斜陽 English

I

One morning, in the dining room, Mother took a single spoonful of soup, drew it in with a light sip, and

"Ah"

gave a faint cry.

"A hair?"

I wondered whether something unpleasant had gotten into the soup.

"No"

Mother, as though nothing at all had happened, let another light spoonful of soup slip into her mouth, then turned her face aside with perfect composure and sent her gaze out to the mountain cherry in full bloom beyond the kitchen window; and still with her face turned that way, let yet another light spoonful of soup glide between her small lips.

To call it light is, in Mother's case, no exaggeration at all.

Her manner of taking a meal is utterly unlike what one sees pictured in the ladies' magazines.

My younger brother Naoji once said to me, his sister, while he was drinking:

"Having a title doesn't make you an aristocrat, you know. There are plenty of fine aristocrats with no title at all, who carry what you might call a heavenly rank instead, and there are people like us who hold nothing but the title and are closer to the lowest rabble than to nobility. Take a fellow like Iwashima"—(and he named a count who was a school friend of his)—"a man like that has a coarser feel to him, I swear, than a tout dragging customers into a Shinjuku brothel. And the other day, at the wedding of the elder brother of Yanai"—(again he named a school friend of his, the second son of a viscount)—"the damned fool turns up wearing a tuxedo, of all things—what in hell does he need a tuxedo for—well, never mind that, but when he got up to make his table speech and came out with that impossible word gozaimasuru, I about gagged. Putting on airs has nothing whatever to do with being refined—it's just wretched bluster. There used to be signboards around Hongo reading 'superior lodgings for gentlefolk,' and the plain truth is that most of what calls itself nobility these days is nothing but superior beggary. A true aristocrat would never put on the clumsy airs a man like Iwashima does. Even in our own family, if there's a real aristocrat, it's about Mama, and no one else. She's the genuine article. There's something about her nobody else can touch"

Even in the way she takes her soup: the rest of us would bend a little over the plate, hold the spoon sideways to scoop up the soup, and carry it to our mouths still held sideways—but Mother rests her left fingers lightly on the edge of the table, without stooping at all, holds her head high, scoops the spoon sideways with barely a glance at the plate, and then—one is tempted to say like a swallow—carries the spoon lightly and gracefully up at a right angle to her mouth, letting the soup pour from its tip between her lips.

And all the while, glancing here and there with an air of perfect unconcern, she handles the spoon lightly, lightly, like a small wing, never spilling a single drop of soup, and making not the faintest sound, neither a sip nor a clink of the plate.

It may not be what is called proper table manners, but to my eyes it is utterly charming—it looks, if anything, like the real thing itself.

And indeed, drinks really do taste strangely better when let flow straight into the mouth that way.

But I am, as Naoji says, no more than superior beggary, and I cannot manage the spoon with such light, careless grace as Mother does; so I give up and bend gloomily over my plate, eating in the dreary, so-called correct manner.

And it is not only with soup—Mother's whole manner of eating departs quite thoroughly from etiquette.

When meat is served, she cuts it all quickly into small pieces with knife and fork, then sets the knife down, shifts the fork to her right hand, and spears each piece one by one, eating slowly and with evident pleasure.

And with chicken on the bone, while the rest of us struggle to work the meat free without letting our plates clatter, Mother thinks nothing of picking up the bone lightly between her fingertips and, quite composed, parting the meat from the bone with her lips.

Such a barbarous gesture, when Mother does it, looks not only charming but strangely erotic besides—the genuine article really is a different thing.

It is not only chicken on the bone—now and then Mother will even pick up the ham or sausage from a lunch plate lightly between her fingers and eat it that way.

"Do you know why rice balls taste so good? It's because they're pressed into shape by human fingers"

she once said.

I too have sometimes thought that food really would taste better eaten by hand, but if a piece of superior beggary like myself tried clumsily to imitate her, I feel it would end up looking like nothing but a genuine beggar's picture—so I hold myself back.

Even my brother Naoji says he's no match for Mama, and I too, when I think it over, find that imitating Mother is so difficult it fills me with something close to despair.

Once, in the inner garden of our house in Nishikatamachi, on a fine moonlit night at the start of autumn, Mother and I sat together in the little arbor by the edge of the pond, watching the moon and laughing over how the trousseau of a fox's wedding might differ from that of a mouse's, when Mother suddenly rose to her feet, stepped in among the thick bush clover beside the arbor, and then showed her face—whiter than ever now among the white bush-clover blossoms—and said, with a small laugh,

"Kazuko, guess what Mother is doing just now"

she said.

"You're picking flowers"

I answered, and she gave a little laugh and said,

"I'm making water"

she said.

I was astonished that she had not crouched down in the least, and yet there was something in it, truly and utterly charming, that I could never in the world imitate.

This has strayed a long way from this morning's soup, but I once read in a book that the great ladies of the Bourbon court would think nothing of relieving themselves in the palace gardens or in the corners of the corridors, and I found that unselfconsciousness truly charming, and thought that my own Mother might well be one of the last of such genuine great ladies.

So then—this morning, having taken one spoonful of soup, she gave that small cry, "Ah," and I asked, a hair?

but she answered, no.

"Was it too salty, perhaps?"

This morning's soup was one I had made into something like a potage by straining a tin of green peas from the recent American relief rations, and since I have never had much confidence in my cooking, even after Mother said no, I went on asking, still uneasy.

"It came out very well"

Mother said this quite seriously, finished her soup, and then picked up a rice ball wrapped in nori with her fingers and ate it.

I have never had much appetite for breakfast, not since I was small, and I never feel hungry until about ten in the morning, so that morning too I managed to get through the soup somehow, but eating was such a chore that I set the rice ball on my plate, jabbed my chopsticks into it, broke it apart into a mess, then picked up one fragment with the chopsticks and, holding them at a right angle to my mouth the way Mother holds her spoon over soup, pushed the food in as if feeding a small bird, and while I went on eating that way, slowly, Mother had already finished her whole meal, risen quietly, and stood leaning her back against the wall where the morning sun fell, watching my manner of eating for a while in silence, and then said,

"Kazuko, you're still no good at this. You must learn to make breakfast the meal you enjoy most"

she said.

"And you, Mother? Do you enjoy it?"

"Why, of course. I'm not an invalid, after all"

"Neither am I, Mother"

"No, no"

Mother laughed a little sadly and shook her head.

Five years ago I was said to have consumption and took to my bed for a time, but I know now that it was nothing more than a sickness of self-indulgence.

But Mother's recent illness—that was truly a grave and sorrowful illness, one to be feared.

And yet Mother worries only about me.

"Ah"

I said.

"What is it?"

Mother asked, this time.

We looked at each other, and feeling that something between us had been entirely understood, I gave a small laugh, and Mother smiled too.

That strange faint cry of "Ah" is the sort of thing that escapes one when overcome by some unbearable feeling of shame.

Just now, the memory of my divorce six years ago had suddenly welled up in my heart, vivid and unbearable, and the "Ah" had escaped me before I knew it—but what could it have been, in Mother's case?

Surely Mother could have no shameful past like mine—or, then again, perhaps something.

"You must have remembered something too, just now, Mother? What was it?"

"I've forgotten"

"About me?"

"No"

"About Naoji?"

"Yes"

she began, then tilted her head,

"Or perhaps it was"

she said.

My brother Naoji was conscripted midway through university and sent off to an island in the south, and then all word of him ceased; even once the war had ended his whereabouts remained unknown, and Mother says she has resigned herself to the thought that she will never see Naoji again — but as for me, anything of that sort, that so-called "resignation"

— I have never once managed it; I simply go on believing, through and through, that I will surely see him again.

"I meant to have given up on it, but taking this delicious soup made me think of Naoji, and it became more than I could bear. I wish I had been kinder to him"

Ever since he entered higher school, Naoji had grown oddly obsessed with literature and taken up a life little different from that of a delinquent, and there is no telling how much trouble he has caused Mother.

And yet Mother, sipping a single spoonful of soup, thinks of Naoji and says, Ah.

I pushed my rice into my mouth, and my eyes grew hot.

"It will be all right. Naoji will be all right. A scoundrel like Naoji doesn't die so easily. It's always the quiet, beautiful, gentle ones who die. A creature like Naoji—you could beat him with a stick and he still wouldn't die"

Mother laughed and said,

"Then I suppose Kazuko is one of the sort who dies young?"

teasing me.

"Oh, why do you say that? I'm nothing but a thick-skulled little scoundrel myself, so I'll be perfectly fine until eighty"

"Is that so? Then Mother will surely be fine until ninety"

"Yes"

I began, then faltered, a little troubled.

Scoundrels live long.

Beautiful people die young.

Mother is beautiful.

And yet I want her to live long.

I was thoroughly flustered.

"You're being cruel!"

I said, and my lower lip began to tremble, and tears welled up and spilled from my eyes.

Perhaps I should tell the story of the snake.

Four or five days before this, one afternoon, the neighborhood children had found some ten snake eggs in the bamboo thicket along our garden hedge.

The children

"They're viper eggs"

insisted.

I thought that if ten vipers were to hatch in that thicket, I would hardly be able to set foot carelessly in the garden again, so

"Let's burn them"

I said, and the children leapt up with delight and came trailing after me.

Near the bamboo thicket we piled up dead leaves and brushwood, set it burning, and threw the eggs into the fire one by one.

The eggs would not burn easily.

Even when the children heaped more leaves and twigs onto the flames to build up the fire, the eggs showed no sign of burning.

The daughter of the farming family below called from outside the hedge,

"Whatever are you doing?"

laughing as she asked.

"We're burning viper eggs. It would be frightening if vipers hatched"

"How large are they?"

"About the size of quail eggs, and pure white"

"Then those are just ordinary snake eggs. They can't be viper eggs. Raw eggs don't burn easily, you know"

The girl laughed, as though she found it thoroughly amusing, and went on her way.

We had kept the fire burning for perhaps thirty minutes, but the eggs simply would not burn, so I had the children pick them out of the fire and bury them beneath the plum tree, and I gathered small stones and made them a grave marker.

"Now then, everyone, let's pray"

I crouched down and pressed my hands together, and the children, obediently, seemed to crouch behind me and do the same.

And then, parting from the children, I climbed the stone steps alone, slowly, and at the top, in the shade of the wisteria trellis, Mother was standing, and

"What a cruel thing to do"

she said.

"I thought they were vipers, but they were only ordinary snakes. Still, I gave them a proper burial, so it's all right"

So I said, though I thought to myself that it had perhaps been unfortunate for Mother to have seen it.

Mother is by no means superstitious, but ever since Father died ten years ago in the house at Nishikatamachi, she has been terribly afraid of snakes.

Just before Father breathed his last, Mother saw what looked like a thin black cord lying by his pillow, and reached out to pick it up without a thought—only to find that it was a snake.

It slid smoothly away, out into the corridor, and after that no one knew where it had gone; the only two who saw it were Mother and Uncle Wada, and the two of them exchanged a glance but, so as not to disturb the room where Father lay dying, held themselves back and said nothing.

We too had been present in the room at the time, and so we knew nothing whatever of that snake.

But that evening, the day Father died, every single tree by the garden pond had snakes climbing it—that much I saw with my own eyes, and know to be true.

I am an old woman of twenty-nine now, so at the time of Father's death ten years ago I was already nineteen.

I was no longer a child, so even after ten years my memory of that time remains clear, and there should be no mistake in it: I had gone out to the pond in the garden to cut flowers for the offering, and stopped by the azaleas at the water's edge, and glancing up, I saw a small snake coiled around the tip of an azalea branch.

A little startled, I reached to break off a branch of the kerria next to it, and found a snake coiled there too.

On the osmanthus beside it, on the young maple, on the broom, on the wisteria, on the cherry—on every tree, every single tree, there was a snake coiled.

And yet it did not strike me as so very frightening.

I only felt that the snakes, grieving Father's death just as I was, must have crawled out of their holes to pay their reverence to his departed spirit.

And when I quietly told Mother of the snakes in the garden, she remained composed, tilted her head a little as though thinking something over, but said nothing in particular.

But it is a fact that these two incidents with the snakes were what, from that time on, made Mother so terribly averse to them.

Or rather, not so much an aversion as a kind of awe—she seemed to have come to revere the snake and dread it both at once, a feeling closer to reverent fear.

When I thought that Mother, having caught me burning the snake eggs, must surely have felt something dreadfully ill-omened in it, I too suddenly began to feel that burning those eggs had been a truly terrible thing to have done, and I worried and worried that it might bring some evil curse down upon Mother, unable to forget it the next day, and the day after that as well; and then this morning, in the dining room, I had blurted out that reckless thing about beautiful people dying young, and afterward could find no way to smooth it over, and ended up in tears—and now, clearing away the breakfast things, I felt as though some small, unwholesome snake had crept deep into my own breast, one that would shorten Mother's life, and I loathed it, loathed it, past all bearing.

And that same day, I saw a snake in the garden.

The weather that day was very mild and fine, so once I had finished my work in the kitchen, I thought I would carry a rattan chair out onto the lawn and do some knitting there, and as I stepped down into the garden with the chair, there was a snake by the bamboo grass near the garden stones.

Oh, how unpleasant.

That was all I thought, without dwelling on it any further, and I carried the chair back up onto the veranda, set it down there, sat myself in it, and took up my knitting.

In the afternoon, thinking I would fetch a book of Laurencin's paintings from among the books stored at the back of the little shrine in the corner of the garden, I stepped down into the garden again, and there on the lawn a snake was crawling, slowly, slowly.

It was the same one as that morning.

A slender, elegant snake.

I thought, this is a female snake.

She crossed the lawn quietly and made her way to the shade of the wild roses, where she stopped, raised her head, and flickered a thin, flame-like tongue.

Then she seemed to gaze about her for a while, but after a moment lowered her head and settled into a listless, dispirited coil.

Even then, all I could think was what a beautiful snake it was, and after a while I went on to the shrine, brought out the book of paintings, and glanced quietly on my way back at the spot where the snake had been—but it was already gone.

Toward evening, as I was taking tea with Mother in the Chinese room and looking out toward the garden, that morning's snake appeared once more, slowly, on the third of the stone steps.

Mother caught sight of it too, and

"That snake—"

she said, and no sooner had she spoken than she rose to her feet, ran to my side, and stood there frozen, still holding my hand.

At her words, I too suddenly understood, and

"The mother of the eggs?"

I found myself saying aloud.

"Yes, yes, that's it"

Mother's voice was hoarse.

We held each other's hands, held our breath, and watched the snake in silence.

The snake, which had lain coiled listlessly on the stone, began to stir again as though staggering, and made its way weakly across the steps and in among the irises.

"It's been wandering the garden since this morning"

I said in a low voice, and Mother sighed and sank limply into her chair, and

"Isn't that so? It's searching for its eggs. Poor thing"

she said, in a subdued voice.

I could do nothing but give a small, helpless laugh.

