雁 English

I

It is an old story.

I happen to remember that it took place in the thirteenth year of Meiji.

The reason I recall the year so clearly is that at the time I was living at a boarding house called Kamijo, directly across from the Iron Gate of Tokyo University, in the room next to the hero of this story, with only a single wall between us.

When Kamijo burned down in a fire of its own making in the fourteenth year of Meiji, I was one of those burned out of house.

It is because I remember that the events took place the year before that fire.

Most of the lodgers at Kamijo were students of the Medical College, and the rest were mostly patients attending the University Hospital.

In almost any boarding house there is some lodger who carries special weight, and such a man is, first of all, flush with money and quick-witted, and never fails to call out a word as he passes down the hallway before the landlady, who sits there with her wooden brazier at hand.

Now and then he will crouch down on the other side of the brazier and pass the time with some bit of gossip.

He will hold drinking parties in his room, going out of his way to have special dishes prepared and putting the landlady to no end of trouble, seeming all the while to indulge his whims, when in fact he is seeing to it that the house account comes out ahead.

It is generally a man of roughly this stamp who wins respect, and who, taking advantage of it, does exactly as he pleases.

But the man who carried weight at Kamijo, the one who lived on the other side of my wall, was of a rather different sort.

He was a student named Okada, a year my junior, yet already within reach of graduation.

To explain what sort of man Okada was, I must begin with the most immediate and striking of his qualities.

It was that he was handsome.

Not the pale, spindly sort of handsome.

His complexion was ruddy, his build sturdy.

I have scarcely ever seen another face like his.

If I must find a comparison, it would be that, a good while after those days, I came to be on friendly terms with Kawakami Bisan, in his youth.

The same Kawakami, the writer, who in the end fell into desperate straits and met a tragic death.

His face as a young man bore a certain resemblance to Okada's.

Though in build Okada, who was at the time a champion oarsman, far surpassed Kawakami.

A handsome face recommends its owner to anyone.

But looks alone will not make a man carry weight in a boarding house.

As for his character and conduct, I doubt there were many students at the time who led so well-balanced a life as Okada.

He was no grind, competing term after term for examination marks in hopes of a scholarship.

He did just what needed doing, properly, and had come along never falling below the middle of his class.

He kept fixed hours for play.

After supper he invariably went out for a walk, and was back, without fail, before ten.

On Sundays he went rowing, or, failing that, on an excursion.

Except when he was lodging with his crewmates at Mukojima before a race, or gone home during the summer break, the hours when the room next to mine had its master in it, and the hours when it stood empty, never varied.

Anyone who had forgotten to set his watch by the noon gun would go and ask at Okada's room.

Even the clock at the Kamijo front desk was from time to time corrected by Okada's pocket watch.

In the minds of those around him, the longer they watched his conduct, the stronger grew the sense that here was a man to be trusted.

It was on this trust that the Kamijo landlady's praise of Okada was founded—Okada, who never flattered her and never spent money beyond reason.

That he settled his monthly accounts promptly no doubt had much to do with it, needless to say.

"Just look at Mr. Okada."

Such words often came from the landlady's mouth.

"I could never manage to be like Okada, anyway,"

some student would say, forestalling the comparison.

In this way Okada became, before anyone quite noticed, the model lodger of Kamijo.

Okada's daily walk generally followed a fixed route.

He would go down the lonely slope of Muenzaka, round the north side of Shinobazu Pond, into which the black, dye-like waters of the Aizome River flowed, and wander over the hill of Ueno.

From there he would pass through Hirokoji, where the restaurants Matsugen and Gannabe stood, and through the narrow, bustling Nakacho, enter the precincts of the Yushima Tenjin shrine, and come home by way of the corner of the gloomy Karatachidera.

But sometimes he would turn right at Nakacho and come home by Muenzaka instead.

This was one route.

At other times he would cut through the University grounds and come out at the Red Gate.

The Iron Gate was locked early, so he would go in and pass through by the tenement gate used by patients coming and going.

Later that old tenement gate was pulled down, and in its place rose the new black gate now standing where the road runs up against it from Harukicho.

Coming out at the Red Gate, he would walk along Hongo Avenue, pass the shop where they pounded millet cakes in fancy rhythms, and enter the precincts of the Kanda Myojin shrine.

He would go down to Meganebashi, which was still a novelty in those days, and walk a little way along the one-sided street of Yanagihara.

Then he would return to Onarimichi, thread through one or another of the narrow side lanes on its west side, and come out again in front of Karatachidera.

This was another route.

He rarely walked any route besides these.

As for what Okada did along the way, it amounted to little more than glancing now and then into the secondhand bookshops he passed.

Of the secondhand bookshops of Ueno Hirokoji and Nakacho, two or three from those days still remain.

On Onarimichi too there is a shop still standing just as it was then.

Those of Yanagihara have vanished entirely.

Those on Hongo Avenue have almost all changed both location and owner.

That Okada rarely turned right on coming out of the Red Gate was partly because Morikawacho was a narrow, cramped sort of place, but it was also because at the time there was only a single secondhand bookshop on its west side.

That Okada looked into bookshops was, to put it in the language of today, because he had literary tastes.

But no new novels or plays had yet appeared, and it was still before the birth of Shiki's haiku or Tekkan's tanka in the way of lyric poetry, so that anyone at all read magazines like the Kagetsu Shinshi, printed on Chinese paper, or the Keirin Isshi, printed on plain white paper, and thought the boudoir-style verses of men like Kainan and Muko the most refined things going.

I too was a devoted reader of the Kagetsu Shinshi, so I remember it well.

It was that magazine that first brought out translations of Western novels.

As I recall it was some story of a student at a Western university who is murdered on his way home, rendered into the colloquial style, and I believe the translator was Mr. Kanda Kohei.

That, it seems, was the first Western novel I ever read.

Such being the times, Okada's literary taste amounted to no more than an enjoyment of reading the verses in which Chinese scholars set down the new happenings of the world.

I was never much given to sociability, so that even with people I often ran into on the school grounds, I would not speak unless I had some business with them.

Even to the students living in the same boarding house, I seldom troubled to lift my cap in greeting.

That I came to be somewhat familiar with Okada was owing to the secondhand bookshops, which served as a kind of go-between.

My own walks followed no fixed course as Okada's did, but being strong of leg I ranged freely from Hongo to Shitaya and Kanda, and wherever there was a secondhand bookshop I would stop and look.

On such occasions I would often run into Okada right there at the shop front.

"We do seem to keep meeting at secondhand bookshops, don't we?"

was the sort of thing one of us said first, and that was the beginning of our speaking to each other on familiar terms.

In those days, at the bend where the slope in front of Kanda Myojin ran down, there was a shop that set its benches out in an L-shape and displayed its old books to the sun.

There one day I found a Chinese edition of the Jin Ping Mei and asked the proprietor the price; he said seven yen.

I asked him to come down to five yen, and he said, "Just now Mr. Okada told me he'd give six for it, but I turned him down—"

so he said.

As it happened I was flush that month, so I bought it at his asking price.

A couple of days later, when I ran into Okada, he was the one to bring it up.

"You're a cruel man. I'd gone to the trouble of finding that Jin Ping Mei, and you went and bought it out from under me."

"Yes, the bookseller told me you'd made an offer and it fell through. If you want it, I'll let you have it."

"No, never mind—since we're neighbors, I can just borrow it once you've read it."

I gladly agreed.

In this way Okada and I, who for so long had lived on either side of a single wall without ever exchanging a word, fell into the habit of going back and forth to each other's rooms.

II

In those days the south side of Muenzaka was already the Iwasaki estate, but it was not yet enclosed by the towering earthen wall one sees today.

A shabby stone wall had been built there, and from between the moss-grown stones fern and horsetail peeped out.

Whether the ground above that stone wall was level or rose like a little hill I have never known, having never once set foot inside the Iwasaki estate, but at any rate in those days the scrub trees above the wall grew as thickly and as freely as they pleased, visible from the road down to their very roots, and the grass thick about those roots was seldom cut.

On the north side of the slope stood a row of shabby houses; the most presentable of them was a small private house ringed by a board fence, and the rest were dwellings of tradesmen and the like.

As for shops, there was little besides a sundries dealer and a tobacconist.

The one that caught the eye of passersby was the house of a woman who taught sewing, where by day a great many girls gathered behind the lattice window at their work.

When the weather was fine and the window stood open, the girls, who were always chattering away, would all lift their heads to look out at the street whenever we students passed.

Then they would go on talking, or fall to laughing.

Next door to it stood a house with a lattice door always wiped spotless, its entryway paved with granite, and sometimes, passing in the evening, one would find the ground freshly sprinkled with water.

In cold weather the paper screens were kept shut.

In hot weather bamboo blinds were let down.

And because the tailor's house next door was so lively, this house always seemed, by contrast, remarkably still.

It was in September of the year this story took place, not long after Okada had returned from his home province, that he set out on his usual after-supper walk, passed by the old buildings of the Kaga mansion where the dissecting room had been temporarily set up, and, sauntering down Muenzaka, happened to see a woman coming back from the bath enter that quiet house beside the tailor's.

By then the weather had already turned autumnal, and it was no longer a season for people to come out for the evening cool, so that the slope lay for the moment quite deserted of passersby; and just as Okada came along, the woman, who had returned to the lattice door of that quiet house and was about to open it, heard the clatter of his geta, stayed her hand on the lattice, and turned to find her eyes meeting his.

She wore an unlined kimono of navy crepe, with an obi of black satin reversible to brown Kenjo silk, and in her slender left hand she held, listlessly, a finely woven bamboo basket holding a hand-towel, a soap box, a bran bag, and a sponge, her right hand still on the lattice as she turned—but the sight of her made no deep impression on Okada.

Still, two things caught his eye: the freshly dressed ginkgo-leaf coiffure, its side-locks thin as cicada wings, and the high-nosed, long, faintly melancholy face, which for some reason gave, from brow to cheek, an impression of being somewhat flattened.

It amounted to no more than that momentary impression passing through him, and by the time he had come down Muenzaka he had already forgotten the woman entirely.

But some two days later, when Okada again set out toward Muenzaka and came near the house with the lattice door, the memory of the woman returning from her bath suddenly rose up from the depths of his mind to the surface of his thoughts, and he glanced toward the house.

There was a bay window with bamboo fixed upright and, crosswise, two thin strips of shaved wood, the whole bound about with vine.

The paper screen of that window stood open about a foot, and a pot of lily-of-China, with an eggshell set upside down over the soil, could be seen within.

Because he took some little notice of these things, his pace slowed, and by the time he came directly before the house a few seconds had been gained.

And just as he drew level with it, quite unexpectedly, above the pot of lily-of-China, out of what had until then been a background sealed in gray shadow, a white face rose into view.

Moreover, that face was smiling at Okada.

After that, hardly ever did Okada pass this house on his walks without seeing the woman's face.

From time to time this woman came intruding into the domain of Okada's fancy, and little by little began to conduct herself there as though she owned the place.

The question would arise in him: was the woman waiting for him to pass, or was she simply looking out with no particular meaning, so that their eyes happened by chance to meet?

So he would cast his mind back to before the day he had seen her returning from the bath, trying to recall whether a face had ever shown itself at that window before, but he could summon up nothing beyond the memory of a quiet house, always kept spotlessly clean, standing next to the noisiest establishment on that side of Muenzaka, the tailor's.

He was fairly sure he had once wondered what sort of person lived there, but even that question had never been resolved.

In any case that window, so far as he could recall, had always had its screen shut or its blind lowered, and all beyond it had seemed perfectly still.

Looking at it that way, Okada finally concluded that the woman must have only recently taken to watching outside, opening the window and waiting for him to pass.

Their eyes met each time he passed, and in the intervals, turning such thoughts over, Okada came little by little to think of her as "the woman in the window"

and to feel a kind of familiarity with her, until, some two weeks having gone by, one evening as he passed before the window he found himself, without quite meaning to, lifting his cap in greeting.

At that the woman's pale face flushed suddenly red, and her faint, wistful smile broke into a radiant one.

From then on Okada made a fixed habit of greeting the woman in the window as he passed.

III

Okada was fond of the Yuchu Xinzhi, and among its tales he could recite the whole of "The Legend of the Great Iron Cudgel" from memory.

He had long harbored a wish to try his hand at the martial arts, but the occasion had simply never come, and so he had never taken any of them up.

That in recent years, once he had taken up rowing, he had thrown himself into it and progressed to the point of being put forward by his crewmates as a champion oarsman, was simply this side of Okada's will finding its outlet.

In that same Yuchu Xinzhi there was one more piece Okada was fond of.

It was the Legend of Xiaoqing.

The woman written of in that tale—to put it in a newer phrase, one who might be said to have kept the angel of death waiting outside her threshold while she calmly finished applying her powder and rouge, a woman whose very life was her beauty—how deeply she must have stirred Okada's sympathy.

To Okada a woman was simply a beautiful thing, a thing to be loved, and he felt that whatever her circumstances, she ought to rest content and guard that beauty, that loveliness, unspoiled.

This was no doubt in part because he had, in the ordinary course of his reading, taken in the boudoir-style verses and the sentimental, fatalistique prose of the so-called men of talent of the Ming and Qing, and had come, without knowing it, under their influence.

Even long after Okada had fallen into the habit of nodding to the woman in the window, he never once tried to find out anything about her circumstances.

From the look of the house and the woman's dress he could of course guess she was someone's kept woman.

But this did not particularly displease him.

He did not know her name, nor did he make any effort to learn it.

It had occurred to him that he might learn it from the nameplate, but when the woman was at the window he felt bound to look away out of consideration for her,

and when she was not, he shrank from the eyes of the neighbors and passersby.

So in the end he never did read what characters were written on the little wooden plate that hung in the shadow of the eaves.

IV

The woman's lineage—her family and origins—I learned of only after the events of this story, which must properly take Okada as its hero, had already passed into the past, but for convenience's sake I will set it down briefly here.

It was at a time when the University's medical department still stood in Shitaya.

The gatehouse tenement of the old Todo mansion, its walls of gray tile set in plaster in a checkerboard pattern, pierced here and there by windows barred with uprights of wood as thick as a man's arm, served as the dormitory, and within it the students led—it is a rather unkind thing to say—something like the life of wild beasts.

Nowadays, of course, if one wished to see a window of that sort one could find scarcely any left, save perhaps on the old watchtowers surviving in Marunouchi; even the bars of the cages that hold the lions and tigers at the Ueno zoo are far more delicately made than those were.

