CHAPTER 59
The first time I returned from Tokyo for the summer holidays, my uncle and aunt had moved into the house where I had suffered through the death of my parents, and were now ensconced there. This had been decided on before I left for Tokyo. It was the only thing to be done, since I was the only remaining person in our family, and no longer living there myself.
My uncle, I recall, was involved with a number of companies in the town at the time. When we were discussing how to arrange things so that I would be free to go to Tokyo, he had remarked half-jokingly that it would actually be more convenient for him to stay in his home in town to attend to his work, rather than move out to this house five miles away. My family home was an old and important one in the area, fairly well known to the local people. As you probably know, to demolish or sell an old house with a history when there is an heir who could live there is a serious matter. Nowadays I would not let such things bother me, but I was still essentially a child. The problem of leaving the house empty while I was living in Tokyo was a great worry for me.
My uncle grudgingly agreed to move into the empty house that now belonged to me. But he insisted he would need to keep his house in town and move to and fro between the two as the need arose. I was, of course, in no position to object. I was happy to accept any conditions as long as I could get to Tokyo.
Child that I still was, I looked back with a warm nostalgia on the house I had now left. I felt about it as a traveler feels about the home to which he will one day return. For all that I had longed to leave it for Tokyo, I had a strong compulsion to go back there when the summer holidays came, and I often had dreams of the house I would return to after the hard study and fun of the term were over.
I do not know just how my uncle divided his time between the two places while I was away, but when I arrived in the summer, the whole family was gathered there under a single roof. I imagine that the children were there for the holidays, although they would have lived in town for most of the year to attend school.
Everyone was delighted to see me, and I was happy to find the house so much livelier and more cheerful than it had been in my parents’ day. My uncle moved his eldest son out of the room that had been mine so that I could occupy it again. There were quite enough rooms to go around, and at first I demurred, saying I didn’t mind where I slept. But he would not hear of it. “It’s your house,” he told me.
Recollections of my dead mother and father were all that disturbed the pleasure of the summer I spent with my uncle’s family before returning to Tokyo. But one event did cast a faint shadow across my heart. Although I had barely begun my college life, my uncle and aunt both urged me to consider marrying. They must have repeated it three or four times. The first time they brought up the subject, it was so unexpected that I was no more than taken aback. The second time I made my refusal clear. When they brought it up a third time, I was forced to ask their reasons for pressing marriage on me in this way. Their answer was brief and straightforward. They simply wanted me to make an early marriage so that I could come back to live in the house and become my father’s heir.
Personally, all I wanted to do was to come back during vacations. I was familiar enough with country ways to understand this talk of succeeding my father and the consequent need for a wife, of course, and I was not even really against the idea. But I had only just gone to Tokyo to pursue my studies, and to me it was all in some distant future landscape, seen as it were through a telescope. I left the house without consenting to my uncle’s wish.
CHAPTER 60
I forgot all about this talk of marriage. None of the young fellows around me, after all, had the air of responsible householders—all seemed their own men, individual and free of constraints. If I had penetrated below the apparent happiness, I might have found some whom family circumstance had already forced to marry, but I was too young and innocent to be aware of such things then. Besides, anyone who found himself in that kind of situation would have kept it to himself as far as possible, considering it private and quite irrelevant to a student’s life. I now realize that I was already in this category myself, but in my innocence I continued to pursue my studies contentedly.
At the end of the school year I once more packed my trunk and returned to the home that held my parents’ graves. Once again I found my uncle and aunt and their children in the house where my parents used to live. Nothing had changed. I breathed again the familiar scent of my home, a scent still filled with nostalgic memories. Needless to say, I also welcomed being back there as a relief from the monotony of the year’s studies.
But even as I breathed this scent, so redolent of the air I had grown up in, my uncle suddenly thrust the question of marriage under my nose again. He repeated his line from my previous visit, giving the same reason as before. But while the summer before he had had no particular woman in mind, this time I was disconcerted to learn that a prospective wife had been selected for me. She was my uncle’s daughter—in other words, my own cousin. Marrying her would suit both of us, he maintained, and furthermore my father had actually spoken of it before he died. Put this way, I supposed it was a suitable enough arrangement, and I easily accepted that my father could have had that conversation with my uncle. I was certainly rather surprised, since this was the first time I had heard of it. My uncle’s request seemed perfectly reasonable and comprehensible, however.
No doubt I should not have taken his words on faith. But what primarily concerned me was that I felt quite indifferent to this younger daughter of my uncle. We’d been close ever since childhood, when I had been a constant visitor at my uncle’s house in town, not only on day visits but also as an overnight guest. As you will know, romantic love never develops between siblings. I may be stretching the interpretation of this well-known fact, but it seems to me that between any male and female who have been close and in continual contact, such great intimacy rules out the fresh response necessary to stimulate feelings of romantic love. Just as you can only really smell incense in the first moments after it is lit, or taste wine in that instant of the first sip, the impulse of love springs from a single, perilous moment in time, I feel. If this moment slips casually by unnoticed, intimacy may grow as the two become accustomed to each other, but the impulse to romantic love will be numbed. And so, consider it as I might, I could not find it in me to marry my cousin.