The evening sun fell on Mother's face, and her eyes seemed to shine almost blue, and that face, faintly touched with something like anger, was so beautiful I wanted to fling myself upon her.

And I thought, ah, Mother's face resembles, somehow, that sorrowful snake from before.

And then, I could not say why, I could not say why, but I felt that the ugly, coiled, viper-like snake living within my own breast might someday devour that deeply sorrowful, beautiful, beautiful mother-snake.

I laid my hand on Mother's soft, delicate shoulder, and writhed with an anguish I could not account for.

It was in early December of the year Japan surrendered unconditionally that we gave up our house at Nishikatamachi in Tokyo and moved to this mountain villa in Izu, built in a manner faintly Chinese in style.

Ever since Father's death, our family's finances had all been managed for us by Mother's younger brother—Uncle Wada, who is now her only living blood relation—but once the war ended and the world changed, Uncle Wada seems to have declared to Mother that it was hopeless, that there was nothing for it but to sell the house, dismiss all the maids, and let mother and daughter buy some tidy little house in the country and live there as they pleased; and Mother, who understands still less about money than a child does, seems simply to have said, once Uncle Wada had told her so, that in that case she left it entirely to him, please.

At the end of November a special-delivery letter came from Uncle: along the line of the Suzu Railway, he wrote, the villa of Viscount Kawada was up for sale; the house stood on a rise with a fine view, and there was a garden plot of some hundred tsubo besides; the area was known for its plum blossoms, warm in winter and cool in summer, and he was sure that once she lived there she would find it entirely to her liking; since it seemed there would be a need to meet and speak with the other party directly, he asked that she come, in any case, to his office in Ginza the following day; that was the substance of it, and

"Will you go, Mother?"

I asked,

"Well, I did ask him to see to it, after all"

she said, with a smile so unbearably lonely it was hard to watch.

The next day, Mother asked Matsuyama, our former driver, to accompany her, and set out a little past noon, returning at around eight in the evening, escorted home by Matsuyama.

"It's settled"

She came into my room, rested her hand on my desk, and sank down as if collapsing into the chair there, and said just that one word.

"Settled—settled what?"

"Everything"

"But—"

I said, taken aback, and

"You haven't even seen what sort of house it is……"

Mother set one elbow upon the desk, rested her hand lightly against her forehead, gave a small sigh, and said,

"Uncle Wada says it's a good place. I feel as though I could close my eyes just as I am and move to that house without a second thought"

she said, and raising her face, gave a faint smile.

That face, a little careworn, was beautiful.

"Yes, I suppose so"

I too, won over by the beauty of Mother's trust in Uncle Wada, agreed, and said,

"Then I'll close my eyes too"

The two of us laughed aloud together, but a terrible loneliness came over us once the laughter had died away.

After that, laborers came to the house every day, and the packing for our move began.

Uncle Wada came as well, and arranged for whatever was to be sold to be sold.

I was kept busy, together with our maid Okimi, sorting through clothing and burning odds and ends in the yard, but Mother offered no help whatever with the sorting, gave no instructions, and simply lingered in her room every day, doing nothing in particular.

"What's the matter? Have you stopped wanting to go to Izu?"

I asked once, screwing up my courage, a little sharply, but

"No"

was all she answered, her face vague and distant.

After about ten days, the sorting was finished.

One evening, as Okimi and I were burning scraps of paper and straw in the yard, Mother too came out of her room and stood on the veranda, watching our fire in silence.

A cold, ashen west wind was blowing, and the smoke crept low along the ground; I happened to glance up at Mother's face, and was startled to see her complexion worse than I had ever seen it before, and

"Mother! You look so pale"

I cried, and Mother gave a faint smile,

"It's nothing"

she said, and quietly went back into her room.

That night, since our bedding had already been packed away, Okimi slept on the sofa in the western-style room upstairs, and Mother and I laid out a single set of bedding borrowed from the neighbors in Mother's room, and lay down to rest together.

Mother spoke—oh?

in a voice grown so aged and feeble it startled me, saying,

"It's because Kazuko is with me, because Kazuko is here for me, that I'm going to Izu at all. Because Kazuko is here for me"

she said, something so unexpected it startled me.

My heart gave a lurch, and

"And if Kazuko weren't here?"

I asked, before I could stop myself.

Mother suddenly began to weep, and

"It would be better to die. In this house where your father died, Mother wants to die too"

she said, brokenly, in fits and starts, and wept all the more violently.

Never before had Mother spoken to me in such a weak, despairing way, nor had she ever let me see her weep so violently.

Not when Father died, not when I went off to be married, not when I came back to Mother's house carrying a child in my belly, not when that child was born dead at the hospital, not when I fell ill and took to my bed, nor even when Naoji did something terrible—never once, at any of those times, did Mother show me such weakness.

For the ten years since Father's death, Mother had remained exactly as carefree and gentle as she had been while he was alive.

And we, in turn, had grown up complacent, indulged, spoiled.

But now Mother's money had run out entirely.

She had spent it all, every last bit of it, without the slightest reluctance, for our sake—for Naoji's and mine.

And now she had to leave this house she had lived in for so many long years, and begin a bleak new life with no one but me, alone together in a small mountain villa in Izu.

If Mother had been the sort of person who was mean and grasping, who scolded us and schemed in secret to increase her own fortune, then no matter how the world changed, she would never have come to feel as though she wanted to die like this; ah, what a dreadful, wretched, hopeless hell it is to have no money—I felt as though I understood this for the first time in my life, and my heart grew so full, so wracked with pain that I wanted to weep and could not; perhaps this is what is meant by the solemnity of human life; unable to stir so much as a finger, lying flat on my back, I remained as still as a stone.

The next day, Mother's complexion was still poor, and she still lingered over one thing and another, seeming to want to remain in this house even a little longer, but Uncle Wada arrived and declared that since almost all the baggage had already been sent off, we would set out for Izu that very day; and so Mother put on her coat, unwillingly, gave a silent nod to Okimi and to the tradespeople who came to offer their farewells, and the three of us, Uncle and Mother and I, left the house at Nishikatamachi.

The train was fairly empty, and all three of us found seats.

On the train, Uncle was in the highest of spirits, humming snatches of song, but Mother sat with her head bowed, her complexion poor, looking terribly cold.

We changed at Mishima onto the Suzu Railway, got off at Izu-Nagaoka, rode a bus for some fifteen minutes and got down, and then, climbing a gentle slope toward the mountains, came upon a small hamlet, at the edge of which stood a mountain villa built with a certain elaborate Chinese air.

"Mother, it's a nicer place than I expected"

I said, my breath coming quick with excitement.

"Yes, it is"

Mother too, standing before the entrance of the villa, showed for a moment a look of something like happiness in her eyes.

"And best of all, the air is good. Pure, clean air"

Uncle said, with evident pride.

"It really is"

Mother said, smiling, and

"It's delicious. The air here is delicious"

she said.

And the three of us laughed together.

When we stepped inside, our baggage from Tokyo had already arrived, and the entryway and every room besides were full to bursting with it.

"And next, the view from the sitting room is splendid"

Uncle said, in high spirits, and pulled us along to the sitting room and sat us down.

It was about three in the afternoon, and the winter sun fell softly on the lawn of the garden; where the stone steps from the lawn came to an end there was a small pond, and many plum trees besides; below the garden a mikan orchard spread out, and beyond that ran the village road, and beyond that lay rice paddies, and further beyond, a pine grove, and beyond the pine grove, the sea came into view.

Seated here in the sitting room, the sea appeared at just such a height that its horizon seemed to touch the tips of my breasts.

"What a gentle view"

Mother said, with a listless air.

"It must be the air. The sunlight is nothing like it is in Tokyo. It's as though the light itself has been strained through silk"

I said, in high spirits.

There was a ten-mat room and a six-mat room, and a Chinese-style parlor besides, an entrance hall of three mats, another three-mat room by the bath, a dining room and kitchen, and upstairs a single Western-style guest room with a large bed—that was the whole of it, but I thought it would not feel cramped for the two of us, nor even, once Naoji came home, for three.

Uncle went off to negotiate for meals at the one inn the hamlet was said to possess, and when the boxed lunches he had ordered were delivered, he spread them out in the sitting room and drank the whisky he had brought with him, telling stories of his blunders back when he and Viscount Kawada, the villa's former owner, had gone carousing together in China, in tremendously high spirits; but Mother barely touched her chopsticks to her own lunch, and before long, as the light around us began to dim,

"Let me lie down for a little while, just as I am"

she said, in a small voice.

I dug a set of bedding out from among the baggage and laid her down, and, growing terribly uneasy, searched out a thermometer from among our things and took her temperature—it was thirty-nine degrees.

Uncle too looked startled, and set off at once down to the village below to find a doctor.

"Mother!"

I called, but she only drifted in and out of a doze.

I clasped Mother's small hand tightly and wept.

I felt so terribly, terribly sorry for Mother—no, for the two of us together, so terribly, terribly sorry—that no matter how much I cried, I could not stop.

As I wept, I truly wished I could simply die then and there together with Mother.

We needed nothing more.

I thought that our lives had already come to an end the moment we left the house at Nishikatamachi.

About two hours later, Uncle came back with the village doctor.

The village doctor seemed already quite elderly, and wore hakama of Sendai-hira silk, with white tabi on his feet.

When the examination was over, he said,

"It may develop into pneumonia. But even should it become pneumonia, there is no cause for worry"

he said, in a way that somehow inspired no confidence at all, gave her an injection, and left.

The next day, Mother's fever still had not gone down.

Uncle Wada pressed two thousand yen into my hand, told me to send a telegram to Tokyo should it become necessary to have her hospitalized, and returned to the capital that same day.

I took out the barest minimum of cooking implements from among our baggage, made some rice gruel, and offered it to Mother.

Mother, still lying down, took three spoonfuls and then shook her head.

A little before noon, the doctor from the village below came again.

This time he had not put on his hakama, but he still wore the white tabi.

"Perhaps it would be better if she were hospitalized……"

I ventured, and

"No, I don't believe that will be necessary. Today I'll give her a strong injection, and I expect her fever will come down"

he answered, in that same unconvincing way as before, and gave her what he called his strong injection before leaving.

But whether it was that strong injection working some remarkable effect, that afternoon Mother's face turned bright red and she broke into a heavy sweat, and as she changed into fresh nightclothes, she laughed and said,

"Perhaps he's a fine doctor after all"

she said.

Her fever had come down to thirty-seven.

Overjoyed, I ran to the village's one and only inn, asked the proprietress there to spare me about ten eggs, and at once soft-boiled some and brought them to Mother.

Mother ate three soft-boiled eggs, and about half a bowl of rice gruel besides.

The next day, the village's fine doctor came again, again in his white tabi, and when I thanked him for the strong injection of the day before, he nodded deeply with an expression that seemed to say of course it worked, gave her a thorough examination, and then turned to face me, and said,

"Her ladyship is no longer ill in the least. And so, from now on, she may eat whatever she likes, and do whatever she likes"

he said, in that same odd manner of speaking as ever, so that I had a hard time holding back the urge to burst out laughing.

I saw the doctor off at the entrance, and when I returned to the sitting room, Mother was sitting up in her bed, and said,

"He really is a fine doctor. I'm not sick anymore"

with a look of real delight on her face, murmuring it dreamily, as though to herself.

"Mother, shall I open the shoji? It's snowing"

Great flakes of snow, like petals, had begun drifting softly down.

I opened the shoji, sat down beside Mother, and through the glass doors we watched the snow of Izu together.

"I'm not sick anymore"

Mother said again, as though to herself, and went on,

"Sitting here like this, it feels as though everything before was all a dream. The truth is, right at the very end, right before the move, I found I simply could not bear coming to Izu, no matter what. I wanted to stay in that house in Nishikatamachi one more day, even half a day longer. When I got on the train I felt half dead already, and when we arrived here, at first I felt something like happiness, but once it grew dim outside, I found myself longing so for Tokyo, my chest burning with it, that I very nearly fainted. It wasn't an ordinary illness. I think God struck me down once, and then made me into a different person from the one I was until yesterday, and brought me back to life"

And from then until today, our life together in the mountain villa, we two alone, has gone on, more or less without incident, in quiet peace.

The people of the hamlet, too, have been kind to us.

We moved here in December of last year, and from then—January, February, March—up to today in April, we have lived, apart from preparing our meals, mostly knitting on the veranda, reading books in the Chinese room, taking tea, living a life all but entirely cut off from the world.

In February the plum blossoms came out, and the whole hamlet was buried in plum flowers.

And even into March there were many calm, windless days, so the plum trees in full bloom showed no sign of fading, and went on blossoming beautifully clear to the end of the month.

Morning, noon, evening, and night, the plum blossoms were beautiful enough to draw a sigh.

And whenever we opened the glass doors on the veranda, the scent of the flowers would come drifting straight into the room.

At the end of March, without fail, a wind would rise each evening, and as I set out the rice bowls in the dining room at dusk, plum petals would blow in through the window and land in the bowls, growing wet there.

Once April came, as Mother and I sat knitting on the veranda, our talk was mostly of plans for making a vegetable garden.

Mother said she wanted to help with it too.

Ah, writing it all out like this, it does seem, just as Mother once said, as though we had died once and been reborn as different people altogether—and yet, in the end, is a resurrection such as Jesus knew simply not possible for human beings?

Mother spoke that way, and yet she still, even now, sips a single spoonful of soup and thinks of Naoji and cries out, Ah.

And the scars of my own past, too, are, in truth, not healed in the least.

Ah, I want to write it all down clearly, without concealing a single thing.

There are even times when I secretly think that the peace of this mountain villa is nothing but a false front, a mere appearance, through and through.

Even if this were merely a brief period of rest granted to mother and daughter by God, I cannot help feeling that some dark, ill-omened shadow has already begun creeping into this peace.

Mother, even while feigning happiness, grows weaker day by day, and meanwhile a viper has taken up residence in my own breast, growing fat even at the cost of Mother's suffering, growing fat no matter how I try and try to hold it down—ah, if only this were merely something to blame on the season—and there are times, these days, when this life becomes more than I can bear.

Even that unseemly act of burning the snake eggs must surely have been one expression of this restless, irritable state of mind of mine.

And it has only served to deepen Mother's sorrow, and hasten her decline.

I wrote the word love, and then found I could write no further.

II

Some ten days after the business with the snake eggs, a string of ill-omened things happened one after another, deepening Mother's sorrow still further, and thinning the thread of her life.

I very nearly started a fire.

I, starting a fire.

Never once, from my childhood until now, had I so much as dreamed that such a terrible thing could happen in my life.

Was I so entirely lacking in awareness of so obvious a fact as that carelessness with fire causes fires, that I was nothing but one of those so-called "young ladies"

—was that what I was, I wonder?

I had gotten up in the middle of the night to use the lavatory, and as I passed by the screen near the entrance hall, I noticed a light coming from the direction of the bathhouse.

