I was rather embarrassed, and I moved away from the two of them and sat down in a chair by the window. The two resumed their interrupted discussion in lower voices. It was mostly devoted to people and affairs unfamiliar to me. She seemed moved by some of them in ways I could not know.
I contrasted the two in their happy conversation as if I were looking at a picture. I saw her girlish sparkle revive in the expression on her face and the modulation of her voice that she displayed to her father in this conversation. Her happy childlike manner led me to dream of her life as a girl, before I knew her.
A little later when we two were alone, I went up to her and whispered in a teasing way.
“You’re a rosy lass today, a stranger to me.”
“I don’t know.” She covered her face with her hands like a little girl.
Father stayed for two days.
Before he left, he had me show him around the sanitarium. His purpose was for the two of us to talk. The day was completely clear without a cloud in the sky. Even when I pointed out the reddish slopes of Mount Yatsugatake, completely clear that day, he only glanced at them and continued his fervent conversation.
“This place doesn’t seem to be helping her, does it? It’s already been more than half a year, and I would have thought she might be a little better.”
“Well, the weather was bad everywhere this summer, wasn’t it? They say that winter is the best time in a mountain sanitarium like this. . . .”
“Maybe we should just be patient till winter, but it’s not easy to wait until then. . . .”
“But I expect to be here this winter.” I fretted about how to make Father understand what happiness this mountain isolation brought to us, but when I thought of the sacrifice Father was making for us, I could not speak about it, and our conversation continued at cross-purposes. “Well, since we came to the mountains for a purpose, shouldn’t you leave her here?”
“Yes, but can you stay with her until winter?”
“Yes, of course.”
“That’s really inexcusable to do to you. . . . Are you able to work?”
“No . . .”
“Don’t you have to do a little work without concern only for a sick one?”
“Yes, a little, from now on,” I stammered.
“I’ve had to abandon my work for a long time. I’ll have to start it up again soon. . . .” My emotions were brimming as I thought about this. We remained silent for a while and stopped to linger on top of a hill. We gazed at the countless clouds of a mackerel sky spreading rapidly in from the west.
Then we walked through a forest where all the leaves had turned yellow and so returned to the hospital from the rear. Two or three workmen were still leveling the slope that day. I said casually as we passed, “I hear you’re making a flower bed here.”
I went to see Father off at the station in the evening, and when I returned, I found the sick one in bed, lying on her side and choking with violent coughs. She had never before coughed so violently. I waited until the outburst had subsided a bit and asked her:
“How are you?”
“It’s nothing. . . . It’ll stop right away.” That’s all she said. Then, “water, please.”
I poured some water from the pitcher into a glass and held it up to her mouth. She took a sip, then rested quietly for a bit until she was attacked by another more violent outburst. I almost jumped on her bed, but I could do nothing for her writhing body except to ask:
“Shall I call the nurse?”
“. . .”
When the spasm had subsided but her body was still twisted in pain, she covered her face with her hands and nodded.
I went to call the nurse. I followed the nurse, who, ignoring me, raced ahead into the room. With the nurse supporting her by both hands, the sick one regained a somewhat happier attitude. She opened her eyes vacantly. The coughing spell seemed to have ended for the moment.
The nurse gradually released her hands.
“It’s stopped. . . . Stay like that, please,” the nurse said, beginning to straighten the mussed-up blankets. “I’ll get you an injection.”
As the nurse went out, she whispered in my ear as I stood tensely at the door, not knowing what else to do. “A little bloody phlegm came up with the coughs.”
I returned to the bedside.
She had her eyes wide open, but I had to think she was asleep. With one hand I pushed up a loose curl of hair on her pale forehead and gently stroked her brow, moist with cold sweat. The hint of a smile flitted across her lips, as if she felt my warm presence.
Days of absolute quiet followed.
The yellow window blind of the sickroom was pulled all the way down; the room was dark. The nurses walked on tiptoe. I remained constantly by her bed. I alone watched over her through the night. Now and then the sick one would look my way and start to speak. Immediately I put my finger to my mouth to signal to her not to talk.
The silence plunged us each into the depths of our own thoughts. Each clearly felt pain at the other one’s thoughts. I sensed acutely that in this event she had sacrificed herself for me and that as I brooded on how she changed before my eyes, she seemed to regret how as an invalid she had destroyed in a moment with her own rashness what we two had so carefully nurtured.
My heart was torn at how she so sweetly seemed to blame only her own rashness without making it into a sacrifice. While the sick one had to make appropriate compensation even to the point of sacrifice, this had, we believed, brought us the most sublime happiness, a joy in life that I savored together with the sick one, even here at what might become her deathbed. Would it really satisfy us, though? What we thought was our happiness, wasn’t it more a passing fancy, a thing of the moment, than it was the happiness we believed it to be?
Tired as I was with night nursing at the side of the dozing invalid, I felt an unease, a hesitant thought that something there and then was threatening our happiness.
The crisis passed in only a week.
One morning the nurse threw back the blinds and opened the window partway. Brilliant autumn sunshine streamed through the window.
