I asked if he had found a solution, and he replied that he was thinking of taking work teaching at an evening school. Times were far easier back then; it was not as difficult as you might think to find part-time work of this sort. I thought it would see him through very well. But I also bore responsibility in the matter. I had been the one to agree with his decision to ignore his adoptive family’s plans for him and tread a path of his own choosing, and I could not now stand idly by. I immediately offered K financial assistance. He rejected it absolutely. Given who he was, no doubt financial independence gave him far greater satisfaction than the prospect of living under a friend’s protection. Now that he was a university student, he declared, he must be man enough to stand on his own two feet. I was not prepared to hurt K’s feelings for the sake of satisfying my own sense of responsibility, so I let him have his way and withdrew my offer of a helping hand.
K soon found the kind of job he hoped for, but as you can well imagine for someone with his temperament, he chafed at the amount of precious time it consumed. Still, he pushed fiercely on with his studies, never slackening under the added burden. I worried about his health; iron-willed, he laughed me off and paid no heed to my warnings.
Meanwhile his relations with his adoptive family were growing increasingly difficult. His lack of time meant that he no longer had a chance to talk with me as he used to, so I never learned the details, but I was aware that more and more stood in the way of a resolution. I also knew that someone had stepped in and attempted to mediate. This person wrote to K encouraging him to return, but he refused, having made up his mind that it was absolutely out of the question. This obstinacy—or so it would have struck the other party, although he claimed that it was impossible for him to leave during the school term—seemed to exacerbate the situation. Not only was K hurting the feelings of his adoptive family, he was fueling the ire of his real family as well. Worried, I wrote a letter that attempted to soothe the situation, but it was too late by now for it to have any effect. My letter sank without a word of response. I too grew angry. The situation had always encouraged my sympathy with K, but now I was inclined to take his side regardless of the rights and wrongs of the matter.
Finally, K decided to officially return to his original family’s register, which meant that they would have to repay the school fees paid by the other party. His own family, however, responded by washing their hands of him. To use an outmoded expression, they, as it were, disowned him. Perhaps it was not quite so radical as that, but that was how he understood it. K had no mother, and certain aspects of his character were perhaps the result of his being brought up by a stepmother. If his mother had not died, I feel, this distance between him and his family might never have arisen. His father, of course, was a priest, but his sternness in matters of Confucian moral obligation suggests that there was a lot of the samurai in him.
CHAPTER 76
K’s crisis had begun to resolve itself a little when I received a long letter from his elder sister’s husband. This man was related to the adoptive family, K told me, so his opinion had carried a lot of weight both during the attempted mediation and in the decision that K return to his original family register.
The letter asked me to let him know what had happened to K since relations were severed. I should reply as soon as possible, he added, as K’s sister was worrying. K was fonder of this sister, who had married out, than he was of the elder brother who had inherited the family temple. K and his sister shared the same mother, but there was a large age gap between them, and when he was little, she must have seemed to him more of a mother than his adoptive mother.
I showed the letter to K. He said nothing in direct response, but he did tell me that he had received two or three such letters from his sister herself, and that he had replied that she need not be concerned for him. She had married into a household that did not have much money, so unfortunately she was not in a position to offer financial help, much as she sympathized with him.
I replied to her husband along similar lines and assured him firmly that if problems arose, I would help in any way I could. This was something I had long since decided. My words were intended partly as a friendly reassurance to the sister who was so worried about him, but also as a gesture of defiance toward the two families whom I felt had snubbed me.
K’s adoption was annulled in his first year of university studies. From then until the middle of his second year, he supported himself. But it was apparent that the prodigious effort this required was slowly telling on his health and nerves. No doubt the stress of his indecision over whether to leave his adoptive family had also played its part. He grew overly emotional. At times he spoke as if he alone bore the weight of the world’s woes on his shoulders, and he grew agitated if I contradicted him. Or he would fret that the light of future hope was receding before his eyes. Everyone, of course, at the beginning of their studies is full of fine aspirations and dreams, but one year passes and then another, and as graduation draws near, you realize you are plodding. At this point the majority inevitably lose heart, and K was no exception. His feverish anxiety was excessive, however. My sole concern became to somehow calm him.
I advised him to give up all unnecessary work, and added that for the sake of that great future of his, he would be wise to relax and enjoy himself more. I knew it would be difficult to get this message through to my stubborn friend, but when the time came for me to say my piece, it took even more persuasion than I had anticipated, and I struggled to hold my ground. He countered me by asserting that scholarship was not his primary aim; his goal was to develop a toughness of will that would make him strong, and to this end his circumstances must remain as straitened as possible. From any normal point of view, this determination was wildly eccentric. Furthermore, the situation to which he chose to cling was doing nothing to strengthen his will—indeed, it was rapidly driving him to nervous collapse. All I could do was present myself as deeply sympathetic. I declared that I too intended to pursue a similar course in life. (In fact, these were no empty words—K’s power was such that I felt myself increasingly drawn by his views.) Finally, I proposed that he and I should live together and work to improve ourselves. In effect, I chose to give in to him in order to be able to bend his will. And with this, at last, I brought him to the house.