The dormitory kept a porter.

The students could send him out on errands.

The purchases of students in white cotton sashes and Kokura hakama were, for the most part, always the same.

The so-called "yokan"

and "konpeito"

were what they wanted.

That "yokan" meant baked sweet potato, and "konpeito" meant popped beans, is perhaps a fact worth setting down for the record, as a note on the history of civilization.

The porter was to receive two sen for each errand.

Among these porters there was one named Suezo.

Where the others let their beards grow out shaggy as chestnut burrs, mouths hanging slackly open within them, this man's lips were always held firm and tight amid the blue-shadowed traces of a close shave.

Where the others' Kokura cloth uniforms were grimy, his was always neat, and now and then one might see him wearing something like a striped cotton kimono with an apron over it.

I do not recall who first told me of it, but I heard that when a student was short of money, Suezo would advance it for him.

It was of course only fifty sen or a yen at a time.

But by degrees this grew into lending five yen, ten yen, having the borrower sign a note, having it renewed.

In the end he became a full-fledged moneylender.

Where, one wonders, did his capital come from?

Surely it could not all have come from saving up two-sen errand fees, but when a single man pours the whole of whatever energy he possesses into one purpose, there may in truth be nothing that remains impossible.

In any case, by the time the school moved from Shitaya to Hongo, Suezo was no longer a porter.

But by then Suezo had moved to Ikenohata, and reckless students never stopped coming and going at his house.

Suezo had already passed thirty when he became a porter, and though the household was poor, he had a wife and children.

Once he had prospered as a moneylender and moved to Ikenohata, he came to find his plain, sharp-tongued wife wanting.

It was then that Suezo remembered a certain woman.

She was someone he had caught sight of now and then on his way to the University, cutting through a narrow alley behind Neribeicho.

There, where the drain-boards were always broken, stood a dim little house with its door left half shut the year round, and passing by at night one would find a wheeled stall drawn in beneath the eaves, so that even in that already narrow alley one had to turn sideways to get by.

What first caught Suezo's attention was the sound of a shamisen being practiced in this house.

He learned afterward that the player was a pretty girl of sixteen or seventeen.

For all the poverty the house suggested, the girl always kept herself neat, and wore clean, tidy clothes.

Even when she was at the doorway, the moment someone passed she would slip back into the dim house.

Suezo, being by nature attentive to everything, learned without ever deliberately inquiring that the girl was called Tama, that she had no mother and lived alone with her father, and that the father kept a stall selling candy figures at Akihabara.

Before long a revolutionary change came over this back-alley tenement.

The stall that used to be drawn in beneath the eaves was, whenever he passed at night, no longer there.

It was as though this once-quiet house and its surroundings had, to use the fashionable word of the day, been overtaken by Civilization: the drain-boards, half broken and half springing up underfoot, were replaced, the entrance was done over, and a new lattice door was put up.

One day he saw a pair of leather shoes left at the entrance.

Not long after, a new nameplate was put up at the door, and on it was written, Police Constable So-and-so.

Going about his various errands from Matsunagacho to Nakaokachimachi, Suezo confirmed, again without deliberately prying, that a son-in-law had married into the old candy-seller's house.

The constable named on the nameplate was that son-in-law.

The old man, who prized Otama above the very eyeballs in his head, felt handing his daughter over to a stern-faced policeman was rather like having her carried off by a goblin, and found the prospect of this son-in-law moving into his own house unbearably cramping; he consulted this friend and that among his usual acquaintances, but not one of them would tell him plainly to refuse the match.

"See what comes of it,"

one of them said, "here we were trying to arrange a good match for her, and you went on about how you couldn't part with your only daughter and made such a fuss over it, and now you've ended up with a son-in-law you can hardly refuse."

Another, as though to frighten him, said, "If you two don't like it, there's nothing for it but to move somewhere far off—but since the man's a policeman, he'll only track down wherever you've gone and come after you there, so I doubt you'll get away with it."

Among them, the wife who had the reputation of being the most sensible had this to say:

"With that girl's good looks—why, the sewing teacher herself said she looked cut out for the geisha trade and praised her for it—didn't I tell you to put her out early as an apprentice geisha? When it comes to a bachelor policeman, he makes his rounds house by house, and if you keep a good-looking girl in your home, he'll carry her off whether you like it or not. There's nothing to do but resign yourself to the bad luck of having caught such a man's eye, I'm afraid."

That, at least, was what she was said to have told him.

It must have been a good three months after Suezo first heard this talk.

One morning the door of the old candy-maker's house was found shut, with a notice pasted to it reading, "For lease—inquire of the agent at the west end of Matsunagacho."

So it read.

Listening again, in the course of his errands, to the talk of the neighborhood, Suezo learned that the constable had had a wife and children back home all along, that she had turned up quite without warning and made a terrible scene, and that Otama had rushed out declaring she would throw herself into the well, only to be stopped, with great difficulty, by the wife next door, who had been listening in.

When the constable had first proposed to marry in, the old man had consulted any number of people, but not one of them had thought to serve as anything like a legal adviser to him, so that he had remained entirely unconcerned about how the family register stood or what sort of documents had or had not been filed.

When the constable, twisting his mustache, had said that he would see to all the formalities himself, the old man had not doubted him in the least.

At that time there was a girl, fair-skinned, round-faced, and short of chin, at a sundries shop called Kitazumi in Matsunagacho, whom the students called "Chinless"—

so they called her.

This girl said to Suezo:

"It's really too pitiful for little Tama, isn't it. She's such an honest girl, she took it for a real marriage, and all along the policeman thought of it as no more than boarding there."

So she said.

The bald-headed proprietor of Kitazumi put in from beside her:

"The old man's to be pitied too. He said he couldn't stand it, too ashamed to face the neighbors, and moved off toward Nishitorigoe. Still, he can't carry on his old trade except where he has his young customers, so I hear he still sets up at Akihabara. He'd sold off his stall too—it had turned up at a secondhand shop in Sakumacho—but he explained the whole thing and got it back. Between that and the moving, it must have cost him a good deal, so no doubt he's hard pressed. While that policeman was starving his own wife and children back home, drinking with a big face on him and making the old man—who can't hold his liquor at all—keep him company, well, it was rather like a dream of a comfortable retirement, wasn't it,"

he said, smoothing his bald head with a hand.

After that Suezo had forgotten all about the candy-seller's Otama, but now that he had money and was gradually coming into his own, she suddenly came back to his mind.

Suezo, whose connections had by now grown wide, sent word round to make inquiries toward Nishitorigoe, and tracked down the old candy-maker living next to the rickshaw dealer behind the Ryuseiza theater.

Otama too was still unmarried, living there with him.

So Suezo sent someone to put the proposal that a certain great merchant wished to take her as his mistress; at first she said she would not become anyone's mistress, but being a docile girl, she was in the end persuaded, for her father's sake, and the matter progressed to the point of arranging for her to be presented to her patron at the Matsugen restaurant.

V

Suezo, who had never in his life given serious thought to anything but money, no sooner had he tracked down Otama's whereabouts than he set off himself, even before he knew whether she would consent, to look for a house to rent nearby.

Among the many houses he looked at, two took his fancy.

One stood likewise at Ikenohata, roughly midway between the residence of Fukuchi Genichiro—Suezo's own neighbor—and the noodle shop Renkyokuan, then famous, set back a little from the road a short way from the pond's southwest corner toward Renkyokuan.

Within a lattice fence of woven bamboo stood a single umbrella pine and two or three dwarf cypresses, and through the foliage one could see a bay window barred with bamboo.

There was a to-let notice posted, and going in to look, he found the house still occupied, an old woman of about fifty showing him around inside.

Without being asked, the old woman told him that the master had been chief retainer to some daimyo out in the Chugoku region, but since the abolition of the domains had been serving, for a mere pittance, as a minor clerk in the Ministry of Finance.

He was already past sixty, she said, but fastidious about cleanliness; he went about all over Tokyo hunting up newly built houses to rent, and the moment one began to grow the least bit shabby, he moved out.

Naturally his children had long since set up on their own, so there was no rough usage to speak of, but of course the house grew old simply through being lived in, needing its screens repapered and its tatami re-covered.

And rather than be troubled with all that, she said, he simply moved out promptly.

The old woman found this so trying that she would air her grievances against her husband even to strangers.

"Even this house, as clean as it still is, and already he says we must move,"

she said, and showed him every corner of the place.

It was kept remarkably clean, from one end to the other.

Suezo thought rather well of it, and jotted down in his notebook the deposit, the rent, and the agent's name before leaving.

The other was a small house partway up Muenzaka.

No notice had been posted there, but hearing it was up for sale, he went to have a look.

The owner was a pawnbroker at Yushima Kiridoshi; its retired old master had lived there until quite recently, but had since died, and the old woman who kept house for him had gone back to live at the main shop.

It was a little noisy, with the sewing teacher next door, but as it had been built expressly as a retirement house, with the trees chosen with some care, it had, somehow, the air of a comfortable place to live.

From the lattice door at the entrance to the paved yard set with granite, the whole was built neat and unassuming, with a certain quiet refinement.

Suezo lay on his bedding one night turning over which of the two he should take.

Beside him his wife, meaning only to put the child to sleep, had dropped off herself, mouth wide open, snoring in a most unwomanly fashion.

It was nothing new for her husband to lie awake into the night working over the turning of his loans, so however long he kept his eyes open, his wife paid it not the slightest heed.

Suezo could hardly keep from laughing to himself.

Turning things over, he looked at his wife's face and thought:

"Well, a woman's a woman, and yet here's one with a face like this. That Otama, now—I haven't laid eyes on her in a good while, but even back then, when she was still fresh out of childhood, she had a face that made you want to grab hold of her, quiet enough but with a certain spirit to it. She must be looking finer than ever by now. I'll enjoy seeing that face again. And here's this old woman of mine, sleeping away without a care. Little does she know I'm forever thinking of nothing but money. Ha—there's a mosquito already. This is why I hate Shitaya. I'd better get the netting up soon—never mind her, but the child will get eaten alive."

Having thought this much, he turned again to the matter of the house.

It was past one o'clock when he seemed at last to arrive at some sort of conclusion.

It was this:

"That house at Ikenohata—people might say it's nice to have a view, but I get view enough right here. The rent's cheap, but once you're renting, there's this and that to deal with. And it's the sort of open, exposed spot where people are bound to notice. It'd be no end of trouble if that wife of mine, out with the children on her way to Nakacho, happened to catch sight of the window left carelessly open. Muenzaka may look gloomy, but hardly anyone passes there except a student out for a walk now and then. Paying out the money all at once to buy it outright seems a bother, but the woodwork is good, and it's cheap for what it is, so if I take out insurance on it I can rest easy that I'll get my money back whenever I come to sell. Muenzaka it is, Muenzaka it is. Come evening I'll go have a bath, fix myself up smart, tell the old woman some tale or other to fool her, and slip out.

And when I open that lattice door and go on inside, what will it be like, I wonder.

That Otama.

I'll bet she's sitting there with a cat or something on her lap, waiting all lonesome.

Made up nicely for the occasion, of course.

I'll see to it she has whatever clothes she needs.

Wait, now.

I mustn't throw money away foolishly.

There are plenty of fine things to be had among unredeemed pledges.

To give one woman finery in the way of clothes and hair ornaments, there's no need to play the fool the way other men do.

That Mr. Fukuchi next door keeps a grander establishment than mine, struts about Ikenohata with a Sukiyacho geisha on his arm, making the students green with envy and feeling rather pleased with himself—but underneath it all his finances are in flames.

It would astonish anyone to hear it, scholar though he is.

Make a clever living with the tip of your pen, and even a shopman's job would be a step down.

Ah, now, let's see.

Otama can play the shamisen, can't she.

It'd be nice if she'd give me a bit of finger-plucking to show her spirit, but seeing as the only world she's known is being a policeman's wife, I doubt she'll oblige.

She'll say something like, 'Oh, no, you'll only laugh at me,' and however much I press her to play, she won't do it easily.

Really, whatever it is, she's bound to turn shy.

Blushing and fidgeting, no doubt.

What will she do, the first night I go?"

His fancy ran freely in every direction, with no notion of where to stop.

As it went on, his imaginings grew fragmentary, and a glimpse of white skin flickered before him.

A whisper seemed to reach his ear.

And Suezo drifted off to sleep in the pleasantest of moods.

Beside him his wife went on snoring, just as before.

VI

The presentation at Matsugen was, for Suezo, a veritable fête.

People speak lightly of "lighting a candle at one's fingertip," but there are all sorts among those who hoard money.

Attending to small economies—cutting one's toilet paper in half before using it, or writing letters so minute they could hardly be read without a microscope, so as to make a postcard do the work of a letter—is a trait common enough to most such men, but among them there are those who extend it absolutely over the whole range of their lives, truly lighting a candle at their fingertip, and those who leave open somewhere a single hole through which to let out a little breath.

The misers written into novels or worked up for the stage seem, for the most part, to be entirely of the absolute sort.

But among real, living men who hoard money, it is often otherwise.

A man may be tightfisted and yet have an eye for women, or, oddly enough, indulge only in fine eating—that is the sort I mean.

As I believe I have already mentioned, Suezo's one indulgence was dressing himself neatly, and even back when he was still a porter at the University, on his days off he would cast aside the customary Kokura cloth with its tube sleeves and change into smart, merchant-like clothes.

This he made a kind of pleasure in itself.

That was why the students, on the rare occasions they came upon him decked out entirely in striped cotton, would be quite taken aback.

Beyond this, Suezo had no other indulgence to speak of.

He had never had dealings with geisha or courtesans, nor had he ever gone drinking his way from one restaurant to another.

Even eating a bowl of noodles at Renkyokuan already counted as an extravagance for him, and until quite recently his wife and children had never once been taken along on such occasions.

This was because he had never troubled to dress his wife in a way that matched his own appearance.

Whenever his wife asked for anything, Suezo would always say, "Don't talk nonsense—you're not me. I have to keep up appearances for my dealings, that's all, there's no help for it,"

and turn her down flat.

Later, once his money had begun to breed a good deal more money, Suezo did take to going in and out of restaurants now and then, but only on occasions when a large party gathered—never as a guest going alone.

But now that the matter of Otama's presentation had come up, he was suddenly seized with a solemn, ceremonious feeling, and it was he who proposed that the presentation be held at Matsugen.

Now, once it was actually decided to hold the presentation, an unavoidable problem arose.

