五

My father gradually grew weaker. The old straw hat with the handkerchief that had so surprised me was left naturally neglected. Every time I looked at that hat sitting on the black, soot-stained shelf, I felt sorry for my father. While my father was still moving about lightly as before, I had worried, wishing he would be a little more careful. But once he began to sit fixed and motionless, I felt that after all his former state had been the healthier one. I often talked with my mother about my father’s health.

“It’s just his imagination,” my mother said. In her mind, she connected the Emperor’s illness with my father’s. I could not feel so certain that it was only that.

“It’s not just imagination. Isn’t his body truly unwell? Somehow it seems his health is failing faster than his spirits.”

Saying this, I wondered inwardly whether I ought to send for a fairly decent doctor from somewhere far off and have him examined.

“This summer must be dull for you. You’ve just graduated, and we can’t even give you a celebration, your father’s health is as it is, and then there’s His Majesty’s illness. —It would have been better if we had simply invited guests as soon as you came home.”

I had returned on the fifth or sixth of July, and it was a week later that my father and mother first proposed inviting guests to celebrate my graduation. The day finally settled upon was more than another week beyond that. Having returned to the leisurely countryside, where one was not bound by time, I was in effect saved from the unwelcome pain of social obligations—but my mother, who did not understand me, seemed not to notice this in the least.

When the announcement of the Emperor’s death arrived, my father took the newspaper in his hands and said, “Ah, ah.”

“Ah, ah, even His Majesty has at last passed away. And I too…”

My father did not finish the sentence.

I went into town to buy black muslin. With it I wrapped the ball on the flagpole, and attached a fluttering strip some three inches wide to the top of the pole, which I thrust out diagonally from beside the gate across the road. Both the flag and the black streamer hung limply in the windless air. The old roof of my house’s gate was thatched with straw. Beaten and blown by rain and wind, the straw had changed color peculiarly, taking on a pale grayish tint, and here and there its unevenness caught the eye. I stepped alone outside the gate and gazed at the black streamer, the white merinos ground, and the red rising-sun dyed into that ground. I also gazed at how these were reflected against the grimy thatch. I recalled that once Sensei had asked me, “What sort of appearance does your house have? Is it very different in character from the place in my own hometown?” I both wished to show Sensei this old house where I was born, and felt ashamed to show it to him.

I went back inside alone. Coming to where my desk stood, I read the newspaper and imagined the state of distant Tokyo. My imagination gathered upon the picture of how Japan’s greatest capital, in its darkness, was moving. Amid the uneasy, restless turmoil of that city, which had to keep moving in its blackness, I saw Sensei’s house like a single point of lamplight. I did not notice then that this lamplight was being naturally drawn into a soundless whirlpool. Nor, of course, did I notice that before long this light too was destined to be abruptly extinguished before my eyes.

Thinking of writing to Sensei about this event, I took up my brush. I wrote some ten lines and stopped. What I had written I tore to pieces and threw into the waste basket. (I thought that writing such things to Sensei would be of no use, and judging from past experience, he was not at all likely to reply.) I was lonely. That was why I wrote letters. And I thought it would be good if a reply came.

“Stories of the world, in your language.”