by Неизвестный
I let word slip out about the paper, and Hiroyuki and Haruko set their eyes on it. If I had said nothing, they could hardly have had ideas about making money from my paper.
It’s my money. I won’t have them laying their hands on a single yen of it. So I said to Hiroyuki. I was not being unpleasant and I was not being selfish. I was only saying what I meant.
“You might be a little more cooperative, Father,” Hiroyuki said, and with that I lost my temper.
If he had come and asked me humbly for the money, I might have reconsidered on the spot. “We’re having a hard time of it, Father,” he might have said. “Forgive us for asking, but could you let us have part of the money?” I might not have given up as much as half of it, but I would have let him have possibly a fifth.
Haruko poked her head in from the dining room: “Father is right. It’s his money. It would be best to give it to him, every last cent of it.” She was polite in a very icy way.
“That’s right. It’s my money. I won’t have it being wasted on candy for those children.”
Hiroyuki snorted. Let him snort—I don’t care if he is my son, that sort of double-dealing is intolerable. If Misa were alive, I would not be driven to this. Misa tended to be weak, though, and toward the end she was taking their part. I could not depend on her. But when it came to money from paper that was to go into my work she would not have given in easily. I feel sure of that.
What happened this morning only made matters worse. I was at my desk, ready to begin work, when Haruko came in with a roll of bills, twelve thousand yen. That was very well, but she didn’t have to say what she did: “You’re getting to be very fond of money, aren’t you, Father?”
I am not fond of money. I am seventy-eight years old, and I have lived a life of honest poverty with my studies. I have had nothing besides scholarship. If I had wanted money, I would have become a clinician, and presently I would have opened my own practice, and by now I would be a rich man. I would not have spent my time prodding corpses in a dark laboratory, begging rich businessmen for donations, writing books in foreign languages and not selling a copy. Haruko was as wrong as she could be. There’s a limit to this obtuseness. Having to live in such a vulgar atmosphere, in the house of an ordinary office worker with not the slightest scholarly ties, and, the times being what they are, having to depend on his insignificant salary, how can I rest easy without money of my own, however little it may be, tucked away in my desk? I can’t relax with my work. And they seem to resent the fact that I don’t turn over my pension to help pay household expenses. But if I were to do that, where would I find the money to pay the students who help me? That pension is all the money I have for my research. Isn’t it really going too far when a son sets his eye on his own father’s pension?
I did not answer Haruko. I did not want to dirty my mouth with a single word. I took the twelve thousand yen from her, and counted it with quivering hands, bill by bill, right under her eyes. It was exactly right: a hundred twenty bills.
“Very well. You may go now,” I said.
I sat for a time at my desk. I made myself a bowl of tea. I held the old Hagi tea bowl (it was left on my seventieth birthday by a student who did not give his name—I like both the bowl and the student, whoever he was) at my chest, and tilted it so that the rich green foam trailed off down the side.
I looked out at the garden. Beyond the shrubbery I saw a slovenly figure in Western clothes coming in from the gate. It was the manager of the Ōmoriya Dry Goods Store. I had seen him two or three times before. Probably Haruko was selling another kimono. She brought her clothes with her when she was married, and she can sell them if she likes. We are not that hard up yet, however. If we were, we could stop those piano lessons for Yōichi. What possible good does it do to spend a lot of money giving piano lessons to a twelve-year-old boy who has no real talent? And how annoying that piano is! Music is for a genius to give his life to. The painting lessons for Keiko, who is only eight, are the same. Complete, absolute waste! They talk about “educating the sensibilities.” Educating the sensibilities! Education of the sensibilities is a far different thing. How can they educate the sensibilities without teaching a decent respect for scholarship?
The useless expenses on the children are one example, but there are plenty of others. Haruko was saying the other day that she had her shoes shined at Shijō, and it cost her twenty yen. Shocking! But did Hiroyuki reprimand her for it? By no means. He said that he himself had his shoes shined in front of Kyōgoku. It cost him thirty yen, but the shoe-shine boys at Kyōgoku were politer and more thorough. An able-bodied man and woman hiring someone to shine their shoes! What can one possibly say?
