“I had a funny dream. . . .” She spoke to my back.
I realized she was straining to make some difficult confession. She always spoke hoarsely like that on such occasions.
I turned toward her. Now it was my turn to put my finger over my mouth as a signal not to talk. . . .
Shortly the head nurse came bustling in with a kindly manner. Every morning she visited the patients one by one in their sickrooms.
“Did you sleep well last night?” she asked in a cheerful voice.
The patient said nothing but nodded meekly.
Life in a mountain sanitarium like this has a special human quality of its own, stemming first from the average person’s belief that this is no more than a dead end. . . . I first became dimly conscious of this human quality, previously unknown to me, when shortly after our arrival the sanitarium director called me to his consultation room and showed me Setsuko’s X-ray.
He led me to the window and held up the film to the light for me to see. He explained the picture point by point. On the right side of her chest, several ribs could be distinctly seen. But on the left they were almost invisible. Instead there was a large infected spot like a strange dark flower.
“The infection has spread farther than I expected. . . . I didn’t think it would be as bad as this. . . . She may be about the second worst case we have in the hospital. . . .”
The director’s words were like a croaking in my ears. I felt I had lost the power of thought. The image of the strange dark flower I had just seen, unrelated to his words, jumped out vividly on the threshold of my consciousness. I left the consultation room. Nurses passing me in white uniforms, the naked bodies of patients sunbathing here and there on the balconies, the bustle in the ward, the twitter of birds, all rushed past without connection. I went into the farthest ward and slowed my steps mechanically to climb the stairs leading to our second-floor sickroom, when from a sickroom just before the stairway I heard a continuous hacking cough, strange and gruesome like nothing I had ever heard before. “Oh, there’s a sick person in here, too,” I thought as I stared blankly at the no. 17 on the door.
Thus began our extraordinary life of love.
When Setsuko entered the hospital, she was ordered to rest and she remained in bed. Before she entered the hospital, she had always wanted to get up whenever she felt better. Now she seemed more sickly by comparison, although I did not think the illness itself had worsened. The doctors always appeared to treat her as an invalid who was expected to recover soon.
“We’re getting a hold on that illness all right,” the director kept joking.
The season, which had seemed a bit delayed, now reversed itself and raced ahead. It was as if spring and summer had rushed in almost simultaneously. We were awakened each morning by the singing of bush warblers and cuckoos. All through the day, the fresh green of the surrounding forest invaded the sanitarium from all sides and colored the sickrooms an invigorating green. It seemed in those days that white clouds came boiling out of the mountains in the morning and returned to their mountain sources in the evening.
When I recall those first days that we were together and I was scarcely ever away from her bedside, one day resembles another. There was a consistent sameness to the charms of one day after the next, so that I cannot now distinguish what came before and what came after.
Yet now I feel that while we lived through day after day of repeated similarity, we somehow escaped completely from time. Every trivial detail of our daily life during those days free of time still holds a unique and distinctive charm. The warmish but fragrant being before me, her rather rapid breathing, the limp hand holding mine, her smile, and the simple conversation we sometimes exchanged—if I lay all those things aside, there is a sameness to those days that leaves nothing in memory.—That’s really all there was to the essence of our life. The fact that we were so satisfied in this modest existence came, I am sure, because we two were together.
To mention the one and only event of those days, she would occasionally develop a fever that, little by little, wasted away her body. On those days we tried to savor the charm of the unchanging daily schedule a little more carefully and a little more slowly, as if we were secretly stealing the taste of forbidden fruit. We could cherish our joy to the fullest in a life that tasted somehow of death.
One of these evenings we gazed spellbound, I from the balcony, Setsuko from her bed, at the uncertain grayness vividly tinged with red that crept over the neighboring mountains, the hills, the forests, the highland fields, all bathed alike by the setting sun sinking behind the opposing range. I recall birds flying up occasionally, drawing parabolas above the trees. I thought how impossible it was for us, with our overflowing happiness beyond the moment, to grasp a scene like this, no matter how familiar, created on the instant of an early summer evening. Much later, whenever this beautiful evening came back to me, the dream brought memories, a perfect vision of our happiness.
“What are you thinking about?” Setsuko’s voice sounded from behind my back.
“I’m thinking about how, long after this, we will remember how beautiful was our life here.”
“Yes. That may be true,” she replied, as if happy to agree with me. Then again without speaking, we gazed on that scene. Absorbed in my gaze, I sensed to my surprise a vague and incoherent pain, a feeling that I was not myself. At that moment I fancied I heard the sound of deep breathing behind me. I thought that maybe the sound was my own. Trying to confirm as much, I turned to her.
“Like this. . . .” She spoke in a hoarse voice, as she turned to look at me. Seeming to hesitate after starting to speak, she added quickly in a new and different tone of resignation, “It’ll be all right if we can just go on living like this.”
“What a thing to say!”
I exclaimed in my irritation.
“I’m sorry.” With this brief answer, she looked away.
I was gradually becoming irritated, but with a feeling that I did not understand. I turned to look again at the mountains, but the strange momentary beauty had already faded from the scene.
That evening when I was starting for bed in the neighboring room, she called me.
