and there under the bright white gaslight sat a girl painted dead white like a plaster monster, so he suddenly lost the wish and gave it up.

And all the way home he thought of nothing but the color of the face of the woman he had met by the university pond. —

It was a fox color, like rice cake lightly toasted.

And the grain of the skin was extremely fine.

Sanshiro decided that a woman's coloring simply had to be that, and nothing else.

III

The academic year began on the eleventh of September.

Sanshiro honestly went to the college about half past ten in the morning, but there was nothing but the lecture timetable on the notice board in front of the entrance, and not a single student.

He copied down in his notebook only the lectures he was to attend, and then looked in at the office, where at least the clerk was in.

When he asked when lectures began, the clerk said they began on the eleventh of September.

He said it quite coolly.

But when he said that in every room he looked into there seemed to be no lecture going on, the clerk answered that this was because the professors were not there.

Sanshiro thought, ah, of course, and left the office.

Going around to the back and looking up at the high sky from under a great zelkova, he found it looked brighter than an ordinary sky.

He went down through the bamboo grass to the water's edge, came to the chinquapin tree of the other day, and squatted down again.

Thinking vaguely that it would be pleasant if that woman were to pass by once more, he looked up at the hill again and again, but there was not a soul on it.

Sanshiro thought that this was only natural.

Nevertheless he went on squatting there.

Then the noon gun went off and startled him, and he went back to his lodgings.

The next day he went to the college at exactly eight o'clock.

Coming in at the main gate, his eye was caught by the ginkgo trees planted on both sides of the broad avenue in front of him.

From about the point where the ginkgoes come to an end in the distance the ground slopes gently down, so that to Sanshiro standing beside the main gate only part of the second story of the science college beyond the slope was visible.

Behind its roof the woods of Ueno shone far off in the morning sun.

The sun was straight ahead.

Sanshiro found this view, with its depth, delightful.

On the right, where the row of ginkgoes ends on this side, is the college of law and letters.

On the left, a little further down, is the natural history lecture building.

Both buildings are alike, with sharply pointed triangular roofs jutting out above long narrow windows.

Where the edge of that triangle joins the red brick to the black roof there runs a slender straight line of stone.

And the color of that stone is faintly blue, which lends a certain charm to the showy red brick that comes just below it.

And these long windows and high triangles are repeated side by side any number of times.

Ever since he had heard Nonomiya's view the other day Sanshiro had suddenly come to appreciate this building, but this morning he began to feel that the opinion was not Nonomiya's at all but a theory of his own from the beginning.

In particular he thought it irregular and odd that the natural history building did not stand in a straight line with the college of law and letters but was set back a little.

He decided that next time he met Nonomiya he would bring out this theory as his own discovery.

He also admired the library, which juts forward some fifty meters from the right end of the college of law and letters.

He did not really know, but it seemed to him it must be the same sort of architecture.

The five or six large palm trees planted along its red wall were a very fine touch.

The engineering college, far back on the left, looked as though it had been worked out from a Western castle of feudal times.

It is built perfectly square.

The windows are square too.

Only the four corners and the entrance are round.

These must be modeled on turrets.

Being a castle, it is solid.

It does not look ready to fall over, as the law and letters building does.

It resembles, somehow, a short sumo wrestler.

Sanshiro looked as far as he could look, and, taking into account that there were still many other buildings he could not see, was filled with a feeling of grandeur.

"A seat of learning must be like this. It is because there is a setting like this that research is possible. Splendid."

— Sanshiro felt as though he had become a great scholar.

But when he went into the lecture room, the bell rang and no professor came.

Nor did any students appear.

The next hour was the same.

Sanshiro lost his temper and left the lecture room.

Then, to make sure, he walked twice around the pond and went home.

About ten days after that, the lectures at last began.

Sanshiro's state of mind, when he first entered the lecture room and sat with the other students waiting for the professor, was truly reverent.

He guessed at his own feelings, thinking that a Shinto priest who has put on his vestments and is about to conduct a festival must feel something like this.

He had certainly been struck by the dignity of learning.

Not only that: since the professor did not appear even fifteen minutes after the bell had rung, the awe born of expectation grew greater still.

Presently a fine-looking old Westerner opened the door, came in, and began to lecture in fluent English.

At that time Sanshiro learned that the word answer comes from the Anglo-Saxon and-swaru.

Then he learned the name of the village where Scott's primary school was.

He carefully wrote both down in his notebook.

Next he attended the lecture on the theory of literature.

This professor came into the room and looked for a moment at the blackboard, and seeing the words Geschehen and Nachbild written on it said, Ah, German, and with a laugh promptly rubbed them out.

Sanshiro felt that this made him lose a little of his respect for German.

The professor then listed some twenty definitions of literature that literary men had given from ancient times.

Sanshiro carefully wrote these down in his notebook too.

In the afternoon he went to the large lecture hall.

There were about seventy or eighty listeners in that room.

So the professor spoke in the manner of an orator.

It opened with, A single cannon shot shattered the dream of Uraga, and Sanshiro listened with interest, but toward the end a great many names of German philosophers came out and it grew extremely hard to follow.

Looking down at the desk, he saw the word FAILED splendidly carved into it.

It must have been finished at great leisure, for the hand that had cut so neatly into the hard oak board did not seem that of an amateur.

It was an admirable piece of work.

The man next to him was admirably persevering in taking notes.

Peering over, he found they were not notes at all.

He was drawing a caricature of the professor's face from a distance.

