"Even if it means disclosing my past?"

The word disclose disclose had a frightening ring. Suddenly the man seated before me was not the Sensei I loved and respected but a criminal. His face was pale. had a frightening ring. Suddenly the man seated before me was not the Sensei I loved and respected but a criminal. His face was pale.

"Are you truly in earnest?" Sensei asked. "My past experiences have made me suspicious of people, so I must admit I mistrust you too. But you are the sole exception; I have no desire to suspect you. You seem too straightforward and open for that. I want to have trusted even just one person before I die, you know. Can you be that person? Would you do that for me? Are you sincerely in earnest, from your heart?"

"If what I've just said is not in earnest, then my life is a lie." My voice shook.

"Good," said Sensei. "I shall speak, then. I'll tell you the story of my past and leave nothing out. And in return . . . But no, that doesn't matter. But my past may not actually be as useful for you as you expect, you know. You may be better off not hearing about it. Besides, I can't tell you right now-please wait until I can. It requires a suitable moment."

Even after I returned to my lodgings that evening, my memory of this conversation continued to oppress me.

CHAPTER 32.

Apparently my teachers did not find my thesis quite as good as I thought it was. Nevertheless, I managed to pa.s.s. On the day of graduation I retrieved from the trunk my musty old formal winter wear and put it on. Up and down the rows of graduating students in the ceremony hall, every face looked heat-oppressed, and my own body, sealed tightly in thick wool impenetrable to any breeze, sweltered uncomfortably. I had been standing only a short time when the handkerchief I held was sodden with sweat.

As soon as the ceremony was over, I went back to my room, stripped off, and opened my second-floor window. Holding the tightly rolled diploma up to my eye like a telescope, I gazed through it, out over the world. Then I tossed it onto my desk and flung myself down spread-eagle in the middle of the floor. Lying there, I reviewed my past and imagined my future. This diploma stood like a boundary marker between the one and the other. It was a strange doc.u.ment indeed, I decided, both significant and meaningless.

That evening I was to dine at Sensei's house. We had agreed beforehand that if I managed to graduate, I would keep the evening free for a celebratory dinner at his home.

As promised, the dining table had been moved into the living room, close to the veranda. The patterned tablecloth, thick and crisply starched, glowed with a fine white purity beneath the electric light. Whenever I dined at Sensei's, the chopsticks and bowls were placed on this white linen that seemed to have come straight from some Western restaurant; the cloth was always freshly laundered.

"It's just as with collar and cuffs," Sensei remarked. "If you're going to have dirty ones, you might as well go for color in the first place. If it's white, it must be purest white."

Sensei was, in fact, a fastidious man-his study too was always meticulously tidy. Being rather careless myself, this aspect of him occasionally struck me quite forcibly.

Once I mentioned to his wife how finicky he seemed, and she replied, "But he doesn't pay much attention to the clothes he wears." Sensei, who had been sitting nearby at the time, laughed, "It's true, I'm psychologically finicky. It's a constant problem for me. What a ridiculous way to be, eh?"

I was not sure whether he meant that he was what we would call highly strung or intellectually fastidious. His wife didn't seem to grasp his meaning either.

This evening I was again seated across the table from Sensei with the white tablecloth between us. His wife sat at the end of the table, facing the garden.

"Congratulations," Sensei said to me, raising his sake cup. The gesture did not make me particularly happy, however. This was partly due to my own rather somber mood, but I also felt that Sensei's tone was not of the cheerful kind calculated to excite joy. Certainly he raised his cup and smiled, and I detected no irony in his expression, but I felt a distinct lack of any genuine pleasure at my success. His smile said, I guess this is the kind of situation in which people usually congratulate someone. I guess this is the kind of situation in which people usually congratulate someone.

"Well done," his wife said to me. "Your father and mother must be very happy."

Suddenly the image of my sick father rose in my mind. I had to hurry home and show him my diploma, I decided.

"What did you do with your certificate, Sensei?" I asked.

"I wonder. Would it still be tucked away somewhere?" he asked his wife.

"Yes, I would have put it away somewhere," she replied.

Neither of them knew what had become of it, it seemed.

CHAPTER 33.

In Sensei's house, when a meal with informal guests had progressed to the point where the rice was served, his wife dismissed the maid and served us herself. This was the custom. The first few times I dined there, it made me feel rather awkward, but once I grew more used to it, I had no difficulty handing her my empty bowl for refilling.

"More tea? More rice? You certainly eat, don't you?" she would say teasingly, completely unabashed at her own directness.

But that day, with the summer heat beginning, my normally large appet.i.te deserted me.

"So that's all? You've begun eating like a bird lately."

"No, it's just that I can't eat a lot when it's hot like this."

She called the maid and had her clear the table, then ordered ice cream and fruit to be served.

"I made it myself," she explained. Sensei's wife was at such loose ends, it seemed, that she could take the time to make her own ice cream for guests. I had several helpings.

"So now that you've graduated," said Sensei, "what do you plan to do next?" He had half-turned his cushion toward the garden and was leaning back against the sliding doors at the edge of the veranda.

I was only conscious that I had graduated; I had not yet decided on any next step. Seeing me hesitate, Sensei's wife intervened. "Teaching?" she asked. When I did not reply, she tried again: "The civil service, then?"

Sensei and I both burst out laughing. "To be honest," I said, "I haven't any plan at all yet. I haven't even so much as thought about what profession to enter, actually. I can't see how I can choose, really, since I don't know what's a good profession and what's not until I try them out."