“Excuse me for that, won’t you?”
“That’s all right.”
“I wanted to say something else that time, but then I said it that way.”
“What did you want to say?”
“Once you said right out that you thought true beauty lay only in the eyes of one about to die. I remembered that then. To think like that about the beauty of such a time. . . .” As she spoke, she stared at me, complaining or appealing for something.
My heart was stricken at these words, and I had to look down. Suddenly a thought crossed my mind. The uncertain feeling of irritation became clear to me at last. “Yes. Why didn’t I think of that? It was not I that thought nature was so beautiful. It was both of us. Let’s say that Setsuko’s spirit saw the dream through my eyes and my fashion. Without knowing that Setsuko was dreaming of her final moments, I chose to think of our long life together. . . .”
She continued staring at me in the same way until, after pondering these things, I finally raised my eyes. Avoiding her glance, I leaned over and kissed her on the brow. I was heartily ashamed.
Midsummer came at last. It was more intense here than in the plains. In the forest in back, cicadas shrilled ceaselessly morning to night, as if on fire. The odor of resin was wafted through open windows. By evening many patients had their beds moved onto the balconies to breathe a little more comfortably in the outdoors. Seeing these patients, we realized for the first time how their numbers had grown. Yet we continued our life as two together without regard to others.
These days Setsuko had lost her appetite completely because of the heat, and often she could not sleep at night. To protect her afternoon nap I took extra care against footsteps in the hall and against wasps and horseflies coming in through the window. I also was worried about my own heavy breathing from th
e heat.
Watching over the sick one at her bedside and holding my breath as I watched, I myself was close to sleep. I was keenly and painfully aware of the changes in her breathing, speeding up and slackening as she slept. My heart was beating with hers. From time to time, she was attacked by spells of difficult breathing. Her hands would twitch, and she would clutch at her throat. I wondered whether she was having a dream, but as I debated whether to wake her, the spell passed and she relaxed. I was relieved, and her now quiet breathing gave me a sense of pleasure. When she awoke, I kissed her hair gently. She looked toward me with a tired glance.
“Are you there?”
“Yes, but I’m a little drowsy, too.”
That night when I could not sleep, I found myself imitating that gesture of clutching my throat. It had become a habit. When I noticed it, I too felt a real difficulty in breathing. To me, though, that was a rather agreeable feeling.
“The color of your face isn’t very good these days.” She looked at me steadily as she spoke.
“Haven’t you rubbed something on it?”
“It’s nothing,” I said in a satisfied manner. “Don’t I always look like this?”
“You ought to go take a walk or something and not stay too much at a sick person’s bedside, don’t you think?”
“How can I take a walk when it’s so hot? . . . Evening is evening, but then it’s all dark. . . . But then I’m always coming and going in the hospital every day.”
To avoid pursuing this conversation, I would go out every day into the corridors, meet people, and talk with other patients. I chatted with people about the cluster of young patients on the balcony who watched the drifting clouds and compared them to animals on a racetrack in the sky, and about the tall, weird, severely mentally disturbed patient coming and going aimlessly in the hall, clinging to the arm of the attendant nurse. I always avoided mentioning the patient whom I had never seen but whose gruesome cough made me shudder whenever I heard it as I passed room no. 17. I thought he might be the most severely ill patient in the sanitarium.
Although it was near the end of August, the sleepless nights continued. One of those nights when we could not sleep (it was long past the 9 P.M. bedtime), some hubbub erupted in the opposite ward on the floor below. There were mingled sounds of footsteps tripping along the corridors, the subdued, quiet voices of nurses, and the clink of utensils. I listened for a while in apprehension. When I thought the noises had subsided, a low murmuring sounded here and there simultaneously through the wards, finally ending in the room directly below us.
I realized that some kind of storm was raging throughout the sanitarium. Straining my ears, I went to check the sick one in the next room, where she might be sleepless, too, in the dark. She had not rolled over and was lying still. Stifling my breath, I waited quietly for the storm to subside.
Finally after midnight, it did seem to subside, and I dozed off for a bit unexpectedly, but suddenly I was awakened by two or three violent, nervous coughs that the sick one next door had been forcibly suppressing. The coughing stopped right away, but I didn’t like it, so I went into the next room. The sick one, alone and frightened in the total darkness, her eyes wide open, looked toward me. I went to her quickly without speaking.
“I’m all right.”
She smiled and spoke in a low voice that I could hardly hear. Without a word, I sat down on the edge of the bed.
“Stay here, please.”
She spoke in a faint voice, unlike her usual tone. There we two stayed until dawn without a wink of sleep.
Two or three days later, summer suddenly faded away.
In September a series of rainstorms came and went, and in between it drizzled without a break. The rain seemed to rot the leaves before turning them yellow. Day after day the windows were closed and the sanitarium rooms remained dark. The doors rattled in the wind. Monotonous and heavy noises were wrenched out from the woods. On windless days we listened all day long to the rain falling on the balcony roofs. Early one morning when the rain was like mist, I looked vacantly out of the window into the dawning light on the long narrow courtyard facing the balcony. I saw a nurse coming toward me, picking all she could reach of the cosmos and asters blooming in profusion there in the rain. I recognized her as the attendant to room no. 17. “Oh, that patient whose wretched cough I heard all the time may have died.” I thought of that as I stared at the nurse, who was sopping wet from the rain but who continued excitedly picking flowers. I felt a sudden wrenching in my heart. “Wasn’t he the most severely ill one here? If he dies, who will be next? I wish the sanitarium director hadn’t said that. . . .”