The moment Sanshiro peered over, the man held out his notebook toward him to show it.

The drawing was well done, but what the words written beside it — a cuckoo in the far-off cloudy sky — were supposed to mean, he could not make out.

When the lecture was over, Sanshiro, feeling somehow tired, rested his cheek on his hand at the second-floor window and looked down at the garden inside the main gate.

There were only great pines and cherry trees planted there, with a broad graveled path laid between them, but just because it had not been overtended it was pleasant to look at.

According to Nonomiya, it had not been so pretty here in the old days.

When Nonomiya's teacher, a man whose name he forgot, was a student he used to ride a horse about here, and the horse would not obey him but out of spite went deliberately under the trees, so that his cap caught on the pine branches.

The teeth of his clogs caught in the stirrups.

And while he was in great difficulty, the apprentices from the barber's shop called Kitadoko in front of the main gate came out in a crowd and stood laughing in high amusement.

In those days men who were interested put up money together and built a stable on the grounds, where they kept three horses and a riding master.

But the master was a terrible drinker, and in the end he sold the best of the three, the white one, and drank the money.

It was said to be an old horse from the time of Napoleon the Third.

Surely it could not have been from the time of Napoleon the Third.

But as he was thinking that there had been easygoing times too, the man who had drawn the caricature came up and said,

"University lectures are dull, aren't they."

he said.

Sanshiro gave a noncommittal answer.

In fact, whether they were dull or not, Sanshiro could not judge in the least.

But from that time on he began to talk with this man.

That day he felt somehow low and out of spirits, so he gave up walking around the pond and went home.

After supper he read his notes over again, but grew neither more cheerful nor more depressed.

He wrote his mother a letter in plain spoken language. —

School has begun.

From now on I go every day.

The college is a very large, fine place, and the buildings are very beautiful.

In the middle there is a pond.

Walking around the pond is my pleasure.

I have lately grown used to the streetcars at last.

I should like to buy you something, but as I do not know what would be good I shall not buy anything.

If you want something, please write and tell me.

This year's rice will rise in price before long, so it will pay to hold it rather than sell.

It would be better not to be too friendly with Omitsu of the Miwata family.

Now that I have come to Tokyo, I find there are people without number.

There are many men, and many women too.

Such were the things he strung together in confusion.

When he had written the letter and read six or seven pages of an English book he grew sick of it.

He began to think that reading one book of this kind was no use at all.

He laid out his bedding and decided to go to sleep, but he could not sleep.

While he was thinking that if he became an insomniac he had better go to a hospital and be examined at once, he fell asleep.

The next day too he went to the college at the fixed hour and listened to the lectures.

Between lectures he overheard talk of how this year's graduates had been sold to such and such a place for so much.

There were men saying that so-and-so and so-and-so were still left over and were rumored to be competing for a post at some government school.

Sanshiro felt a dull pressure, as though the future were bearing down on him from far away, but he soon forgot it.

He was more interested in the talk about what Shonosuke had done.

So in the corridor he caught a classmate from Kumamoto and asked what Shonosuke was, and was told she was a girl chanter of joruri who appeared at the variety halls.

Then the man told him what the hall's signboard looked like and where in Hongo it was, and on top of that invited him to go together the coming Saturday.

Thinking how well he knew all this, Sanshiro learned that the man had gone to a variety hall for the first time only the night before.

Sanshiro somehow began to want to go to the hall and see Shonosuke.

When he thought of going back to his lodgings for lunch, the man who had drawn the caricature the day before came up saying, Here, here, and dragged him off to a place on the Hongo main street called Yodomiken, where he made him eat curried rice.

At this Yodomiken they sell fruit in the front of the shop.

It was a new building.

The man who had drawn the caricature pointed at the front of the building and informed him that this was the Art Nouveau style.

Sanshiro learned for the first time that there was an Art Nouveau style in architecture as well.

On the way back he was taught about Aokido too.

That too, it seemed, was a place university students often went.

They went in at the Red Gate and the two of them walked around the pond.

At that time the caricaturist said that the late Professor Lafcadio Hearn had hated going into the teachers' common room, and whenever a lecture was over he always walked round and round here — saying it as though he had been taught it by Hearn himself.

When Sanshiro asked why he had not gone into the common room, he said,

"Why, that is obvious. In the first place, you can tell just by listening to their lectures. There is not one of them worth talking to."

Sanshiro was astonished that he could say such a savage thing so calmly.

This man was called Sasaki Yojiro, and had graduated from a technical college and this year entered the university as a special-course student.

He said he was living at a house called Hirota's at number five, Higashikatamachi, and that Sanshiro should come and visit.

When Sanshiro asked if it was a lodging house, he answered, No, it is the house of a higher school teacher.

For some while after that, Sanshiro went to the college every day and dutifully listened to the lectures.

He sometimes attended things outside the required subjects as well.

Even so, he was still unsatisfied.

So in the end he sometimes showed his face even at subjects with no connection whatever to his own field.

But mostly he gave them up after two or three times.

There was not one that he kept up for a month.

Even so, it came on the average to about forty hours a week.

However diligent Sanshiro might be, forty hours was rather too many.

Sanshiro felt a kind of pressure without a break.

And yet he was unsatisfied.

Sanshiro could no longer enjoy himself.

One day he met Sasaki Yojiro and told him about it, and Yojiro, hearing forty hours, opened his eyes wide and said, "Idiot, idiot,"

and then, "Think whether you would be satisfied if you ate the bad food at a lodging house ten times a day,"

knocking Sanshiro down with an epigram out of the blue.

