I responded with a question of a completely different order. "What's the situation with the household property?"

"I've no idea. Father hasn't said a thing about it yet. But as far as actual money goes, it won't amount to much, I'm sure."

As for my mother, she continued to fret over the awaited letter from Sensei, badgering me with reminders about it.

CHAPTER 51.

"Who is this Sensei you keep talking about?" my brother asked.

"I told you about him the other day, remember?" I replied crossly, annoyed that he could so easily forget the answer to a question he himself had asked.

"Yes, I know what you said then." He was implying that what I'd said didn't explain it.

Personally, I felt no need to bother trying to explain Sensei to my brother. But I was angry. That's just like him, That's just like him, I thought. I thought.

My brother was a.s.suming that since I so evidently respected this man I honored with the name Sensei, he must be someone of distinction in the world, at the very least a professor at the university. What could be impressive about someone who had made no name for himself and did nothing?

This instinct of my brother was in complete accord with my father's. But while my father had jumped to the conclusion that Sensei was living an idle life because he was incapable of doing anything, my brother spoke in terms that dismissed him as hopelessly lazing about despite his abilities.

"Egoists are worthless types. It's sheer brazen laziness to spend your life doing nothing. A man's talent amounts to nothing if he won't set it to work and do all he can with it."

I felt like retorting that my brother didn't seem to understand the meaning of the word egoist, egoist, which he was bandying about. which he was bandying about.

"Still," he added as an afterthought, "if this fellow can find you a position, it's a fine thing. Father's delighted at the prospect as well, you know."

As for me, I couldn't believe Sensei could do such a thing until he gave me a clear answer; nor did I have the courage to claim otherwise. But thanks to my mother's announcement of her hasty conclusions, I could not suddenly turn around and deny it. My longing for a letter from Sensei needed no urging from her, and I prayed that when it came, it might somehow fulfill everyone's hopes with word of a position that would make me a living. Faced with the expectations of my father, so close to death, my mother with her urgent desire that he should be somehow rea.s.sured, and my brother and his statements that a man wasn't fully human unless he worked, and indeed all the other relatives, I found myself tormented by an issue that I privately cared nothing about.

Not long afterward my father vomited a strange yellow substance, and I recalled the danger that Sensei and his wife had spoken of.

"His stomach must be upset from being bedridden for so long," my mother concluded. Tears came to my eyes to see how little she understood.

When my brother and I met in the sitting room, he said, "Did you hear?" He was referring to something the doctor had said to him as he was leaving.

I needed no explanation to understand its import.

My brother looked at me over his shoulder. "Would you like to come back home and manage the place?"

I could make no reply.

"Mother won't be able to cope with it on her own," he went on. Apparently he was perfectly happy to let me rot here in the dank and dreary countryside. "You can do all the reading you like in the country, and you wouldn't have to work. It'd suit you down to the ground."

"The elder son's the one who ought to come back," I said.

"How could I do that?" he said, curtly dismissing the suggestion. He was driven by the powerful urge to work in the wider world. "If you don't want to do it, I suppose we could ask our uncle to help out, but someone will have to take Mother in."

"The first big question is whether she'd be willing to leave here or not."

Even while our father still lived, we were talking at cross-purposes about what would happen after his death.

CHAPTER 52.

In his delirium my father sometimes spoke aloud.

"General Nogi fills me with shame," he mumbled from time to time. "Mortified to think of it-no, I'll be following His Majesty very soon too."

These words disturbed my mother. She did her best to gather everyone at his bedside. That seemed to be what my father wanted, as whenever he was fully conscious, he constantly complained of loneliness.

He was particularly upset if he looked around and found no sign of my mother. "Where's Omitsu?" he would ask, and even when he did not speak the question, it was evident in his eyes. I would often stand and go to call her. She would leave what she had begun to do and come to the sickroom, saying, "Is there anything I can do?" but sometimes he would simply gaze wordlessly at her. At other times he would talk about something quite irrelevant. Or he would surprise her by saying gently, "You've been very good to me, Omitsu." At this my mother's eyes would always fill with tears. Then, however, she would remember his earlier, healthy self and remark, "He sounds so tender now, but he was quite a tyrant in the old days, you know."