And then they complain that they have trouble making ends meet, and they sell their clothes. Their whole way of thinking is riddled with inconsistencies. If the husband drank, if he drank like a fish, and that made it hard to pay the bills, I would understand. My life as a matter of fact has been a succession of days when drinking made it hard to pay the bills. Research and liquor. The dissecting room and the bar. But the money I spent on liquor was different, even if you must call it waste. I would never economize on liquor to have my shoes shined. I would probably go on drinking even if I had to shine someone else’s shoes. Liquor is one of my basic needs. Like my research, it makes its demands and there is no putting it off.
As I heard the man from the Ōmoriya ringing the door bell, I got up and changed clothes. Across my chest I strung the decoration I am most fond of, the little Order of the Red Cross, First Degree, given to me by the Polish government. With the beginning of Part Nine and a German dictionary in my brief case, I stepped down from the veranda into the garden. I first put the twelve thousand yen in an outside pocket, then moved it to my breast pocket. I cut across the garden and went out through the back gate. Perhaps because I was angry, my knee joint creaked at each step.
I walked slowly out to the streetcar track, where I was lucky enough to stop a taxi. I asked how much the fare would be to Katada. It would be possibly two hundred yen, I thought, but the driver, who could not have been more than eighteen or nineteen, said two thousand. I was furious. My hands shook. The driver spun the wheel as though he thought me a complete fool, but I called after him. “All right, take me to Katada.” He turned around and opened the door from inside. In the old days a driver would have climbed out to open the door.
The taxi shook violently. “This will never do,” I said to myself. I told the driver to slow down. I closed my eyes, folded my arms, and hunched my shoulders, contracting the exposed surface of my heart to lessen the burden on it. The shaking subsided as we moved out of Kyoto and onto the concrete surface of the Ōtsu highway. Over the pass at Keage and down into Yamashina and Ōtsu. From Ōtsu the road turned north along the lake-shore, and Hira lay before us. Ah, Hira! my heart sang. I had almost unconsciously told the driver that I wanted to go to Katada, and the impulse had not been wrong. I did indeed want to see Lake Biwa, and Hira. I wanted to stand on the veranda of the Reihōkan, all by myself, and look at the quiet waters of Lake Biwa and at Mount Hira beyond until I was content.
I was twenty-five when I first saw Hira. Some years before, I had come upon a copy of Picture News, a magazine but recently founded. I was still a high school student in Tokyo, and the magazine belonged to my landlady’s daughter. The frontispiece, in the violet tint popular then, was captioned “The Rhododendrons of Hira.”
I remember the picture vividly even now. It was taken from the summit of Hira, with a corner of Lake Biwa like a mirror far below. Down over the steep slope, broken here and there by a boulder, stretched a brilliant field of mountain rhododendrons. A sort of astonishment swept over me, I have no idea why. A volatile, ether-like excitement stirred a corner of my heart. Carefully I studied the picture of the rhododendrons of Hira.
I said to myself that someday I would stand on the little steamer, depicted in a circular inset on the same page, that several times each day made its way from hamlet to hamlet up t
he lake coast; and, looking up at the jagged lines of Hira, I would climb to exactly the spot on the peak from which the picture was taken. I do not know how to explain it, but I was quite sure that the day would come. It would come. Without fail. My heart had made its decision, shall we say—in any case, I felt not the slightest doubt
And I thought too that the day when I would climb Hira would be a lonely day for me. How shall I describe it? A day when I had to be moving, when no one understood me. “Solitary” is a convenient word. Or perhaps “despairing” will do. Solitary, despairing. In general I dislike such dandyisms, but I can’t help thinking that here they fit the case. On a day of solitude and despair, I would climb to the summit of Hira, where the mountain rhododendrons would be in bloom, and I would lie down by myself and sleep under the heavily scented clusters of flowers. That day would come. It had to come. My confidence, as I look back on it, seems so passive that I find it hard to understand, but at the time it moved into my heart as the most proper and acceptable thing in the world. So it was that I first came to know of Hira.