Sanshiro was at once overawed, and asked his advice: "What should I do, then?"

he asked.

"You should ride the streetcars,"

said Yojiro.

Sanshiro thought this must be some sort of figure of speech and considered it for a while, but since nothing occurred to him he asked again,

"Real streetcars?"

he asked again.

At that Yojiro burst out laughing.

"Ride the streetcars and go around Tokyo fifteen or sixteen times, and you will come to be satisfied of yourself,"

he says.

"Why?"

"Why? Well, there is no saving a living head that is sealed up with dead lectures. Go outside and let the wind in. There are any number of other devices for getting satisfied, but the streetcar is the first step and the easiest of all."

That evening Yojiro dragged Sanshiro off, and they took a streetcar from Yonchome to Shimbashi, and from Shimbashi back again to Nihonbashi, where they got off, and he asked,

"Well?"

he asked.

Next they turned from the main street into a narrow side street and went upstairs at a restaurant with a signboard reading Hiranoya, where they ate supper and drank sake.

All the maids there speak in the Kyoto manner.

It has a most clinging feel about it.

Coming out into the street, Yojiro, his face flushed, asked again,

"Well?"

he asked.

Next, saying he would take him to a real variety hall, he turned into another narrow side street and went up into a hall called Kiharadana.

Here they heard a storyteller named Kosan.

After ten o'clock, coming out into the street, Yojiro asked again,

"Well?"

he asked.

Sanshiro did not answer that he was satisfied.

But neither did he feel altogether unsatisfied.

At that Yojiro launched into a great discourse on Kosan.

Kosan is a genius.

An artist like that does not appear often.

Because one thinks one can hear him any time, he seems cheap, which is a great pity.

In truth, we who live in the same age as he are extremely fortunate.

Born a little earlier, one could not have heard Kosan.

A little later, the same. —

Enyu is skillful too.

But he is of a different sort from Kosan.

The hanger-on Enyu performs is amusing because it is Enyu turned into a hanger-on; the hanger-on Kosan does is amusing because it is a hanger-on separated from Kosan.

Hide Enyu from the characters Enyu performs, and the characters vanish altogether.

Hide Kosan from the characters Kosan performs, hide him as much as you like, and the characters only go on living and moving.

That is where his greatness lies.

Yojiro said all this, and then asked again,

"Well?"

he asked.

To tell the truth, Sanshiro did not really understand the flavor of Kosan.

And besides, he had never once heard this Enyu.

So it was hard to judge whether Yojiro's theory was right.

But he was impressed that the comparison hit the mark so well that it might almost be called literary.

When they parted in front of the higher school, Sanshiro said,

"Thank you. I am greatly satisfied,"

by way of thanks.

At which Yojiro said,

"From here on nothing but the library will satisfy you,"

and turned off toward Katamachi.

By this one remark Sanshiro learned for the first time that one could go into the library.

From the next day Sanshiro cut his forty hours of lectures down to nearly half.

And he went into the library.

It was a wide, long building with a high ceiling and many windows to left and right.

Of the stacks one could see only the entrance.

Peering in from the front on this side, it seemed that inside there were books beyond counting.

Standing and watching, he saw people coming out of the stacks with two or three thick volumes in their arms and turning left at the exit.

They were people going to the faculty reading room.

Some took the book they needed down from the shelves and spread it open against their chests and examined it standing there.

Sanshiro grew envious.

To go right to the back and climb to the second floor, and then to the third, and up there higher than Hongo, with no living thing near, smelling the smell of paper — how he would like to read.

But as to what he would read, he had no clear idea.

He would not know until he read, but he felt that there must be a great deal of something back there.

Being a first-year student, Sanshiro had no right to go into the stacks.

Having no choice, he bent over the great boxed card catalogue and went through it card by card, and however many he turned, new titles kept coming after them.

At last his shoulders began to ache.

Lifting his face and looking around the hall to rest, he found it quiet, as a library should be.

And yet there were a great many people.

And the heads of the people at the far end looked black.

Their eyes and mouths were not distinct.

Outside the high windows trees could be seen here and there.

A little sky could be seen too.

From far off came the sounds of the town.

Standing there, Sanshiro thought that the life of a scholar was a quiet and a deep thing.

So that day he went home just as he was.

The next day he gave up daydreaming, and as soon as he went in he borrowed a book.

But he had borrowed the wrong one, so he returned it at once.

The book he borrowed after that was too difficult to read, so he returned that too.

In this way Sanshiro borrowed eight or nine books without fail every day.

Though there were some, now and then, that he read a little of.

What astonished Sanshiro was when he discovered the fact that whatever book he borrowed, someone had certainly looked through it once before him.

This was clear from the pencil marks visible here and there in the books.

Once, to make sure, Sanshiro borrowed a novel by a writer named Aphra Behn.

Until he opened it he thought surely not, but when he looked there too were careful pencil marks.

At this Sanshiro thought that it was more than he could bear.

Just then a band passed outside the window, and he found himself wanting to go for a walk, and went out into the street, and at last went into Aokido.

Going in, he found two parties of customers, both students, and in the far corner one man sitting quite apart, drinking tea.

When Sanshiro happened to see his profile, it seemed to be the man who had eaten so many peaches on the train when he came up to Tokyo.

The other man did not notice him.

A sip of tea and then a pull at his cigarette; he was taking things very slowly.

Today he had given up the white cotton kimono and was wearing a Western suit.

But it was by no means a fine one.