Glancing in without much thought, I saw that the glass door of the bathhouse was glowing bright red, and I could hear a crackling sound.

I ran there at a trot, threw open the little side door of the bathhouse, and went out barefoot to look, and found the pile of firewood stacked beside the bath's furnace ablaze, burning with terrible force.

I ran to the farmhouse just below, adjoining our garden, and pounded on the door with all my strength,

"Mr. Nakai! Wake up, there's a fire!"

I shouted.

Mr. Nakai had apparently already gone to bed, but

"Yes, I'm coming at once"

he answered, and while I was still saying, please, please hurry, he came bursting out of his house still in his yukata nightclothes.

The two of us ran back to the fire together, and as we drew water from the pond with buckets and threw it on the flames, I heard Mother's cry—ahh!—coming from the direction of the corridor by the sitting room.

I flung down my bucket, went up from the garden into the corridor, and said,

"Mother, don't worry, it's all right, please go back and rest"

and caught Mother, who was on the point of collapsing, in my arms, carried her to her bed and laid her down, then dashed back to the fire, where this time I drew water from the bath and passed it to Mr. Nakai, who threw it onto the burning woodpile, but the flames were too strong, and there seemed no way we could put them out like that.

"Fire! Fire! The villa's on fire!"

voices came shouting from below, and in no time four or five people from the village broke through the hedge and came rushing in.

They formed a bucket relay from the irrigation channel below the hedge, and within two or three minutes had the fire out.

It had been just on the point of spreading to the roof of the bathhouse.

The moment I thought, thank goodness, I realized the cause of the fire and was struck with horror.

It was only then, truly, that I first realized this whole commotion had started because I, that evening, had pulled the half-burnt firewood out of the bath furnace, thinking I had put it out, and set it down beside the woodpile.

Realizing this, I stood rooted to the spot, wanting to burst into tears, when I heard, from outside the hedge, the young wife of the Nishiyama family across the way saying loudly that the bathhouse had burned right down, that it was carelessness with the furnace fire.

Fujita, the village headman, Officer Ninomiya, Ouchi, the head of the fire brigade, and others came, and Fujita, with his usual gentle smile, asked,

"You must have had quite a fright. What happened?"

he asked.

"It was my fault. I thought I had put the firewood out, but……"

I began, and then, so wretched did I feel, tears welled up, and I fell silent, hanging my head.

I thought, just then, that I might be taken off to the police and made into a criminal.

Suddenly I felt ashamed of my own disheveled appearance, barefoot, still in my nightclothes, and thought, with a pang, how far I had fallen.

"I understand. And your mother?"

Fujita asked, quietly, in a tone of concern.

"I've had her lie down in the sitting room. She had a terrible fright……"

"Well, still"

young Officer Ninomiya put in as well,

"it's a good thing the house itself didn't catch"

he said, as if to comfort me.

Just then, Mr. Nakai from the farmhouse below came back, having changed into proper clothes, and said, catching his breath,

"Oh, it was nothing—just a bit of firewood caught, that's all. It didn't even amount to a proper blaze"

and in this way he covered for my foolish mistake.

"Is that so. I understand well enough"

Fujita, the headman, nodded two or three times, and then conferred with Officer Ninomiya in low voices for a moment, before saying,

"Well then, we'll be on our way. Please give your mother our regards"

and with that he left, together with Ouchi, the fire brigade chief, and the others.

Only Officer Ninomiya remained behind, and coming to stand directly before me, said, in a voice so low it was scarcely more than a breath,

"Now then, I'll see to it that tonight's business is not reported anywhere"

he said.

After Officer Ninomiya had left, Mr. Nakai from the farmhouse below asked,

"What did Officer Ninomiya say?"

in a voice tight with real anxiety.

"He said he wouldn't report it"

I answered, and some of the neighbors, still there by the hedge, seemed to catch my reply, and saying, ah, good, that's good, went trailing off home one after another.

Mr. Nakai too said good night and went home, and left alone, I stood there vacantly by the burnt woodpile, and looking up at the sky with tears in my eyes, found that it already had the feel of a sky nearing dawn.

I washed my hands and feet and face at the bathhouse, and, feeling somehow afraid to face Mother, lingered in the three-mat room by the bath, fixing my hair, and then went to the kitchen, where I busied myself with needless tidying of the dishes until the night had fully given way to day.

Once day had broken, I crept quietly toward the sitting room to look, and found that Mother had already finished dressing, and was sitting in a chair in the Chinese room, looking utterly exhausted.

She saw me and smiled brightly, but her face was startlingly pale.

I did not smile, but went and stood silently behind her chair.

After a while, Mother said,

"It wasn't anything, after all. It was firewood meant to be burned"

she said.

Suddenly I felt light-hearted, and gave a small laugh.

I remembered the proverb from the Bible, that a word fitly spoken is like apples of gold set in pictures of silver, and thanked God, from the bottom of my heart, for the happiness of having so gentle a mother.

Last night's business was last night's business.

I resolved not to brood over it any longer, and gazed out through the glass doors of the Chinese room at the morning sea of Izu, standing behind Mother for a long while, until at last her quiet breathing and my own fell perfectly into time together.

After a light breakfast, as I set about clearing away the burnt woodpile, Osaki, the proprietress of the village's one and only inn, came—

"What happened? What happened? I only just heard about it now—my goodness, whatever happened last night?"

she said, coming at a trot through the garden's wicket gate, and there were tears shining in her eyes.

"I'm sorry"

I apologized, in a small voice.

"Never mind sorry. More to the point, Miss, what about the police?"

"They said it's all right"

"Well, thank goodness"

she said, her face lighting up with what looked like real relief.

I asked Osaki what form my thanks and apologies to the people of the village ought to take.

Osaki said money would probably be best, and told me which houses I ought to make the rounds of with it to apologize.

"But if you'd rather not go around alone, Miss, I'll go along with you"

"Wouldn't it be better if I went alone?"

"Can you manage alone? Well, yes, it would be better alone"

"Then I'll go alone"

After that, Osaki helped me a little with clearing away the burnt remains.

Once the clearing was done, I received money from Mother, wrapped a hundred-yen note in a sheet of mino paper for each house, and wrote, with apologies, on each little packet.

First of all I went to the village office.

Fujita, the headman, was out, so I held out the paper packet to the young woman at the reception desk, and said,

"I did an unforgivable thing last night. I will be more careful from now on, so please forgive me. My regards to the headman"

I said, offering my apology.

Next I went to the house of Ouchi, the fire brigade chief; he came out to the entrance, saw me, and smiled a silent, sorrowful smile, and I suddenly, I could not say why, wanted to cry, and

"I'm so sorry, about last night"

was all I could manage to say, and I hurried to take my leave, and as I walked along the road the tears came flooding, ruining my face, so I went home once, washed my face at the basin, redid my makeup, and as I was putting on my shoes at the entrance to go out again, Mother came out, and said,

"Are you still going somewhere?"

she asked.

"Yes, I'm just about to go"

I answered without raising my face.

"Thank you for your trouble"

she said, quietly, feelingly.

Strengthened by Mother's love, I was able this time to make the whole round of visits without crying even once.

At the district head's house, he was out, and his son's wife came out instead, but the moment she saw me it was she who ended up in tears; and at the police box, Officer Ninomiya said, again and again, good, good, that's good; everyone was kind, every one of them, and as I went on making my rounds of the neighboring houses, I was met everywhere with sympathy and comfort.

Only the young wife of the Nishiyama family across the way—though by now she was a woman of about forty—scolded me sharply, the one exception.

"You be more careful from now on. I don't know whether you're princesses or what have you, but I've been watching the way you two carry on your little playhouse of a life with my heart in my mouth for some time now. It's like watching two children keep house on their own—it's a wonder you haven't started a fire before this. You really must be more careful from now on. Why, if there'd been a strong wind last night, the whole village would have burned down"

This was the same woman who had stood outside the hedge loudly declaring that the bathhouse had burned right down, that it was carelessness with the furnace fire, even while Mr. Nakai from the farmhouse below had rushed forward in front of the headman and Officer Ninomiya to cover for me, saying it hadn't even amounted to a proper blaze.

And yet I felt the truth in the Nishiyama wife's scolding as well.

I thought that she was, in truth, entirely right.

I bore her not the slightest resentment.

Mother had comforted me with her little joke, that it was only firewood meant to be burned anyway, but if the wind had been strong that night, then just as the Nishiyama wife said, the whole village might indeed have burned to the ground.

If that had happened, even my own death would not have been enough to make amends.

And if I died, Mother would surely not go on living either, and besides, it would bring disgrace upon the name of my late father.

There is no such thing as princesses or peerage any longer, of course, but even so, if we are to be ruined regardless, I want to be ruined magnificently, without holding back.

To die in atonement for having started a fire—such a wretched way to die would leave me unable to rest even in death.

In any case, I had to become more capable, more self-reliant.

From the next day on, I threw myself into work in the fields.

The daughter of Mr. Nakai, from the farmhouse below, sometimes helped me.

Ever since I had made such an ugly spectacle of myself by starting that fire, the very blood in my body felt as though it had turned somehow darker, more reddish-black; before, a spiteful viper had already taken up residence in my breast, and now even the color of my blood had changed a little besides, so that I felt myself becoming more and more some wild country girl, and even sitting knitting with Mother on the veranda left me feeling strangely confined and short of breath, so that it was actually easier for me, more of a relief, to go out into the fields and turn over the earth.

Manual labor, I suppose one might call it.

This kind of heavy work was not, for me, something entirely new.

During the war I had been conscripted for labor, and made to do even yoitomake ramming work.

Even the split-toe work shoes I now wear out in the fields were issued to me by the army at that time.

It was then, in truth, that I put on a pair of jika-tabi for the very first time in my life, and I found them astonishingly comfortable to wear; walking about the garden in them, I felt as though I truly understood, for myself, the light-footed ease with which birds and beasts go about barefoot on the bare earth, and I was so happy that it ached, somewhere deep in my chest.

That is the one and only pleasant memory I have from the whole of the war.

Thinking back on it, the war was, all in all, a tedious business.

Last year, nothing happened.

The year before that, nothing happened.

And the year before that, too, nothing happened.

A curious poem to that effect appeared in some newspaper just after the war ended, and truly, even now, thinking back, it seems to me both that all manner of things happened and that, all the same, it comes to much the same thing as nothing having happened at all.

I hate both telling of the war and hearing of it.

So many people died, and yet it is still, somehow, stale and tedious.

And yet, I wonder—am I simply being selfish?

Only the time I was conscripted, put on my jika-tabi, and was made to do yoitomake work does not strike me as stale in that way.

I went through plenty of unpleasantness, but that yoitomake work made my body thoroughly strong, and even now, I sometimes think that if life ever grows hard enough, I could always go back to doing yoitomake work to get by.

Around the time the war situation had begun to look hopeless, a man dressed in something like a military uniform came to the house at Nishikatamachi and handed me my conscription papers, along with a sheet setting out my work schedule.

Looking at the schedule, I found that I would have to travel to the mountains beyond Tachikawa every other day starting the very next day, and, before I knew it, tears welled up in my eyes.

"Might a substitute go in my place?"

The tears would not stop, and I ended up sobbing outright.

"The army has issued this conscription order to you personally, so it must be you, and no one else"

the man answered, firmly.

I resolved to go.

It rained the next day, and we were lined up at the foot of the mountains at Tachikawa, where first an officer delivered a lecture.

"We will surely win this war"

he began, and then went on,

"We will surely win this war, but if each of you does not carry out the work exactly as the army orders, it will hamper our operations, and we will meet the same fate as Okinawa. I ask, without fail, that you do precisely the work you are told to do. Furthermore, there may be spies infiltrating even this mountain, so all of you must be on your guard, one and all. From now on you will be working within the position itself, just as the soldiers do, and so I ask you to take the greatest care never to speak a word to anyone of what you see there"

he said.

The rain smoked over the mountain, and close to five hundred workers, men and women together, stood there soaked in the rain, listening reverently to his words.

Among the workers were even boys and girls from the national elementary schools, all of them looking cold and on the verge of tears.

The rain soaked through my raincoat and into my jacket, and before long had even wet through to my underclothes.

That whole day I carried loads of earth on a rope-net frame, and on the train home the tears came and simply would not stop, but the next time it was rope-pulling for the yoitomake ramming work.

And of all the work, that was the one I found most enjoyable.

After going to the mountain two or three times, the boys from the national school began to stare at me in an unpleasantly fixed way.

One day, as I was carrying loads on the rope frame, two or three of the boys passed by me, and one of them said, in a low voice,

"So that's the spy?"

and hearing this, I was thoroughly startled.

"Why would he say such a thing, I wonder"

I asked the young woman walking beside me, carrying her own load.

"Because you look like a foreigner"

the young woman answered, quite seriously.

"And do you think I'm a spy too?"

"No"

she answered this time, with a small laugh.

"I'm Japanese, you know"

I said, and my own words struck me, even as I said them, as such foolish nonsense that I laughed quietly to myself.

On some fine day, I had been carrying logs together with the men since morning, when a young officer on watch duty frowned, pointed at me, and said,

"Hey, you. Come over here"

he said, and walked briskly off toward the pine grove; I followed after him, my heart pounding with anxiety and fear, and found, deep in the grove, freshly cut boards from the sawmill stacked up; the officer walked up to them, stopped, turned around to face me, and said,

"It must be hard, every day. Today, just keep watch over this timber for me"

he said, laughing and showing his white teeth.

"Am I to stand here the whole time?"

"It's cool and quiet here, so feel free to take a nap on these boards. And if you get bored—well, you may already have read this, but—"

he said, and pulled a small paperback out of his jacket pocket, and, looking a little embarrassed, tossed it onto the boards, saying,

"Read something like this, if you like"

On the paperback's cover was written "Troika"

was written on it.

I picked up the little paperback, and said,

"Thank you. There's a great reader in my own family too—my brother—he's out in the South Pacific now"

I said, and, apparently mishearing me, he answered,

"Ah, I see. Your husband, is it. It must be dreadful out there in the South"

he said, shaking his head, feelingly, and

"Anyway, for today, let's just call it standing watch here, and I'll bring your lunch to you myself later, so take your time and rest"

he said, and hurried off.

I sat down on the timber and read the paperback, and when I had gotten about halfway through it, the officer came up again, his boots clicking against the ground, and said,

"I've brought your lunch. It must be dull, all alone like this"

he said, and set the lunch down on the grass, and hurried off again in a great rush.

Once I had finished my lunch, I climbed up onto the timber and lay down reading, and when I had finished the whole book, I began to drift off into a doze.

I woke a little past three in the afternoon.

I found myself thinking, suddenly, that I had seen that young officer somewhere before, and turned it over in my mind, but could not place him.

I climbed down off the timber and was smoothing my hair when again I heard the click of boots, and he said,

"Well, thank you for your trouble today. You're free to go home now"

I ran up to him and held out the paperback, meaning to thank him, but no words would come, and I only looked up at his face in silence; and when our eyes met, tears began falling from my own, one after another.