It was the matter of Otama's outfitting.

Had it been Otama's alone it would have been simple enough, but it turned out he must see to the old man's outfitting as well.

The old woman who had gone between and done the talking found herself much at a loss over this, but since whatever the old man said his daughter agreed to without a second thought, there was no help for it—to press the point too hard risked breaking off the whole negotiation.

The old man's argument ran roughly as follows.

"Otama is my precious only daughter, and not an only daughter such as other men have, either—she is the only kin I have left in this world. I lived out a lonely life relying on my late wife alone, and she, past thirty at the time and bearing her first child, gave birth to Otama and then, in the end, died of the illness that came with it. I had her wet-nursed and was raising her along, when at just four months old she caught the measles that were then going round all of Edo, and the doctors gave her up for lost; I threw over my trade and everything else to nurse her, and just barely pulled her through. It was a troubled time in the world—the second year after Lord Ii was assassinated, the very year a foreigner was cut down at Namamugi. From then on, having lost my shop and everything besides, there were times more than I can count when I thought I might as well die outright, but I could never bring myself to kill dear little Otama along with myself, the way she would paw at my chest with her tiny hands and look up laughing into my face, and so, bearing what I could not bear, I kept myself alive from one day to the next. When Otama was born I was already forty-five, and worn older than my years from all my hardships besides; there were kindly people who told me that though one mouth might starve, two could eat, and offered to arrange a match with some widow of a little means, marrying me in as her husband, with the child to be sent off to be raised elsewhere—but out of pity for Otama I refused them all flatly. And now, after raising her that far, to have her made the plaything of some faithless scoundrel—as they say, poverty dulls the wits—it galls me, it galls me more than I can say.

"As luck would have it, people are kind enough to call her a fine girl, and though I wished with all my heart to marry her off to some respectable man, having a father like me, no one ever came forward to ask for her.

"Even so, I had made up my mind that whatever happened, I would never let her become anyone's kept woman or mistress; but since you all assured me the patron was a solid, upstanding man, and Otama will turn twenty next year, and I was anxious to see her settled somehow before she grew too far past her prime, I finally gave way.

"And since I am giving up so precious a thing as my Otama, I must by all means go along myself and be presented to the patron."

That was what he said.

When this was reported to him, Suezo felt some dissatisfaction at seeing his own plans thrown a little off course.

It was because his expectation—that once Otama was brought to Matsugen he would send the go-between old woman home as soon as possible and enjoy sitting alone together with Otama—now seemed likely to be dashed.

With the father coming along too, the occasion threatened to turn unexpectedly formal.

Suezo himself did feel a certain solemnity about the occasion, but it was in the sense of a joyful send-off, a first step toward loosening the bonds of a desire he had held in check all this while, and for that a tête-à-tête was the first requirement.

But with the father turning up as well, the very nature of that solemnity changed entirely.

From what the old woman told him, both father and daughter were rigidly upright people; at first the two of them together had refused, saying she would not go into service as a mistress, but the old woman had one day called the girl aside, asked whether she did not wish to ease the burden on a father who could no longer earn as he once had, pressed the point every which way, and finally won her over, after which the old man too was brought around.

When he first heard this, he had rejoiced privately at the thought of getting hold of so gentle, so demure a girl, but with so rigidly upright a father and daughter appearing together, their first meeting at Matsugen threatened to take on something of the character of a son-in-law paying his respects to a father-in-law, and this altered species of solemnity poured a ladle of cold water over Suezo's heated head.

Still, Suezo was determined to live up to his reputation, whatever it cost him, as a thoroughly respectable man of business, and wishing above all to show himself generous in the other party's eyes, he ended by taking on the outfitting of both of them.

Part of what decided him, too, was a certain resignation to the fact that once he had Otama, he could hardly abandon the old man's welfare in any case, so that this was merely a matter of doing sooner what he would have had to do later.

In the ordinary way of things he would simply have handed over a lump sum, so much for outfitting, but Suezo did nothing of the kind.

Having his own indulgence in fine dressing, Suezo had a shop that made up his own clothes for him, and to this he explained the circumstances and ordered suitable garments made up for the two of them.

Only the measurements did he have taken, by way of the old woman he had asked to see to the arrangements, from Otama herself.

The pitiable thing was that Otama and her father took this careful, tightfisted arrangement of Suezo's in altogether too generous a spirit, believing that they were not simply handed cash because they themselves were held in respect.

VII

Ueno Hirokoji was a place little troubled by fires, and I have no memory of Matsugen ever having burned down, so its rooms may well stand there still.

He had asked in advance for some quiet, small room, and so, coming up through the south-facing entrance and going a little way straight along the corridor before turning left, Suezo was shown into a room of six mats.

A man in a livery coat was in the midst of rolling up a great oiled-paper sunshade.

"The evening sun does come in something dreadful until it goes down,"

the maid who had shown him in explained, and withdrew.

Suezo took his seat with his back to the alcove, where a hanging scroll of an ukiyo-e painting of doubtful authenticity was hung, and a single gardenia stood in a slender vase, and looked sharply about him.

Unlike the upstairs rooms, this one—unlike also that stretch of pond-side road which, long after those days, was crudely fenced off as a racetrack and, after passing through yet further changes of the world, became a cycling track—had, so that it might not be seen from the road along the pond's edge, a fence of woven bamboo running around the outside of the room, which otherwise looked out, most agreeably, upon Shinobazu Pond itself.

Between the fence and the house there was nothing but a strip of ground, narrow and long as an obi, so that of course nothing that could properly be called a garden had been made there.

From where Suezo sat he could see the trunks of two or three parasol trees planted close together, trunks that looked as though they had been wiped down with an oiled rag.

A single stone lantern of the Kasuga style was also in view.

Besides that there was nothing but a scattering of small cypress trees standing here and there.

The sun had been beating down for some while, so that out on Hirokoji white dust rose from beneath the feet of passersby, but here within the fence the moss, freshly watered, lay green and fresh.

Presently a maid brought in mosquito incense and tea, and asked for his order.

Suezo said he would wait until his party arrived, and sent the maid away, smoking alone.

When he had first sat down it had seemed rather close, but after a while a breeze, carrying faintly the mingled smells of having passed by the kitchen and the privy, came drifting in now and again from the direction of the corridor, so that he had no need to pick up the soiled fan the maid had left beside him.

Suezo leaned against the alcove post, blowing smoke rings, and gave himself over to fancy.

The Otama he had once thought a pretty girl, catching sight of her in passing, had after all still been a child.

What sort of woman had she become?

What would she look like when she came?

In any case, having the old man tag along had been a thoroughly awkward business.

He found himself wondering whether there might not be some way to get the old man sent home early.

Upstairs someone had begun tuning a shamisen.

There came the sound of two or three sets of footsteps in the corridor, and a maid's voice, poking her head in first, said, "Your party has—"

so she began.

"Come, come right on in. The gentleman's a broad-minded sort, no need to stand on ceremony,"

said the voice of the old go-between, in a tone like the shrill of a katydid.

Suezo rose abruptly from his seat.

And going out into the corridor, he found the old man bent low, hesitating against the wall at the turn, and behind him, standing quite without any air of timidity, looking curiously about her, was Otama.

He had remembered her as a round-faced, plump little thing, pretty enough, but somewhere along the way her face had grown slender, and her figure too was more slight than before.

Her hair was done up neatly in a ginkgo-leaf coiffure, and she wore none of the heavy makeup usual on such occasions—her face was almost bare.

This was entirely unlike what he had imagined, and yet she was all the more beautiful for it.

Suezo drank in the sight of her with his eyes and felt a deep satisfaction rise within him.

Otama, for her part, had come resigned, telling herself that since she was selling herself to save her father from poverty in any case, it hardly mattered who her buyer might be; but seeing Suezo, dark-complexioned, with sharp eyes that yet had a kind of charm to them, dressed in refined, unassuming good taste, she felt as though she had recovered a life she had given up for lost, and she too knew a moment's satisfaction.

Suezo said to the old man, "Please, do go right on through,"

with great politeness, gesturing toward the room, then turning his eyes to Otama and saying, "Come—"

urging her on.

Once he had shown the two of them into the room, he called the go-between old woman aside, pressed something wrapped in paper into her hand, and murmured something to her.

The old woman showed her teeth, stained where the blackening had worn away, in a smile that was somehow both deferential and faintly mocking, bowed her head two or three times, and went back the way she had come.

Returning to the room, Suezo found father and daughter drawn together diffidently near the doorway, and, urging them forward with great affability, gave his order for the food to the maid who had been waiting.

Presently the appetizer,

and with it the sake, was brought out; Suezo first pressed a cup upon the old man, and, falling into talk with him, found that—true to a man who had once known a decent way of life—he was quite unlike someone hastily got up in fine clothes for the occasion.

Suezo, who at first had found the old man's presence an irritation, was gradually won over and softened, and fell into a heartfelt sort of talk he had never at all anticipated.

And while making every effort to bring forward whatever good qualities he possessed, deep within he rejoiced that so uniquely fitting an occasion had arisen, quite by chance, for winning the trust of the gentle-natured Otama.

By the time the food was brought in, the party had taken on somehow the air of a family out on an excursion who had simply stopped in at a restaurant.

Suezo, who ordinarily behaved toward his wife and children like a petty tyrant and was met by his wife with defiance at some times and submission at others, watched Otama—her face flushed with shyness, a modest smile playing over it—pour his sake once the maid had left the room, and felt a mild, quiet sort of pleasure he had never known before.

But Suezo, though intuitively sensing, without quite realizing it, this phantom-like shadow of happiness that had risen up at this gathering, possessed no such careful powers of reflection as would have led him to wonder why his own home life yielded nothing of this flavor, or to weigh just what conditions would be needed to sustain such a company-manners sort of feeling day in and day out, and whether he or his wife could ever meet them.

Suddenly, outside the fence, came the clack-clack of wooden clappers being struck together.

followed by a voice calling, "Your kind patronage, if you please, for a little something—"

it said.

The shamisen playing upstairs stopped, and a maid, gripping the balustrade, was saying something.

Below, the voice went on, "Very well then—Naritaya's Kochiyama and Otowaya's Naozamurai, if you please, starting with Kochiyama—"

and began doing his imitations of the kabuki actors' voices.

A maid who had come to bring a fresh flask of sake said, "Oh my, tonight it's the real one,"

she said.

Suezo did not understand.

"What do you mean, the real one, the fake one—are there several of them going about?"

"No, it's just that these days a University student comes around doing it too."

"With all the instruments and everything, I suppose?"

"Yes, the whole getup and everything, just the same. But you can tell by the voice."

"Then it's always the same fellow, is it."

"Yes. There's only the one who does it."

The maid was laughing.

"You know him, do you, missy?"

"Well, he's a gentleman who's come here now and again."

The old man put in from the side:

"So there are students clever enough for that sort of thing too, are there."

The maid said nothing.

Suezo gave a strange sort of laugh.

"A student who does that sort of thing is bound to be no good at his studies, I'll wager."

So he said, while inwardly he was thinking of the students who always came round to his own place.

There were some among them who took to aping tradesmen, saying it was amusing to go teasing the girls at the low-class shops, and who even in ordinary times spoke like tradesmen themselves.

But that anyone would go about seriously doing voice imitations for a living was more than even Suezo had imagined.

Suezo glanced at Otama, who had been listening to the talk in silence, and said:

"And who is your favorite, Otama?"

"I haven't any favorite at all."

The old man added a word:

"She never goes to the theater at all, you see. The Ryuseiza's right in our neighborhood, and all the girls of the district go peeking in, but Otama never goes near it. The ones who like that sort of thing, they say the moment they hear the drums going bang-bang they can't sit still in the house."

The old man's talk had a way of turning, before he knew it, into boasting about his daughter.

VIII

The matter having been settled, it was decided that Otama should move to Muenzaka.

But even this move, which Suezo had thought a perfectly simple matter, came trailing some measure of trouble after it.

It was because Otama had said she wished to keep her father as near as possible, so that she might go and look after him now and again.

From the first Otama had been thinking of setting aside the greater part of the allowance she was to receive and sending it to her father, so as to keep him, now past sixty, from want, and even to see that a young maid was kept on for him.

To manage that, there was no need to leave her father in the shabby house at Torigoe next door to the rickshaw dealer, where he had lived until now.

If it came to the same thing, she wanted him moved somewhere nearer.

Just as, at the meeting that was meant to summon the daughter alone, the father had come along too, so now, where Suezo had thought it would be enough simply to prepare the house and receive Otama into it, it turned out he must see to the moving of both father and daughter.

Otama said, of course, that since it was her own idea to have her father moved, she meant to see to it entirely on her own and cause her patron no trouble whatever.

But once he had heard the whole of it, Suezo could hardly pretend to know nothing about it.

Having met her and found himself all the more taken with Otama, and moved besides by his usual wish to show off his generosity, he ended by arranging that, at the same time Otama moved to Muenzaka, the old man too should move into that other house at Ikenohata Suezo had already had his eye on.

Once he had made himself party to the arrangements in this way, however much Otama insisted she wished to cover everything out of her own allowance, he could hardly stand by and watch her struggle when he could see it plainly, and expenses cropped up at every turn.

More than once the old go-between woman, seeing with what indifference Suezo laid out the money for it all, could only stare in astonishment.

It must have been about the middle of July when the bustle of both households' moving was finally settled.

Suezo, who in his moneylending exercised every ounce of a harsh, unsparing temper, seemed to have taken such a strong liking to Otama's fresh, innocent way of speaking and carrying herself that toward her he employed every gentle art at his command, coming to Muenzaka almost every night to court her favor.

There is in this something of what historians are fond of calling the other side of a great man's nature.

Not once did Suezo stay the night.

But he came nearly every evening.

The old go-between had arranged for a single young maid named Ume, thirteen years old, who did no more in the kitchen than play at something like housekeeping games, so that Otama came gradually to feel the tedium of having no one to talk to, and by evening found herself hoping her patron would come soon—and, catching herself at it, would laugh at her own expense.

At Torigoe too, after her father had gone off to his trade, Otama had been left alone at home doing piecework, but she had spurred herself on with the thought of how much this much more would earn once finished, and how her father would be surprised when he came home, so that even keeping no company with the neighborhood girls, she had never once felt bored.

But the moment the hardships of making a living vanished from her life, she came to know, for the first time, what it was to be bored.

Even so, Otama's boredom was tolerable enough, since by evening her patron would come and offer her some comfort.