My uncle said that if I wanted, I could put off the marriage until after my graduation. “But,” he went on, “we should ‘seize the day,’ as the saying goes, and perform the basic exchange of marriage cups as soon as possible.”1 The question of when it should happen was of no concern to me, since I felt no interest in the bride. I reiterated my refusal. My uncle looked unsatisfied, and my cousin wept. Hers were not tears of regret that she could not take her place beside me; they were the tears of a humiliated woman who has sought marriage and been rejected. I knew perfectly well that she loved me as little as I loved her. I went back to Tokyo.
CHAPTER 61
A year later, at the beginning of the following summer, I went back home for the third time. As always, I couldn’t wait to finish final exams and get out of Tokyo, which indicates how much I longed for my home. I am sure you know this well too—the very color of the air in the place I was born was different, the smell of the earth was special, redolent with memories of my parents. To spend July and August nestled back inside that world, motionless as a snake in its hole, filled me with warm pleasure.
My innocent and uncomplicated mind felt no need to bother itself much over the problem of the proposed marriage to my cousin. If you didn’t want to do something, you simply said no, I believed, and there would be no further repercussions. So although I had not submitted to my uncle’s will, I remained unperturbed. I returned home in my usual high spirits, after a year spent unworried by the question.
But when I got home, I discovered that my uncle’s attitude had changed. He did not embrace me with a welcoming smile as he had before. For the first four
or five days I remained unaware of the change—my loving upbringing had not prepared me even to recognize coldness. Finally, however, some chance event finally brought it to my notice. I then realized in bewilderment that it was not only my uncle who had changed, but also my aunt. My cousin was also odd, and so was my uncle’s son, who had earlier written a friendly letter asking me to investigate the Industrial College he intended to enter in Tokyo once he had graduated from middle school.
Being who I am, I puzzled over this development. Why had my feelings changed? Or rather, why had theirs changed? Then it occurred to me that perhaps my dead parents had suddenly cleansed my dulled eyes and given me a clear vision of the world. Deep inside, you see, I felt that my parents continued to love me as in life. Even though I was already well acquainted with the real world by then, the strong superstitious beliefs of my ancestors coursed deep in my blood. No doubt they still do.
I climbed the nearby hill alone and knelt before my parents’ graves, half in mourning and half in gratitude. I prayed to them to watch over me, feeling as I prayed that my future happiness lay in those hands buried beneath the cold stone. You may laugh, and no doubt I deserve it. But that is who I was.
In a flash, my whole world changed. This was not, mind you, my first such experience. When I was sixteen or seventeen, my sudden discovery of beauty in the world had stunned me. Many times I rubbed my eyes in sheer disbelief, and doubted my own eyes, while my heart exclaimed, “Ah, how beautiful!” At that age boys and girls alike attain what is commonly called sensuality. In this new state, I was for the first time able to see women as representative of the beauty that the world contains. My eyes, until then quite blind to this beauty in the opposite sex, sprang open, and from that moment my universe was transformed.
It was with precisely the same sort of shock that I became conscious of the change in my uncle’s attitude to me. I was stunned by the realization, which came upon me abruptly, without any premonition. Suddenly, my uncle and his family seemed to me completely different creatures. I was haunted by the feeling that I must make some move, or who knew what might befall me?
CHAPTER 62
I decided that I owed it to my dead parents to obtain a detailed understanding of the house and property that I had until then left for my uncle to look after. My uncle presented himself as living a hectic life. He bustled endlessly between the town house and the country estate, spending perhaps one in three nights in town. Forever on the move, he made a great fuss about how busy he was. I had always taken him at his word, although I sometimes cynically suspected that he was following the modern fashion to appear busy. But now, with my newfound desire to find a time to talk through the question of property, I could only interpret this endless rush as an excuse to avoid me. I never had a chance to pin him down.
A friend from my middle-school days told me that my uncle kept a mistress in town. Knowing the sort of man he was, I had no reason to doubt that he might have a mistress, but I had no memory of such talk while my father was alive, so the rumor startled me. The friend also passed on to me various other rumors that were circulating about my uncle. Among them was the story that his business had been generally thought to be going under, but in the last two or three years it had suddenly revived and prospered. This tale heightened my own suspicions.
