五

I entered from the left side of the seedling field in front of the cemetery, and walked along the wide path planted with maples on both sides toward the back. Then, from the teahouse visible at the end of it, a person who looked like Sensei suddenly emerged. I approached until the rims of his glasses glinted in the sunlight. And then, without warning, I called out in a loud voice, "Sensei!" Sensei stopped abruptly and looked at my face.

"Why... why..."

Sensei repeated the same word twice. The word was repeated in the hushed midday with a strange intonation. I suddenly found myself unable to answer at all.

"You followed after me, didn't you. Why..."

Sensei's manner was rather composed. His voice was rather lowered. Yet there was in his expression a kind of cloudiness that could not be clearly defined.

I told Sensei how I had come to be there.

"Did your wife mention whose grave she had gone to visit?"

"No, she said nothing of the sort.

"I see. — Yes, there was no reason she should say, to you whom she had just met. There was no need to."

Sensei seemed at last to be convinced. But I had not the slightest understanding of what it meant.

Sensei and I passed between the graves to come out onto the road. Beside tombs such as "The grave of Isabella so-and-so" and "The grave of Logan, servant of God," there stood wooden grave markers inscribed with "All sentient beings possess the Buddha-nature." There was also one reading "Plenipotentiary Minister so-and-so." Before a small grave carved with "Andrei," I asked Sensei, "How would one read this?" Sensei gave a wry smile and said, "They probably intend it to be read as 'Andre,' I suppose."

Sensei did not seem to perceive, as I did, any absurdity or irony in the varied styles of these grave markers representing different peoples. At first he listened in silence as I pointed to round tombstones and slender granite monuments and kept chattering this and that, but at last he said, "You have never yet seriously contemplated the fact of death." I fell silent. Sensei too said nothing more after that.

At the boundary of the cemetery stood a great ginkgo tree, as if shielding the sky. When we came beneath it, Sensei looked up at the high branches and said, "A little later, it is beautiful. When this tree has turned entirely yellow, the ground around here is buried in golden fallen leaves." Sensei passed beneath this tree without fail once every month.

On the far side, men leveling the uneven ground to make a new cemetery rested their spades and watched us. We turned left from there and soon came out onto the highway.

Having no purpose of my own as to where to go next, I simply walked in the direction Sensei walked. Sensei spoke less than usual. Even so, I did not feel particularly constrained, and strolled along with him.

"Are you going straight home?"

"Yes, I have nowhere in particular to stop by."

The two of us again walked silently down the slope southward.

"Is Sensei's family grave there?" I spoke up again.

"No."

"Whose grave is it? — A relative's grave?"

"No."

Sensei gave no answer beyond this. I too dropped the subject there. Then, after we had walked about a quarter of a mile, Sensei suddenly returned to it.

"There is my friend's grave there."

"Do you visit your friend's grave every month?"

"Yes."

Sensei said nothing more than this that day.

“Stories of the world, in your language.”