And then, in his eyes too, a tear glinted.

We parted just like that, in silence, and that young officer never once showed his face at our work site again; I had that single day of ease and no more, and after that went on doing hard labor on the mountain at Tachikawa every other day, just as before.

Mother worried constantly over my health, but I only grew stronger for it, and now I even carry a secret confidence in my ability at yoitomake work, and have become a woman who feels no particular hardship in fieldwork either.

Even as I say I hate both the telling and the hearing of war stories, I find I have gone and told my own "precious tale of experience"

after all—but of my memories of the war, this is roughly the whole of what I care to tell, and as for the rest, it is much like that poem from before:

Last year, nothing happened.

The year before that, nothing happened.

And the year before that, too, nothing happened.

that is almost what I want to say; and, absurdly enough, all that remains to me of it now is this one pair of jika-tabi—such is the fleeting emptiness of it.

Talking of the jika-tabi has led me off into idle rambling, but I go out to the fields nearly every day wearing them, this one keepsake of the war as it were, trying to lose myself in the work and so blunt the secret unease and restlessness deep within my chest—but Mother, these days, seems to grow visibly weaker with each passing day.

The snake eggs.

The fire.

Ever since around that time, Mother has come to seem, unmistakably, more and more like an invalid.

While I, on the other hand, feel myself becoming, in contrast, more and more a coarse, vulgar sort of woman.

I cannot shake the feeling, somehow, that I am steadily drawing the very life out of Mother and growing fat on it.

Even at the time of the fire, Mother made her little joke about the firewood being meant to be burned anyway, and never said another word about it afterward, and if anything seemed to be looking after my feelings instead—but the shock she must have felt within, in truth, was surely ten times greater than my own.

Ever since that fire, Mother sometimes moans in her sleep at night, and on windy nights especially, she pretends to be going to the lavatory but instead slips out of bed again and again in the small hours to make the rounds of the whole house.

Her complexion is always dull now, and there are days when even walking seems to be almost more than she can manage.

She used to say she wanted to help with the fields, and once, even after I told her not to, she carried five or six heavy pails of water from the well out to the garden by herself, and the next day complained that her shoulders were so stiff she could hardly breathe, and spent the whole day in bed; since that happened, she does seem, at last, to have given up on fieldwork, and when she comes out to the fields now and then, she only stands and watches me work in silence.

"They say people who love summer flowers die in the summer—I wonder if it's true"

Mother, watching me work in the fields today as well, suddenly said this.

I went on watering the eggplants in silence.

Ah, come to think of it, it is already early summer.

"I'm fond of silk-tree blossoms myself, but there isn't a single one in this garden"

Mother said, again, quietly.

"There are plenty of oleanders, though"

I said, deliberately curt.

"I don't care for those. I like most summer flowers, but that one's too brash for my taste"

"I'd choose roses, myself. But roses bloom in every season, so does that mean a person who loves roses has to die in spring, and die in summer, and die in autumn, and die in winter—die all over again, four times?"

The two of us laughed.

"Won't you rest a little?"

Mother said, still laughing a little, and

"There's something I'd like to talk over with you today, Kazuko"

"What is it? I won't hear another word about dying, though"

I followed after Mother, and we sat down side by side on the bench beneath the wisteria trellis.

The wisteria blossoms were already over, and the soft afternoon light fell through its leaves onto our knees, dyeing them a pale green.

"This is something I've wanted you to hear for a while now, but I meant to speak of it only when we were both in good spirits, and I've been waiting for the right moment until today. It isn't good news, in any case. But somehow, today, I feel as though I can get through it easily enough, so please, bear with me and hear me out to the end. The truth is, Naoji is alive"

My body went rigid.

"Five or six days ago I had a letter from Uncle Wada. Someone who used to work at his company, it seems, has recently come back from the South Pacific and went to pay his respects at Uncle's office, and in the course of their talk, it turned out that this man had, by pure chance, been in the very same unit as Naoji, and that Naoji is safe and will likely be coming home before long. But there's one unpleasant thing. According to this man, Naoji seems to have become quite badly addicted to opium, and……"

"Again!"

My mouth twisted, as though I had bitten into something bitter.

Back in higher school, Naoji had aped some novelist or other and fallen into drug addiction, running up a dreadful debt at the pharmacy on account of it, and it had taken Mother two full years to pay the whole of that debt off.

"Yes. It seems he's begun again. But he won't be permitted to come home until it's cured, this man said, so he's sure to come back cured, in the end. Uncle writes that even once he's cured and comes home, a man of such disposition can hardly be set to work anywhere right away—working in Tokyo, in all this confusion, unsettles the minds even of ordinary sound people, and a half-invalid only just recovered from addiction would be all the more likely to slip into something like madness, and there's no telling what he might do; and so, Uncle says, once Naoji is back, it would be best to take him in at once here at this villa in Izu, and keep him from going anywhere else, and let him convalesce here quietly for a while—that's one thing. And then, Kazuko, there's another thing Uncle has instructed us on. According to him, our money has all run out entirely now. What with the freeze on savings, and the property tax, Uncle says it's become too much trouble for him to keep sending us money the way he has until now. And so, he says, if Naoji comes home and the three of us—Mother, Naoji, and Kazuko—simply go on living idly together, it will be a terrible burden on Uncle to arrange for our living expenses, and so, while there's still time, you must either find a husband for Kazuko, or else find her a place in service somewhere—that, more or less, is his instruction"

"Service—do you mean as a maid?"

"No, Uncle means, well, you know, the one at Komaba"

she said, naming a certain prince, and went on,

"He says that since that family is related to us by blood, if you went into service there, doubling as tutor to the young princess, you wouldn't have to feel so lonely and constrained about it"

"Isn't there some other position I could take?"

"He said any other kind of work would be quite beyond you, Kazuko"

"Why would it be beyond me? Tell me, why?"

Mother only smiled a lonely smile, and gave no answer at all.

"I don't want it! I don't want to hear any of this"

Even to myself, it felt as though I had blurted out something wild and unreasonable.

But I could not stop.

"I've worn these jika-tabi, these very jika-tabi—"

I said, and the tears came, and before I knew it I burst out sobbing.

I lifted my face, brushing away the tears with the back of my hand, and even while thinking, this is wrong, this is wrong, I went on directing words at Mother that seemed to pour out of their own accord, quite apart from my body, one after another.

"You said it yourself once, didn't you? You said, it's because Kazuko is with me, because Kazuko is here for me, that Mother is going to Izu. You said you'd die without me, didn't you? And so, because of that, I've thought of nothing but staying here at your side, going nowhere, wearing these jika-tabi, growing you delicious vegetables to eat—and then the moment you hear Naoji is coming back, all at once I'm in the way, and you tell me to go off and be some prince's maidservant—it's too much, it's too much"

Even as I thought to myself how terrible a thing I was saying, the words, like some creature with a will of its own, simply would not stop.

"If we've become poor, if we have no more money, then let's just sell our clothes. Let's sell this house too, if it comes to that. I can do anything, you know. I could become a clerk at the village office, or anything else you like. And if they won't take me on at the office, I could go back to yoitomake work. Being poor is nothing at all. As long as you love me, Mother, I've thought of nothing but staying at your side for the rest of my life—but you love Naoji more than me, don't you. I'm going. I'm leaving. Naoji and I have never gotten along, not since we were children, so if the three of us lived together we'd only make each other miserable. I've lived alone with you, Mother, for so long now, that I have nothing left to regret. From now on let Naoji live alone with you, just the two of you together, undisturbed, and let him be as dutiful a son as he likes. I'm sick of it now. I'm sick of this life we've been living. I'm leaving. I'm leaving right now, today. I have somewhere to go"

I stood up.

"Kazuko!"

Mother said, sharply, and rose to her feet in one motion, with an expression of dignity I had never once seen on her face before, and stood facing me, and seemed, just then, to stand a little taller than I did.

I wanted at once to say, I'm sorry, but the words simply would not come out of my mouth, and other words came out instead.

"You deceived me. You deceived me, Mother. You were only using me until Naoji came back. I'm your maidservant, is that it. Now that I've served my purpose, you tell me to go off to some prince's house"

A cry burst out of me, and, still standing, I wept without restraint.

"You're a fool"

Mother said, in a low voice trembling with anger.

I lifted my face, and said,

"Yes, I'm a fool. It's because I'm a fool that I get deceived. It's because I'm a fool that I become a burden. It would be better if I weren't here, wouldn't it? What is poverty? What is money? I don't know anything about those things. I have lived believing in nothing but love—your love, Mother, that alone"

I said, blurting out something foolish and unreasonable once again.

Mother turned her face away, suddenly.

She was weeping.

I wanted to say I'm sorry and throw my arms around Mother, but I found myself faintly troubled by how dirty my hands were from the fieldwork, and, feeling strangely hollow and false, I said instead,

"It would be better if I simply weren't here, wouldn't it? I'm leaving. I have somewhere to go"

and, flinging out these words, I ran off at once to the bathhouse, and, sobbing, washed my face and hands and feet, and then went to my room, and as I was changing into Western clothes, another great cry burst from me and I broke down weeping again, and, wanting to weep still more, to weep out everything inside me, I ran up the stairs to the western-style room, threw myself onto the bed, pulled the blanket over my head, and wept so hard I felt as though I might waste away, until gradually I began to feel faint, and grew, more and more, to long for a certain someone—longed so terribly to see his face, to hear his voice—until I fell into a strange state of mind, as though enduring the burn of hot moxa pressed to the soles of both my feet, holding perfectly still.

Toward evening, Mother came quietly into the western-style room upstairs, switched on the electric light with a click, and then came close to the bed, and said,

"Kazuko"

she called, very gently.

"Yes"

I sat up in bed, pushed my hair back with both hands, looked at Mother's face, and gave a small laugh.

Mother smiled faintly too, and then sank deep into the sofa beneath the window, and said,

"For the first time in my life, I have gone against Uncle Wada's instructions……Just now, Mother wrote him a letter in reply. I wrote that he should leave my children entirely to me. Kazuko, let's sell our clothes. Let's sell both our wardrobes, one after another, and spend it all extravagantly, without a thought, and live in luxury for a while. I don't want you doing fieldwork like this anymore. It's perfectly all right to buy expensive vegetables. This daily work in the fields is too much for you"

The truth was, the daily work in the fields had begun to grow a little hard for me too.

Even that fit of wild weeping just now had come from the exhaustion of the fieldwork tangled together with grief, until everything in the world had come to seem hateful and hard to bear.

I sat on the bed with my head bowed, and said nothing.

"Kazuko"

"Yes"

"This place you say you have to go—where is it?"

I felt myself blush, right up the back of my neck.

"Mr. Hosoda?"

I said nothing.

Mother let out a deep sigh, and said,

"May I speak of something from the past?"

"Go ahead"

I said, in a small voice.

"When you left the Yamaki family's house and came back to us at Nishikatamachi, I don't believe I said a single word to reproach you—but there was just that one thing I said, 'Mother has been betrayed by you.' Do you remember? And then you burst into tears……I did think afterward that it was wrong of me to use so harsh a word as betrayed, but……"

But in fact, when Mother said that to me then, I had felt, somehow, grateful, and had wept tears of joy.

"When Mother said, that time, that she had been betrayed, it wasn't over your leaving the Yamaki house. It was when the Yamakis told me that you had, in fact, been having an affair with Hosoda. When they told me that, I truly felt the color drain from my face. Because Hosoda had already had a wife and children for a long time before that, and no matter how much you might have longed for him, there was nothing to be done about it, and……"

"An affair—what a terrible thing to say. That was only the Yamakis' own suspicious imagining"

"Is that so. You're surely not still carrying a torch for that man Hosoda, are you? This place you have to go—where is it?"

"It isn't Mr. Hosoda's place, not at all"

"Is that so? Then where?"

"Mother, I was thinking, the other day, about what it is that makes human beings truly different from all other animals. Language, wisdom, thought, the order of society—other animals have all of these too, to one degree or another, don't they? They may even have something like faith. Human beings puff themselves up as the lords of all creation, but really there seems to be no essential difference between us and the other animals at all. And yet, Mother, there was one single thing. You won't be able to guess it. Something that other living creatures have absolutely none of, and human beings alone possess. It's this: a secret. What do you say to that?"

Mother's face colored faintly, and she gave a beautiful smile, and said,

"Ah, well, I only hope that secret of yours, Kazuko, bears good fruit. Every morning, Mother prays to your father to make Kazuko happy, you know"

There rose up in my heart, all at once, the memory of driving with Father across the Nasuno plain, and getting out partway, and the sight of the autumn fields at that moment.

Bush clover, pinks, gentians, maiden flowers, and other autumn blossoms had been in bloom.

The wild grapes had still been green.

And then, with no connection at all to what came before or after, the memory rose up in my heart and vanished again: of riding a motorboat with Father on Lake Biwa, and diving into the water, and the small fish living among the weeds brushing against my legs, and the shadow of my own legs cast sharply against the lake bottom, moving there.

I slid down off the bed and threw my arms around Mother's knees, and, for the first time, managed to say,

"Mother, I'm sorry, about before"

I was able to say, at last.

Looking back now, it was around that day that the last embers of our happiness gave off their final light, and after that, Naoji came home from the South Pacific, and our true hell began.

III

A helplessness so utter that I felt I could not possibly go on living.

Was this, perhaps, that feeling called anxiety? A painful wave came surging into my breast, and just as white clouds go scudding hurriedly one after another across the sky once a summer shower has passed, it clenched my heart and loosened it by turns; my pulse grew irregular, my breathing thin, a haze of darkness gathered before my eyes, and I felt all the strength drain suddenly out through my fingertips, until I could no longer go on with my knitting.

These days the rain has been falling on and on, gloomily, so that whatever I do I feel listless; today I carried a rattan chair out to the veranda of the sitting room and found myself in the mood to take up again a sweater I had begun knitting once, this past spring, and then left off.

It is a pale, blurred sort of peony-pink yarn, and I mean to add cobalt-blue thread to it to make the sweater.

This same pale peony-pink yarn was the yarn Mother had once knitted into a muffler for me, twenty years ago now, when I was still attending primary school.

The end of that muffler was fashioned into a hood, and when I put it on and looked in the mirror, I looked like a little goblin.

And besides, its color was so utterly unlike the colors of my schoolmates' mufflers that I hated it, hated it beyond bearing.

A schoolmate from the Kansai region, the daughter of some great taxpayer, said to me, "That's a fine muffler you're wearing,"

praising it in that grown-up way of speaking of hers, but it only made me the more ashamed, and from that day I never once wore the muffler again; I left it cast aside for years.

This spring, in something like a revival of a long-buried thing, I set about unraveling it to make it over into a sweater for myself, but I found the blurred color not to my liking after all and put it aside again; today, having nothing at all to occupy me, I took it out on a sudden impulse and went on slowly knitting.