It was hardly better than the suit of Nonomiya of the pressure of light, except for the white shirt.

As he watched, Sanshiro made certain that it was indeed the peach man.

Since he had begun attending university lectures, what this man had said on the train had somehow suddenly begun to seem full of meaning, and so Sanshiro thought of going over and greeting him.

But the man kept looking straight ahead, drinking tea and puffing at his cigarette, puffing at his cigarette and drinking tea.

There was no way to make an opening.

Sanshiro sat gazing at his profile, then suddenly drained the wine in his glass and dashed out into the street.

And went back to the library.

That day, what with the strength of the wine and a certain working of his mood, he was able to study with unusual interest, and Sanshiro was greatly pleased.

After about two hours absorbed in reading he came to himself at last, and while slowly getting ready to go home he idly turned over the last of the books he had borrowed, the one he had not yet opened, and found that in the blank space of the endpaper someone had scrawled a great deal in pencil.

"When Hegel lectured on philosophy at the University of Berlin, Hegel had not the least intention of selling philosophy. His lectures were not lectures that expounded the truth; they were the lectures of a man in whom the truth was embodied. Not lectures of the tongue, but lectures of the heart. When truth and man are melted together into one, then what is expounded, what is spoken, is no longer a lecture for the sake of a lecture but a lecture for the sake of the Way. Only when it has reached this point is a lecture on philosophy worth hearing. Those who merely roll the truth about on the tip of the tongue leave nothing behind but empty notes in dead ink on dead paper. What meaning has it? … I am reading this book now for an examination, that is to say for bread, swallowing my resentment and my tears. Pressing my throbbing head, remember to curse the examination system for ever and ever."

So it ran.

There was of course no signature.

Sanshiro smiled in spite of himself.

But he felt somehow that his eyes had been opened.

Thinking that this must be true not only of philosophy but of literature as well, he turned the page, and there was more.

"Hegel's …"

The man seems to have been very fond of Hegel.

"The students who gathered in Berlin from every quarter to hear Hegel's lectures did not gather out of the ambition to use those lectures as capital for earning their bread. It was nothing but the expression of a pure heart: hearing that there was a sage named Hegel who from the lecture platform transmitted the highest universal truth, and being desperate in their longing to rise and to seek the Way, they wished to resolve, beneath that platform, the doubts coiled in their own hearts. That is why they could decide their own futures by hearing Hegel. They could remake their own destinies. To imagine that it is the same thing as you Japanese university students, who listen blankly to lectures and graduate blankly, is an outrageous conceit. You are nothing but typewriters. And greedy typewriters at that. What you do, what you think, what you say, in the end has no bearing on the urgent living movement of society. Blank to the day you die. Blank to the day you die."

— repeating blank twice over.

Sanshiro sat silent, lost in thought.

Then someone tapped him lightly on the shoulder from behind.

It was Yojiro.

It is a rare thing to see Yojiro in the library.

He is a man who maintains that lectures are useless but the library is important.

But he is also a man who seldom goes in, for all his maintaining it.

"I say, Nonomiya Sohachi was looking for you,"

he says.

It had never occurred to him that Yojiro might know Nonomiya, so he asked again, to make sure, whether he meant Nonomiya of the science college, and got the answer, yes.

He put down his book at once and went out to the place at the entrance where the newspapers are read, but Nonomiya was not there.

He went out as far as the porch, but he was not there either.

He went down the stone steps and craned his neck and looked all around, but there was neither shadow nor shape of him.

He had no choice but to turn back.

Coming back to his seat, he found Yojiro pointing at the Hegel passage and saying in a low voice,

"He is in fine spirits. It must be a graduate of the old days. The old ones were rough, but there was something interesting about them. It really is exactly as he says,"

grinning as he spoke.

He seemed to like it very much.

Sanshiro said,

"Nonomiya is not there,"

he says.

"He was at the entrance a while ago."

"Did he seem to want something?"

"He seemed to, perhaps."

The two of them left the library together.

At that time Yojiro told him this. —

Nonomiya was formerly a pupil of Professor Hirota, in whose house Yojiro was living, and he often came there.

He is tremendously fond of learning, and has done a good deal of research.

Anyone in that field, even Westerners, all know Nonomiya's name.

Sanshiro remembered again the story of Nonomiya's teacher who had been tormented by a horse inside the main gate long ago, and began to wonder whether that might not be Professor Hirota.

When he mentioned it to Yojiro, Yojiro laughed and said it might well be their own professor, that he was just the man to do such a thing.

The next day happened to be Sunday, so he could not meet Nonomiya at the college.

But the fact that Nonomiya had been looking for him the day before was on his mind.

Luckily he had not yet called at the new house, so he decided to go himself and hear what the business was.

He resolved on it in the morning, but while he was dawdling over the newspaper it became noon.

He ate lunch and was about to set out when a friend from Kumamoto he had not seen for a long while turned up.

It was well past four before he finally got rid of him.

He was a little late, but he went out as planned.

Nonomiya's house is very far away.

He had moved to Okubo four or five days before.

But by streetcar one can get there quickly.

He had heard it was near the station, so there would be no trouble in finding it.

To tell the truth, Sanshiro had made a bad blunder since that trip to Hiranoya.

Meaning to go to the higher commercial school in Kanda, he had got on at Hongo Yonchome, and had gone past his stop as far as Kudan, and had then been carried on to Iidabashi, where he had at last changed to the outer-moat line, and come out from Ochanomizu to Kandabashi, and, still not realizing, had gone hurrying along Kamakura-gashi in the direction of Sukiyabashi.