I finally managed to open negotiations with my uncle. Perhaps the word negotiations is a little harsh, but as we talked, the tenor of our relations sank to such a low level that only this word can express what took place. My uncle persisted in treating me as a child, while I viewed him through the jaundiced eyes of suspicion. Under these circumstances, the chances of a peaceful resolution were nil.
Unfortunately, my need to press on with my story prevents me from describing the details of those negotiations for you. To tell the truth, there is another, more important matter I have yet to speak of, one that I have with difficulty restrained my pen from writing all this time. I have lost forever the chance to talk quietly with you, and now I am also forced to omit some of what I would like to write—not only because I lack the skill to express myself on the page but also because time is precious to me.
You may remember I once said to you that no one is inherently bad by nature, and I warned you to be careful because most honest folk will suddenly turn bad when circumstances prompt it. You warned me I was becoming excited and upset, and you asked me what kind of circumstances provoked good people to become wicked. When I answered with the single word money, you looked dissatisfied. I well remember that look. I can reveal to you now that I was thinking at that moment of my uncle. I was thinking of him with hatred, as an example of an ordinary, decent person who will suddenly turn bad when he sees money, and I was thinking of the fact that no one in this world is to be trusted.
Probably my reply dissatisfied you because you were bent on seeing things in terms of philosophical questions, and you found my answer trite. But I spoke from experience. I was upset at the time, I agree. But I believe that a commonplace idea stated with passionate conviction carries more living truth than some novel observation expressed with cool indifference. It is the force of blood that drives the body, after all. Words are not just vibrations in the air, they work more powerfully than that, and on more powerful objects.
CHAPTER 63
To put it simply, my uncle cheated me out of my inheritance. He did it with ease, during the three years that I spent in Tokyo. From a worldly perspective, I was an absolute fool to have left everything in my uncle’s hands without a thought. From some more elevated viewpoint, perhaps I could be admired as pure and innocent. But when I look back on that self now, I wonder why I should have been born so innocent, and that foolish credulity makes me grind my teeth. And yet I also long to be once again that person who still retained his first innate purity. Bear in mind that the Sensei you know is a man who has been sullied by the world. If we define our betters as those who have spent more years being tarnished by the dirt of the world, then I can certainly claim to be your better.
Would I have been materially better off if I had married my cousin as my uncle wanted? The answer is clear, I think. But the fact is, my uncle was scheming to force his daughter on me. He wasn’t offering me this marriage out of some kindly intended idea of how well it would suit both sides of the family; no, what drove him was the baser motive of personal profit. I did not love my cousin, but nor did I dislike her. Still, thinking back on it now, I can see it gave me a certain degree of pleasure to refuse her. Of course my refusal did not alter the basic fact that he was cheating me, but at least as the victim I had the satisfaction of standing up for myself a little. I wasn’t letting him entirely have his way. This point is so trivial, however, that it is hardly worth bothering over. To your outsider’s point of view, it must seem like nothing more than foolishly stubborn pride.
Other relatives stepped in to mediate between us. They were people I did not trust at all—indeed, I felt quite hostile toward them. Having discovered my uncle’s treachery, I was convinced that others must be equally treacherous. After all, my reasoning went, if the man my father had praised so highly could behave like this, what could one expect of others?
Nevertheless, these relatives sorted out for me everything that pertained to my inheritance. Its cash value came to a great deal less than I had anticipated. I had only two options: to accept this accounting without complaint, or to take my uncle to court. I was angry, and I was confused. If I sued him, I feared the case might continue for a long time before it was settled. It also seemed to me that it would cause me added difficulties by taking precious time away from the studies I was still pursuing. After thinking it all through, I went to an old school friend in the town and arranged to have everything I had received converted to cash. My friend advised me against the plan, but I refused to listen to him. I had decided to leave my native home forever. I vowed that I would never lay eyes on my uncle again.
Before I left, I paid a final visit to my parents’ graves. I have not seen it
since, and now I never will.
My friend disposed of everything as I had asked. Naturally, it took some time after my return to Tokyo to finalize it all. Selling farm land in the country is no easy matter, and I had to be careful lest others take advantage of me, so in the end I settled for a lot less than the market price. To be honest, my assets amounted to the few government bonds I had in my pocket when I left home, and the money my friend subsequently sent. Sadly, the inheritance my parents had left me was greatly diminished. And it felt all the worse because it was not profligacy on my part that had reduced it. Still, the proceeds were more than enough for me to survive on as a student—indeed, I used less than half the interest from it. And it was this financial security that subsequently propelled me into an utterly unforeseen situation.
CHAPTER 64
With my new financial freedom, I began to play with the idea of quitting my noisy boardinghouse and finding myself a house to live in. I soon realized, however, that this would entail the bother of buying the necessary furniture, and employing a servant to run the household, one who was honest, so that I could leave the house unattended without worrying. One way or another, I could see that it would be no easy matter to achieve my plan.
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