But as I knitted, I noticed that this pale peony-pink yarn and the gray rain-sky were melting together into a tone indescribably soft and mild.

I had not known it.

I had not known that important thing—that a costume must be considered in harmony with the color of the sky.

Harmony—what a beautiful, wonderful thing it was; I sat there somewhat astonished, quite dazed by it.

It is strange—when the gray rain-sky and the pale peony-pink yarn are set together, both come alive at once.

The yarn in my hands suddenly felt warm, all aglow, and even the cold rain-sky came to feel soft as velvet.

And it brought to mind Monet's painting of the cathedral in the mist.

It seemed to me that through the color of this yarn I had, for the first time, been made to understand what is called "goût"—

or so it seemed to me.

A good sense of taste.

And Mother, who had known perfectly well how beautifully this pale peony-pink would harmonize with a winter snow-sky, and had chosen it for me on purpose—while I, fool that I was, only hated it; and yet she never tried to force it upon me, her child, but let me have my own way. Mother.

Mother, who for twenty years, until I should truly come to understand the beauty of this color, never said a single word of explanation about it, but waited silently, feigning not to notice.

I thought, from the bottom of my heart, what a good mother she was—and in the same moment a cloud of unbearable dread and worry rose up in my breast, that Naoji and I between us were tormenting this good mother, wearing her down, weakening her, and would before long let her die; and the more I turned it over in my mind, the more only fearful, evil things seemed to lie ahead, until I grew so anxious I felt I could not possibly go on living, and the strength went out of my fingers, and I laid my knitting needles on my lap, let out a great sigh, tilted my face upward, closed my eyes, and—

"Mother,"

I said, without meaning to.

Mother had been leaning against the desk in the corner of the room, reading a book, but

"Yes?"

she answered, sounding puzzled.

I was flustered, and then, in a deliberately loud voice,

"The rose has finally bloomed. Did you know, Mother? I only just noticed. It's finally bloomed."

The rose just in front of the veranda of the sitting room.

It was a rose that Uncle Wada had once brought back from far away—France, or England, I forget which—and which he had transplanted into the garden of this mountain villa two or three months before.

This morning one bloom had finally opened, and I had known it perfectly well already, but to cover my embarrassment I made a great show of it, as though I had only that instant noticed.

The flower was a deep purple, with a proud, stern strength about it.

"I knew,"

Mother said quietly, and then,

"To you, that sort of thing seems terribly important, doesn't it."

"Maybe it is. Do you pity me for it?"

"No, I only meant that you have that streak in you. Pasting pictures by Renard onto the matchboxes in the kitchen, making little handkerchiefs for your dolls—that sort of thing you love. And even about the rose in the garden, to hear you talk, it's as if you were speaking of a living person."

"It's because I have no child."

The words came out of my mouth, utterly unexpected even to me.

Having said it, I was startled, and sat there awkwardly fidgeting with the knitting in my lap, when—

—Twenty-nine, is it.

I seemed to hear, quite distinctly, a man's voice saying it, in a ticklish bass like a voice heard over the telephone, and my cheeks grew hot with shame, as though they were burning.

Mother said nothing, and went back to reading her book.

Mother had been wearing a gauze mask over her mouth for some days now, and perhaps because of it she had grown noticeably quiet of late.

She wore the mask on Naoji's orders.

Naoji had come home about ten days before, his face turned a dark blue-black, from some island in the south.

With no warning at all, one summer evening, he came in through the back gate into the garden, and said,

"Ugh, what a wretched house. What terrible taste. Put up a sign—Rairaiken, shumai served here."

That was Naoji's greeting to me, the first time we set eyes on each other.

Mother had taken to her bed two or three days before that, with something wrong with her tongue.

She said that the tip of her tongue, though outwardly it showed no change at all, hurt unbearably whenever she moved it, and she took nothing but thin rice gruel for meals; I asked whether she oughtn't to see a doctor about it—

but when I said so, she only shook her head and,

"They'll only laugh at me,"

she said, with a wry smile.

I painted Lugol's solution on it for her, but it seemed to do no good at all, and I found myself strangely on edge.

It was into this that Naoji came home.

Naoji sat down at Mother's pillow, said, "I'm back," and bowed, then at once stood up and went wandering here and there through the small house, looking it over, with me following after him, and I asked,

"Well? Has Mother changed?"

"Changed, all right. Wasted away. Better if she'd just hurry up and die. In a world like this, someone like Mama hasn't a chance of living on. It's too pitiful—I can't stand to look at it."

"And me?"

"You've gone coarse. You've got the look of a woman with two or three men on the side. Any sake? I'm drinking tonight."

I went to the one inn in this village and asked the landlady, Osaki, to let me have a little sake, since my brother had come home; but Osaki said that unluckily she had none in just now, and when I came back and told Naoji so, his face took on an expression I had never seen before, like a stranger's, and he said, tch, that's because you're no good at negotiating, and asked me where the inn was, then thrust his feet into garden clogs and dashed outside, and however long I waited after that, he did not come home.

I made baked apples, which Naoji had always liked, and some egg dishes besides, and changed the bulb in the dining room for a brighter one, and waited a good long while, until at last Osaki poked her head in at the kitchen door and said,

"Excuse me. Is it going to be all right? He's drinking shochu."

—opening those round eyes of hers, like a carp's eyes, even wider than usual, and speaking low, as though it were a matter of the gravest importance.

"Shochu? You mean—methyl?"

"No, it isn't methyl, but—"

"But it won't make him ill, will it, from drinking it?"

"No, but..."

"Let him drink it, then."

Osaki nodded, as though swallowing something, and went back.

I went to Mother and said,

"He's drinking, it seems, over at Osaki's place."

and Mother twisted her mouth slightly and laughed, saying,

"Is that so. I wonder if he's given up the opium, at least. You go and finish your supper. And tonight the three of us will sleep in this room—Naoji's bedding in the middle."

I felt as though I wanted to cry.

Late that night, Naoji came home with a heavy, unsteady tread.

The three of us slept together in the sitting room, under a single mosquito net.

"Why don't you tell Mother about the south?"

I said, lying there,

"There's nothing. Nothing at all. I've forgotten it. I got to Japan, got on the train, and out the train window the rice paddies looked wonderfully beautiful. That's all. Turn off the light. I can't sleep."

I turned off the light.

Summer moonlight came flooding into the mosquito net like a rising tide.

The next morning, Naoji lay sprawled on his stomach in bed, smoking a cigarette and gazing off toward the distant sea, and said,

"Her tongue hurts, does it?"

—speaking as though he had only just noticed, for the first time, that Mother was unwell.

Mother only smiled faintly.

"That's bound to be psychological. You sleep with your mouth open at night, don't you. It's careless. Wear a mask. Soak some gauze in Rivanol solution and put it inside the mask."

I burst out laughing at that, and said,

"And what would you call that kind of treatment?"

"Aesthetic therapy."

"But Mother's sure to hate wearing a mask."

Mother, and not only masks—eye patches, spectacles, anything of that kind fastened to her face—had always hated such things, I was sure.

"Mother, will you wear the mask?"

I asked her,

"I will,"

she answered, low and quite in earnest, and it startled me.

It seemed she meant to believe and obey whatever Naoji told her, no matter what it was.

After breakfast I soaked gauze in Rivanol solution, just as Naoji had said, made a mask, and brought it to Mother; she took it without a word, and lying there just as she was, obediently hooked the strings of the mask over both her ears, and the sight of her doing so was truly so like a young child that it struck me as sad.

In the early afternoon, Naoji said he had to see his friends in Tokyo and his mentor in literary matters, changed into a suit, got two thousand yen from Mother, and went off to Tokyo.

And that was that—it has been nearly ten days now, and Naoji has not come back.

And Mother wears her mask every day and waits for Naoji.

"Rivanol is really a fine medicine, isn't it. While I have this mask on, the pain in my tongue quite goes away,"

she said, laughing, but I could not help feeling that Mother was telling a lie.

She says she is quite well now and is up and about, but she still seems to have hardly any appetite, and she has grown noticeably quiet, and I am terribly worried; whatever can Naoji be doing in Tokyo, I wonder—no doubt he is out carousing all over the city with that novelist Uehara and the like, caught up in Tokyo's whirlpool of madness—and the more I thought of it the more wretched and painful it became, until I blurted out to Mother, out of nowhere, that business about the rose, and then that strange thing I had never meant to say, that it was because I had no child, and things only went from bad to worse, until

"Ah,"

I said, and stood up, and then, having nowhere at all to go and not knowing what to do with myself, I wandered unsteadily up the stairs and looked into the Western-style room upstairs.

This room was to become Naoji's, and four or five days before, I had talked it over with Mother and asked Nakai, from the farmhouse below, to help, and we had carried up here Naoji's wardrobe, his desk, his bookcase, and five or six wooden boxes crammed full of his books and notebooks—in short, everything that had once been in Naoji's room at the house in Nishikata-cho—thinking it would be best to leave it all lying about in disorder just as it was until Naoji came back from Tokyo and could have the wardrobe and bookcase and the rest set in whatever places he liked; so the room was left cluttered, scarcely a place to set one's foot, and I, without thinking much of it, picked up one of Naoji's notebooks from a wooden box at my feet, and on the cover of that notebook were written the words,

Yugao Diary

and inside it, page after page, were scrawled things such as these.

It seemed to be a record from the time Naoji was suffering from that morphine addiction of his.

A feeling of burning to death.

However much it hurts, I can't even cry out the one word, half a word, 'it hurts'—don't you go glossing over the feel of a bottomless hell the like of which has never once existed since the human world began.

Thought?

A lie.

Principle?

A lie.

Ideals?

A lie.

Order?

A lie.

Sincerity?

Truth?

Purity?

All lies.

The wisteria of Ushijima is said to be a thousand years old, the wisteria of Yuya several hundred; I hear the racemes run as long as nine feet on the one, five-odd feet on the other, and it's only the racemes themselves that make my heart leap.

That too is a child of man.

It is alive.

Logic, so-called, is a love of logic.

It is not love for a living human being.

Money and women.

Logic turns bashful, and scurries hastily away.

History, philosophy, education, religion, law, politics, economics, sociology—Doctor Faust's brave demonstration that the smile of a single virgin is worth more than all such learning put together.

Scholarship is just another name for vanity.

It is the effort of a human being to stop being human.

I can swear it even to Goethe himself.

I could write as skillfully as anyone likes.

Not a single misstep in the construction, just the right measure of comedy, a sorrow that scorches the reader behind the eyes, or else something solemn enough to make them, as they say, sit up straight—a flawless little novel that, read aloud in ringing tones, would sound exactly like a film narrator's commentary. I'm too ashamed to write anything like that, that's the plain truth.

To begin with, that whole consciousness of writing a masterpiece is petty and small-minded.

Sitting up straight over a novel is the behavior of a lunatic.

If that's the case, one might as well read it in formal dress.

And yet the better a work is, the less it seems to be putting on airs.

Just to see a friend's face light up with real, heartfelt laughter, I'll deliberately botch a story, write it clumsily on purpose, land flat on my rear, and scurry off scratching my head.

Ah, the delighted look on my friend's face at such a time!

With prose that falls short and a manner that falls short, I blow a toy trumpet for them to hear and say: here stands the biggest fool in Japan, you're still better off than I am, long may you thrive!

Whatever is this love, that wishes such a thing?

My friend, wearing a knowing look, remarks to himself: that's his bad habit, what a waste.

He has no idea he is loved.

Is there any human being who isn't a delinquent?

A joyless feeling.

I want money.

Or else—

a natural death in my sleep!

I owe the pharmacist close to a thousand yen.

Today I secretly brought the pawnbroker's clerk home, showed him into my room, and told him: is there anything worth pawning in here, take it if there is, I need money urgently—whereupon the clerk, hardly even glancing around the room, had the nerve to say, come now, none of this is even yours.

Fine, then, take only what I've bought with my own pocket money, I said grandly, and gathered up a heap of junk, not one item of which was fit to be pawned.

First, a plaster cast of a hand.

This one, Venus's right hand.

A hand like a dahlia blossom, a pure white hand, just sitting there on its stand.

But look closely, and you'll see that this hand renders, well enough to catch at your own breast, all of Venus's breathless shame—the moment her whole naked body was seen by a man, the shock of it, the whirlwind of blushing modesty, her helpless bare form, a faint crimson spreading to every last inch of her, cheeks burning, her body twisting into just this gesture—all of that breathless nakedness and shame of Venus, expressed by this slender, pure white right hand, without a single fingerprint on the fingertips, without one line on the palm.

But this is, so to speak, useless junk.

The clerk appraised it at fifty sen.

Besides that, a large map of the environs of Paris, a celluloid top nearly a foot across, a special pen nib fine enough to write letters thinner than thread—every one of them a thing I'd bought thinking it a real find—but the clerk only laughed and said he'd best be taking his leave now.

Wait, I stopped him, and in the end loaded him down with a mountain of books besides, and received the sum of five yen.

The books on my shelves are almost all cheap paperback editions, and bought secondhand at that, so naturally their pawn value comes to just this little.

Trying to settle a debt of a thousand yen—with five yen.

My real worth in this world, roughly, is just about this.

It's no laughing matter.

Decadent?

But there's no living any other way than this.

Rather than someone who says that and condemns me, I'd sooner have someone who says—die!

—that I'd be grateful for.

It clears the air.

But people hardly ever say—die!

—that's just how it is.

You petty, cautious hypocrites.

Justice?

The essence of the so-called class struggle doesn't lie in anything like that.

Humanity?

Don't make me laugh.

I know perfectly well.

It's about knocking down the other side for the sake of your own happiness.

Killing them.

Die!—

if it isn't that sentence, what is it?

Don't try to dress it up.

But then, there's no one decent in my own class either.

Idiots, ghosts, misers, mad dogs, braggarts, oh-so-formal bowers-and-scrapers, pissing down on everyone from up in the clouds.

Die!—

even that word is too good to waste on them.

The war.

Japan's war is pure desperation.

I refuse to die dragged along in someone else's desperation.

I'd sooner die alone.

When a person lies, he always wears a perfectly serious face.

That seriousness on the faces of our leaders these days.

Pff!

I want to spend my time with people who never think of wanting to be respected.

But people that good won't spend their time with me.

When I put on an air of precociousness, people gossiped that I was precocious.

When I pretended to be lazy, people gossiped that I was lazy.

When I pretended I couldn't write fiction, people gossiped that I couldn't write.

When I pretended to be a liar, people gossiped that I was a liar.

When I pretended to be rich, people gossiped that I was rich.

When I put on an air of coldness, people gossiped that I was a cold sort of fellow.

But when I was truly in pain, and let out a groan without meaning to, people gossiped that I was only pretending to be in pain.

Somehow it never lines up.

In the end, is there any way out but to kill myself?

When I thought that, however much I suffer like this, it will all end only in suicide, I burst out crying aloud.