Ever since then the streetcars had somehow seemed dangerous to him, but as he had heard that the Kobu line ran straight through he got on with an easy mind.

Getting off at Okubo station and going along the Nakahyakunin street, if instead of going toward the Toyama school you turn aside immediately at the crossing, it becomes a narrow lane about a meter wide.

Going gently up this on the rise of one's toes, there is a thin grove of large bamboo.

On this side of the grove and beyond it there is a house with people living in it.

Nonomiya's house was the nearer one.

A small gate stood at an angle, in a position with no relation whatever to the direction of the road.

Going in, he found the house too in an unexpected place.

Both the gate and the entrance had clearly been added on later.

There was a fine hedge beside the kitchen, while on the garden side there was no partition of any kind.

There was only a great bush clover grown taller than a man, hiding a little of the veranda of the sitting room.

Nonomiya had brought a chair out onto this veranda, and was sitting in it reading a Western magazine.

Seeing Sanshiro come in, he said,

"This way,"

he said.

It was exactly the same greeting as in the cellar of the science college.

Whether he should come in from the garden or go around to the front door, Sanshiro hesitated a little.

Then again came

"This way,"

urging him on, so he made up his mind and went up from the garden.

The sitting room was itself the study, about eight mats in size, with a fair number of Western books.

Nonomiya left his chair and sat down on the floor.

Sanshiro made loose, aimless conversation — what a quiet place it was, how quickly one could get to Ochanomizu after all, how the telescope experiment was coming along — and then asked,

"I hear you were looking for me yesterday. Was there something you wanted?"

he asked.

At which Nonomiya looked a little apologetic and said,

"Oh, it was really nothing at all,"

he said.

Sanshiro only said,

"Ah."

"And you came all this way for that?"

"No, it was not exactly that."

"The fact is that your mother at home sent me some very fine things, saying that her son was in my care in all sorts of ways, so I thought I would thank you too …"

"Ah, is that so. Did she send something?"

"Yes, a red fish pickled in sake lees."

"Then it must be himeichi."

Sanshiro thought she had sent a poor sort of present.

But Nonomiya asked all sorts of questions about this himeichi.

Sanshiro explained in particular the proper way to eat it.

He instructed him that one must grill it lees and all, and that if one does not remove the lees just as one transfers it to the plate the flavor is lost.

While the two of them were going back and forth about himeichi, the sun set.

Sanshiro was thinking of going home and was beginning his farewells when a telegram arrived from somewhere.

Nonomiya broke the seal and read the telegram, and said under his breath, "How awkward,"

he said.

Sanshiro could hardly sit there with an unconcerned face, and yet he did not feel he could ask anything so intrusive, so he only said,

"Has something happened?"

asking it stiffly.

At which Nonomiya said,

"No, it is nothing very much,"

and showed Sanshiro the telegram he held in his hand.

It said, Come at once.

"Are you going somewhere?"

"Yes, my sister has been ill for some time and is in the university hospital, and she says to come at once,"

he said, without the least sign of alarm.

It was Sanshiro who was startled instead.

He lumped Nonomiya's sister, the sister's illness, and the university hospital all together, added to them the woman he had met by the pond, and stirred them up all at once and was startled.

"Then she must be very bad."

"No, I should think not. The fact is my mother is there nursing her — if it were really because of the illness it would be quicker to jump on a streetcar and come here. No, it is some mischief of my sister's. She is a foolish thing and often plays tricks like this. I have not been once since I moved here, so she probably expected me to come on Sunday and has been waiting — that is all,"

he said, and bent his head to one side, thinking.

"Still, you had better go. It would be bad if she were really ill."

"Yes. It hardly seems likely she could change so suddenly in four or five days, but perhaps I shall go and see."

"It can do no harm to go."

Nonomiya decided to go.

Having decided to go, he said he had a favor to ask of Sanshiro.

If by any chance the telegram was because of the illness, he would not be back tonight.

In that case the maid would be left alone to keep the house.

The maid is extremely timid, and the neighborhood is uncommonly unsafe.

Since it was fortunate that he happened to be here, would he stay the night, if it did not interfere with tomorrow's classes? If it was only an ordinary telegram he would come straight back.

If he had known beforehand he would have asked Sasaki, but at this hour it was far too late.

It was only for one night, and while it was not yet certain whether he would stay at the hospital or not, it was too selfish to trouble a person who had nothing to do with it, and he could hardly press him — of course Nonomiya did not put the request so fluently, but Sanshiro was a man who did not need to be asked so fluently, and he agreed at once.

When the maid asked about supper, he said, "I shall not eat,"

and to Sanshiro, "Forgive me, but eat by yourself afterward,"

and went out, leaving even his dinner behind.

No sooner had he gone than he called out in a loud voice from among the dark bush clover,

"You may read any of the books in my study. There is nothing especially interesting, but look at something. There are a few novels too,"

and with that he vanished.

When Sanshiro had seen him off as far as the veranda and made his thanks, the bamboo of the grove, some ten square meters of it, was thin enough that he could still make out each stalk separately.

Before long Sanshiro was eating his supper at a little tray table in the middle of the eight-mat study.

Looking at the tray, he saw that, just as his host had said, the himeichi was there.

He was glad to catch the scent of home after so long, but the meal was not as good as all that.

Looking at the face of the maid who came to wait on him, he saw that her eyes and nose too were made timid, just as his host had said.