Some years later I saw not a picture but the real Hira. I was twenty-five, I think. It was the end of the year after I graduated from the Imperial University, and I was lecturing at the Okayama Medical College. That would make it 1896. An angel of death was with me in those days. Everyone goes through some such period when he is young, and life hardly seems worth living. Keisuke was twenty-five when he died so senselessly. If he had lived through the crisis, he would probably have had tens of years ahead of him. Spineless, irresolute Keisuke—but the angel of death that was after him may have been a stronger one than mine. What a fool he was, though—and yet one couldn’t help feeling sorry for him. If he were alive today—the fool, the fool. The unspeakable fool. When I think of Keisuke, my temper quite gets the better of me.
The angel of death that followed me when I was twenty-five was a simpler one than Keisuke’s. I had doubts about the meaning of my existence, and I thought of ending it, that was all. I had not yet come upon my life’s work, non-osseous anthropology. I can see now that my heart was full of chinks. I was saturated in religion and philosophy as no student of the natural sciences should be. It was some years later that Fujimura Masao threw himself over Kegon Falls, but every student who went into philosophy and such was at some time or other threatened by much the same angel of death. “The truth is exhausted in one word, ‘incomprehensible’ ”—it was a strange age, and we seriously thought such thoughts. A strange age, when the youth of the nation was lost in meditation on problems of life and death.
Winter vacation came. I went straight to Kyoto with a Zen text under my arm, and into the Tenryū-ji temple at Saga. There, with an old sage for my master, I threw myself into Zen meditation. Almost every night I sat on the veranda of the main hall. Sometimes I went out to sit on a boulder by the lake, which was covered each night with a thin sheet of ice. When we finished the all-night services celebrating the Buddha’s enlightenment, I was staggering with exhaustion. I can see now that there was nothing in the world the matter with me but a bad case of nerves from malnutrition and overwork and lack of sleep.
It was the morning of the twenty-second or twenty-third of December, whichever day the winter solstice was that year. As soon as the services were over, I left the Tenryū-ji and started for Ōtsu. I suppose it was about eight o’clock in the morning. The tree stumps in the temple precincts were covered lightly with snow, and it was a cold morning even for Saga, a morning to freeze the nose and ears. In my cotton priest’s robe, my bare feet slipped into sandals, I walked as fast as I could through Kitano and the main part of Kyoto, and on to Ōtsu, not once stopping to rest, over the road I took today. I remember that a light snow was falling when I passed the Kaneyo restaurant in Yamashina. I was nearly fainting with hunger.
Why do you suppose I went to Ōtsu? The details are no longer very clear in my mind. It would be a distortion to say that I was attracted to Hira by the picture I had seen in Picture News years before. Probably I started out with a vague intention of finding a place on the shore of the lake to die. Or possibly I simply moved toward the lake like a sleepwalker, and as I looked out over the water the thought of dying came to me.
It was a very cold day. At Ōtsu I turned and walked up the lake, the angel of death with me. On my right the cold water stretched motionless, on and on. Now and then a few birds started up from among the reeds near the shore.
In front of me was Mount Hiei, and to the left and far beyond soared a line of peaks white with snow, their beauty a revelation. I was used to the gentler lines of the mountains around Saga with their scattered groves of trees, and the harsh, grand beauty of these mountains was a change to make me wonder that the word “mountain” could cover both. I must have asked a peddler along the way—in any case I knew that the range before me was Hira. Now and then I stopped to look at Hira, and the angel of death looked with me. I was held captive by those jagged lines stretching off into the distance, almost god-like.
It was evening when I reached the Floating Hall in Katada. From time to time through the day a few flakes of snow had fallen. Now it began snowing in earnest, and the air was dense with snowflakes. I stood for a long time under the eaves of the Floating Hall. The surface of the lake was cut off from view. I took out my purse and undid the strings with freezing fingers, and one five-yen bill fell out. With that clutched in my hand I stepped into the wide hall of an inn by the lake. It was a fairly imposing place, but somehow it suggested a country post-inn—the Reihōkan.
