五十四

The mother of my concubine fell ill. When we called in a doctor, the diagnosis was that she would never recover. I nursed her as devotedly as I could. This was for the sake of the patient herself, and also for the sake of my beloved wife, but in a larger sense, it was ultimately for the sake of humanity. Until then I had been unable to bear the urge to do something, yet having nothing I could do, I must have stood by with my hands in my sleeves. It was at this time that, cut off from the world as I was, I first reached out of my own accord and gained the awareness that I had done some good, however small. I was governed by a certain feeling that I can only call atonement.

The mother died. My wife and I were left entirely alone. My wife said to me that now there was only one person in the world she could rely on. I, who could not even rely on myself, looked at my wife’s face and could not keep back my tears. And I thought her an unhappy woman. I even said aloud that she was unhappy. My wife asked why. She could not understand my meaning. Nor could I explain it to her. She cried. She resented me, saying that because I always observed her with twisted thoughts, I had come to say such things.

After the mother’s death, I treated my wife as kindly as I could. Not merely because I loved her. My kindness seemed to have a broader background, beyond the individual. Just as in nursing my wife’s mother, my heart appeared to move in the same spirit. My wife seemed satisfied. Yet within that satisfaction there seemed to linger somewhere a vague, thin point born of her inability to understand me. But even had she understood me, there was no fear that this dissatisfaction would lessen—rather it would have grown. For it seems to me that women, more than men, are of a nature to delight in kindness concentrated solely upon themselves, even at some cost to propriety, rather than in affection arising from the great standpoint of humanity.

My wife said to me once: can the heart of man and the heart of woman never fit together as one? I merely gave her the vague reply that perhaps they could, when young. She seemed to be looking back over her own past, and then let slip a faint sigh.

From around that time, terrible shadows would now and then flash through my breast. At first they came upon me by chance from without. I was startled. I shuddered. But after a while, my heart began to answer to those ghastly flashes. At last, even without their coming from outside, they came to seem as though they had lain hidden in the depths of my breast from the moment I was born. Each time I fell into such a state, I wondered whether my head had gone wrong. But I had no mind to be examined by a doctor or anyone.

I simply felt deeply the sin of man. That feeling sends me to K’s grave every month. That feeling made me nurse my wife’s mother. And that feeling commands me to be gentle with my wife. For that feeling’s sake, there were times I even wished to be whipped by some stranger on the roadside. Passing gradually through such stages, I came to feel that rather than be whipped by others, I should whip myself. And rather than whip myself, I should kill myself. Having no choice, I resolved to live as if dead.

How many years has it been since I made that resolution? My wife and I have gone on living in harmony as before. My wife and I have by no means been unhappy; we have been happy. Yet that one point I possess—for me no trifling point—seemed always to my wife to be darkness. Thinking of it, I feel profoundly sorry for my wife.

“Stories of the world, in your language.”