On a spring morning, they say, the morning sun fell on a plum branch where two or three blossoms had just opened, and from that branch a young student in Heidelberg was found hanging, slender, dead.

"Mama! Scold me!"

"In what way?"

"Say I'm a coward!"

"Is that so? A coward.... There, is that enough?"

There is a goodness in Mama beyond compare.

Thinking of Mama makes me want to cry.

I'll die, if only to make amends to Mama.

FORGIVE ME.

JUST THIS ONCE, FORGIVE ME.

Year after year,

blind as ever,

the crane chick

seems to grow up all the same—

pitiful, that it fattens too. (New Year's Day, a first attempt)

Morphine. Atromol. Narcopon. Pantopon. Pavinal. Pantopin. Atropine.

What is pride, anyway—pride.

Can't a human being—no, a man—get through life without thinking, I'm superior, I have my good points, that sort of thing?

Hating others, hated by others.

A contest of wits.

Solemnity = a sense of one's own foolishness

Anyway, since I'm alive, I must be running some kind of racket.

A certain letter asking for a loan.

"A reply.

Give me a reply.

And let it, without fail, be good news.

I brace myself for humiliations of every kind, and groan alone.

I am not putting on an act.

Absolutely not.

I beg you.

I am dying of shame.

This is no exaggeration.

Every single day, waiting for your reply, I shake and tremble, day and night.

Don't make me chew on sand.

I hear stifled laughter through the wall, and toss and turn in bed deep into the night.

Don't put me through such shame.

Sister!"

Reading that far, I closed the Yugao Diary, put it back in the wooden box, and then walked over to the window, threw it wide open, and looked down at the garden hazy with white rain, thinking of those days long past.

Six years have gone by since then.

Naoji's morphine addiction was the cause of my divorce—no, I mustn't say that; even without Naoji's addiction, my divorce would surely have come about sooner or later, over some other pretext, as though it had been decided from the moment I was born.

Naoji, in trouble over his payments to the pharmacist, often begged me for money.

I had only just married into the Yamaki family, and it was not as though money was mine to spend freely, and besides, secretly funneling money from my husband's house to my own brother back home seemed like a terribly awkward thing to do, so I talked it over with Oseki, the nursemaid who had come with me from home, and we sold my bracelets, my necklaces, my dresses.

My brother sent me a letter asking for money, saying that he was now in such pain and shame that he could not possibly face his sister, or even speak to her by telephone, so would I have Oseki deliver the money instead to the novelist Jiro Uehara—whose name, he said, I must at least have heard—living at the Kayano Apartments in such-and-such block, Kyobashi; the world spoke of Uehara as a wicked man, but he was nothing of the kind, so I need not worry about sending the money to Uehara's place, and Uehara would let him know at once by telephone, so please, please do it exactly this way; he did not want Mama

to find out about this new addiction of his, and meant to cure himself of it somehow without her ever knowing; once he had the money from me this time, he would pay off everything he owed the pharmacist, and then go off to a villa in Shiobara or somewhere, and come back with a healthy body—truly, he said, once he had settled his debt with the pharmacist, from that very day he meant to give up the drug entirely, he swore it to God, please believe him, and please, without telling Mama, use Oseki to get the money to Uehara at the Kayano Apartments—that was the substance of the letter, and I did as he instructed, having Oseki carry the money and deliver it secretly to Uehara's apartment; but my brother's sworn promises in his letters were always lies, and he never went to the villa in

Shiobara, and his drug addiction only grew worse and worse, and his letters begging for money took on a tone nearer and nearer to a scream of pain, swearing this time, this time he would truly give it up, in a piteous vow that made me want to look away, so that, thinking it might all be a lie again and yet unable to help myself, I would once more have Oseki sell off a brooch or some such thing and deliver the money to Uehara's apartment.

"What sort of person is this Mr. Uehara?"

"A small man, sallow-faced, and rather curt,"

Oseki answered.

"But he's hardly ever at the apartment. It's usually only his wife and their little girl, six or seven years old. His wife isn't especially pretty, but she's a gentle, well-mannered sort of person. One can safely leave the money with a wife like that."

I, in those days, was—compared to what I am now, or rather quite beyond comparison, an altogether different sort of person, vague and carefree—but even so, I could not help growing terribly anxious as the sums Naoji begged for grew larger and larger, coming one after another; and one day, on my way back from a Noh performance, I sent the car home from Ginza and walked alone to visit the Kayano Apartments in Kyobashi.

Uehara was alone in his room, reading a newspaper.

He wore a striped lined kimono with a dark splash-patterned haori over it, and my first impression of him was a strange one—he seemed both old and young at once, like some odd creature I had never seen before.

"My wife's out just now, with our child, collecting the rations—"

he said, in a slightly nasal, halting voice.

He seemed to have mistaken me for some friend of his wife's.

When I told him I was Naoji's sister, Uehara gave a short laugh—"Hmph."

For some reason it sent a chill through me.

"Shall we go out?"

he said, and then, throwing on a two-layered cloak and taking a new pair of clogs from the shoe cupboard, put them on and walked off ahead of me down the corridor of the apartment building.

Outside it was the evening of early winter.

The wind was cold.

It felt like a river wind blowing off the Sumida.

Uehara walked on in silence toward Tsukiji, one shoulder raised a little as though bracing against that river wind.

I trotted along behind him, half running to keep up.

We went down into the basement of a building behind the Tokyo Theater.

Four or five parties of customers sat quietly drinking, each at their own table, in a long, narrow room of some twenty mats.

Uehara drank his sake from a tumbler.

And he had another tumbler brought for me too, and pressed drink on me.

I drank two of those tumblers myself, and felt nothing at all.

Uehara drank, and smoked, and stayed silent the whole while.

I stayed silent too.

It was the first time in my life I had ever been to such a place, and yet I felt strangely settled, in a good mood.

"You ought to try drinking yourself, you know."

"What?"

"No, I mean your brother. He'd do better switching over to alcohol. I was a morphine addict myself once, long ago—people find that sort of thing rather sinister, you know, and alcohol's much the same, really, but somehow people are more forgiving of it. Let's turn your brother into a drinker. All right?"

"I once saw a drunk. It was New Year's, when I was about to go out, and an acquaintance of our driver was asleep in the front seat of the car, snoring loudly, his face bright red like a demon's. I cried out in surprise, and the driver said, oh, that's just a drunk, nothing to be done about it, and pulled him out of the car and carried him off on his shoulder somewhere. He was limp, boneless, and still muttering something even so—that was the first time I ever saw a drunkard, and I found it quite fascinating."

"I'm a drunkard myself."

"Oh, but you're different, aren't you?"

"You're a drunkard too."

"That's not true at all. I've seen a real drunkard. You're nothing like that."

Uehara laughed, looking pleased for the first time, and said,

"Well then, your brother may never make a proper drunkard either, but in any case, it's better for him to be the sort of person who drinks. Let's head back. You'll be in trouble if it gets late, won't you?"

"No, it doesn't matter."

"No, actually, it's me who's uncomfortable here. Miss! The bill!"

"Is it terribly expensive? I have a little with me, if that's not enough."

"Is that so. Then you're paying."

"It might not be enough."

I looked in my bag and told Uehara how much money I had.

"With that much you could drink at two or three more places. They must take me for a fool."

Uehara said, frowning, and then laughed.

"Are you going drinking somewhere else?"

I asked, and he shook his head seriously, and said,

"No, I've had enough. I'll get you a taxi, so go on home."

We climbed the dark stairs out of the basement.

Uehara, a step ahead of me, turned around suddenly halfway up the stairs and kissed me, quickly.

I received it with my lips pressed firmly shut.

I didn't particularly like Uehara at all, and yet from that moment I had that "secret"

all my own.

Uehara went clattering on up the stairs at a run, and I climbed slowly after him, in a strange, transparent state of mind, and when I stepped outside, the river wind felt wonderfully good against my cheeks.

Uehara found me a taxi, and we parted without a word.

Rocked along in the car, I felt as though the whole world had suddenly grown as wide as the sea.

"I have a lover."

One day, after being scolded by my husband, feeling lonely, I said that quite suddenly.

"I know. Hosoda, isn't it? Can't you put him out of your mind, no matter what?"

I said nothing.

After that, whenever something unpleasant happened between us, that subject would come up between my husband and me.

This is finished, I thought.

Like a dress fabric cut wrong, that fabric could no longer be sewn back together; it would have to be thrown out entirely, and a new cutting begun on some other piece of cloth.

"Surely that child, in your belly, isn't—"

my husband said to me one night, and I was so terrified I trembled all over.

Looking back now, both my husband and I were young.

I knew nothing of romantic love.

I did not even understand love itself.

I had become infatuated with the paintings Mr. Hosoda made, and went about telling everyone how, if I could become the wife of a man like that, what a beautiful daily life we would surely build together—that marriage without marrying a man of such fine taste would be meaningless—and because of this everyone came to misunderstand me, and yet, knowing nothing of love or passion, I went on declaring my fondness for Mr. Hosoda quite openly, without a thought of taking it back, and things grew strangely tangled, until even the little baby then sleeping in my belly became a target of my husband's suspicion, and though not a single person had ever come out and spoken of divorce, somehow, before I knew it, the air around me had gone cold and false, and I went back, with Oseki attending me, to Mother's house,

and after that the baby was stillborn, and I fell ill and took to my bed, and things with the Yamaki family simply ended there.

Naoji, perhaps feeling some sense of responsibility for my divorce, said, I'll die, and wailed aloud, crying until his face seemed almost to rot away.

I asked my brother how much he owed the pharmacist, and it was a frightening sum.

And it later came out that my brother, unable to say the real amount, had been lying to me.

The true total, which came to light afterward, was nearly three times what he had told me at the time.

"I met Mr. Uehara. He's a good person, isn't he. Why don't you go drinking and enjoying yourself with him from now on? Sake's quite cheap, after all. I'll always give you money enough for that much, at least. And don't worry about the pharmacist's bill. It'll work itself out somehow."

That I had met Uehara, and called him a good person, seemed to please my brother enormously, and that very night he took money from me and went straight off to visit Uehara.

Addiction, perhaps, truly is a disease of the spirit.

When I praised Uehara, and borrowed his books from my brother to read, and said, what a fine man he is, my brother would say, what would someone like you understand, and yet he seemed thoroughly delighted all the same, and would say, well then, read this one too, and hand me another of Uehara's books, until before long I too had come to read Uehara's novels in earnest, and the two of us would gossip about him this way and that, and my brother went off every night, as if it were his proudest duty, to visit Uehara, and gradually, it seemed, he was shifting over to alcohol, just as Uehara had planned.

When I quietly consulted Mother about the pharmacist's bill, she covered her face with one hand and sat still for a while, but then raised her face at last and gave a sad little laugh, and said, there's no use thinking it over and over, is there—however many years it takes, let's just pay it back a little each month.

It has already been six years since then.

Yugao.

Ah, my brother must be in pain too.

And with the road blocked before him, he still, even now, has no idea what to do, or how.

He simply drinks, day after day, as though bent on dying.

I wonder if it wouldn't be better for him to give up entirely and become a full-fledged delinquent.

Wouldn't that, in the end, be an easier thing for him?

Is there any human being who isn't a delinquent, that notebook of his had said—and now that I think of it that way, even I seem a delinquent, and Uncle too, and even Mother seems, somehow, a delinquent.

Isn't being a delinquent simply another name for gentleness?

IV

I have been wondering, for a long while, whether or not to write to you.

But this morning I suddenly recalled Jesus's words—be as gentle as doves, and as shrewd as snakes—and felt strangely emboldened, and so I have decided to write to you after all.

I am Naoji's sister.

I wonder if you've forgotten me.

If you have forgotten, please remember.

Naoji came to bother you again recently, and seems to have caused you a great deal of trouble; I am very sorry.

(Though really, Naoji's doings are his own affair, and it feels rather nonsensical of me to come forward and apologize for him.)

Today, though, it is not about Naoji but about myself that I have a favor to ask.

I heard from Naoji that you were bombed out of your apartment in Kyobashi and have since moved to your present address, and I very nearly thought of calling on you at your house out in the Tokyo suburbs, but Mother has been somewhat unwell again these past days, and I cannot possibly go up to Tokyo and leave her, so I have decided to write to you by letter instead.

There is something I want to consult you about.

This matter I want to consult you about, seen from the standpoint of the old "Onna Daigaku"—

may be terribly cunning, sordid, even a wicked sort of crime; but I—no, we—cannot possibly go on living as we are now, and so I mean to tell you, whom my brother Naoji seems to respect above anyone else in this world, my true feelings, and ask for your guidance.

I cannot bear my present life.

It isn't a matter of liking or disliking it—the three of us, mother and children, simply cannot go on living like this.

Yesterday too I felt wretched, feverish, short of breath, quite at a loss what to do with myself, when, a little after noon, the daughter from the farmhouse below came through the rain carrying rice on her back.

And I, in return, gave her the clothing we had agreed on.

The girl sat facing me at the table in the dining room, drinking tea, and in a thoroughly matter-of-fact tone,

"How much longer do you think you can go on living, selling off your things like this?"

she said.

"Six months, maybe a year,"

I answered.

And then, covering half my face with my right hand,

"I'm sleepy. I can't help how sleepy I am,"

I said.

"You're tired out. It must be that kind of nervous exhaustion that makes you sleepy."

"I suppose it must be."

I nearly cried, and all at once the words "realism" and "romanticism" rose up in my mind.

I have no realism in me.

When I wondered whether I could really go on living this way, a chill ran through my whole body.

Mother is half an invalid, in and out of bed, and my brother is, as you know, gravely ill in spirit—when he is here he devotes himself faithfully to drinking shochu at the inn-cum-restaurant nearby, and once every three days he sets off on business to Tokyo, carrying money from the sale of our clothes.

But it is not this that is hard to bear.

What frightens me is simply this: I can feel, vividly, a foreboding that my own life, in the midst of these daily circumstances, is rotting where it stands, of its own accord, the way a banana leaf rots without ever falling.

I cannot bear it.

And so I—the "Onna Daigaku"—

even in defiance of it, I want to escape from this present life.

And so I am consulting you about it.

I want, now, to declare plainly to Mother and to my brother

that I have long loved a certain man, and that I mean, in future, to live as that man's mistress—I want to say it plainly, and be done with it.

That man is someone you must surely know.

His initials are M. C.

For a long time now, whenever something painful happens, I have wanted to fly to that M. C., and have gone about feeling as though I might die of longing.

M. C., like you, has a wife and children.

And it seems he has women friends prettier and younger than I am, besides.

But I feel there is no way for me to go on living except by going to M. C.

I have never yet met M. C.'s wife, but she seems to be a very kind and good person.

When I think of that wife, I think what a dreadful woman I am.

But my present life feels like something more dreadful still, and I cannot stop myself relying on M. C.

As gentle as a dove, and as shrewd as a snake, I mean to see my love through to the end.