A middle-aged man with close-cropped hair was warming himself in the office. I shoved the five-yen bill at him and asked him to let me stay the night. He said I should pay in the morning, and when I made him take it he looked at me curiously. He was suddenly very kind. A maid fifteen or sixteen years old brought hot water, and as I sat down on the sill, rolled up the skirt of my robe, and soaked my toes, red and numb from the cold, I felt a little like a human being again. I was given this room, the best one in the Reihōkan. It was already so dark that I had to have a light.
I said not a word. I ate what the innkeeper’s wife gave me, and, taking up my position before the alcove, I began my Zen meditations again. I had decided that the next day I would jump over the cliff beside the Floating Hall. I wondered with some disquiet whether my five-foot self would sink quietly, as a rock sinks. My drowned form at the bottom of the lake came before my eyes time after time, and I felt that I was seeing a particularly heroic death.
It was as quiet as the hall of the Tenryū-ji. The night was bitterly cold, and the slightest movement brought new stabs of cold. I sat in meditation for I do not know how many hours. Toward dawn I came to myself. I was thoroughly exhausted. I got up and went to the toilet, and then lay down to rest. Bedding had been laid out in a corner of the room, but I did not touch it. Instead I lay on the floor with my arm for a pillow. I thought I would doze off for an hour or two until daylight.
At that moment a piercing, throat-splitting scream filled the air. The cry of a night bird possibly? I raised my head and looked around, but the night was as quiet as before. I was composing myself for sleep when the same scream came a second time, from under the veranda, it seemed, almost below my head. I got up, lit a lantern, went out to the veranda, and slid open the outside door. The light reached only the eaves. I could see nothing beyond. Fine snowflakes fell steadily into the narrow circle. As I leaned over the railing and tried to see into the darkness under the veranda, the scream came again, louder than before; and from directly below me, where the cliff fell away to the lake, a bird flew up with a terrible beating of wings, almost near enough to brush my cheek. I could not see it, but those wings, flying off into the snowy darkness over the lake, sounded with a violence that struck me to the heart. I stood for a time almost reeling.
The terrible energy, shall we call it the vital force, in one night bird took me so by surprise that my angel of death left me.
The next day, in heavy snow, I walked back a
live to Kyoto.
I did not see Hira from Katada again until the time of the Keisuke affair. The date I cannot forget: the fall of 1926.
It was the year I became dean of the medical school, and I was fifty-five. The years from then until I retired at sixty were years of rankling unpleasantness. The Keisuke affair, Misa’s death a year later, Hiroyuki’s marriage and Kyōko’s, both of which displeased me intensely. Then there was Sadamitsu’s drift toward radicalism, and as dean of the medical school I was little more than an errand boy, forced to give up what was most important to me, my research. Each day added a new irritation.
The Keisuke affair came quite without warning. A call from R University, and Misa went to see what the difficulty was. Keisuke had been expelled because of trouble with some woman. I could not believe my ears when Misa came into my study and told me. Keisuke had always had a weak strain in him, and we had had to put him in R University, a private school without much standing, because his grades were below average; but there was something boyish about him; he had a quietness and docility lacking in the other children. I had always thought him a model of good behavior. But I suppose he showed a different face to other people, and he had proceeded to get some tramp of an eighteen-year-old waitress pregnant.
I thought the affair might just possibly have found its way into the papers, and when I opened my evening paper, there indeed it was, headlined “Student Indecencies” or something equally trite. The story of Keisuke’s misbehavior, quite new to me, was told in some detail. “The son of an important educator, a dean in a certain university,” the article said, giving a fictitious name that would suggest mine immediately. My standing as an educator was gone. That was very well. I had never considered myself an educator anyway. I am only a scholar. But the boy’s conduct, so unbecoming in a student, was most distressing to me as a father, the only father he had, after all. I had more trouble later when Sadamitsu turned radical, but that incident at least had its redeeming features. There was not one detail I could console myself with in the Keisuke affair.