When the meal was over the maid withdrew to the kitchen.

Sanshiro was alone.

Alone and settled, he suddenly began to worry about Nonomiya's sister.

He felt she was critically ill.

He felt that Nonomiya was slow in hurrying to her.

And he could not help feeling that the sister was the woman he had seen the other day.

Sanshiro once more went over the woman's face and eyes and dress exactly as they had been then, and set her on a hospital bed, and stood Nonomiya beside her and made them exchange two or three words, but a brother was not enough, and before he knew it he had taken his place himself and was nursing her with every kindness.

Then a train roared by just below the bamboo grove.

Whether from the state of the floor or the nature of the soil, the room seemed to shake a little.

Sanshiro left off nursing and looked around the room.

It did indeed seem an old building, and the pillars had the flavor of age about them.

On the other hand the sliding doors fitted badly.

The ceiling was pitch black.

Only the lamp shone in the modern fashion.

It is the same thing as a new sort of scholar like Nonomiya renting such a house out of whim and living with a view of a feudal-age bamboo grove.

If it is a whim, that is his own affair, but if he has been driven out to the suburbs by necessity, then it is a great pity.

From what he had heard, a scholar of his standing gets only fifty-five yen a month from the university.

That must be why he has no choice but to go and teach at a private school.

And on top of that, to have a sister in hospital must be more than he can bear.

Perhaps the move to Okubo too was for reasons of money. …

It was still early in the evening, but the place being what it was, all was hushed.

At the edge of the garden insects were singing.

Sitting alone, it was a lonely beginning of autumn.

At that moment there came from somewhere far off a voice saying,

"Ah, ah, only a little longer now."

a voice said.

The direction seemed to be behind the house, but it was far off and he could not tell for certain.

And it was over before he had time to make out the direction.

But to Sanshiro's ear this one phrase sounded distinctly like the true soliloquy of a person abandoned by everything, expecting an answer from nothing.

Sanshiro felt uneasy.

Then another train came sounding from far away.

The sound came gradually nearer, and when it passed beneath the bamboo grove it went by with twice the noise of the earlier train.

Sanshiro, who had sat blankly until the faint shaking of the room stopped, linked, in a flash like a spark, that earlier cry of grief and the noise of this train by a certain cause and effect.

And he sprang up with a jerk.

That cause and effect was a fearful thing.

At that moment Sanshiro found it extremely hard to go on sitting still.

From his spine to the soles of his feet he crawled with the stimulus of doubt and fear.

He got up and went to the lavatory.

Looking out of the window, the whole sky was full of stars, and the railway line below the embankment was as still as death.

Even so he put his nose out through the bamboo lattice and gazed at the darkness.

Then from the direction of the station men with a lantern came this way, following the rails.

Judging by their voices there seemed to be three or four of them.

The shadow of the lantern was hidden below the embankment from the crossing, and when they passed beneath the bamboo grove there were only voices.

But the words could be heard as clearly as if they were in his hand.

"A little further on."

The footsteps went off into the distance.

Sanshiro went around to the garden, and just as he was, in borrowed clogs, crawled down the two meters and more of embankment from the bamboo grove and ran after the lantern.

Before he had gone ten meters, another man jumped down from the embankment. —

"Somebody run over and killed, is it?"

Sanshiro tried to answer something, but for a moment no voice came.

Meanwhile the dark figure went on past.

This must be the master of the house beyond Nonomiya's, he thought as he followed.

After some fifty meters the lantern had stopped.

The men had stopped too.

They were holding up the light in silence.

Sanshiro looked in silence beneath the light.

Beneath it was half a corpse.

The train had torn clean through from the right shoulder, under the breast, to above the hip, and had gone off leaving behind the trunk cut across on the slant.

The face was unhurt.

It was a young woman.

Sanshiro remembers to this day what he felt then.

He turned on his heel meaning to go straight back, but his legs would not obey and he could hardly move.

When he had crawled up the embankment and returned to the room, his heart began to pound.

When he called the maid to ask for water, the maid luckily seemed to know nothing about it.

After a while there was some sort of commotion at the house beyond.

Sanshiro realized that the master had come home.

Presently there was a hubbub below the embankment.

When that was over it grew quiet again.

It was a quiet almost past bearing.

Before Sanshiro's eyes he could see, vividly, that woman's face of a while ago.

When he joined that face together with the strengthless voice saying "Ah, ah …"

and with the cruel fate that must lie hidden behind the two of them, it seemed that the root of life, which looks so sturdy, loosens before one knows it and is always ready to float off into the darkness.

Sanshiro was so frightened that everything ceased to matter to him.

It is only a single roaring instant.

Until just before it, she had certainly been alive.

At that moment Sanshiro suddenly remembered how the man who had given him the peaches on the train had said, dangerous, dangerous, if you don't take care it's dangerous.

For all his saying dangerous, dangerous, that man had been oddly composed.

In short, if one stands in a position safe enough to be able to say dangerous, dangerous, one may perhaps become such a man.

For a man who is in the world and yet looks on at the world, there may be an interest here.

Certainly, from the way he ate those peaches to the way he sat at Aokido drinking tea and smoking, smoking and drinking tea, staring straight ahead — he was exactly this kind of person. —

A critic. —

Sanshiro tried using the word critic in a curious sense.

Having tried it, he admired his own aptness.

Not only that, he even began to think of living his own future as a critic.

Seeing that dreadful dead face brings on such thoughts too.