The odd case was that of the old man who had moved to Ikenohata: he too, who had spent his life driven by the daily grind of making a living, found himself grown so suddenly comfortable that he felt as though he had been bewitched by a fox.

And under the small lamp, the evenings he had once spent alone with Otama, just the two of them, chatting over this and that, now seemed to him something he longed for as though for a beautiful, vanished dream.

And he went on constantly expecting that Otama might come to visit.

But though a good many days had already gone by, Otama had not come even once.

For the first day or two, so pleased was the old man at having moved into so fine a house, he had the country maid do nothing but draw water and cook the rice, tidying and cleaning himself, and whenever he thought of something lacking he would send the girl running off to Nakacho to buy it.

Then, come evening, while listening to the maid clattering about in the kitchen, he would sprinkle water where the umbrella pine grew beyond the bay window and, smoking, watch the crows begin to fuss on the hill of Ueno, and the evening haze drift by degrees over the grove of the Benten shrine on Nakajima and the pond thick with lotus blossoms.

The old man did think himself fortunate, and thought it all very fine.

But from about that time he began, somehow, to feel a certain want.

It was because Otama was not there—Otama, whom he had raised with his own two hands since she was a babe in arms, with whom he had come to understand each other's meaning almost without speaking, Otama who had been gentle with him in everything, Otama who had always been waiting for him whenever he came home.

He would sit at the window and look out over the pond.

He would watch the people passing by.

That splash just now had been a large carp.

That Western lady who had just gone by had a whole bird fixed to her hat.

Each time, he wanted to say, "Otama, look at that—"

he wanted to say it.

And it was her not being there that left him feeling something wanting.

By the third or fourth day he had grown steadily more irritable, and it began to grate on him whenever the maid came near him to do anything.

Though it had been decades since he had last kept a servant, being gentle by nature he never scolded her.

But nothing the maid did ever quite suited him, and he could not help feeling put out.

To be measured always against Otama, so quiet in her ways and so gentle in her touch whatever she did, was hard luck indeed for a maid fresh up from the country.

On the fourth morning, at last, while she was serving his breakfast, he saw her thumb dip into the soup bowl, and said, "Never mind serving me anymore—go on off, over there,"

was what he said.

Having finished his meal, he looked out the window and found the sky overcast, though with no sign of rain, and rather cooler for it than a fine day would have been, so, wishing to clear his mind, he went outside.

Even so, worried that Otama might come while he was out, he walked along by the pond, glancing back now and again at his own front door.

In time he came to where a little bridge crossed the lane running between Kayacho and Shichikencho toward Muenzaka.

It occurred to him to go and look in on his daughter, but he felt a strange sort of formality about it, a hesitation that struck even him as odd.

Had he been her mother, he thought, no such distance could ever have come between them under any circumstances—strange, strange, he thought to himself, and without crossing the bridge he went on walking along by the pond just the same.

It struck him suddenly that Suezo's house lay just across the ditch from where he stood.

The go-between old woman had pointed it out to him once from the window of his new house.

Looking at it now, it was, sure enough, a splendid establishment, its high earthen wall topped all around with slanted spikes of split bamboo.

The house next to it, which he had heard belonged to the great scholar Mr. Fukuchi, was spacious enough, true, but its buildings were old, and compared to Suezo's house it had neither the gaudiness nor the imposing look of the other.

He stood there a while looking at the plain wooden back gate, kept shut fast even in broad daylight, but no wish to go inside and look ever rose in him.

Yet without exactly thinking anything in particular, he was overtaken by a kind of fleeting, lonesome feeling, and stood there a while quite dazed.

Put into words, it could only be described as the feeling of a father brought low, who had given his daughter out to be another man's mistress.

A full week went by, and still his daughter had not come.

The longing he felt for her sank ever deeper within him, turning inward like some hidden ailment, and a suspicion began to raise its head that perhaps, now that she had come into easy circumstances, she had forgotten all about her father.

This suspicion was of the faintest sort, one he seemed almost to have summoned up deliberately, the better to toy with it—suspicion though it was, he could not, somehow, find it in himself to hate his daughter for it.

Much as one uses irony in speaking to another person, he merely told himself, on the surface of his mind, that it would almost be better if he could bring himself to hate her outright.

Even so, the old man had lately begun to have thoughts of this sort:

if he stayed shut up at home all the time, his mind would only run on and on with all manner of thoughts, so he would go out now, and afterward, when his daughter came and found him gone, she would surely be sorry to have missed him.

Even if she were not sorry exactly, she would surely think it a waste, at least, to have come all that way for nothing.

It would do her no harm to be made to feel that much, he thought.

It was with such thoughts as these that he had taken to going out.

He would go to Ueno Park, seek out a bench standing conveniently in the shade, rest himself there, and, watching the hooded rickshaws pass through the park, imagine his daughter arriving just then at his empty house and standing about at a loss.

The feeling that came over him then was something like wishing to see it served her right, a kind of testing of himself upon himself.

These days he had also taken to going out in the evenings to the Fukinukitei, to hear Encho's storytelling, or Komanosuke's gidayu.

Even sitting there in the hall, he would still find himself imagining that his daughter might just then be calling at his empty house.

Then again he would sometimes wonder, quite out of nowhere, whether his daughter might not be among the audience there, and find himself picking out young women with their hair done up in the ginkgo-leaf style to look them over.

Once, about the time the intermission ended, a woman with her hair in the ginkgo-leaf style came, escorted by a man in a summer kimono wearing a Panama hat—still a rarity in those days—pulled low over his eyes, up to the upper gallery at the back, and as she took hold of the balustrade and glanced down over the audience below while seating herself, he took her, for one instant, to be Otama.

Looking more closely, her face was rounder than Otama's, and she was shorter.

And besides, the man in the Panama hat had brought along not just this one woman, but three or four more behind her as well, their hair done up in shimada and momoware styles.

They were all geisha and serving girls.

A student sitting near the old man said, "Ah, here comes the great master himself—"

he said.

As the old man made his way home when the show let out, he saw a woman carrying a large long-handled lantern, on which was written slantwise, in red, "Fukinukitei"—

and behind her trailed the whole string of geisha and serving girls, seeing the man in the Panama hat off on his way.

The old man walked home falling in behind this procession and then ahead of it by turns, all the way to his own door.

IX

Otama too wished she might go and see how her father, from whom she had never once been parted since childhood, was getting on.

But since her patron came almost daily, and she worried lest he find her out and be displeased, day after day went by with her still meaning to visit her father and never doing so.

Her patron never stayed until morning.

At the earliest he would be gone by about eleven.

Sometimes, too, he would say he had to be elsewhere that day but had just stopped by, sit himself down across the brazier, smoke a pipe, and be off again.

Even so, there was never a day she could be certain her patron would not come, so she could never bring herself to go out.

There was in principle nothing to stop her going out by day, but the young maid she employed was little more than a child, and could not be trusted with anything on her own.

Besides, she had a feeling the neighbors might see her, and did not care to go out by day.

At first, even to go down to the bathhouse at the foot of the slope, she would send the little maid ahead to see whether it was empty just then, and only after that go quietly herself.

Even without any particular incident Otama was thus a rather timid soul by nature, but something happened on the third day after her move that crushed what nerve she had.

On the day she had moved in, both the greengrocer and the fishmonger had come round with their account books to ask for her custom, but the fishmonger had not come that particular day, and so she sent little Ume down the slope to buy some fish, a fillet or two.

Otama herself had no craving for fish every day.

Her father, who never drank, was the sort who was content with any dish so long as it did him no harm, and she had grown into the habit of eating whatever came to hand.

But she had once been told that the neighbors, a poor household, went days on end without so much as a bite of fish, and it worried her that Ume might think it a poor sort of table, which would reflect badly on the patron who provided for her so generously—and it was with some such feeling that she went out of her way to send Ume down to the fishmonger's.

But Ume came back in tears.

Asked what had happened, this was what she told her.

She had found a fishmonger's and gone in, but it turned out to be a different shop from the one that had brought its account book to the house.

The master was not in; his wife was minding the shop.

The husband had likely come back from the fish market, set out what he needed for the shop, and gone off to make his rounds of regular customers.

There was plenty of fresh-looking fish in the shop.

Ume's eye had fallen on a good-colored heap of small horse mackerel, and she asked the price.

At which the wife said, "I don't recognize you—where might you be buying for?"

so Ume told her which house she had come from.

At that the wife's face suddenly turned sour, and she said, "Oh, is that so. Sorry for you, but you'd best go back and tell them—we've no fish here to sell to any moneylender's mistress."

and with that she turned away and smoked her pipe, paying no further attention to her.

Ume was so mortified that she lost all wish to try another fishmonger, and ran straight home.

There, standing before her mistress, she repeated, haltingly and with a look of distress, what the fishmonger's wife had said.

As Otama listened, her face turned pale, even to her lips.

and she was silent for a long while.

Within the breast of this girl unschooled in the world, a tangle of feelings, intricate and various, formed a chaos she could not herself have unraveled thread by thread, but the whole confused mass of it pressed down with a heavy weight upon the innocent heart of a girl who had just been dealt this blow, driving the blood of her whole body in upon her heart, so that the color drained from her face and a cold sweat broke out across her back.

It seems that at such a moment, some quite trivial matter is the first thing to come to conscious mind, for what Otama thought first was whether, after all this, Ume might not say she could no longer stay in this house.

Ume, gazing steadily at her mistress's bloodless face, could tell only that her mistress was in some great distress, but had no notion what it was over.

She had come running home in a fit of temper, but it struck her that with the noon meal's dish still unbought, she could hardly leave things as they were.

Even the money she had been given and gone out with was still tucked away, unused, in her obi.

"Really, there's no one so disagreeable as that woman anywhere. Who'd ever want to buy fish from a shop like that. There's another one a bit further on, near the little Inari shrine—I'll go right off and buy something there,"

she said, as though to comfort her, glancing at Otama's face and getting to her feet.

Otama, moved for a moment by the joy of finding Ume so wholly on her side, gave a reflexive smile and a nod.

Ume hurried straight off, her footsteps pattering away.

Otama remained behind, quite unable to move.

The tension that had held her steady slackened a little, and as the tears welled up she felt them about to spill over, so she took a handkerchief from her sleeve and pressed it to her eyes.

Within her breast she could hear nothing but a cry of it's galling, it's galling.

This was the voice that rose up out of that whole chaos of feeling.

It was not, of course, that she hated the fishmonger's wife for refusing to sell to her, nor that she felt it galling or sad to learn her own position was such that she would be refused; nor was it that, having learned Suezo, to whom she had given herself, was a moneylender, she now hated him for it, or found it galling or sad that she had given herself to such a man.

Otama too had heard, vaguely, that moneylenders were a disagreeable, fearsome sort of thing, hated by the world at large, but her father had never borrowed from anyone but a pawnbroker, and even when the clerk there had been too tightfisted to lend him the full sum he wanted, her father had only said he was in a fix, never once resenting the clerk as unreasonable—so that, much as a child is taught to be afraid of demons or of policemen, she had been taught of the existence of this fearsome thing called a moneylender without ever feeling it as anything sharply real.

What, then, was it that galled her so?

In truth, whatever notion of being galled Otama possessed carried very little sense of resentment against the world or against any particular person.

If it must be said to hold some sense of resentment against something, one might say it was resentment against her own fate.

That she, who had done nothing wrong, should be made to suffer persecution from outside herself—

this she felt as a pain.

And it was this pain that the word galling pointed to.

The first time Otama had ever said the word was when she believed herself deceived and abandoned by a man.

Then, only lately, when it had come to pass that she must become someone's mistress, she had said it again.

Now, learning that it was not merely a mistress she had become, but the mistress of a moneylender at that, a man the world despised, that word galling—its edges worn smooth these past days by the teeth of Time,

and its color already faded, washed by the waters of Resignation—

that same galling feeling

rose up once more before the eye of Otama's mind, sharp of outline and strong of color as ever.

The very substance of what lay knotted up in Otama's breast, if one were to force it into some logical shape, might amount to something like this.

After a while Otama rose, opened the closet, took out of an imitation-leather bag an apron of white calico she had sewn herself, tied it about her waist, and, heaving a deep sigh, went out to the kitchen.

Apron though it was, the silk one she owned had become, for this woman, a kind of formal wear, never to be worn out to the kitchen.

So careful was she of even her cotton kimono, hating to let a soiled collar show, that she would fold a hand-towel and hang it over the collar where her hair might touch it.

By this time Otama had already grown considerably calmer.

Resignation was the mental operation this woman had most often had occasion to practice, and her mind, when turned in that direction, had grown accustomed to working as smoothly as a well-oiled machine.

X

It was one evening.

Suezo came and sat himself down across the wooden brazier.

Ever since that first night, whenever Otama saw Suezo come in she would always bring out a cushion and spread it across the brazier from her.

Suezo would sit cross-legged upon it, smoking his pipe and making conversation.

Otama, seeming rather at a loss what to do with herself, would stay where she always sat, stroking the rim of the brazier or fidgeting with the fire tongs, answering him shyly and in few words.

It looked as though, seated away from the brazier, she would hardly have known where to put herself.

One might almost say she was holding her ground against the enemy only by leaning on the rampart of that brazier.

After talking a while, Otama would sometimes catch a rhythm and fall into a long story.

It amounted, for the most part, to nothing more than the small joys, angers, sorrows, and pleasures she had lived through over the years spent alone with her father.

Suezo, listening less to the content of what she said than to the pretty chirping of her voice, as though it were a caged cricket singing, would find himself smiling before he knew it.

At that Otama would suddenly notice how much she had been chattering, blush, cut her story short, and fall back into her usual brief exchanges.

All of this, in word and gesture alike, was so entirely artless that to eyes like Suezo's, practiced as they were in exceedingly keen observation of certain matters, it could be surveyed to its every corner, hidden nowhere, as easily as one might see to the bottom of a clear basin of water.

This flavor of sitting face to face with her was, for Suezo, as pleasant as soaking still and warming himself in a bath of just the right heat after a day's hard labor.

And since tasting this particular flavor was, for Suezo, an entirely new experience, he had been receiving, ever since he began coming to this house, a kind of culture quite without realizing it, much as a wild beast grows tame to a man.

And from about the third or fourth day, Suezo had begun to notice that whenever he sat himself cross-legged across the brazier as usual, Otama would take to bustling about at this and that with no particular reason, growing restless in one way or another.