CHAPTER 77
From the entrance hall the only access to my room was through a little four-mat room that lay between. This anteroom, in effect a passageway, was virtually useless for practical purposes. This is where I put K. At first I re-created our previous arrangement, placing two desks side by side in my own larger room, with the idea that we would also share the small one. But K chose to make the small room exclusively his, declaring that he was happier alone no matter how cramped the space.
As I mentioned, Okusan initially opposed my plan to bring K in at all. In an ordinary lodging house, she agreed, it made sense for two to share, and still better three, but she wasn’t doing this as a business, she said, and urged me to reconsider. I told her K would be no trouble. Even so, she replied, she did not like the idea of housing someone she didn’t know. In that case, I pointed out, she should have objected to me as well. But she countered with the statement that she had known and trusted me from the beginning. I smiled wryly. At this point she changed her tactics. Bringing in someone like K, she said, would be bad for me. When I asked why, it was her turn to smile.
To tell the truth, there was no real necessity for me to live with K. But if I had tried to give him a monthly cash allowance, I felt sure, he would have been very reluctant to accept it. He was a fiercely independent man. Better to let him live with me, while I secretly gave Okusan money enough to feed us both. Nevertheless, I had no desire to reveal K’s dire financial situation to her. I did, however, talk about his precarious state of health. If left to himself, I told her, he would only grow more perverse and eccentric. I went on to describe his strained relations with his adoptive parents and his severance from his original family.
By attempting to help him, I said, I was grasping a drowning man, desperate to infuse in him my own living heat. I begged Okusan and Ojōsan to help by warmly accepting him. Okusan finally relented.
K knew nothing of this discussion, and I was satisfied that he remain ignorant. When he came stolidly into the house with his bags, I greeted him with an innocent air.
Okusan and Ojōsan kindly helped him unpack and settle in. I was delighted, interpreting each generous gesture as an expression of their friendship for me. K, however, remained his usual dour self.
When I asked what he thought of his new home, he replied with a simple “Not bad.” This brief response was a wild understatement, I felt. Until then he had been living in a dank, grimy little north-facing room, where the food was of a piece with the lodging. The move to my place was, as the old saying goes, “from deep ravine to treetop high.” It was partly sheer obstinacy that caused him to make light of the new place, but partly principle as well. His Buddhist upbringing had led him to think that paying attention to comfort in the basic needs of life was immoral. Brought up on tales of worthy monks and saints, he tended to consider flesh and spirit as separate entities; in fact, he may well have felt that to mortify the flesh was to exalt the soul.
I decided to do my best not to argue, however. My aim was to apply a sunny warmth that would thaw his ice. Once the melted water began to trickle, I thought, he would sooner or later come to his senses.
CHAPTER 78
Aware that under Okusan’s kind treatment I myself had grown cheerful, I set about applying the same process to K. From my long acquaintance with him I was all too aware of how different we were. But just as my own nerves had relaxed considerably since I’d moved into this household, I felt surely K’s heart too would eventually grow calmer here.
K’s will was far steelier than mine. He studied twice as hard, and his mind was a good deal finer. I cannot speak for the later years, when we chose different areas of study, but in the middle and high school years, while we were classmates, he was consistently ahead of me. I used to feel, in fact, that K would best me in everything. But in convincing the stubborn K to move in with me, I was sure I was showing more good sense than he. He failed to understand the difference between patience and endurance, I felt.
Please listen carefully now, I am saying this for your benefit. All our capacities, both physical and mental, require external stimuli for both their development and their destruction, and in either case these stimuli must be increased by slow degrees in order to be effective. But this gradual increase creates a very real danger that not only you yourself but those around you may fail to notice any problems that might develop. Doctors tell us that a man’s stomach is a thoroughly rebellious creature, inclined to misbehave. If you feed it nothing but soft gruel, it will lose the power to digest anything heavier. So they instruct us to train it by feeding it all manner of foods. I don’t think this is just a matter of getting it used to the variety, however. I interpret it to mean that the stomach’s resilience gradually increases as the stimuli build up over time. Now imagine what would happen if the stomach instead grew steadily weaker under this regimen. K was in just such a situation.
Now K was a greater man than I, but he failed to comprehend what was happening to him. He had decided that if he accustomed himself to hardship, then pain would sooner or later cease to register. The simple virtue of repetition of pain, he was sure, would bring him to a point where pain no longer affected him.
In order to bring about a change of heart in K, it was this above all that I would have to clarify to him. But if I spelled it out, he would doubtless resist; he would bring up the example of those stoics and saints of old in his defense, I knew, and I would then have to point out the difference between them and him. That would be worthwhile if he were of a mind to listen to me, but by nature, once an argument reached that point, he would stick to his guns. He would simply assert his own position more vehemently, and having once spoken he would feel obliged to follow through with action. In this respect he was quite intimidating. He was grand in his convictions. He would stride forward to meet his own destruction. In retrospect, the only thing that had any kind of grandeur was the resultant ruin of any hope of success. But there was certainly nothing run-of-the-mill about the process, at any rate.