But surely Mother, and my brother, and the world at large as well, not one of them will approve of me.

What about you?

When I think that in the end I have no choice but to think it through alone and act alone, tears come.

For it is a thing I have never done before, not once in my life.

I rack my brains wondering whether there might not be some way to accomplish this difficult thing with everyone's blessing, the way one puzzles over the answer to some hideously complicated problem in factoring algebra, and it comes to feel as though there must be, somewhere, one thread that, once pulled, would unravel the whole thing cleanly—and then all at once I grow cheerful.

But the crucial thing is what M. C. himself thinks of me.

When I think of that, my spirits sink.

I am, so to speak, an uninvited... what should I call it... one can hardly say an uninvited wife, so perhaps an uninvited mistress—something of that sort—and if M. C. himself absolutely refuses, then that will be the end of it.

So I am asking this of you.

Please, will you ask him for me.

One day six years ago, a faint, pale rainbow arched over my heart; it was not love, not yet, but with each passing year that rainbow has grown ever more vivid, its colors ever richer, and I have never once, not to this day, lost sight of it.

A rainbow that arches over a sky cleared after a summer shower fades away before long, but a rainbow that arches over a person's heart, it seems, does not fade.

Please ask him.

What did he truly think of me?

Did he think of it just as a rainbow after rain?

And suppose it long since faded away, in his mind?

Then I too must make my own rainbow fade.

But it seems that my life would have to go out first, before the rainbow in my heart could fade.

I am praying for your reply.

To Mr. Jiro Uehara (my Chekhov.

My Chekhov.

M. C.)

I have been putting on a little weight these days.

I don't think I am becoming more animal—I think I am becoming more human.

This summer I read just one novel by Lawrence.

Since I have had no reply, I am writing to you once again.

The letter I sent you before must have been so full of cunning, so full of snakelike scheming, that you saw through every bit of it.

It's true—I put every ounce of cunning I had into every line of that letter.

You must have thought, in the end, that it was nothing but a letter with a single aim—that I wanted you to support my life, that I wanted money.

And I won't deny that that is part of it, but if all I wanted were a patron for myself, forgive me for saying so, I should not have chosen you in particular to ask.

There are, I think, plenty of other rich old men out there who would be glad to dote on me.

In fact, just the other day, there was a strange sort of marriage proposal.

You may know the man's name—a bachelor gentleman past sixty, a member of the Art Academy or some such, one of those great masters—he came to this mountain villa to ask for my hand.

This master lived near our house in Nishikata-cho, and we used to meet from time to time as neighbors in the same block association.

Once—it was an autumn evening, I remember—Mother and I were passing his house by car when we saw him standing alone, absent-mindedly, by his gate, and when Mother gave him a small bow from the car window, his stern, sallow face flushed suddenly redder than autumn leaves.

"Could it be love?"

I said, laughing gaily.

"He must be fond of you, Mother."

But Mother said calmly,

"No—he's simply a great man,"

as though speaking half to herself.

Respect for artists seems to be a tradition of our family.

This master, having lost his wife some years back, made his approach to Mother through a certain prince who was a fellow devotee of Noh chanting along with Uncle Wada, and Mother said, why don't you, Kazuko, simply write him your honest answer yourself?

—and since I did not care for the idea at all, without giving it much thought, I found I could write, quite easily and without hesitation, that I had no wish to marry at present.

"It's all right if I refuse, isn't it?"

"Of course... I thought it was an unreasonable idea myself."

The master was staying at his villa in Karuizawa at the time, so I sent my letter of refusal there, and then, two days later, crossing paths with that very letter, the master himself turned up quite suddenly here at this mountain villa, saying he had stopped by on his way to a hot spring in Izu for work, knowing nothing at all of my reply.

Artists, it seems, go on doing childishly whimsical things like that no matter how old they get.

Mother was unwell, so I went out to receive him myself, and served him tea in the Chinese room, and

"That letter of refusal I sent, I believe, must have reached Karuizawa just about now. I thought it over very carefully,"

I said.

"Is that so,"

he said, in a flustered tone, wiping away sweat, and then,

"But please, think it over once more, carefully. I—how shall I put it—I may not be able to give you happiness in a spiritual sense, so to speak, but in its place I can make you happy materially, as much as you like. That much I can say plainly. Speaking frankly, that is."

"I don't quite understand this 'happiness' you speak of. Forgive me if this sounds impertinent. In one of Chekhov's letters to his wife, he wrote, bear me a child, bear our child—something like that. And in an essay of Nietzsche's, too, there was a phrase, a woman one wishes would bear one's child. I want a child. Happiness—that sort of thing hardly matters to me. I do want money, but if I had enough money to raise a child, that would be quite enough."

The master gave a strange sort of laugh, and said,

"You're an unusual person. The kind who can say exactly what she thinks to anyone. With someone like you at my side, some new inspiration might come down into my work."

—saying, in a way rather too dashing for his age, something a little affected.

If I really could, by my own doing, restore some youth to the work of such a great artist, that would surely be worth living for, I thought; but even so, I simply could not picture myself in that master's embrace.

"Would it be all right if I had no love in my heart for you?"

I asked, with a small laugh, and the master, seriously,

"That's quite all right, for a woman. Women are better off being a little vague about such things."

he said.

"But a woman like me can't think about marriage without love in her heart, after all. I'm already grown up, you see. Next year I'll be thirty."

—and having said it, I felt, without meaning to, as though I wanted to clap my hand over my mouth.

Thirty.

A woman, up until twenty-nine, still keeps something of a maiden's fragrance about her.

But by thirty, a woman's body no longer has, anywhere in it, that maiden's fragrance—the line came back to me suddenly, from some French novel I had read long ago, and an unbearable loneliness came over me, and when I looked outside, the sea, bathed in the light of noon, glittered with a harsh brilliance, like shards of glass.

When I read that novel, I had lightly agreed—of course, that must be so—and thought no more of it.

I miss those days when I could calmly think that a woman's life comes to an end at thirty.

As my bracelets, my necklaces, my dresses, my sashes, one by one vanished from around my body, the maiden's fragrance of my body, too, must have gradually thinned and faded away.

A poor, middle-aged woman.

Oh, how I hate it.

But even in the life of a middle-aged woman, there is, after all, a woman's life.

I have come to understand that, these days.

I remember an English governess of mine saying this to me, at nineteen, when she was returning to England:

"You must not fall in love. If you fall in love, you will become unhappy. If you are going to fall in love, do it when you're older—wait until you're thirty."

But even hearing that, I only stared at her blankly.

Being thirty was, to me at that time, something I couldn't even begin to imagine.

"I've heard a rumor that you're going to sell this villa,"

the master said suddenly, with a rather spiteful look on his face.

I laughed.

"Forgive me. It made me think of The Cherry Orchard. Are you going to buy it, then?"

The master seemed, sure enough, to catch my meaning at once, and fell silent, twisting his mouth as though angry.

It is true there had been some talk of selling this house for five hundred thousand new yen, to serve as a residence for a certain prince, but the matter had come to nothing, and no doubt it was that rumor the master had caught wind of.

But it seems he could not bear the thought of our thinking of him as a kind of Lopakhin from The Cherry Orchard, and he grew quite thoroughly out of sorts, and after a little more small talk, went home.

What I am asking of you now is not a Lopakhin.

That much I can say plainly.

Only, please, take in this uninvited middle-aged woman.

The first time I met you was already some six years ago.

At that time I knew nothing at all about you as a person.

I only thought of you as my brother's teacher—and a somewhat disreputable one, at that.

And then we drank sake together out of tumblers, and after that you played a little mischief on me, didn't you.

But I didn't mind at all.

I only felt strangely light, unburdened.

I didn't like you or dislike you—I felt nothing at all.

After that, to humor my brother, I borrowed your books from him and read them, sometimes finding them interesting, sometimes not, never a very keen reader; but over these six years, at some point I could not name, you had seeped into my heart like mist.

What we did that night, on the basement stairs, came back to me all at once, vivid and alive, and it began to feel as though it had been a thing of such weight as to decide my whole fate, and I longed for you, and when I thought, perhaps this is love, I felt so helpless and forlorn that I cried, alone, sniveling to myself.

You are utterly, completely different from other men.

I am not, like Nina in "The Seagull,"

in love with a writer.

I have no romantic longing for novelists as such.

If you took me for some literary-minded girl, that would only embarrass me.

I want your baby.

If we had met much earlier, back when you were still unmarried, and I had not yet gone to the Yamaki family, and had married then, I might not have had to suffer as I do now; but I have already given up any hope of marrying you.

Pushing your wife aside would feel like a wretched, violent thing to do, and I don't want that.

I would be a kept woman—(I hate to say the word, but calling it "mistress" comes to the same vulgar thing in the end, so I'll say it plainly)—even that, I don't mind.

But the ordinary life of a kept woman seems to be a difficult one, doesn't it.

I've heard people say that a mistress, once she's no longer wanted, is simply thrown away.

That by the time a man nears sixty, whoever he is, he always goes back to his lawful wife.

So a woman should never become anyone's mistress, of all things—I once overheard the old manservant and my nurse saying so, back in Nishikata-cho.

But that's the ordinary case of an ordinary mistress; I feel our case would be different.

For you, I think, the most important thing must always be your work.

And if you were fond of me, then our being close would surely be good for your work as well.

And then your wife, too, would come to accept the two of us.

It's a strange, forced sort of logic, I know, but I don't think there's anything wrong anywhere in my reasoning.

The only question is your answer.

Whether you like me, or dislike me, or feel nothing for me at all—that answer terrifies me, but I must ask it all the same.

In my last letter I wrote 'an uninvited mistress,' and in this one too I've written 'this uninvited middle-aged woman,' but now that I think it over carefully, without any answer from you I have no way at all to force myself upon you, and I would only go on, alone, vaguely wasting away.

After all, without some word from you, it's no use.

It just occurred to me—though in your novels you write of the most reckless love affairs, and though the world talks of you as a terrible scoundrel, in truth you're a man of common sense, aren't you.

I don't understand what common sense is.

So long as one can do what one loves, I think that's a good life.

I want to bear your baby.

I don't want to bear anyone else's baby, whatever happens.

That is why I am consulting you.

If you understand, please give me your answer.

Let me know your feelings plainly.

The rain has stopped, and a wind has come up.

It is three in the afternoon now.

I'm about to go and pick up the ration of first-grade sake—six go of it.

I'll put two rum bottles in a bag, and this letter in my breast pocket, and in about ten minutes I'll set off down to the village.

This sake I won't let my brother drink.

Kazuko will drink it.

Every night, one cupful.

Sake really ought to be drunk from a cup, don't you think.

Won't you come here?

To M. C.

It has come on to rain again today.

A drizzle so fine it's almost invisible.

Every single day, without going out at all, I've waited for your reply, and still, up to today, no word has come.

Whatever can you be thinking?

Was it wrong of me to write about that great master, in my last letter?

Did you think I was writing about that marriage proposal just to stir up your jealousy, or something of the sort?

But that proposal has already come to nothing, and that was the end of it.

Just now Mother and I were talking about it and laughing.

Mother, who had been saying the tip of her tongue hurt, took up the "aesthetic therapy" Naoji recommended, and thanks to that treatment the pain in her tongue has gone, and she has been a little more lively lately.

Just now, as I stood on the veranda watching the drizzle blow past in swirling eddies, thinking about your feelings,

"I've heated some milk, come and have some,"

Mother called to me from the dining room.

"It's cold, so I made it very hot."

We sat in the dining room drinking hot, steaming milk and talked about the master from the other day.

"He and I don't suit each other in the least, do we?"

Mother said calmly,

"No, you don't,"

she said.

"I'm so selfish, and I'm not averse to artists, and besides, he seems to have a great deal of money—marrying someone like him would really be a fine thing, I think. But it's no good."

Mother laughed and said,

"Kazuko, you're a wicked girl. For all it being 'no good,' you were chatting away with him the other day, so pleasantly, at such length. I can't make out your feelings."

"Well, but it was interesting. I wanted to talk about all sorts of things more. I suppose I've no proper reserve."

"No, you were just being clingy. Clingy Kazuko."

Mother was in very good spirits today.

And, looking at my hair, which I had put up for the first time only yesterday, she said,

"Putting it up suits people with thin hair, you know. Yours is too grand for it—it makes me want to set a little gold crown on top. It's a failure."

"Kazuko's crestfallen. But Mother, didn't you once say that my neck was so white and pretty that I ought to keep it uncovered as much as I could?"

"So that's the one thing you remember."

"Anything I'm praised for, even a little, I never forget my whole life. It's more fun to remember it."

"He must have praised you for something too, the other day."

"That's right. That's why I got clingy. 'With me at his side, inspiration would come'—oh, I can't stand it. I don't dislike artists, but a person who puts on such airs of being a man of fine character, that sort I really can't bear."

"What sort of man is Naoji's teacher?"

A chill went through me.

"I don't really know, but being Naoji's teacher, he's bound to be a notorious delinquent of some sort."

"Notorious?"

Mother murmured, with an amused look in her eyes, and said,

"What an interesting expression. A delinquent with a label on him is all the safer for it, isn't he—almost sweet, like a kitten with a bell around its neck. It's the delinquent with no label at all that frightens me."

"Is that so."

I was so happy, so happy, that I felt as though my body had turned to smoke and was being drawn straight up into the sky.

Do you understand?

Why I was so happy?

If you don't understand... I'll hit you.

Won't you really come and visit here, sometime?

It would seem unnatural, somehow, odd, if I told Naoji to bring you along himself, so you might come guided by Naoji, on the pretext that it was your own idle whim that brought you here suddenly; but if at all possible, please come alone, and please come while Naoji is away on one of his trips to Tokyo.

If Naoji is here, he'll only take you away from me, and the two of you are sure to go off drinking shochu at Osaki's place, and that will be the end of it.

In my family, it seems, we have loved artists for generations.

The painter Korin, too, once stayed for a long while at our house in Kyoto, and painted beautiful pictures on the sliding doors for us.

So I think Mother would surely be pleased to have you visit.

You would probably be given the Western-style room upstairs to sleep in.

Please don't forget to turn off the light.

I would carry a small candle in one hand and climb the dark stairs—would that be no good?

Too soon, I suppose.

I love delinquents.

Notorious ones, at that.

And I want to become a notorious delinquent myself.

It feels as though there's no other way for me to go on living.

You must be the most notorious delinquent in all Japan.

And lately, I hear from my brother, a great many people have been saying you're filthy, unclean, and attacking you bitterly for it, and hearing that has only made me love you the more.

Being who you are, you surely have any number of women on your line, but before long, little by little, you'll come to love only me.

I can't help feeling that way, for some reason.

And then you would live together with me, and be able to do your work happily every day.

Ever since I was small, people have often told me, "With you around, I forget all my troubles,"

—that's what they've said.

I have never once, in my whole life, been disliked by anyone.

Everyone has always told me I was a good girl.

So I don't think there's any possibility at all that you could dislike me.