There had been shyness before, an avoidance of his eyes, a slowness in answering, but her manner tonight seemed to hint at something more particular.

"Say, there's something on your mind, isn't there,"

said Suezo, packing tobacco into his pipe.

Otama, who had pulled halfway open a drawer of the brazier that was already perfectly tidy and was peering into it though there was nothing to look for, said, "No—"

and turned her large eyes full upon Suezo's face.

Whatever mysteries might lie in old tales, they were not eyes that looked capable of keeping any very great secret hidden.

Suezo, whose brow had knit without his meaning it to, could not help letting it clear again just as unwittingly.

"Don't tell me no. It's written all over your face—'What'll I do, what'll I do, oh dear.'"

Otama's face turned red at once.

And she fell silent for a while.

Turning over how she might put it.

It was as though the delicate workings of some machine could be seen turning right through her.

"Well—it's only that I've been meaning ever so long to go and see my father, meaning to and meaning to, and it's been quite a while now."

One might see how the delicate machine turned, but not what it was meant to do.

An insect that must always be evading the persecution of things larger and stronger than itself has its mimicry.

A woman tells lies.

Suezo laughed with his face, though he spoke as if scolding her.

"What's this? He's moved right there under your nose at Ikenohata, and you still haven't been to see him? Compared to the Iwasaki estate across the way, it's practically like living in the same house. You could go this very minute if you wanted, but well—better make it tomorrow morning."

Otama, poking at the ashes with the fire tongs, stole a glance at Suezo's face.

"But there are so many things to think about—"

"Don't be silly. What is there to think about in a thing like that? How long do you mean to go on being such a baby?"

This time his voice was gentle.

And there the matter ended, for the time being.

In the end Suezo even said that if she found it so much trouble, he would come round himself some morning and walk the four or five blocks with her.

Otama had of late been turning many things over in her mind.

Having met her patron and seen for herself, close at hand, how dependable, how quick-witted, how gentle he seemed, she found herself wondering why a man like this should be in so disagreeable a trade, and even entertaining the unreasonable hope that she might somehow persuade him to give it up for a respectable line of work.

But she had not for a moment come to think of him as a disagreeable man.

Suezo had dimly sensed that something lay hidden at the bottom of Otama's heart, and had put out a feeler to find it, only to be told it was some childish, trifling thing, nothing at all.

But leaving the house past eleven and strolling down Muenzaka turning it over in his mind, it still seemed to him that something more lay hidden beneath it.

Suezo's seasoned, sharp powers of observation had by no means let this something slip by entirely unnoticed.

He went so far in his speculation as to wonder whether someone might not have told Otama something calculated, at the very least, to stir some uncomfortable feeling in her.

Even so, in the end he never did find out who had said what.

XI

The next morning, when Otama came to her father's house at Ikenohata, he had only just finished his breakfast.

Otama, who took little time over her toilet, had hurried over wondering if it might not be a bit too early, but the old man, an early riser, had already swept the entrance clean, sprinkled it with water, washed his hands and feet, stepped up onto the fresh tatami, and finished his usual solitary meal.

A few doors off a teahouse had recently opened, and there were times toward evening when things grew noisy, but the houses on either side were both, alike, kept shut behind their lattice doors, and especially in the morning the whole neighborhood lay quiet.

Looking out from the bay window, one could see, through the branches of the umbrella pine, the willow's threads swaying faintly in the fresh morning breeze, and beyond them the lotus leaves growing thick over the whole surface of the pond.

And amid all that green, here and there like a faint dab of crimson, one could see the flowers that had opened that very morning.

There had been talk of whether a north-facing house might not be cold, but in summer it was a place one could hardly ask for better.

Ever since she had come to understand such things, Otama had often thought that if good fortune should ever come her way, she would do this and that for her father—and now, seeing before her own eyes how he was living, settled in a house like this, she could not help feeling glad, and telling herself that this was indeed the fulfillment of what she had long wished for.

But into that gladness a single drop of bitterness had mixed itself.

How much happier this morning's meeting with her father would have been without it, she thought, and felt, with a kind of impatient regret, just how little the world would go as one wished.

The old man had set down his chopsticks and was drinking the tea poured into his cup when the front gate—which no one had ever yet come knocking at—opened, and with a start he set the cup down and looked toward the entryway.

While her figure was still hidden behind the two-fold reed screen, the sound of Otama's voice calling, "Father—"

reached him, and though he felt like leaping straight up to meet her, he held himself firmly in check and stayed seated.

And within himself he cast anxiously about for what he should say to her.

"So you haven't forgotten your old father, then"—

some such thing he thought he might say, but once he saw his daughter come hurrying in and settle fondly beside him, the words simply would not come out, and, dissatisfied with himself for it, he only sat looking silently at her face.

What a beautiful girl she had become.

He had always been proud of her, and had meant, poor as they were, to keep her from any rough work and see her kept clean and neat, but in the mere ten days he had gone without seeing her, she seemed to have been reborn entirely.

However busy their life had been, she was, as though by instinct, a girl who had never let any grime touch her skin, but compared to these last days, when she had taken to grooming herself with deliberate care, the Otama fixed in the old man's memory was still an uncut jewel.

Whether a parent looks at a child or an old man at someone young, what is beautiful is beautiful.

And before the power of beauty to soften a person's heart, neither parent nor elder can help but yield.

The old man, deliberately holding his tongue, had meant to keep a stern face, but against his own wishes he found his expression softening despite himself.

Otama too, having given herself over to her new circumstances, had gone ten whole days without seeing the father from whom she had never once been separated since childhood, all the while longing to see him, so that even the things she had come meaning to say would not come out for a time, and she simply gazed happily at her father's face.

"Shall I clear the tray away now, sir?"

the maid asked, poking her head out from the kitchen, in a rapid, up-lilting way of speaking.

Unused to it as she was, Otama could not quite make out what she had said.

A plump face set beneath a small head, its hair simply combed and pinned up, made a decidedly ill-matched sight.

And that face was staring at Otama, quite without reserve, as though thoroughly astonished.

"Go on and clear the tray, and bring fresh tea—the green kind on that shelf,"

the old man said, pushing the tray forward.

The maid took up the tray and went back into the kitchen.

"Oh, there's no need to trouble with anything so fine for me—"

"Don't talk nonsense. There's something to go with it too."

The old man rose, took a tin canister from the closet, and arranged egg crackers in a sweets bowl.

"These are made right behind the Hotan shop. It's a convenient sort of neighborhood around here—there's Joen's tsukudani in the side street too."

"Oh, that reminds me—when we went together to hear him at the storytelling hall on Yanagihara, he told some tale about a feast and said the food was as delicious as my own shop's tsukudani, and had everyone laughing. Such a jolly, plump old fellow he is. The moment he takes the stage he just hikes up the back of his robe and plops himself right down. It struck me so funny. I do wish you'd grow that stout too, Father."

"As if I could ever get as fat as Joen."

the old man said, setting the crackers before his daughter.

Presently the tea came, and father and daughter fell into idle talk, as though they had been together every day, yesterday and the day before.

The old man spoke suddenly, as though bringing himself to say something difficult:

"Well, how's it going? Does the master come by now and again?"

"Yes—"

was all Otama said, faltering a little over the answer.

Suezo's visits were hardly a matter of now and again.

He never failed to show his face every single night.

Had she been asked this as a bride, whether things were going smoothly, she could have answered brightly enough that all was very well and he needn't worry.

But given her actual situation, it went against the grain, somehow, to say plainly that her patron came every single night.

Otama thought a moment and said, "Well, it seems to be going well enough, Father, so there's no need for you to worry."

So she said.

"Well, if that's so, all the better,"

said the old man, but he sensed something not quite satisfying in his daughter's answer.

Both the one who asked and the one who answered had, without meaning to, fallen into speaking with a kind of vague evasiveness.

The two of them, who had until now shared everything openly and never once kept a secret from each other, now found themselves obliged, however unwillingly, to exchange a kind of stiff, formal courtesy that suggested there was something being kept back.

Back when they had been deceived by that bad match with the son-in-law, however ashamed they had felt before the neighbors, both father and daughter had, deep down, felt certain the fault lay wholly with the other party, and so had never held anything back in talking it over between themselves.

Unlike that time, now, though the arrangement they had once resolved upon between them had gone through successfully and left them both in comfortable circumstances, they had come to know a sad new flavor—a dark shadow falling across even their most intimate talk.

After a while, feeling he wanted to hear something more definite from his daughter's own mouth, the old man asked once more, from a new angle, "What sort of man is he, really?"

So he asked.

"Let's see—"

said Otama, tilting her head, and then added, in a tone almost like talking to herself:

"He really doesn't seem like a bad sort of man. It hasn't been long, but he's never once spoken a rough word to me."

"Hm,"

said the old man, with a face that showed he was not entirely convinced.

"He can hardly be a bad man, can he."

Otama's eyes met her father's, and she felt her heart suddenly begin to pound.

Though she thought now was as good a moment as any to say what she had come meaning to say that day, it pained her to think of causing fresh distress to a father she had gone to such trouble to make comfortable and set at ease.

With that thought, Otama bore with the discomfort of a growing distance opening between herself and her father, and, at the very edge of the decision, resolved to carry the further secret buried within the secret of being a shadow-wife—having brought it this far—back home again with her, the lid still unopened, and steered the talk elsewhere.

"Well, they say he's made his fortune all in one lifetime, doing all sorts of things to get where he is, so I was worried I couldn't tell what sort of temperament he really had. Let's see, how should I put it. He seems a man of a manly, generous bent, I suppose. Whether he's truly that way at heart, that I can't really say, but he seems the kind of man who's careful, in whatever he says and does, to be seen that way. Isn't that good enough, Father, even if it's only the effort that counts?"

she said, looking up into her father's face.

However honest a woman may be, she does not fret, as a man would, over hiding what is on her mind at the moment and talking of something else instead.

And that her words came the more freely on just such an occasion might, for a woman, almost be counted a sign of unusual honesty.

"Well. That may be so, I suppose. But somehow, the way you put it, it sounds as though you don't quite trust the man."

Otama smiled.

"I'm getting rather clever, bit by bit, you know. I don't mean to go on being made a fool of anymore. Isn't that a bold thing to say?"

Her father, feeling as though his usually docile daughter had, most unusually, turned some edge of her own against him, looked at her with an uneasy face.

"Well. I've gotten by in this world by being made a fool of, over and over, more times than I can count. But you know, it's easier on the mind to be deceived than to deceive. Whatever trade you're in, you mustn't act unfairly toward people, and you must always treasure those to whom you owe a debt."

"Don't worry. You've always said little Tama is honest, haven't you. And I am, quite honest. But lately I've really come to feel this—I'd like to be excused, once and for all, from ever being deceived again. In exchange for never telling lies or deceiving anyone myself, I don't mean to let myself be deceived either."

"So you're saying you don't take even the master at his word carelessly, then?"

"That's right. He thinks of me as no more than a baby. Well, he's such a sharp, quick-witted man, it's no wonder he'd think so, but I'm not quite so much of a baby as he takes me for, even so."

"Well then, what is it? Have you noticed something the master's told you that wasn't true?"

"Oh, there is. That old woman said it over and over, didn't she—that his wife had died leaving the children behind, so that being kept by him, even if not as his lawful wife, amounted to the same thing; only, for the sake of appearances, he couldn't very well bring someone straight from a back-alley tenement into his own house. But he has a wife, alive and well. He told me so himself, without turning a hair. It quite took me by surprise."

The old man's eyes went wide.

"Is that so. So it was all a matchmaker's talk after all."

"So of course he keeps me an absolute secret from his wife. Since he'll lie to her, he's hardly likely to tell me nothing but the truth either. I have to keep my wits about me."

The old man, forgetting even to knock the ash from his spent pipe, sat gazing blankly at his daughter, who somehow seemed to have grown so suddenly worldly-wise, when she spoke up abruptly, as though just remembering something:

"I'll be going now for today. Now that I've come once like this, it's nothing at all anymore, so from now on I'll come and look in on you almost every day. Truth is, I'd been holding back, thinking it might be wrong to come before he told me to go—but last night I finally told him so and got it settled, and came this morning. The maid I have is such a child, she can't even manage the noon meal unless I go back and help her with it."

"If you've already gotten the master's leave to come, you might as well have your noon meal here too."

"No, it wouldn't do to leave things unattended. I'll come again soon. Goodbye, Father."

The moment Otama rose to her feet, the maid hurried out to set her sandals straight.

However slow-witted she might seem, a woman never fails to take the measure of another woman she comes across.

Some philosopher has said that even passing another woman in the street, a woman looks upon her as a rival.

Even a country-bred girl who dipped her thumb into the soup bowl seemed, it appeared, to have been listening in, taken with the beautiful Otama.

"Well then, come again. Give my regards to the master."

the old man said, remaining seated.

Otama took a small purse from between the folds of her black satin obi, twisted some money into a paper and gave it to the maid, slipped on her clogs, and went out through the lattice door.

Through the gate she had entered meaning to unburden her aching heart to the father she relied upon, and to grieve together with him over her misfortune, Otama now went out again in such high spirits that she found it strange herself.

Not wishing to burden a father who had at last found peace of mind with any needless worry, and striving instead to show herself strong and steady, she had, in the very effort of talking that way, felt something that had lain sleeping within her breast come suddenly awake, felt herself, who had always relied upon others, become unexpectedly independent, and now Otama walked along the edge of Shinobazu Pond with a bright, untroubled face.

Though the sun, well clear now of the hill of Ueno, blazed down fiercely, dyeing the shrine of Benten on Nakajima a deep red, Otama walked on without even opening the little parasol she had brought with her.

XII

One evening, when Suezo came home from Muenzaka, he found that his wife had already put the children to bed and was sitting up alone.

Ordinarily, once the children were asleep, she would lie down herself as well, but that night she sat with her head bowed, and though she knew Suezo had come in under the mosquito net, she did not so much as turn to look at him.

Suezo's bedding was laid out a little apart, against the wall farthest in.

At its pillow a cushion had been set out, with a tobacco tray and tea things beside it.

Suezo sat down on the cushion, lit his cigarette, and said in a gentle voice,

"...What's the matter? Still up, are you."

His wife said nothing.

Nor did Suezo try again to give ground.

He had offered the peace overture from his side; if she would not take it up, then so be it, he thought, and went on smoking with a deliberately unconcerned air.

"...Where have you been all this while."

His wife suddenly lifted her head and looked at Suezo.

Since they had taken on servants she had gradually refined her speech, but face to face with him alone it grew rough again.