Sanshiro looked around at the table in the corner of the room, and the chair in front of the table, and the bookcase beside the chair, and the Western books ranged neatly inside that bookcase, and thought that the master of this quiet study, like that critic, was safe and happy. —

One is not likely to run a woman down in order to research the pressure of light.

The master's sister is ill.

But it is not an illness her brother made.

It is an illness she caught herself.

As his mind moved on from one thing to another in this way, it became eleven o'clock.

The streetcar for Nakano would come no more.

Perhaps he was not coming back because the illness was bad after all, he worried again.

Then a telegram came from Nonomiya.

Sister well, returning tomorrow morning, it said.

He went to bed reassured, but Sanshiro's dream was a most precarious thing. —

The woman who had tried to die under the train was a woman connected with Nonomiya, and Nonomiya, knowing it, does not come home.

He sent the telegram merely to reassure Sanshiro.

Sister well was a lie: at the very hour of the accident that night the sister too had died.

And that sister was none other than the woman Sanshiro had met by the pond. …

The next day Sanshiro got up unusually early.

Looking at the traces of the bed where he had lain unable to sleep, he smoked a cigarette, and everything of the night before seemed like a dream.

Going out onto the veranda and looking up at the sky beyond the low eaves, he found it fine weather today.

The world had the color of something that has only just become bright.

When he had finished his meal and drunk his tea and brought a chair out onto the veranda and was reading the newspaper, Nonomiya came back as promised.

"They tell me someone was run over and killed near here last night,"

he says.

He seemed to have heard it at the station or somewhere.

Sanshiro told him his whole experience.

"How unusual. One rarely comes across such a thing. I wish I had been at home. They will have cleared the body away by now. I suppose there would be nothing to see if I went."

"It must be too late,"

he answered in a word, but he was astonished at how casual Nonomiya was.

Sanshiro concluded that this insensibility came entirely from the difference between night and day.

That the temperament of a man who investigates the pressure of light shows itself in the same attitude in a case like this never occurred to him at all.

That must be because he was young.

Sanshiro changed the subject and asked about the invalid.

According to Nonomiya's answer, just as he had guessed, there was nothing wrong with her.

It was only that he had not gone for five or six days, and finding this unsatisfying she had reeled her brother in to relieve her boredom.

She had been angry, it seems, saying it was too bad of him not to come when today was Sunday.

And so Nonomiya calls his sister a fool.

He seems really to think her a fool.

To make a busy man waste precious time is stupid, he says.

But Sanshiro hardly understood what he meant.

If she was a sister who wanted to see him badly enough to send a telegram, then one or two Sunday evenings ought not to be grudged.

Time spent meeting a person like that is real time, and the months and years spent doing experiments with light in a cellar should rather be called an idle lifetime, far from human life.

If he himself were Nonomiya, he would be glad rather than otherwise to have his studies interrupted for such a sister.

So he felt, though at that moment he had forgotten the woman run over and killed.

Nonomiya began to say that as he had not slept well the night before he was hopelessly dull.

Luckily today was a day when he went to the school at Waseda from noon and had nothing at the university, so he said he would sleep until then.

"Did you stay up very late?"

Sanshiro asked, and it turned out that by chance a former teacher of his from the higher school, a man called Hirota, had come to visit his sister, and while they were all talking he had missed the last streetcar and had ended by staying the night.

He should have stayed at Hirota's house, but his sister made a fuss again and insisted he stay at the hospital, so he had no choice but to sleep in a cramped place, where somehow he was uncomfortable and could not sleep.

His sister really is a fool.

And so he attacked his sister again.

Sanshiro found it amusing.

He thought of defending the sister a little, but it was somehow hard to say, so he gave it up.

Instead he asked about Hirota.

Sanshiro had now heard Hirota's name three or four times.

And he had privately given the name of Hirota to the peach gentleman and the Aokido gentleman.

And the man who had been tormented by a spiteful horse inside the main gate and laughed at by the apprentices of Kitadoko he had also made into Professor Hirota.

But now, having asked, he found that the horse affair was indeed Professor Hirota.

So he decided that the peach man too must certainly be the same professor.

On reflection it seemed a little forced.

When he left, he was asked, since he was going anyway, to take a lined kimono to the hospital and deliver it before noon.

Sanshiro was greatly pleased.

Sanshiro wears a new square cap.

Being able to go to the hospital wearing this cap made him a little proud.

He left Nonomiya's house with a bright face.

He got off the streetcar at Ochanomizu and at once took a rickshaw.

It was behavior unlike the usual Sanshiro.

Just as he had himself pulled briskly in at the Red Gate, the bell of the college of law and letters began to ring.

Ordinarily it would be about the time he entered lecture room number eight with his notebook and inkpot.

Feeling that it did not matter if he missed a lecture or two, he drove straight up to the entrance of the Aoyama internal medicine ward.

He had been told to go in from the entrance, turn right at the second corner, and turn left at the end, and it would be the room on the east side; and walking as directed, there indeed it was.

On a black lacquered plate, Nonomiya Yoshiko was written in kana and hung at the door.

Sanshiro stood a while at the door, having read this name.

Being a countryman, he did nothing so clever as to knock.

"The person inside here is Nonomiya's sister, a woman called Yoshiko."

Sanshiro stood there thinking this.

He wanted to open the door and see her face, and he also disliked the thought of being disappointed by what he saw.

The trouble was that the woman's face that came and went in his head did not in the least resemble Nonomiya Sohachi.

From behind, a nurse came near with the sound of sandals.

Sanshiro made up his mind and opened the door about halfway.