We only need to meet.

I don't need any answer now, or anything else.

I want to see you.

It would be simplest of all if I came to call on you at your house in Tokyo, but Mother is, after all, half an invalid, and I am her nurse and maid rolled into one, always at her side, so I simply cannot manage it.

This is my request.

Please, come here.

I want to see you, just once.

And once we meet, everything will be understood.

Look at the faint lines that have appeared at the corners of my mouth.

Look at these lines of a century's sorrow.

My face, more than any words of mine, will surely tell you plainly what is in my heart.

In my first letter to you I wrote of the rainbow arching over my heart, but that rainbow is not some genteel, pretty thing, like the glow of a firefly or the light of a star.

If it were so faint and distant a feeling as that, I would not suffer like this, and could go on, little by little, forgetting you.

The rainbow in my heart is a bridge of flame.

A feeling that scorches my breast to cinders.

Even the craving of an addict, when the drug runs out and he goes searching for more, could not be as painful as this.

Even while telling myself I am not mistaken, that there's nothing wicked in this, there are moments when it suddenly strikes me, with a shudder, that I might be about to do something monstrously foolish.

There are many moments, too, when I wonder, on reflection, whether I haven't gone mad.

But I have my share of cool, calculated plans as well.

Please, truly, come here just once.

Whenever you come, it will be all right.

I go nowhere—I am always here, waiting.

Please believe me.

Meet me once more, and then, if you don't want me, tell me plainly.

This flame in my breast, you are the one who lit it, so you must be the one to put it out.

I cannot possibly put it out by my own strength alone.

If only we meet—if only we meet, I shall be saved.

In the age of the Manyoshu, or of the Tale of Genji, the thing I am asking of you now would have been nothing at all.

My wish.

To become your beloved mistress, and the mother of your child.

If anyone should laugh at a letter like this, that person is laughing at a woman's struggle to go on living.

Laughing at a woman's very life.

I cannot bear the stifling, stagnant air of the harbor any longer, and I want to raise my sail, even if there is a storm outside it.

A sail at rest is, without exception, a filthy thing.

Everyone who laughs at me is surely, every one of them, a sail at rest.

They can do nothing at all.

A troublesome woman.

But it is I who suffer most over this matter.

For a bystander who suffers not at all, not one bit, over this matter, to sit with his sail slack and ugly at rest and criticize it, is nonsense.

I don't want to be labeled, carelessly, with this or that "-ism."

I have no ideology.

I have never once acted on the basis of ideology or philosophy.

I know that the people the world calls good, the people it respects, are all liars, all frauds.

I don't trust the world.

Only the notorious delinquents are on my side.

The notorious delinquent.

That is the one cross I am willing to die nailed to.

Even if the whole world condemns me, I can still answer back.

Aren't you all just delinquents without labels, and more dangerous ones at that?

Do you understand?

There is no reason for love.

I've gone on a bit too much like a lecture, with all this reasoning.

I suspect I've only been aping my brother's way of talking.

I am only waiting for you to come.

I want to see you once more.

That is all.

Waiting.

Ah, human life is full of feelings—joy, anger, sorrow, hatred, all sorts—but these make up only some one percent of a person's life, and the remaining ninety-nine percent, is it not simply spent waiting?

Straining to hear, at any moment now, the footsteps of happiness coming down the hall, waiting with a heart fit to burst—and then, emptiness.

Ah, human life is far too wretched a thing.

This reality, in which everyone thinks it would have been better never to have been born.

And every day, from morning until night, waiting vainly for something.

It is too wretched.

I want, oh, just once, to rejoice—to rejoice that I was born, to rejoice in life, in being human, in the world.

Can we not push aside the morality that stands in the way?

M. C. (Not the initials of my Chekhov.

I am not in love with a writer.

My Child.)

V

This summer, I sent three letters to a certain man, but received no reply.

However I considered it, it seemed to me there was no other way for me to live; in the three letters I set down all that was in my heart, and posted them with the feeling of one leaping from the tip of a headland into the raging surf below — yet no matter how long I waited, no reply came.

When I asked my brother Naoji, as if only in passing, about that man's situation, he seemed to be quite unchanged — drinking every night as he made his rounds, writing ever more immoral works, and by all appearances incurring the scorn and hatred of the respectable people of the world — and yet he was urging Naoji to go into the publishing business; Naoji was quite taken with the notion, saying that besides that man, two or three other novelists had agreed to serve as advisers, and that there was even someone willing to put up the capital, or something of the sort — and listening to Naoji talk, it seemed that in the atmosphere surrounding the man I loved, not the faintest trace of my own scent had seeped in anywhere at all, and rather than feeling ashamed, I began to feel as though this world were some utterly different, strange creature from the world I had imagined, and that I myself had been left

behind, all alone — that no matter how I called out, how I cried aloud, there would be no response, as though I were standing in some autumn wilderness at dusk — and I was seized by a desolation such as I had never before tasted.

Was this, then, what they called a broken heart?

As I stood there rooted in the wilderness like this, thinking that the day would darken utterly and there would be nothing left for me but to freeze to death in the night dew, a tearless anguish came over me, my shoulders and chest heaving violently, until I felt I could hardly breathe.

There was nothing for it now but to go up to Tokyo, whatever it took, and see Mr. Uehara myself — my sail was already raised, and I had already put out beyond the harbor, so I could not simply go on standing still; I had to go as far as I could go — and just as I secretly began making preparations to go up to Tokyo, Mother's condition took a turn for the strange.

One night she began to cough terribly, and when I took her temperature, it was thirty-nine degrees.

"It's probably because it was cold today. By tomorrow I'll be well again."

Mother said this in a small voice, coughing as she spoke, but it seemed to me that this was no ordinary cough, and I resolved that tomorrow, come what may, I would have the doctor from the village below come to see her.

The next morning her fever had gone down to thirty-seven degrees, and the coughing had eased off considerably, but even so I went to the village doctor's and told him that Mother had suddenly grown weaker of late, that the fever had come on again since the previous night, and that the cough did not seem to me like an ordinary cold's cough, and asked him to come and examine her.

"Well, I'll come by later, then," he said, and, saying, "these were a gift someone brought me," took three pears out of a cupboard in the corner of the reception room and gave them to me.

And then, a little past noon, he came to examine her, wearing a white splash-pattern kimono with a summer haori over it.

As always, he took a long, careful time over the auscultation and percussion, and then turned to face me squarely,

"There's nothing to worry about. If she takes her medicine, she'll get well."

he said.

I found this strangely funny, and, holding back my laughter,

"What about an injection?"

I asked, and he answered, quite seriously,

"There shouldn't be any need for that. It's a cold, so if she keeps quiet and rests, the cold should clear up before long."

he said.

But even a week later, Mother's fever had not gone down.

The cough had settled, but the fever stood at around thirty-seven point seven in the morning and rose to thirty-nine by evening.

The doctor, it seemed, had been laid up with a stomach upset since the very next day, and though I went to fetch the medicine and told the nurse how poorly Mother's condition was, asking her to pass it on to the doctor, the answer that came back was always the same — that it was an ordinary cold and nothing to worry about — and they gave me a liquid medicine and a powder.

Naoji, as usual, was away on business in Tokyo, and had not come home in over ten days.

Alone, and out of sheer helplessness, I wrote a postcard to Uncle Wada letting him know that Mother's condition had changed.

On about the tenth day since the fever began, the village doctor, saying that his stomach had finally settled, came to examine her.

He percussed Mother's chest with a carefully attentive expression, and,

"I see, I see,"

he exclaimed, and then turned to face me squarely once more,

"I've found the cause of the fever. There's an infiltration in the left lung. But there's no need to worry. The fever will probably continue for a while yet, but if she stays quiet, there's nothing to worry about."

he said.

Was that so, I wondered?

Even as I thought this, there was also something in me clutching, like a drowning man at a straw, and I felt somewhat relieved by the village doctor's diagnosis.

After the doctor had gone home,

"That's good news, Mother. Just a little infiltration — most people have that sort of thing. If only you keep your spirits strong, you'll get over it in no time. It was this year's unseasonable summer weather that did it. I hate summer. Kazuko hates summer flowers too."

Mother laughed, her eyes closed, and said,

"They say people who love summer flowers die in the summer, so I thought I might die sometime this summer too, but Naoji came home, and so I've gone on living into the autumn."

To think that even a Naoji like that had become a pillar Mother relied on to go on living — it was painful to realize.

"Still, summer has already passed, so that means the dangerous time for you is over the worst of it too. Mother, the bush clover in the garden is blooming. And the maiden flowers, the burnet, the bellflowers, the plume grass, the pampas grass. The garden has turned completely into an autumn garden. Once October comes, I'm sure your fever will go down."

I was praying for that.

If only this sultry September, this so-called lingering summer heat, would pass quickly.

And then, once the chrysanthemums bloomed and the mild, sunny days of Indian summer went on and on, surely Mother's fever would go down and she would grow strong again, and I too would be able to meet that man, and my own plans might come to bloom as splendidly as a great chrysanthemum blossom.

Ah, if only October would come soon, and Mother's fever go down.

About a week after I had sent the postcard to Uncle Wada, through his arrangement, old Dr. Miyake, who had once served as a court physician, came from Tokyo with a nurse to examine Mother.

The old doctor had been acquainted with our late Father as well, so Mother seemed very pleased indeed.

Besides, the old doctor had always had rather poor manners and a blunt way of speaking, and this too seemed to be to Mother's liking; that day the examination was set aside almost entirely, and the two of them spent the time enjoying one relaxed, friendly chat after another.

When I made pudding in the kitchen and brought it to her room, the examination seemed already to be over, and the old doctor sat in a rattan chair in the corridor by her room, his stethoscope hanging loosely over his shoulders like a necklace, and,

"Me, I just duck into a food stall and eat udon standing up. Doesn't matter if it's good or bad,"

he was saying, going on with his carefree chatter.

Mother too was listening to him talk, gazing up at the ceiling with an unconcerned expression.

It was nothing serious after all, I thought, and felt relieved.

"How was it? The village doctor here said something about an infiltration in the left side of her chest?"

I asked Dr. Miyake, my spirits suddenly reviving, and the old doctor answered, quite offhandedly,

"Oh, she's fine,"

he said lightly.

"Oh, that's wonderful, Mother,"

I said, smiling from the heart, calling out to her,

"He says you're fine."

Just then Dr. Miyake rose abruptly from the rattan chair and went off toward the Chinese room.

It looked as though he had something to say to me, so I quietly followed after him.

The old doctor stopped behind the wall hanging in the Chinese room, and,

"There's a crackling sound,"

he said.

"Isn't it an infiltration?"

"No."

"Bronchial catarrh, then?"

I asked, my eyes already brimming with tears.

"No."

Tuberculosis (Tebe)!

I did not want to believe that was it.

If it were pneumonia, or an infiltration, or bronchial catarrh, I would surely nurse her back to health myself.

But if it were tuberculosis — ah, then it might already be too late.

I felt as though the ground beneath my feet were crumbling away.

"Is the sound very bad? Can you really hear it crackling?"

In my helplessness I began to sob.

"Both lungs, right and left, all through."

"But Mother is still so well. She even says her meals taste so good, so good, and—"

"It can't be helped."

"That can't be true. Isn't that so? If she eats plenty of butter and eggs and milk, she'll get better, won't she? If only her body builds up enough resistance, the fever will go down too, won't it?"

"Yes, well, the thing is to eat plenty of everything."

"See? That's right, isn't it? She eats about five tomatoes every day too."

"Yes, tomatoes are good."

"Then she'll be all right, won't she? She'll get better?"

"But this illness this time may well prove fatal. You'd best be prepared for that."

I felt, for the first time in my life, that I had come to know the existence of a wall of despair — the knowledge that there are, in this world, a great many things that no human power can accomplish.

"Two years? Three years?"

I asked in a small, trembling voice.

"I don't know. In any case, there's nothing more to be done now."

And then, saying that he had a room booked that day at the hot spring inn in Nagaoka, Izu, Dr. Miyake left together with the nurse.

I saw them out as far as the gate, and then hurried back in a daze and sat down at Mother's pillow, smiling at her as though nothing had happened, and Mother said,

"What did the doctor say?"

she asked.

"He said it would be fine if only the fever came down."

"And my chest?"

"It doesn't seem to be anything serious. It's probably just like that time before, you know. Once it gets cooler you'll get stronger and stronger."

I tried to believe my own lie.

I tried to forget that terrible word, fatal.

To me, the thought that this Mother might die felt as though my own body too would vanish along with her — it was something I simply could not accept as fact.

From now on I would forget everything else and make Mother all the delicious food I possibly could.

Fish.

Soup.

Canned goods.

Liver.

Meat broth.

Tomatoes.

Eggs.

Milk.

Clear soup.

If only there were tofu.

Miso soup with tofu.

White rice.

Rice cakes.

Whatever looked delicious, I would sell everything I owned and feast Mother on it.

I got up and went to the Chinese room.

And then I moved the daybed from the Chinese room close to the veranda of Mother's room, and sat down where I could see her face.

Mother's face as she rested did not look at all like a sick person's.

Her eyes were beautifully clear, and her complexion looked lively.

Every morning she rose at a regular hour and went to wash her face, then did up her own hair in the three-mat room by the bath, dressed herself with care, and returned to her bed; she took her meals sitting up in bed, then lay down and rose again from time to time, spending the whole morning reading the newspaper or a book, and it was only in the afternoons that the fever came on.

"Ah, Mother is well. Surely she'll be all right,"

I told myself, fiercely denying Dr. Miyake's diagnosis in my heart.

Thinking things like, once October comes and the chrysanthemums are in bloom, I began drifting into a doze.

It was a landscape I had never once seen in reality, and yet one I sometimes saw in dreams, one I recognized at once, thinking, ah, I've come here again — I found myself at the shore of a lake deep in a familiar forest.

I was walking there, soundlessly, together with a young man in Japanese dress.

The whole landscape had the feel of being wrapped in a green mist.

And at the bottom of the lake lay a slender white bridge, sunk beneath the water.

"Ah, the bridge is sunk. We can't go anywhere today. Let's rest at the hotel here. I'm sure there was a room free,"

By the lake stood a hotel built of stone.

The stone of that hotel was damp and glistening with the green mist.

Above the stone gate, carved in slender gold letters, were the words HOTEL SWITZERLAND.

As I was reading through SWI, I suddenly thought of Mother.

What would become of Mother?

Would Mother come to this hotel too, I wondered?

— and this troubled me.

And then, together with the young man, I passed through the stone gate and entered the front garden.

In the misty garden, large red flowers resembling hydrangeas were blooming like flames.

As a child, I had once seen a bedspread patterned with bright red hydrangea blossoms scattered across it, and it had made me strangely sad, but now I thought — so red hydrangeas really do exist after all.

"Aren't you cold?"

"Yes, a little. My ears are wet from the mist, and the backs of my ears are cold,"