Only the word "anata"—

—that alone still held on.

Suezo shot his wife one sharp glance, but said nothing.

He could tell that she had come by some piece of knowledge, but since he could not gauge how far that knowledge extended, there was nothing he could safely say.

Suezo was not a man to talk carelessly and hand his adversary material to work with.

"...I know everything already."

Her voice was sharp.

and toward the end of it, it had begun to break into tears.

"...What a strange thing to say. What is it you know."

He spoke as though he had run into something quite unexpected, his voice gentle, as if soothing her.

"...How cruel of you. How can you go on pretending you know nothing."

Her husband's composure only worked on her the more sharply for it, and her voice came in broken bursts as she wiped away the welling tears with the sleeve of her under-robe.

"...Now this is troubling. Come, tell me plainly what it is. I haven't the faintest idea."

"...Oh, don't. I'm asking you to tell me where you were tonight. How could you do such a thing—telling me it was business and all the while keeping a woman on the side."

Her flat-nosed, ruddy face was scalded-looking with tears, and a hank of hair from her disordered chignon clung damply to it.

She forced her narrow, moistened eyes wide open and stared at Suezo's face, then shuffled close beside him and clutched with all her strength at the hand in which he held the smoldering stub of his cigarette.

"...Stop that."

Suezo said, shaking her hand off, and ground out the embers of tobacco that had scattered across the tatami.

Sobbing, his wife clung to Suezo's hand again.

"...Is there anywhere another man like you? However much money you make, you put on the airs of the master of the house, and won't even have a single kimono made for your wife—you leave her to look after the children while you please yourself running after a mistress."

"...I said stop it."

Suezo shook off his wife's hand once more.

"...You'll wake the children. And the maid will hear you besides."

He said it in a lowered voice, but with force behind it.

The youngest child turned over and murmured something in his sleep, and his wife, too, lowered her voice without meaning to. "What in the world am I to do," she said,

and this time she pressed her face against Suezo's chest and wept softly.

"...There's no need to do anything at all. You're too trusting, that's the trouble—someone's been stirring you up. A mistress, a woman kept on the side—who told you such a thing."

Even as he said this, Suezo, watching her disheveled chignon tremble, found himself idly wondering why homely women were so fond of wearing a style of hair that did not suit them.

And as the trembling of her chignon quickened into a fine shudder, he felt her heavy breasts—which had nursed every one of their children amply—pressed against the pit of his stomach as though he held a warming-stone there, while he said again, "Who told you,"

he repeated.

"...What does it matter who told me? It's the truth, that's all."

The pressure of her breasts against him grew stronger still.

"...It matters because it isn't true. Tell me who it was."

"...There's no harm in telling you. It was the mistress of the fish shop, Uokin."

"...What, you're mumbling like some tanuki talking in its sleep, I can't make it out at all. 'Mumble-jin's wife,' what's that supposed to mean."

His wife lifted her face from Suezo's chest and gave a mortified little laugh.

"...I said it was the mistress of Uokin, the fish shop."

"...Ah. Her. I rather thought it would be something like that."

Suezo, his eyes gentle, looked at his wife's flushed, distracted face while he calmly lit another cigarette.

"...Those newspaper fellows are always going on about the judgment of society, this and that, but I've never once laid eyes on this judgment of society they speak of. If anything, that gossiping old busybody is what passes for it—meddling in everyone's business up and down the street. Am I to take seriously what a creature like that says? Now I'll tell you the truth of it, so listen well."

His wife's mind was clouded as though wrapped in mist, yet one small suspicion remained awake within her—the fear that she might, after all, be deceived.

Still, she watched Suezo's face intently and listened with earnest attention.

It was the same as when he had spoken of the judgment of society just now: whenever Suezo brought out some difficult phrase he had picked up from the newspaper, his wife lost her nerve, and without understanding it she gave way all the same.

Suezo, drawing now and then on his cigarette and blowing out the smoke, kept his eyes fixed suggestively on his wife's face as he went on.

"...Now, you remember, back when the University was still over there, there was a fellow used to come round often, name of Yoshida. Wore gold-rimmed spectacles, gaudy sort of clothes. He's off at a hospital in Chiba now, but it'll take more than two or three years to settle my accounts with him. There was a woman he'd been keeping since his boarding-house days, renting her a place over in Nanamagari until just recently. At first he sent her money regular, every month, but this year he's sent neither letter nor money. So she came and asked me to go and settle it with him on her behalf. You'll wonder how she came to know me—well, Yoshida used to say it drew notice, his coming to my place so often, so he'd call me over to Nanamagari instead to talk about renewing the notes. That's how the woman came to know me. A tiresome business for me too, but since I was at it I went and had it out with him. Even so it's dragged on and on. The woman keeps after me about it. I've gone and got myself mixed up with a troublesome creature, and there's no shaking her off. On top of it all she wanted to move somewhere neater and cheaper, so she asked me to arrange it, and I saw her settled into the place where the old pawnbroker at Kiridoshi used to live. What with one thing and another, I've taken to stopping by now and then these past days, smoked a cigarette or two there, and that's what's set the neighbors talking, I daresay. Next door she's got a woman running a sewing school for girls, so tongues wag plenty there. Would a man be such a fool as to keep a mistress in a place like that?"

So saying, Suezo gave a scornful laugh.

His wife had listened eagerly, her small eyes shining, but now she spoke in a coaxing tone.

"...It may be just as you say, but going to a woman's place so often, there's no telling what might come of it. After all, she's the sort of woman money can buy."

By now his wife had forgotten

to say "anata" any longer.

"...Don't talk nonsense. Do you take me for the kind of man who'd lay a hand on another woman when he has you? Has there ever been so much as once, all these years, that I've done anything with a woman? We're both past the age for jealous quarrels like this. Enough of it now."

Suezo, thinking his excuse had worked more easily than he had expected, was singing a private song of triumph.

"...But a man carrying on the way you do, women take a liking to him, and that's what worries me."

"...Ha. That's just what they call each man's own Buddha seeming holiest to him."

"...What do you mean by that."

"...I mean you're the only one who could ever be fond of a man like me. Now then—it's gone past one already. Let's sleep, let's sleep."

XIII

Suezo's excuses, woven together out of truth and invention, seemed for the moment to have quenched his wife's jealous fire, but their effect was of course only palliatif; and so long as the thing that existed up on Muenzaka went on existing, there would be no end to the whispering behind his back and the muttered complaints to the walls.

It would come to his wife's ears through the maid's mouth: "They say so-and-so saw the master going in at the lattice door again today, ma'am."

—words of that sort, reaching Otsune's ears.

But Suezo was never at a loss for an excuse.

If she said that business, of all things, could hardly always fall in the evening, he would answer, "Is there anyone who comes to talk over a loan first thing in the morning?"

he would say.

If she asked why things had not been this way before, he would say, "That was before I'd spread the business out so wide."

he would say.

Until his move to Ikenohata, Suezo had done everything himself, but now he had set up something in the way of an office near his own house, and besides that a house over in Ryusenjicho that served as a kind of branch office, so that students in need of what they called funds would not have to travel far.

Anyone in Nezu wanting money hurried to the office.

Anyone in Yoshiwara hurried to the branch.

Later on, an understanding grew up between the branch office and a teahouse in Yoshiwara called the Nishinomiya, so that if the branch office gave its word, a man could enjoy himself there even without ready money.

A regular commissariat of dissipation, one might say, had been organized.

Suezo and his wife went on living together for about a month without any clash severe enough to carry their discord a step further.

In other words, Suezo's sophistries were doing their work through all that time.

Then one day the whole thing broke down from a quarter no one had expected.

Since her husband happened to be at home, Otsune said she would go and do her shopping while the morning was still cool, and set off with the maid as far as Hirokoji.

On the way back, as they passed through Nakacho, the maid gave a soft tug at her sleeve from behind.

"...What is it,"

she said, almost scolding, and looked at the maid's face.

Without a word the maid pointed at a woman standing in front of a shop on the left.

Otsune looked that way reluctantly, and found herself stopping in spite of herself.

At that instant the woman turned around.

Otsune and the woman found themselves face to face.

Otsune's first thought was that she must be a geisha.

If she were a geisha, there could hardly be another in all of Sukiyacho so uniformly lovely, Otsune decided in that hurried instant.

But in the next moment she noticed that the woman lacked something a geisha would have.

That something Otsune could not have put a name to.

If she had tried to explain it, she might have called it an exaggeration of manner.

A geisha wears her kimono to striking effect.

That striking effect is always, to some degree, exaggerated.

And because it is exaggerated, something of quietness is lost.

It was this very exaggeration that Otsune felt to be missing.

The woman in front of the shop, almost without realizing it, had sensed someone passing by come to a stop, and had turned to look, but finding nothing about the passer-by worth her notice, she leaned her folded umbrella, turned slightly inward, between her knees, and bent her neck to peer down into the small purse she had drawn out from her sash.

She was hunting for a small silver coin.

The shop was one called Tashigaraya, on the south side of Nakacho—

—that was its name.

"Tashigaraya, read backward, comes out 'yarakashita'"—

so someone had once remarked, of this shop with its curious name; and it sold tooth powder packed in red paper bags stamped in gold.

In those days, before any imported paste tooth powder had come in, the two fine, smooth-grained brands were Kishida's Kaozan, scented with peony, and this Tashigaraya tooth powder.

The woman in front of the shop was none other—

—than Otama, who had stopped to buy tooth powder on her way back from an early-morning visit to her father.

When Otsune had gone four or five steps past, the maid whispered,

"...There she is, ma'am. That's the woman from Muenzaka."

Otsune only nodded silently, and since the words seemed to have no particular effect on her, the maid was taken aback.

For in the very moment she had judged the woman not to be a geisha, Otsune had already, by instinct, known her for the woman of Muenzaka.

Part of this came from her reasoning that the maid would hardly have tugged at her sleeve to point out a merely pretty woman; but one more unexpected thing had played a part as well.

It was the folding umbrella Otama had leaned against her knee.

It had happened a little over a month before.

One day her husband had come back from Yokohama and brought her a foreign parasol as a gift.

The handle was extremely long, and the cloth stretched over it comparatively small.

It might have suited a tall Western woman well enough as a plaything, but when squat, thickset Otsune took it up, it looked, to put it plainly, as though a diaper had been hung from the tip of a laundry pole.

So she had simply put it away without ever using it.

The umbrella had a white ground dyed in indigo with a fine pattern like a Benkei check.

Otsune saw clearly that the umbrella belonging to the woman at the Tashigaraya shop was exactly the same.

As they turned the corner by the wine shop toward the pond, the maid spoke up, trying to please her mistress.

"...Now really, ma'am, she wasn't such a beauty, was she. Her face all flat, and unpleasantly tall besides."

"...That's not a thing to say."

Otsune said only that, and walked straight on without paying the maid any more mind.

Disappointed in her expectation, the maid followed along wearing a discontented look.

Otsune's heart was simply seething within her, and she could not think clearly of anything.

She had formed no plan of what to do about her husband, or what to say to him.

And yet she felt she could not rest until she had gone straight at her husband and said something to him.

And she found herself thinking such things as these.

How glad I was, when he brought that umbrella home for me.

He had never, until then, bought me anything without my asking.

I did wonder why, just this once, he had brought me a gift, but even that wondering was only wondering why my husband had suddenly turned so kind.

Now that I think of it, most likely he bought mine as an afterthought, while buying one for that woman at her asking.

It must be so, surely.

And not knowing that, I had felt so grateful for it.

I had been grateful to receive an umbrella I could not even use.

And it was not only the umbrella.

That woman's kimonos, her hair ornaments too—he might well have bought them all out of this household.

Just as this umbrella of mine, covered in wool satin, differed from that foreign parasol, so everything that woman and I wore on our bodies, everything, was different.

And it was not only me.

Even when I wanted to have clothes made for the children, he was never willing to have them made.

For a boy, he said, one plain smock was enough.

For a girl, he said it was wasteful to have kimonos made while she was still small.

Was there another wife and children anywhere, belonging to a man worth so many thousands, dressed the way we, mother and children, were dressed?

Thinking of it now, it may well have been on account of that woman that he never troubled himself over us.

That business about her having belonged to Mr. Yoshida—there was no telling whether it was even true.

He might have been keeping her himself, from back when she lived in Nanamagari or wherever it was.

No.

It must be so, surely.

When money began to flow more freely and he took to extravagance in his own clothes and belongings, he said it was for the sake of appearances, this and that, but it must have been for that woman's sake.

He must never have taken me anywhere, and taken that woman instead.

Oh, how it galled her.

As she was thinking such thoughts, the maid suddenly cried out.

"...Oh, ma'am! Where are you going?"

Otsune stopped short, startled.

Walking on with her head down, she had very nearly gone straight past the gate of their own house.

The maid laughed without the least restraint.

XIV

When Otsune, having cleared away after breakfast, had set out on her shopping, Suezo had still been sitting there smoking and reading the newspaper; but by the time she got back, he was already out.

Otsune had come home not knowing quite what she would say, only meaning, whatever came, to fly at him, to fling herself upon him, to say something—anything—and so she felt the wind knocked out of her.

There was the midday meal still to prepare.

There was the child's half-finished lined kimono, soon to be needed, still to be sewn.

As Otsune went about her work mechanically, as she always did, the sharp edge of her resolve to strike at her husband gradually blunted.

Many times before, she had gone at him with all her force, meaning to dash her head against a stone wall.

But every time she found, to her astonishment, that what should have resisted her like a stone wall was in fact only a shop-curtain that slipped aside from her arm.

And listening to her husband's smooth tongue produce things that sounded reasonable, she found herself, without ever quite yielding to the reason of it, simply worn down and left without spirit.

Today, somehow, it began to seem as though she would not even manage that first assault.

Otsune ate the midday meal with the children.

She sat in judgment over the children's squabbles.

She sewed at the lined kimono.

She prepared the evening meal.

She had the children take their bath, and bathed herself as well.

She ate the evening meal with mosquito-smudge burning.

The children, who had gone out to play after eating, came home worn out with play.

The maid came out from the kitchen and laid the bedding in its usual place, and hung the mosquito net.

She had the children wash and put them to bed.

She covered her husband's supper tray with a fly-net, set the iron kettle on the brazier, and placed it all in the next room.

This was always what she did on evenings when her husband failed to come home for supper.

Otsune got through all of this mechanically.

Then, taking up a fan, she went in under the mosquito net and sat down.

