二十二

After the K affair had more or less settled down, I received a long letter from K's sister's husband. Since the home K was adopted into was related to this man, K had told me that his opinion had carried great weight both when K was placed there and when he was later restored to the family register.

The letter asked me to let him know how K had been getting on since. It added a request that, as his sister was worried, he would like a reply as soon as possible. K liked this sister, who had married into another family, better than the brother who had inherited the temple. They were all born of the same mother, but there was a considerable age gap between this sister and K. So when K was a child, this sister must have seemed more like a true mother to him than his stepmother did.

I showed the letter to K. He said nothing, but admitted that his sister had written to him two or three times with much the same meaning. Each time, he said, he had written back telling her there was no need to worry. Unfortunately, this sister had married into a household with little to spare, so however much sympathy she felt for K, she could do nothing for him in material terms.

I sent a reply to his brother-in-law much like the one K had sent. In it, I stated in strong words that should anything happen, I would see to it myself, and told them to rest easy. This was naturally my own decision alone. While it was certainly meant in goodwill, to reassure the sister who worried about K's future, it also held a stubborn pride toward his birth family and adoptive family, who could do nothing but despise me.

K had been restored to the register during his first year. From then until around the middle of his second year, for some eighteen months, he had supported himself by his own strength. Yet this excessive labor seemed gradually to begin telling upon his health and mind. No doubt the tiresome question of whether or not to leave his adoptive home played its part as well. He grew ever more sentimental. At times he would say that he alone bore the misfortune of the world upon his shoulders. And if you contradicted him, he would fly into a rage at once. Then he would grow restless, feeling the light that lay across his future receding ever farther from his eyes. When one begins one's studies, everyone commonly sets out upon a new journey with some great ambition; but after a year passes, and two, and graduation draws near, one suddenly notices how slow one's own feet have become, and more often than not despairs—such was K's case too, yet his anxiety was far more acute than ordinary. At last I thought it best to calm his spirits.

I told him to stop taking on extra work. I advised him that for the present he should ease his body and that to play would be the wise course for the sake of his greater future. Knowing K's stubbornness, I had expected he would hardly heed me; but when I actually spoke, talking him round proved harder than I thought, and I was at a loss. K merely insisted that learning was not his aim. He said his idea was to cultivate the power of will and become a strong man. To that end, he concluded, he must remain in as constraining a circumstance as possible. To an ordinary eye, this was sheer folly. Moreover, his will, in that constraining circumstance, had grown not strong at all. He was rather on the verge of nervous exhaustion. Having no other way, I put on every appearance of agreeing with him. At last I plainly said that I too had meant to advance through life in just such a direction. (To be sure, this was not wholly an empty word for me. For as I listened to K's doctrine, he had a power that drew me little by little into just such a frame of mind.)

Finally I proposed to K that we live together and tread the path of self-improvement side by side. To bend his stubbornness, I did not shrink from kneeling before him. And so, with no little difficulty, I brought him to my lodgings.

“Stories of the world, in your language.”