“I feel good,” the sick one said with renewed vigor from her bed.
With my newspaper spread out next to her pillow, I thought how events that shocked people seemed in their aftereffects to be quite remote affairs. I glanced at her and spoke in unthinking jest.
“When your father comes again, it would be better not to get too excited.”
She accepted my jest openly, showing her feelings with a blush. “I’ll keep it cool next time Dad comes.”
“If you can.”
While we joked together, consoling each other’s feelings, we, like children, pushed all responsibility onto her father.
Without seeming to will it at all, we came lightly through the crisis, which had so recently assailed us in spirit and in body, as if we were cheered that the events of the last week were no more than an aberration. At least, it seemed so to us. . . .
One evening as I was reading by her side, I suddenly slammed the book shut, went to the window, and stood there, thinking deeply. Then I returned to her side. I picked up the book and started reading again.
“What’s up?” she asked, looking up at me.
“It’s nothing,” I replied casually, buried briefly in my book. Then I broke the silence.
“I haven’t done much of anything since we came, and I was thinking I ought to start working.”
“That’s right. You ought to do your work. Father was worried about that, too.” She spoke with a serious look on her face. “You shouldn’t think only of me. . . .”
“No, I’d like to think much more about you. . . .” A vague idea for a novel suddenly popped into my head, and pursuing it, I spoke as if to myself. “I’m thinking of writing a novel about you. I can’t think of any other topic right now. This happiness that we share together—the joy of life that flows from what everyone thinks is a dead end—our life that nobody knows, I want to give it sh
ape, make it more certain. Do you understand?”
“I understand.” She seemed to follow my thinking as if it were her own, and she quickly agreed with me. She laughed with a wry smile.
“If you are writing about me, do it as you like,” she replied with indifference.
I, however, took her words seriously.
“Well then, I’ll write it as I like it. . . . But I’ll need lots of help from you.”
“What can I do?”
“While I’m working, I’d like to have you happy from your head to your toes. If you aren’t, . . .”
Rather than thinking abstractly to myself, I wanted us to think together. I walked around and around in the sickroom, oppressed with thoughts boiling up one after another in a strange feeling of excess activity at work in my brain.
“You’ll lose your energy if you hang around too much with an invalid. . . . Shouldn’t you go out for a walk?”
“Yes, if I’m going to work,” I said in high spirits, my eyes shining, “I’ll go for a walk.”
I came out of the woods. In front of my eyes the lower slopes of Mount Yatsugatake spread endlessly beyond the forest on the far side of the wide valley. In the foreground backed up to the forest lay the small village with its farm fields sloping outward, and there I could see clearly the tiny shape of the sanitarium building, its red roofs spread out in wings.
From early morning I roamed from one woods to another, letting my thoughts leave my feet to wander as they would. Then at a moment when the tiny shapes of the sanitarium unexpectedly came into my view, appearing close by in the clear autumn air, I had a feeling of suddenly awakening from whatever possessed me. Now for the first time I felt myself drawn apart from the strangeness of that life we lived together so casually day after day, surrounded by all those sick people in the sanitarium. Thus, as the desire to create that had been seething inside me was stimulated, I began to convert our strange everyday life into an extraordinarily sad but serene story. . . . “Setsuko, I can’t believe that two people have ever shared such mutual love. There hasn’t been a you before. Or a me. . . .”
Our dreams at times rushed by the affairs around us, and at times they stalled as if in permanent pause. When I was far from her, I talked incessantly with her and listened to her answers. Like life itself, our story seemed endless. Before we knew it, the story took on a life of its own, developing on its own without regard to me, leaving me to stagnate there in place. As if wishing for the outcome, the story itself had accomplished the sad death of the invalid heroine. . . . The girl, with a premonition of the end of life, exerts her declining energies to be cheery, to live with nobility. Held up on the arm of her lover, the girl grieves for the grief of the one she will leave behind. The girl who went happily into death, the image of that girl soars clearly as if sketched against the void. . . . “The man, trying to make their love more pure, escorts the sick one to a mountain sanitarium, but when death threatens, the man comes to doubt whether the happiness that they tried to attain and may even have attained to the fullest is really enough to satisfy them. Yet the woman, grateful to the man who has been attending her faithfully to the end in the agony of her death, goes contented to that death. So the man, aided by the nobility of the dying one, comes in the end to believe in their small happiness. . . .”
The end of the story seemed to lie in wait to trap me there. Suddenly the image of the girl about to die struck me with unanticipated intensity. I was attacked by indescribable fear and shame as if I were being awakened from a dream. To shake off the dream, I stood up brusquely from the beech-tree root I had been sitting on.
The sun had climbed high. The mountains, the forest, the village, the fields—everything—lay placid on that peaceful autumn day. In the tiny far-off buildings of the sanitarium, all were unmistakably following their daily routine. The image of the lonely Setsuko awaiting me alone in dejection, left behind as always amid all those unknown people, hit me unbearably, and I hurried down the mountain path.