I held my face pressed heedlessly against the window pane even after the nurse disappeared with her flowers under the balcony.
“What are you looking at?” she asked me from her bed.
“There was a nurse picking flowers there in the rain. I wonder who it was?”
I murmured that to myself and stepped away from the window.
All through this day I simply could not look directly at the sick one’s face. Deliberately I feigned ignorance even as I saw through everything, but at times I felt her eyes staring at me. That pained me even more. We began to share a kind of inseparable, mutual anxiety and fear. I thought it insufferable that the two of us were each thinking a little differently, and while I tried to forget the event as quickly as possible, I could keep nothing else in my head. In the end, the dream the sick one had on the snowy night when first we arrived at the sanitarium, the unfortunate dream that first I did not want to hear but finally overcome, I had to hear from her—the dream I had forgotten till now—abruptly it hit me again. . . . In that uncanny dream the sick one had become a corpse lying in a coffin. People were carrying the coffin across some unknown fields and in and out of some woods. The dead woman in the coffin was watching intently the withered wintry fields and the black fir trees and was listening to the lonesome sound of the wind blowing overhead. . . . When she awoke from that dream, she felt keenly that her ears were cold and were full of the soughing of the firs.
While the misty rain continued for some days, the seasons changed again. In the sanitarium the patients, who had noticeably grown to a large number, now began to depart by ones and twos, and only the seriously ill remained, those who would have to spend the winter here. The sanitarium reverted to the loneliness that preceded summer. The death of the patient in room no. 17 suddenly made this conspicuous.
One morning at the end of September, I was gazing casually into the woods from a window on the north side of the hall when I had a strange feeling that someone was out there in the mist, going in and out of the woods. I asked the nurses, but they appeared to know nothing. I forgot about it then, but the next morning two or three workmen appeared and disappeared in the mist as they began to cut down a chestnut-like tree on the side of the hill.
That day I happened to find out about the events of the day before, with which none of the patients seemed acquainted. It was reported that the weird, mentally disturbed patient had hanged himself in the woods. That big man that I had seen so many times going up and down the hall on the arm of his nurse had suddenly disappeared yesterday, it was noticed.
“So it was that man’s turn?” I had become very nervous after the death of the patient in room no. 17, but to my surprise, I was relieved at this unexpected death less than a week later. Even though this gloomy death left me with an eerie feeling, it would be correct to say that I hardly felt it at all.
“You could say this isn’t as bad as the death of that fellow the other day, because that one had no intention of dying,” I told myself cheerily.
Starting from that odd space where the workmen had cut down two or three chestnut trees in the forest, the men continued leveling the side of the hill. They pushed the soil down the steeper slope north of the ward into a small open space where they began to grade the gentle slope. They were making a flower bed.
“There’s a letter from Father.”
I handed Setsuko the letter, one from the packet of mail the nurse had given me. She took it lying in bed, and with a girlish sparkle in her eyes, she read it through.
“Oh, Father says he’s coming.”
Father had written that he would drop by the sanitarium quite soon, stopping off on his return from a trip.
It was a clear October day but with a rather strong wind. Recently Setsuko had lost her appetite from constantly lying in bed, and she had become noticeably emaciated. Now she started trying to eat, and occasionally she would get up or sit up in bed. A sweet smile of remembrance would now and then cross her face. I recognized the likeness to the girlish smile she always showed her father. That was her way, I had to admit.
One afternoon a few days later her father arrived.
His face looked somewhat older than before, but more noticeable was the stoop in his back. He rather dreaded the atmosphere of the hospital, it appeared. He came into the room and sat down beside the sick one’s bed where I habitually sat. Because she had been too active for the last few days, she had developed a fever the night before, and the doctor, frustrating her expectations, had ordered her to remain quiet since the morning.
Although he had been convinced that the sick one was recovering, when Father saw how she kept to her bed, he appeared uneasy. As if looking for the reason, he carefully studied the room, watched every move by the nurses, and went out onto the balcony to look around. He seemed to be satisfied with these observations. When he noticed that the sick one’s cheeks had become rosy from the fever and not from excitement, he remarked, “The color of her face is really good.” He repeated it again as if to convince himself that his daughter was somehow better.
I left the sickroom on the pretext of being busy, leaving the two of them alone together. When I came back a little while later, the sick one was sitting up in bed. Spread out on the quilt were a box of cakes and other packages her father had brought. They seemed to be things she had liked as a child and that her father thought she would still like. When she saw me, she blushed like a child caught in some mischief. She picked up the things and lay back in bed.
The Columbia Anthology of Modern Japanese Literature: From Restoration to Occupation, 1868-1945: vol. 1 (Modern Asian Literature Series) Page 60