She told the tale of how he had beaten her on the back with a broomstick. My brother and I had heard the story many times before, but now we listened with very different feelings, hearing in her words a precious recollection of one, as it were, already dead.

Though the dark shadow of death hovered before his eyes, my father still did not speak of how he wished his estate to be managed after death.

"Don't you think we should ask while there's still time?" my brother said, looking anxiously at me.

"Yes, I guess so," I replied. I could see arguments both for and against bringing up the subject when he was so ill.

We decided in the end to take the question to our uncle before making a final decision, but he too scratched his head over the problem. "It would be a great pity if he died leaving things he wanted to say unsaid, but on the other hand, it doesn't seem right to press things from our side."

The question ended up bogged down in indecision. And then my father slipped into unconsciousness. My mother, as innocent as ever, mistook it for sleep, and was quite pleased. "It's a relief for everyone around if he can sleep as well as this," she said.

Occasionally my father would suddenly open his eyes and ask after one or another of us, always someone who had only just left his bedside. He seemed to have dark and light areas of consciousness, and the light part wove its way through the darkness like a discontinuous white thread, now there, now gone again. It was natural enough that my mother should confuse his comatose state for sleep.

Then his words grew tangled. Sentences he began would end in confusion, so that often his speech made no sense. Yet when he first began to speak, it was in a voice so strong it seemed incredible that it emerged from one on his deathbed. Meanwhile whenever we spoke to him, we had to raise our voices and bring our lips close to his ear.

"Does that feel good, when I cool your head?"

"Mm."

The nurse and I changed his water pillow, then laid a fresh ice pack on his head, pressing it gently to the bald area above his forehead, until the sharp little fragments of chopped ice inside the bag settled with a harsh rustle.

Just then my brother came in from the corridor and silently handed me a postal item. My right hand on the ice pack, I took it with my left, and as my hand received the weight, I registered puzzled surprise.

It was considerably heavier than the usual letter. It wasn't in a normal-size envelope; indeed, it was too bulky to fit in one. The package was wrapped in a piece of white writing paper, carefully pasted down. As soon as I took it from my brother, I realized it had been sent by registered mail. Turning it over, I saw Sensei's name, written in a careful hand. Busy as I was just then, I couldn't open the letter right away, so I slipped it into the breast of my kimono.

CHAPTER 53.

That day my father's condition seemed particularly bad. At one point, when I left the room to go to the toilet, I ran into my brother in the corridor.

"Where are you off to?" he asked sharply, challenging me almost like a watch guard. "We must try to be constantly with him. He seems in bad shape."

I thought so too and returned to the sickroom without touching the letter I had tucked away.

My father opened his eyes and asked my mother to tell him who was present. She carefully named us one by one, and at each name he nodded. If he failed to nod, she raised her voice and repeated the name, asking if he understood.

"Thank you all very much," my father said with careful formality, then sank back into unconsciousness. Everyone gathered around his bed watched him in silence for a while. Finally someone got up and went into the next room. Then another left. I was the third to leave at last and go off to my room. I intended to open the letter I had earlier slipped into my breast. I could, of course, easily have done this at the bedside, but the letter was evidently so long that I couldn't have read it all then and there, so I stole some special time to myself to devote to the task.

I tore roughly at the strong, fibrous paper that wrapped it. When I got it open, what emerged was a doc.u.ment written in a clear hand on ruled ma.n.u.script paper that had been folded in quarters to post. I bent back the kinks of the folds to straighten the pages for ease of reading.

My astonished heart wondered what this great bulk of pages and its inked writing might tell me. Simultaneously, I was anxious about what was happening in the sickroom. I was in no state of mind to settle down calmly and read Sensei's letter-I had a strong foreboding that if I began it, something would have happened to my father before I finished, or at the least someone would call me to his bedside. Nervously, I ran my eye over the first page. This is what it said: "When you asked me that day about my past, I had not the courage to reply, but I believe I have now achieved the freedom to lay the story clearly before you. This freedom, however, is merely circ.u.mstantial and will be lost if I wait until your return to Tokyo, and if I do not make use of it while I may, I will have forever missed the chance to present you with the story of my past, which will then become indirectly your own experience. If this opportunity is missed, that firm promise I made to you will have come to naught. Therefore, I must relate with my pen the words I should be speaking to you."