Threading through the woods in back, I returned to the sanitarium. Detouring around by the balcony, I approached the farthest sickroom. Setsuko lay in bed without noticing me but fiddling with her hair as usual and staring sorrowfully into space. Dropping the idea of tapping on the window glass with my fingers, I gazed at her. She seemed lost in reverie, looking as if she could at last endure the threat against her, or perhaps unaware that she appeared that way. . . . Feeling a wrench in my heart, I stared at the unfamiliar figure of this woman, when suddenly her face brightened. Raising her head, she smiled. She had seen me.
I entered from the balcony and came to her side.
“What are you thinking about?”
“Nothing.” She spoke in a voice hardly hers.
When I remained silent and a little depressed, she returned to her normal self and spoke in an intimate voice.
“Where did you go? You were gone a long time, weren’t you?” she asked.
“Over there.” I spoke casually and pointed at the forest that could be seen in the distance beyond the balcony.
“Oh, you went that far? Did you get any work done?”
“Well, . . .” I replied grumpily and lapsed back into silence. Then suddenly I blurted out:
“You, are you satisfied with this life?” I asked her in a shrill, nervous voice.
She seemed to flinch at my crazy question. She stared back at me, nodding as if to verify the question.
“Why do you ask such a question?” she said, dubiously.
“I wondered whether a life like this wasn’t some whim of mine. No matter how important I took it, but for you. . . .”
“Don’t talk like that,” she interrupted me suddenly. “It’s a whim of yours to talk that way.”
My dissatisfaction at her words was apparent. She watched my downcast appearance uneasily for a while, and then when she could stand it no longer, she spoke at last.
“You don’t understand that I’m so contented here? Even when I’m feeling my worst, I haven’t for a moment thought of wanting to return home. If you weren’t here with me, how would it be for me, really? . . . A little while ago when you weren’t here, I pretended to endure it, thinking at first that the later you came back, the greater would be my happiness on your return, but when the time had passed that I thought you would return and you had not come back, I finally became uneasy. I felt this room where we had been together so constantly had become unfamiliar, and I wanted to escape from this frightening place. Then when I thought about what you had said, I regained my composure. When did you say it to me?—Long afterward when we think back on our life here, how beautiful it will seem. . . .”
She spoke in a hoarse voice that trailed off. She stared at me, her mouth twisted into something not quite a smile.
My heart was unbearably full to hear those words, but I was afraid to let her see my feelings and I stepped quietly out onto the balcony. It was like those early summer evenings that so perfectly epitomized our happiness, and yet it was tinged with the totally different light of an autumn morning, a colder, deeper light. I gazed intently at the wide vista. It was like our happiness at that time, and I felt myself filled with unfamiliar feelings that wrung my heart more and yet more. . . .
Winter
OCTOBER 20, 1935
In the afternoon I left the sick one as usual and went out from the sanitarium. Weaving through the fields where farmers worked busily at the harvest, I passed over a wooded hill and descended into the deserted little village in the hollow. I crossed the hanging bridge over the mountain stream and climbed a low hill on the opposite bank, wooded with chestnut trees. There on the upper slope I sat down. How many hours I was absorbed there, serene and cheery, conceiving the story I was about to write. I remember at times being startled by loud noises echoing through the valley, the sounds of children below shaking the trees to make the chestnuts fall.
Everything I could see and hear around me proclaimed the ripening fruit of our life, and I felt myself stimulated t
o reap those fruits quickly. I loved that thought.
The sun started to set, and I saw the village in the valley sink into the shadow of the wooded hill. I stood up slowly, started down the mountain, crossed the bridge again, and walked silently through the little village to the droning of waterwheels here and there. Then, thinking of the sick one waiting dejectedly for my return, I quickened my pace toward the sanitarium, proceeding along the edge of the larch forest at the foot of Mount Yatsugatake.
OCTOBER 23
Near dawn I was awakened in surprise by a strange sound from close by. I pricked up my ears, but the sanitarium was deathly quiet. I was wide awake and could not go back to sleep.
I stared blankly out through the little moth-encrusted window glass at two or three faintly gleaming morning stars. Feeling how lonely the daybreak was, I got up, and not knowing what to do, I walked barefoot into the darkened sickroom next door. As I approached the bed, I bent over and looked at Setsuko’s sleeping face. At that moment she opened her eyes wide and looked up at me.
“What are you doing?” she asked suspiciously.
Nothing, I said with a wink, bending over quietly, and feeling I could not endure it, I pressed my face down against hers.
“My, it’s cold,” she said, closing her eyes and turning her head slightly. There was a fragrance to her hair. We felt our mutual breathing as we pressed our cheeks together.
“Oh, a chestnut dropped,” she whispered, peering at me through half-closed eyes.
“Was that a chestnut? . . . That’s what woke me up.”
I spoke in a rather excited voice. I left her and walked over to the window that was gradually becoming light. I leaned against the window. A warm teardrop oozed from an eye and ran down my cheek as I stared at the muddy red color of the unmoving clouds above the mountain. I could hear sounds coming from the fields.
The Columbia Anthology of Modern Japanese Literature: From Restoration to Occupation, 1868-1945: vol. 1 (Modern Asian Literature Series) Page 61