Knowing his temperament as I did, therefore, I couldn’t utter a word. My sense that he was close to a nervous breakdown also made me hesitate. Even if I did manage to convince him, it would only agitate him further. I didn’t mind quarreling, but I remembered how poorly I had withstood my own sense of isolation, and I couldn’t bear to think of placing my friend in a similar situation, let alone exacerbating it. And so, even after bringing him into the house, I held back from voicing any real criticism. I decided simply to wait calmly to see what effect his new environment would have on him.
CHAPTER 79
Behind his back, I asked Okusan and Ojōsan to talk to K as much as possible, convinced that the silence of his previous life had been the cause of his ruin. It seemed clear to me that his heart had rusted like iron from disuse.
Okusan laughed, remarking that he was rather curt and unapproachable, and Ojōsan supported this by describing an encounter she had had with him. She’d asked him if his brazier was lit, and he had told her it wasn’t. She offered to bring some charcoal, but he said he didn’t need any. Wasn’t he cold? she asked. He replied curtly that he was but didn’t want a fire, and he refused to discuss the matter further. I couldn’t simply dismiss her story with a rueful smile; I felt sorry for her, and that I must somehow make up for his rudeness. It was spring, of course, so he had had no real need for a warm fire in the brazier, but I could see that they had good reason to feel that he was difficult.
I then did my best to use myself as a catalyst to bring them together. At every opportunity I encouraged K to spend time in the company of all three of us. When I was talking with him, I would call them in, or when I met up with them in one of the rooms, I’d invite him to join us. Naturally, K did not much care for this. Sometimes he would abruptly rise to his feet and walk out. At other times he ignored my calls. “What’s the point of all that idle chatter?” he asked me. I just laughed, but I was well aware that he despised me for indulging in such frivolities.
In some ways I doubtless deserved his scorn. His sights were fixed on far higher things than mine, I’ll not deny it. But it is surely crippling to limp along, so out of step with the lofty gaze you insist on maintaining. My most important task, I felt, was somehow to make him more human. Filling his own head with the examples of impressive men was pointless, I decided, if it did not make him impressive himself. As a first step in the task of humanizing him, I would introduce him to the company of the opposite sex. Letting the fair winds of that gentle realm blow upon him would cleanse his blood of the rust that clogged it, I hoped.
This approach gradually succeeded. The two elements, which had seemed at first so unlikely to merge, slowly came together until they were one. K apparently grew to realize that there were others in the world besides himself. One day he remarked to me that women were not after all such despicable creatures. He had at first assumed, he told me, that women had the same level of knowledge and academic ability as I had, and when he discovered that they didn’t, he had been quick to despise them. He had always viewed men and women without any distinction, he said, without understanding that one could see the sexes differently. I pointed out that if we two men were to go on talking exclusively to each other forever, we would simply continue in the same straight line. Naturally, he replied.
I spoke as I did because I was by then quite in love with Ojōsan. But I did not breathe a word to him of my inner state.
This man who had constructed a defensive fortress of books to hide behind was now slowly opening up to the world, and the change in his heart delighted me. Opening him up had been my plan all along, and its success sent an irrepressible wave of joy through me. Though I said nothing of it to him, I share
d my joy with Okusan and Ojōsan. They too seemed gratified.
CHAPTER 80
Although K and I were in the same faculty, our fields of study were different, which meant that we came and went at different times. If I returned home early, I could simply pass through his empty room to reach my own. If he got home before I did, I always acknowledged him briefly before going on into my room. As I came through the door, K would glance up from his book and invariably say: “Just back, are you?” Sometimes I’d nod, and sometimes I’d simply give a grunt of assent.
One day on my way home I had reason to stop in at Kanda, so I returned much later than usual. I hurried to the front gate and the lattice door clattered as I thrust it open. At that moment I heard Ojōsan’s voice. I was sure it came from K’s room. The sitting room and Ojōsan’s room lay straight ahead through the entrance hall, while our two rooms were off to the left, and by now I had become attuned to deciphering the location of voices. Just as I hastened to close the lattice door, her voice ceased. While I was removing my shoes—I now wore fashionable Western lace-ups—not a sound emerged from K’s room. This struck me as odd. Had I been mistaken?
But when I opened the sliding doors as usual to pass through K’s room, I found the two of them sitting there. “Just back, are you?” said K, as always.
“Welcome home,” Ojōsan said, remaining seated. For some reason, her straightforward greeting struck me as slightly stiff and formal. The tone had a somehow unnatural ring to my ears.
“Where’s Okusan?” I asked her. The question had no real significance—it was just that the house seemed unusually hushed.
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