And found himself face to face with the woman inside.

(One hand still on the knob.)

She was a woman with large eyes, a slender nose, thin lips, a forehead so broad that the crown of her head seemed to jut out, and a lean chin.

That is all there was to her features.

But it was the first time in his life that Sanshiro had seen the expression that flashed out at that moment from such a face.

Behind the pale forehead, thick hair hanging as it naturally fell could be seen down to the shoulders.

And since the morning light leaking in from the eastern window struck it from behind, the border where hair and sunlight met burned violet, and she wore a living halo of light.

And yet her face and forehead were very dark.

Dark and pale.

And in them were eyes with a faraway feeling.

A high cloud lies deep in the sky and hardly moves.

But neither can it help moving.

It only moves as though sliding away.

Such was the look in her eyes when the woman saw Sanshiro.

In this expression Sanshiro found the harmony of a languid melancholy and an unconcealed cheerfulness.

That sense of harmony is for Sanshiro one of the most precious fragments of human life.

And it is a great discovery.

Sanshiro, still holding the knob — his face still thrust half into the room from behind the door — surrendered himself entirely to the feeling of this instant.

"Please come in."

the woman says, as if she had been waiting for Sanshiro.

In her tone there was a settled note that one cannot find in a woman met for the first time.

Only a pure child, or a woman who has known every kind of man, could come out like that.

It is not the same as familiarity.

It is that one is an old acquaintance from the beginning.

At the same time the woman moved her thin cheeks and smiled.

In the midst of the pallor a dear warmth came into being.

Sanshiro's feet carried him naturally into the room.

At that moment the shadow of his mother in his far-off home flashed through the young man's head.

When he had gone around behind the door and faced forward for the first time, a woman of over fifty greeted him.

This woman appeared to have risen from her seat and been waiting even before Sanshiro's body had come out from behind the door.

"Are you Mr. Ogawa?"

she was good enough to ask first.

Her face resembles Nonomiya's.

It resembles the daughter's too.

But it merely resembles them.

When he brought out the cloth-wrapped parcel he had been asked to bring, she took it, thanked him, and,

"Please,"

she said, offering him a chair, while she herself went around to the far side of the bed.

Looking at the mattress laid on the bed, it was pure white.

What was spread over it was pure white too.

Turning about half of it back on the slant, and avoiding the place at the foot where it looked thick, the woman sat down with her back to the window.

Her feet did not reach the floor.

She has knitting needles in her hands.

A ball of wool rolled under the bed.

A long red thread trails from the woman's hand.

Sanshiro thought of getting the ball of wool out from under the bed for her. But since the woman was entirely indifferent to the wool, he refrained.

The mother from the other side thanks him again and again for the night before.

When you are so busy, and so on.

Sanshiro says, no, not at all, I am idle in any case.

While the two of them talked, Yoshiko was silent.

When their talk broke off, she suddenly asked,

"Did you see the person who was run over and killed last night?"

she asked.

Looking around, there was a newspaper in the corner of the room.

Sanshiro says,

"Yes."

he says.

"It must have been frightening,"

she said, bending her neck a little to one side and looking at Sanshiro.

Like her brother, she is a woman with a long neck.

Sanshiro answered neither that it was frightening nor that it was not, but gazed at the way the woman's neck was bent.

Half of it was that the question was so simple that he was at a loss how to answer.

Half of it was that he forgot to answer.

The woman seemed to notice, and at once straightened her neck.

And the depths of her pale cheeks turned a little red.

Sanshiro thought it was time to go.

He made his farewells and left the room, and coming to the front of the entrance and looking ahead, he saw that the end of the long corridor was cut off in a square, brilliantly bright, and there in the entrance where the green outside was reflected stood the woman of the pond.

Sanshiro, startled, at once lost the rhythm of his step.

At that moment the woman's figure, drawn dark on the canvas of transparent air, moved a step forward.

Sanshiro too, as if drawn on, moved forward.

The two came toward each other with the fate of having to pass somewhere in that single straight corridor.

Then the woman looked back.

In the bright air outside there was nothing but the green of early autumn floating.

Answering the eyes of the woman who had looked back, nothing appeared within the square, and nothing had been waiting for her.

In that interval Sanshiro took the woman's posture and dress into his head.

What the color of her kimono was called he did not know.

It was like the shadow of a clouded evergreen reflected in the water of the university pond.

Vivid stripes run through it from top to bottom.

And as they run they wave, drawing together and apart, overlapping and thickening, splitting into two lines.

It is irregular, but not disordered.

A third of the way down it is divided across by a broad sash.

There is warmth in the feeling of the sash.

That must be because it contains yellow.

When she turned to look behind her, her right shoulder drew back and her left hand, resting on her hip, came forward.

She is holding a handkerchief.

The part of that handkerchief that hangs beyond her fingers falls loosely open.

That must be because it is silk. —

From the hips down she stands correctly.

Presently the woman turned back as she had been.

When, with lowered eyes, she had come two steps nearer to Sanshiro, she suddenly drew her head back a little and looked the man full in the face.

Her eyes have double lids and long corners, and are composed in shape.

They live beneath conspicuously black eyebrows.

At the same time her fine teeth appeared.

These teeth and this coloring were, for Sanshiro, an unforgettable combination.

Today she wears a thin coat of white powder.

But she was not so tasteless as to hide the ground beneath it.

Over skin of fine grain, colored just enough that it seemed it would not be beaten by strong sunlight, a very thin bloom of powder lies.