Only when I had read this far did I fully understand why he had written this long missive. I had believed all along that he would not bother sending a letter on the trivial question of my future employment. But why should Sensei, who disliked writing, have felt the urge to write about the past at such length? Why had it been impossible for him to wait until I returned?

I am telling you because I am now free to. But that freedom will soon be lost forever. I turned the words over and over in my head, struggling to understand. Then a sudden anxiety flooded me. I returned to the letter, determined to read on, but at this moment there came a shout from my brother, calling to me from the sickroom. Startled, I jumped to my feet and ran down the corridor to join the others. I was prepared for this to be my father's end. I turned the words over and over in my head, struggling to understand. Then a sudden anxiety flooded me. I returned to the letter, determined to read on, but at this moment there came a shout from my brother, calling to me from the sickroom. Startled, I jumped to my feet and ran down the corridor to join the others. I was prepared for this to be my father's end.

CHAPTER 54.

The doctor had appeared in the sickroom and was giving my father another enema in an attempt to ease his discomfort. The nurse, who had stayed up with him all night, was asleep in another room. Unused to such scenes, my brother was standing there looking unnerved. "Lend us a hand here," he said when he saw me, and sat down again. I took his place by the bedside, helping out by holding the piece of oiled paper under my father's b.u.t.tocks.

My father began to look a little more comfortable. The doctor stayed with him for about half an hour and checked the results of the enema, then left, saying he'd be back. As he was on his way out, he made a point of telling us we should call him at any time if something untoward occurred.

Even though something seemed likely to happen at any moment, I left the fraught atmosphere of the sickroom to make another attempt to read Sensei's letter. But I was quite unable to compose myself and give the words my attention. As soon as I was settled at my desk, I fully expected my brother to call out for me again, and my hand holding the letter shook with fear that this time it really would be the end.

I flipped abstractedly through the pages, my eyes taking in the careful script that filled the little squares of the ma.n.u.script paper but completely unable to concentrate enough to read it. I could barely even skim it for a general sense of what was written.

I went through page after page until I reached the last, then began to fold them up to leave on the desk. As I did so, a couple of lines near the close of the letter caught my eye.

"When this letter reaches your hands, I will no longer be in this world. I will be long dead."

I caught my breath. My heart, until that moment agitated and distracted, instantly froze. I ran my eyes hastily back through the letter from the end, picking up a sentence here or there on each page. My eyes attempted to pierce the flickering words pa.s.sing in front of them, in a desperate attempt to gain an understanding. All I wanted was rea.s.surance that Sensei was safe. His past, that vague past that he had promised to explain, was completely beside the point in my present state of urgent need.

At length, having run through the letter backward, I gave up and folded the pages, infuriated by this long letter that refused to give me the information I sought.

I returned to the doorway of the sickroom, to check on my father's condition. All was unusually quiet around him. I beckoned to my mother, who was sitting there looking faint from weariness, and asked how he was. "He seems unchanged for the moment," she replied.

I lowered my head to his face and asked, "How are you? Was the enema any help?"

My father nodded. "Thanks," he said in a clear voice. His mind seemed surprisingly lucid.

Retreating to my room once more, I checked the clock against the train timetable. Suddenly I stood, tightened my kimono belt, and thrust Sensei's letter into my sleeve. I went out through the backdoor. Frantically, I ran to the doctor's house-I had to ask him to tell me plainly whether my father would survive a few more days, to beg him to use injections or some means to keep him alive a little longer.

Unfortunately, the doctor was out. I had neither the time nor the patience to await his return. I climbed into a rickshaw and hurried on to the station.

Once there, I penciled a letter to my mother and brother, holding the page against the station wall. It was very brief, but I judged it was better than simply running off without apology or explanation, so I gave it to the rickshaw man and asked him to hurry and deliver it. Then, with the vigor of decision, I leaped onto the Tokyo-bound train.