It was then that the thought came to her, freshly and with sudden clarity, that at this very hour her husband must be at the house of that woman she had met on the road that morning.

She felt she could not possibly sit still and keep her body calm.

As she thought, what shall I do, what shall I do, she found herself drawn, half against her will, to go and see the house on Muenzaka for herself.

Once, when she had gone to Fujimura to buy the country buns the children liked best, she had passed by, thinking to herself, so this must be the house next to the sewing teacher's, and had looked it over; and so she knew which lattice-doored house it must be.

She longed simply to go that far and see.

Was lamplight spilling out into the street?

Could she hear even the faintest sound of voices?

That much, at least, she wanted to see for herself.

No, no—such a thing was impossible.

To go out she would have to pass along the corridor beside the maid's room.

These days the sliding doors along that corridor had been taken down.

Matsu would surely still be up, sewing.

If she were asked where she was going at this hour, there was no way she could answer.

If she said she was going out to buy something, Matsu would only offer to go herself.

So it was, then, that however much she longed to go and see, she could not slip out and see it quietly.

Oh, what was she to do.

This morning, on her way home, she had thought only that she wanted to face him as soon as possible; but if she had met him then, what would she have said?

If they had met, being who she was, she was sure she would only have said one incoherent thing after another.

And then he would only have talked his way around her once more, and deceived her all over again.

He was too clever a man; she could never win a quarrel against him.

Better, perhaps, to say nothing at all.

But what would come of saying nothing?

With a woman like that at his side, he must have come to feel it made no difference what became of her.

What was she to do.

What was she to do.

Turning these same thoughts over again and again, her mind circled back, time after time, to the point where it had started.

Before long her head grew hazy, and she could no longer make out what was what.

But at least this much she could settle: that flying at her husband with all her force would do no good, and so she would let it be.

It was then that Suezo came in.

Otsune sat in silence, fidgeting, in a way that was plainly meant to be noticed, with the handle of the fan she had taken up.

"...Well now. Making that queer face again, are you. What's the matter?"

That his wife had not, this time, spoken her usual greeting, "welcome home,"

did not particularly anger him.

For he was in a good humor.

Otsune said nothing.

She had meant to avoid a clash, but at the sight of her husband home again, resentment welled up in her, until it seemed she could not help but resist him after all.

"...Brooding over some foolishness again, are you. Stop it, stop it now."

He put a hand on his wife's shoulder, gave it two or three shakes, and then sat down on his own bedding.

"...I've been wondering what I ought to do. Even if I said I'd go back to my family, there's no home to go back to, and there are the children besides."

"...What's that? Wondering what you ought to do? There's no need to do anything at all. All's well with the world."

"...Well, you can talk of peace and quiet easily enough. It's fine for you, so long as it doesn't matter what becomes of me."

"...That's absurd. What do you mean, 'what becomes of you.' There's no need for anything to become of you. Just go on as you are."

"...Go right on making a joke of it. I'm the sort of person it makes no difference whether I'm here or not, so I'm not worth troubling over. No—not 'whether I'm here or not.' It's plainly better that I'm not here at all."

"...What a twisted way of putting it. Better that you're not here—that's quite wrong. I'd be at a loss without you. Even just looking after the children is a job in itself."

"...Well, a pretty new mother would come along afterward and look after them, wouldn't she. Though they'd be stepchildren then."

"...I don't follow you. They've got both their parents together, so they oughtn't to become stepchildren at all."

"...Oh. Is that how it is. Well, aren't you pleased with yourself. So you mean to go on just as you are now, forever?"

"...Of course."

"...I see. A beauty and a homely fright, both carrying matching parasols."

"...Now what's this. That sounds like the plot of some farce."

"...Well, someone like me could hardly appear in a serious play, after all."

"...I'd rather you were a little more serious than a farce, myself. What's all this about a parasol, anyway."

"...You know perfectly well."

"...I don't know at all. I haven't the least idea."

"...Then I'll tell you. That parasol you brought back from Yokohama that time."

"...What of it."

"...You didn't buy that only for me, did you."

"...Who else would I buy it for, if not for you."

"...No. That's not it, is it. You bought one for the woman on Muenzaka, and then it just occurred to you, on the spot, to buy one for me as well."

Though she had been talking of the parasol for some time already, the moment she put it into words as concrete as these, Otsune felt the resentment come welling up in her all over again.

"You've got it—"

she had come so near the mark that he might well have said "—right on the mark," and Suezo gave a start, but showed instead a face of blank astonishment.

"...What a preposterous idea. What, are you saying that Yoshida's woman has the very same parasol I bought for you?"

"...Of course she has the same one—you bought her the same one, so naturally she has it."

Her voice had turned unmistakably sharp.

"...What is this. I'm at a loss for words. That's quite enough of that. It's true that when I bought yours in Yokohama it was said to be a sample piece, but by now they're surely sold everywhere around Ginza. This is the very stuff of a stage melodrama—an innocent man falsely accused, that's what this is. And what, are you telling me you actually met this woman of Yoshida's somewhere? However did you find all this out."

"...Of course I found out. There's no one around here who doesn't know. Because she's such a beauty."

Her voice was full of venom.

Until now, whenever Suezo played the innocent, she had always ended up believing him after all; but this time her intuition had struck her with such force, and she felt she had seen the thing before her own eyes so plainly, that she could not for the life of her bring herself to think, well, perhaps he's right after all.

Suezo turned over in his mind all manner of questions—how had she met the woman, had they even spoken—but judging that to press her for every detail now would only work against him, he made a point of not pursuing it.

"...A beauty, is she. Is that what you call a beauty. Seemed to me an oddly flat-faced sort of woman."

Otsune said nothing.

But her husband's words, finding fault with the face of the woman she so hated, softened her feelings a little.

That night too, after their heated words, the couple came to a kind of reconciliation.

But in Otsune's heart there remained a pain like a thorn driven in and never drawn out.

XV

The atmosphere of Suezo's household gradually settled toward something heavy and low.

There were times when Otsune would sit gazing vacantly into empty space, unable to set her hand to anything at all.

At such times she could not even look after the children, and if one of them asked for something, she would scold it roughly on the spot.

Then, having scolded, she would come to herself and apologize to the child, or weep alone.

When the maid asked what she should make for a side dish, Otsune would either give no answer, or say, "Do as you like,"

or something of the sort.

At school Suezo's children were shunned by their friends as the moneylender's brood, but because Suezo liked things kept neat and had his wife see to it, they had always been noticeably clean; now, though, they could be seen playing in the street with their hair full of grime and wearing kimonos with the seams left unmended.

The maidservant, grumbling under her breath that it was a poor state of affairs with the mistress the way she was, grew slipshod in her own work too, like a horse under a bad rider loitering to nibble grass by the roadside, so that the fish went bad in the food safe and the vegetables shriveled dry.

For Suezo, who liked household matters kept scrupulously in order, it was nothing short of torment to see such neglect.

But since he understood the root cause of it all, and knew the fault to be his own, he could not very well complain.

Besides, Suezo prided himself, when he did have occasion to find fault in ordinary times, on saying it lightly, as a joke, so as to bring the other person round to reflect on their own; but this same jesting manner now seemed only to spoil his wife's temper the more.

Suezo began, silently, to observe his wife.

And he discovered something unexpected.

It was that Otsune's strange behavior was worst of all precisely when her husband was at home, and that, more often than not, once he was out, she seemed to come to herself again and worked as usual.

When he learned of this pattern from what the children and the maid let slip, Suezo was at first surprised, but he turned the matter over in his shrewd head from every angle.

This sickness of hers, he thought, comes out only while she has to look at my face, at me doing things she can't stomach.

Here I am doing everything I can so that my wife won't think her husband's grown cold, won't feel herself neglected, and yet if she's more out of sorts precisely when I'm at home, it's exactly as if I were dosing her with medicine that only worsens the sickness.

There was nothing so pointless as that.

From now on, Suezo thought, I'll try doing just the opposite.

So Suezo took to leaving the house earlier than usual, and coming home later than usual.

But the result was very bad indeed.

When he left early, his wife at first only watched him go, startled into silence.

When he came home late, the very first time, unlike her usual passive way of sulking, she seemed to have lost all patience, her forbearance snapped clean through, and she came pressing at him: "Where have you been all this while."

so she demanded of him.

And then she burst into tears all at once.

From the next time on, whenever he tried to leave early, she would say, "Where are you off to now,"

and try by force to keep him from going.

If he told her where he was going, she said it was a lie.

If he tried to go regardless, she would say there was something she absolutely had to ask him, and beg him to wait, even just a little.

She would seize hold of his clothes and not let go, or plant herself in the doorway, and, careless even of the maid's eyes, try to keep him from going out.

Suezo made a habit of turning even things that displeased him into a joke, and letting matters pass without a scene, but there was one occasion when, shaking off her clinging grip, his wife fell to the floor, and the maid witnessed the unseemly sight.

At such times, when Suezo let himself be held back obediently and stayed, and said, well then, let's hear what it is, she would say, "What do you mean to do with me,"

or, "Going on like this, what's to become of me in the end,"

posing him problems of just the sort that could hardly be settled in a single morning or evening.

In short, the remedy of leaving early and returning late, which Suezo had tried against his wife's malady, had not worked in the least.

Suezo turned the matter over again.

His wife's temper was worse when he was at home.

And so, whenever he tried not to be at home, she tried all the harder to force him to stay.

Looking at it that way, she was seeking, of her own accord, to keep him at home, and seeking, of her own accord, to spoil her own temper by it.

In connection with this, something came back to him.

Back in his Izumibashi days, there had been a student he had lent money to, called Ikai.

The fellow affected a total unconcern for his own appearance, went about barefoot in his high wooden clogs, and walked with his left shoulder hitched a couple of inches higher than the other.

This fellow would neither repay the money nor renew the note, but kept running from him, until one day Suezo came upon him at the corner of Aoishi Yokocho.

"...Where are you off to,"

Suezo asked, and Ikai said, "Just over there, to my jujitsu teacher's place. That business of ours, I'll see to it one of these days,"

and slipped away past him.

I made as if to go my own way, then quietly doubled back and stood at the corner watching.

Ikai went into the Iyomon.

Having marked that down, I went and did my business at Hirokoji, and after a while I marched straight over to the Iyomon.

The rascal was startled enough at that, but with his usual swagger of the great fellow, he hauled me by main force into the room where he'd called in two geisha and was carrying on in high style, saying, "Don't be a spoilsport, have a drink with me today,"

and made me drink with him.

That was the first time I ever saw a geisha in a proper sitting-room, and among them there was one, a striking, spirited sort of woman.

Called herself Oshun, as I recall.

Drunk, she sat herself down in front of Ikai, and something must have set her off, for she began to lay into him.

I listened in silence to what she said then, and I've never forgotten it to this day.

"...Mr. Ikai. For all your tough airs, you haven't a bit of spine, have you. Let me tell you something worth knowing: a woman can't fall for a man unless he gives her a good beating now and then. Remember that well."

That's what she said, as I recall.

It's not only geisha.

Women in general may well be made that way.

That Otsune of mine lately, she keeps me close by her side and does nothing but sulk and pick fights.

I can see plainly enough she wants something done to her.

She wants to be struck.

That's it.

She wants to be struck.

There's no mistaking it.

That Otsune of mine, I never even fed her properly all these years, worked her like an ox or a horse, so she'd turned into something like an animal, and none of her woman's nature had ever had a chance to show itself.

But since we moved into this house, with a maid to order about and being called 'ma'am,' she's been living something more like a human life, and has begun turning into a woman more like the ordinary run of them.

And so, just as Oshun said, she's come to want a good beating.

And what of me, then.

Until I'd made my money, I didn't care what anyone said of me.

I'd bow and call even some milk-mouthed greenhorn 'sir.'

Trodden on, kicked at—so long as I came out without a loss, that was all I cared for, and that's how I made my way in the world.

Every single day, wherever I went, before whoever it was, I went crawling along flat as a spider on the ground.

Watching the fellows I dealt with, I noticed that a man who bows and scrapes to his betters is cruel to those beneath him, and bullies the weak.

Gets drunk and beats his wife and children.

For me there's no better and no lesser.

I'll crawl before whoever lets me make money.

Anyone who doesn't, whoever he is, might as well not exist at all, for all it matters to me.

I take no notice of him whatever.

I leave him be.

I don't waste the trouble of striking him.

If I've time to waste on such foolishness, I'd rather spend it working out interest.

And I'd been treating my wife the same way.

That Otsune of mine has come to want me to strike her.

I'm sorry for her, but this much, at least, is too bad for her.

Squeezing a debtor like a yuzu, until even the bitter juice comes out—that I can do.

Striking anyone at all, that I cannot do.

Such were the thoughts Suezo turned over in his mind.

XVI

Traffic on Muenzaka had grown busy again.

September had come, and with the University's term about to begin, the students who had gone back to their home provinces returned all at once to the boarding houses around Hongo.

Though the mornings and evenings had already turned cool, there were still days when the noon hours grew hot.

At Otama's house, the green bamboo blinds hung when she first moved in, not yet given time to fade, shut the inside of the elbow-rest window's bamboo lattice deep and close, top to bottom, without a gap.

Otama, oppressed by idleness, leaned there behind the window against the post below the fan-holder, which held several fans painted by Kyosai and Zeshin, and gazed vacantly out at the street.

Once three o'clock had passed, students went by in groups of three or four.

At each such passing, next door at the sewing teacher's house, the girls' voices, twittering like sparrows, grew noisier still.

Roused by this, Otama too would sometimes find herself watching, without quite meaning to, to see what sort of man was passing.

Seven or eight in ten students of that day had the rough manner later called soshi-like, and the rare gentlemanly one was always a man near graduation.

A fair-skinned man with good features was apt to seem shallow, too pleased with himself, and left her cold.

As for the others, there might well have been men of learning among them, but to a woman's eye they looked rough and coarse, and were disagreeable.

Even so, Otama went on watching the students pass by her window every day, without quite meaning to.

And one day she felt something seeming to have taken root and sprouted in her own breast, and was startled by it.

It was as though some mass of imagining, having formed and taken shape below the threshold of her awareness, had suddenly leapt out into the open, and it was this that startled her.

Otama had had no object in view beyond making her father happy, and so, all but forcing her rigidly upright father to yield to her, she had let herself be made another man's mistress.

She had regarded it as a fall into degradation as far as degradation could go, and had sought a kind of peace of mind in the very selflessness of the act.