"That's true enough," she responded. "But after all, you'll inherit property, so it's natural that you'd feel relaxed about the question. Just take a look at others who aren't so fortunate. They're far from able to be so blithe."

Some of my friends had been searching for positions as middle-school teachers since well before graduation, so her words were true. I privately acknowledged that but what I said was "I may have been a bit infected by Sensei."

"Oh dear, he's not a good influence, I'm afraid."

Sensei grimaced. "I don't mind if you're influenced by me. What I'd like is for you to make sure, while your father is still alive, that you get a decent inheritance, as I said the other day. You mustn't relax until that's sorted out."

I recalled our conversation back in early May in the s.p.a.cious grounds of the nursery garden among the flowering azaleas. Those forceful words, spoken with emotion as we were walking back, echoed in my mind. They were not only forceful, those words, they were terrible. Ignorant of his past as I was, I could not fully make sense of them.

"Are you very well off?" I asked Sensei's wife.

"Now why should you ask such a question?"

"Because Sensei won't tell me the answer."

She smiled and looked at Sensei. "That would be because we're not well off enough to make it worth mentioning."

"I'd like to know, so that when I go home and talk to my father, I'll have some idea of how much I'd need to live as Sensei does." Sensei was facing the garden, calmly puffing on his cigarette, so I naturally addressed his wife.

"Well, it's not really a question of how much, you know . . . I mean, we get by, one way and another . . . Anyway, that's beside the point. The point is, you really must find something to do in life. You can't just laze around like Sensei does . . ."

Sensei turned slightly. "I don't just laze around," he protested.

CHAPTER 34.

That night it was after ten when I left Sensei's house. I was due to go back to my family home in two or three days, so I said my farewells as I left.

"I won't be seeing you for a while," I explained.

"You'll be back in September, won't you?" Sensei's wife asked.

Having graduated, I had in fact no reason to come back to Tokyo in September. Nor did I fancy the idea of returning to the city in August, at the height of the hot summer. In fact, since I felt no urgency to search for work, I could come back or not as I wished.

"Yes, I guess it'll be around September."

"Well, then, take good care, won't you? We may end up going somewhere ourselves over the summer. It promises to be very hot. If we do, we'll send you a postcard."

"Where do you have in mind, if you were to go somewhere?"

Sensei was grinning as he listened to this conversation. "Actually, we haven't even decided whether we're going or not."

As I rose to leave, Sensei held me back. "How is your father's illness, by the way?" he asked.

I had had very little news on the subject, I replied, so I could only a.s.sume that he was not seriously ill.

"You can't make such easy a.s.sumptions about an illness like his, you know," he reminded me. "If he develops uremia, it's all up with him."

I had never heard the term uremia uremia and did not know what it meant. Such technical terms had not come up in my discussion with the local doctor back during the winter vacation. and did not know what it meant. Such technical terms had not come up in my discussion with the local doctor back during the winter vacation.

"Do look after him well," Sensei's wife added. "If the poison goes to his brain, he's finished, you know. It's no laughing matter."

This unnerved me, but I managed to grin. "Well, there's no point in worrying, I guess, since they say it's not an illness you recover from."

"If you can approach it so matter-of-factly, no more need be said, I suppose," she replied, and looked down, subdued. I guessed she was recalling her mother, who had died of the same illness many years ago. Now I felt genuinely sad at the thought of my father's fate.

Sensei suddenly turned to her. "Do you think you'll die before me, Shizu?"

"Why?"

"No particular reason, I'm just asking. Or will I move on before you do? The general rule is that the husband goes first, and the wife is left behind."

"That's not always so, by any means. But the husband is generally the older one, isn't he?"

"You mean therefore he dies first? Well, then, I'll have to die before you do, won't I?"

"You're a special case."

"You think so?"

"Well, look at you. You're just fine. You've almost never had a day's illness. No, it's certainly going to be me first."

"You first, you think?"

"Definitely."

Sensei looked at me. I smiled.

"But just say it turns out to be me who goes first. What would you do then?"

"What would I do . . ." Sensei's wife faltered, seeming stricken by a sudden apprehension of the grief she would feel. But then she raised her face again, her mood brighter.

"Well, there'd be nothing I could do, would there? Death comes when it will, as the saying goes." She spoke jokingly, but her eyes were fixed on me.

CHAPTER 35.

I had been about to leave, but once this conversation was under way, I settled back into my seat again.

Sensei turned to me. "What do you think?"

I was in no position to judge whether Sensei or his wife would be first to die, so I simply smiled and remarked, "Who can foretell allotted life spans?"

"Yes, that's what it amounts to, isn't it," Sensei's wife responded. "We each receive a given span of years, and there's nothing we can do about it. That's exactly what happened with Sensei's mother and father, you know."

"They died on the same day?"

"Oh no, not quite the same day, of course, but just about the same-one died soon after the other."

I was struck by this new piece of information. "Why did they die so close together?"

She was about to answer when Sensei broke in. "That's enough of this subject. It's pointless." He gave his fan a few boisterous flaps, then turned to his wife. "I'll give you this house when I die, Shizu."

She laughed. "And the earth under it too, if you don't mind."

"The earth belongs to someone else, so we can't do much about that. But I'll give you everything I own."

"Thank you. But I couldn't do much with those foreign books of yours, you know."