Seated in the thundering third-cla.s.s carriage, I retrieved Sensei's letter from my sleeve and at last read it from beginning to end.

PART III.

SENSEI'S TESTAMENT

CHAPTER 55.

I have had two or three letters from you this summer. I seem to remember that in the second or third you asked my aid in securing a suitable position. When I read this, I had the impulse to help in some way. At the very least I should have replied, and I felt bad that I did not. But I must confess that I made absolutely no effort in response to your request. Living, as you know, not so much in a confined social milieu as entirely cut off from the social world, I simply had no means of doing so.

But this was not my real problem. Truth to tell, I was just then struggling with the question of what to do about myself. Should I continue as I was, like a walking mummy doomed to remain in the human world, or . . . but whenever I whispered in my heart this or or, a horror overcame me. I was like a man who rushes to the edge of a cliff and suddenly finds himself gazing down into a bottomless chasm. I was a coward, suffering precisely the agony that all cowards suffer. Sorry as I am to admit it, the simple truth is that your existence was the last thing on my mind. Indeed, to put it bluntly, the question of your work, of how you should earn a living, was utterly meaningless to me. I didn't care. It was the least of my problems. I left your letter in the letter rack, folded my arms, and returned to my thoughts. Far from feeling sympathetic, I did no more than cast a bitter glance your way-a fellow from a family with a decent amount of property, only just graduated, and already making a fuss about a job! I confess this to you now by way of explanation for my unforgivable failure to respond. I am not being intentionally rude to stir your anger. I believe that as you read on, you will fully understand. At all events, I neglected to reply as I should have done, and I now apologize for my remissness.

Afterward I sent you a telegram. In truth I rather wanted to see you just then. I wanted to tell you the story of my past, as you had asked. When you replied that you could not come to Tokyo, I sat for a long time gazing at the telegram in disappointment. You must have felt that your brief response was not enough, for you then wrote me that long letter, from which I understood the circ.u.mstances that held you at home. I have no cause to consider you rude. How could you have left your dear sick father back at home and come? Indeed, it was wrong of me to have summoned you so high-handedly, ignoring the problem of your father's health-I had forgotten about him when I sent that telegram, I must admit. This despite the fact that I was the one who so earnestly advised you to take good care of him and emphasized how dangerous his illness was. I am an inconsistent creature. Perhaps it is the pressure of my past, and not my own perverse mind, that has made me into this contradictory being. I am all too well aware of this fault in myself. You must forgive me.

When I read your letter-the last letter you wrote-I realized I had done wrong. I thought of writing to that effect, but I took up my pen, then laid it down again without writing a line. If I were to write to you, it must be this letter, you see, and the time for that had not yet quite come. That is why I sent the simple telegram saying you need not come.

CHAPTER 56.

I then began to write this letter. Being unaccustomed to writing, I have agonized over the difficulty of describing my thoughts and experiences precisely as I wanted. Time and again I almost reached the point of giving up and abandoning the effort to fulfill my promise to you. But it was useless to put down the pen and decide to stop. Within an hour, the urge to write would return. You may well attribute this simply to my nature, as someone who is meticulous about promises and obligations. I don't deny it. Being, as you know, quite isolated from human intercourse, I have not a single truly binding obligation in my life. Whether intentionally or by nature, I have lived so as to keep such ties to an absolute minimum. Not that I am indifferent to obligation. No, I spend my days so pa.s.sively because of my very sensitivity to such things-I lack the energy to withstand the toll they take on my nerves. And so once I make a promise, it distresses me deeply if I do not fulfill it. It is partly in order to avoid being distressed on account of you that I must keep taking up the pen.

Besides, I want to write. I want to write about my past, quite aside from the obligation involved. My past is my own experience-one might call it my personal property. And perhaps, being property, it could be thought a pity not to pa.s.s it on to someone else before I die. This is certainly more or less how I feel about it. But I would rather that my experience be buried with me than be pa.s.sed to someone incapable of receiving it. In truth, if you did not exist, my past would have remained just that and would not become someone else's knowledge even at second hand. Among the many millions of j.a.panese, it is to you alone that I want to tell the story of my past. Because you are sincere. You are serious in your desire to learn real lessons from life.