But when she learned that the man she had come to depend on as her patron was, of all people, a moneylender, the shock of it left her utterly at a loss.

Unable, then, to clear the murk from her own heart by herself, she thought she would confess her feelings to her father and let him suffer and struggle over it together with her.

But though she thought this, when she visited her father at Ikenohata and saw his peaceful life with her own eyes, she could not bring herself to drop even a single drop of poison into the cup the old man held in his hand.

Even if it meant a bitter, aching heart, she resolved to fold that feeling away and keep it locked within her own breast alone.

And with this resolution, Otama, who until now had known nothing but relying upon others, felt for the first time something like a sense of standing on her own.

From this time on, Otama took to watching, secretly, her own words and actions, and when Suezo came to her now, she no longer met him with the same unguarded, artless feeling as before, but received him with conscious deliberation.

All the while, some separate true self of hers stood apart from her body and watched from the side.

And that true self mocked both Suezo, and herself as she lay at Suezo's disposal.

When Otama first became aware of this, she was seized with a chill of horror.

But as time passed she grew used to it, and came to feel that her heart could not have been otherwise.

From then on, Otama's outward treatment of Suezo grew ever more attentive, even as her heart grew ever more distant from him.

She no longer felt any gratitude for being kept by him, and even in failing to feel obliged for what he did on her behalf, she sensed no need to feel sorry toward him for it.

At the same time, unaccomplished and untrained as she was in any art, she began to feel it a waste that she should end her days as no more than Suezo's possession.

At last, watching the students pass in the street, she found herself even wondering whether some reliable man among them might not, someday, save her from her present condition.

And when she suddenly became aware of herself lost in such imaginings, she was startled all over again.

—————————————

It was at this time that Okada came to be a face Otama knew.

To Otama, Okada was at first no more than one of the students who passed outside her window.

But Otama noticed that, striking and handsome, fresh-faced young man that he was, he showed none of the conceited, affected manner she might have expected, and she began, without quite knowing why, to think him a person she felt drawn to.

After that, whenever she looked out the window each day, she found herself waiting to see whether he might pass by again.

Not yet knowing even his name, nor where he lived, but seeing his face again and again, Otama came, before she knew it, to feel naturally drawn to him.

And once, on impulse, she smiled at him first; but that was the work of a single unguarded moment, when her self-restraint had gone slack, and gentle-natured as she was, there was no deliberate intention in her, no clear resolve to set about falling in love with him herself.

The first time Okada raised his cap to her in greeting, Otama's heart leapt, and she felt her own face grow warm with color.

A woman's intuition is sharp.

Otama knew at once, with perfect clarity, that Okada's raising of his cap had been an impulsive act, not something done with intent.

So she felt an unbounded happiness that their uncertain, wordless acquaintance across the window's lattice had now entered upon a new époque, and she pictured Okada's manner at that moment over and over again in her imagination.

—————————————

A mistress living in her patron's own house stands under the ordinary protection of the world, but a woman kept apart in lodgings of her own has troubles no one else knows of.

One day a man of about thirty came to Otama's house, wearing a livery coat turned inside out, and said he was from Shimosa, on his way home, but had hurt his foot and could not walk, and asked for alms.

When she wrapped a ten-sen silver coin in paper and had Ume take it out to him, he opened the paper and looked at it. "Only ten sen, is it,"

he said, and gave a leering grin. "That's most likely a mistake, so go ask again, won't you,"

he said, tossing it back.

Ume, flushing crimson, picked it up and went back inside, and the man followed right in after her without the least hesitation, and sat himself down across from Otama, who was adding charcoal to the box brazier.

He said all sorts of things, none of it making much sense.

He spoke over and over of his time in prison, one moment swaggering, the next whining and complaining.

The reek of drink on him was enough to turn her stomach.

Otama, terrified and holding back tears, took out two of the blue fifty-sen notes then in use, shaped like playing cards, wrapped them in paper before his eyes, and put them into the man's hand without a word.

The man, unexpectedly satisfied with so little trouble, said, "Two half-yen notes'll do fine. You're a sensible one, sister—you'll get on in the world, you will,"

and went off, planting his unsteady feet one after the other.

After an incident of this kind, Otama, left feeling unbearably uneasy, learned to "buy her neighbors' goodwill"—

—and whenever she made some special dish, she took to sending a portion by Ume's hand to the sewing teacher living alone next door on the right.

The teacher's name was Otei, a fair-skinned woman who, though past forty, still had something youthful about her.

She had served in the inner apartments of the Maeda house until she was thirty, and had then married, but her husband had died soon after, so it was said.

Her speech was refined, and she wrote a fine hand in the Oie style.

When Otama said she wished to practice her handwriting, Otei lent her copybooks and the like.

One morning Otei came round by the back door to thank Otama for whatever it was she had sent the day before.

As they stood talking for a while, Otei said, "You're acquainted with Mr. Okada, aren't you."

she said.

Otama did not yet know the name Okada.

And yet the thought that the teacher must mean that student, the realization that she had been seen when he bowed to her, and the sense that, whatever her feelings, she must now pretend to know him—all this flashed through her mind like lightning.

And so quickly that Otei could not have noticed any hesitation, "Yes,"

she answered.

"...Such a fine-looking gentleman, and they say his conduct is excellent besides."

Otei said.

"...You seem to know a great deal about him."

Otama said boldly.

"...Even the mistress of Kamijo says that, for all the many students boarding there, there's not another like him."

So saying, Otei took her leave.

Otama felt as though she herself had been praised.

And "Kamijo, Okada"—

—she repeated to herself under her breath.

XVII

The frequency of Suezo's visits to Otama did not diminish as time passed, but rather increased.

For besides coming regularly in the evenings as before, he had taken to dropping in now and then at irregular hours as well.

The reason for this was that his wife Otsune clung to him so tiresomely, begging him again and again to do something, to do something about it, that he would suddenly bolt and come to Muenzaka.

Whenever Suezo told her, at such times, that there was nothing to be done, that things could go on just as they were, she would say she could not bear to leave things as they were, and would set out, one after another, every obstacle standing in the way of any change in her circumstances—that she could not go back to her own family, that she could not part with the children, that she was getting on in years—and press her case.

Still Suezo repeated, over and over, that there was nothing to be done, that there was no need to do anything at all.

In time Otsune would grow angrier and angrier, until there was no managing her.

And so it always ended with his bolting out of the house.

For Suezo, who thought about everything in a logical, almost mathematical way, what his wife said was nothing short of baffling.

It felt to him like watching someone stand with his back to the one open doorway of a room whose other three sides were solid wall, moaning and writhing that he could go nowhere at all.

Was the doorway not standing wide open?

There was nothing else to say to such a person, except to ask why he did not simply turn and look.

Otsune's circumstances had, if anything, grown easier than before; she suffered not the least oppression, or want, or constraint.

It was true, certainly, that this thing called Muenzaka had newly come into being.

But unlike other men in the world, he had not, on that account, grown cold toward his wife, or harsh with her.

If anything, he treated her more kindly, more generously than before.

The doorway, he thought, still stood open as ever.

Of course there was self-interest mixed into this reasoning of Suezo's.

For even if what he did materially for his wife remained unchanged, and even if his words and manner toward her remained unchanged, to ask her to feel that the present, now that a woman called Otama existed, was the same as the past, when she had not existed, was an unreasonable demand.

Was not Otama, for Otsune, a thorn lodged in her very eye?

And had he himself any intention of drawing out that thorn and setting her mind at rest?

To be sure, Otsune was not a woman given to reasoning things out logically, and so she was not clearly conscious of any of this; but the doorway Suezo spoke of was not, in fact, still standing open.

Across the doorway through which Otsune might have glimpsed her present peace of mind, or her hopes for the future, a heavy black shadow had fallen.

One day, after a quarrel, Suezo darted suddenly out of the house.

It must have been a little past ten in the morning.

He thought at first of going straight to Muenzaka, but as luck would have it the maid was out with the youngest child on the street in Shichikencho, so he deliberately cut through toward Kiridoshi instead, and walked on with no particular destination in mind, hurrying as if on urgent business, from Tenjincho toward Gokencho.

Now and again he muttered under his breath such disreputable words as "damn it"

"the swine"

and the like.

As he was crossing Shohei Bridge, a geisha came toward him from the opposite direction.

He thought she resembled Otama in some way, but when he looked closely as she passed beside him, her face was covered in freckles.

The moment he thought, after all, Otama is the finer beauty, he felt a rush of pleasure and satisfaction, and stood for a while on the bridge watching the geisha's retreating figure.

Probably out on some errand, the freckled geisha disappeared down the side street by the Kobusho.

He strolled on past the foot of the Meganebashi, which was still enough of a novelty in those days to be worth a look, heading toward Yanagihara.

Beneath the willows along the riverbank a man had set up a great umbrella, and under it was making a girl of twelve or thirteen dance the kappore.

Around them, as always, a crowd had gathered to watch.

Suezo paused a moment to watch the dance, when a man in a livery coat, nearly colliding with him, swerved aside and passed on.

Suezo, quick-eyed, turned to look, and his gaze met the man's for an instant before the fellow turned his back and hurried on.

"...What's this, can't he see where he's going,"

Suezo muttered, feeling with the hand he had tucked into his sleeve for whatever he carried inside his robe.

Of course nothing had been taken.

The pickpocket had, in fact, truly failed to see what was before his eyes.

For on days when he had quarreled with his wife, Suezo's nerves were strung tight, and he noticed things he would ordinarily let pass unremarked.

His already keen senses grew keener still.

He could sense the pickpocket's intent to rob him even before the man himself had fully formed it.

At such times even Suezo, who prided himself on his self-command, found that command somewhat slackened.

But most people would never have noticed it.

Had there been someone of unusually sharp perception watching Suezo closely, he might have noticed that Suezo had grown somewhat more talkative than usual.

And he might have noticed, too, in the way Suezo fussed over people and spoke words of apparent kindness, some faint air of haste, something faintly unnatural.

Feeling that a good deal of time must have passed since he had bolted from the house, Suezo turned back along the riverbank and took out his pocket watch to look.

It was only just eleven.

Not even thirty minutes had passed since he had left the house.

Suezo walked on again with no destination in mind, from Awajicho toward Jinbocho, looking for all the world as though he had some urgent errand.

A little short of Imagawa Koji there stood, in those days, a house with a sign reading Ochazuke.

For about twenty sen they would set out a tray, with pickles and even tea besides.

Suezo knew the place, and thought of stopping in for his midday meal, but it was still a little early for that.

Passing it by, he turned right and came out onto the broad street just before Manaita Bridge.

This street did not run broadly all the way down to the foot of Surugadai as it does now.

It was almost like a blind alley, ending at the very spot where Suezo had just turned, and beyond that ran a narrow side street, which medical students had nicknamed the vermiform appendix, passing by a small shrine with a post carved in the calligraphy of Yamaoka Tesshu.

This was because they likened the broad, dead-end street before Manaita Bridge to the cecum itself.

Suezo crossed Manaita Bridge.

On the right stood a shop selling caged birds, from which came the lively chatter of birds of every kind.

Suezo stopped in front of this shop, which stands there still today, and looked over the cages of parrots and mynah birds hung high beneath the eaves, and the cages of white doves and Korean doves set out below, and then moved his eyes to the small birds' cages stacked in tiers further back.

For singing and for flying about, these small ones were the loudest and liveliest of the lot, but most numerous and noisiest of all were the bright yellow foreign canaries.

But as he went on looking closely, it was the strawberry finches, their small bodies colored in a deep, vivid hue, that caught Suezo's eye.

It occurred to him, on the spot, that if he bought a pair and took them to Otama to keep, they would suit her very well indeed.

So he asked the price of the old man, who seemed none too eager to sell, and bought a pair of strawberry finches.

When he had paid for them, the old man asked how he meant to carry them off.

Suezo said he had supposed they were sold in a cage, but the old man said they were not.

After some trouble he managed to have the old man let him buy a cage as well, and had the finches put into it.

The old man thrust his withered hand roughly into the cage where several birds were kept, snatched out two, and moved them into the empty cage.

Asked whether he could tell a hen bird from a cock, he answered reluctantly, "Aye,"

he said.

Suezo took up the cage of finches and turned back toward Manaita Bridge.

His pace was slower now, and now and again he would lift the cage and peer in at the birds inside.

The mood in which he had stormed out of the house after their quarrel had vanished as if wiped away, and the gentle heart that ordinarily lay hidden somewhere within this man had risen to the surface.

The birds in the cage, perhaps frightened by its swaying, gripped their perch tightly, drew their wings in close, and did not stir at all.

Each time he peered in, Suezo thought he could hardly wait to carry them to the house on Muenzaka and hang them by the window.

Passing through Imagawa Koji, Suezo stopped at the tea-rice shop for his midday meal.

He set the cage of finches down beyond the black-lacquered tray the serving girl had brought, and with his eyes on the dear little birds and his heart on his dear Otama, Suezo ate the plain fare of the tea-rice shop as though it were a feast.

XVIII

The strawberry finches Suezo had bought for Otama became, quite by chance, the go-between that brought Otama and Okada to exchange words at last.

Telling this story brings back to me the weather of that year.

In those days my late father grew autumn flowers in the back garden of our house at Kitasenju, and when I went home from Kamijo on a Saturday, he had bought a great many slender bamboo stakes, saying the two-hundred-tenth day was drawing near, and was tying one to each of the maiden flowers and the mistflowers to prop them up.

But the two-hundred-tenth day passed without incident.

Then it was said the two-hundred-twentieth day would be the dangerous one, but that too passed without incident.

Yet from about that time the look of the clouds grew unsettled day after day, and the sky wore a threatening look.

Now and then it turned so close and sultry that one might have thought summer had come back.

A wind out of the southeast would seem about to rise, and then die down again.

My father said the two-hundred-tenth day had come

"by installments," as he put it.

I came back from Kitasenju to Kamijo one Sunday evening.

All the students were out, and the boarding house was hushed and still.

I went into my room, and after sitting there vacantly for a while, I heard the scratch of a match being struck in the next room, which I had thought empty.

Feeling lonely just then, I called out at once.

"...Okada. Are you in there?"

"...Mm."

It was a voice I could hardly tell was an answer at all.

Okada and I had grown quite easy with each other by then, and had long since dropped any formality between us, but even so, this answer of his was unlike his usual way.

I thought to myself,

here I've been sitting in a daze myself, but it seems Okada was sitting in one too.