四十一

I was watching K with the same attention one might give to a man about to engage in a duel with another school. I prepared everything that bore my name—my eyes, my mind, my body, all of me—with not a fraction of an inch left unguarded, and turned toward K. Innocent K was so careless that it would be more fitting to call him wide open rather than full of holes. It was as if I had taken the map of the fortress he was guarding right from his own hands and could leisurely examine it before his very eyes.

Having discovered K wandering unsteadily between ideal and reality, I fixed my eye solely on the point that I could bring him down with a single blow. And I immediately exploited his weakness. I suddenly assumed a stern and solemn attitude toward him. It was of course a tactic, but since I also felt a tension befitting that attitude, I had no leisure to find myself ridiculous or ashamed. First I declared flatly, “He who has no aspiration for spiritual improvement is a fool.” These were the words K had used to me when the two of us were traveling in Bōshū. I threw them back at him in the same tone he had used, exactly as he had said them. But it was by no means revenge. I confess it held a meaning crueler than revenge. With that one phrase, I meant to block the path of love lying before K.

K was a man born into the Shinshū temple. Yet from his middle-school days his inclinations were never close to the faith of his household. I am aware that, knowing little of doctrinal distinctions, I am hardly qualified to say such things, but I recognized this only in relation to matters between men and women. K had liked the word *shōjin*—spiritual endeavor—from long ago. I interpreted that word as also containing the meaning of abstinence. But when I later heard the reality, I was surprised to find it held an even stricter meaning. Since his first creed was that all must be sacrificed for the Way, not only was curbing or forbidding desire a matter of course, but even love itself, free of desire, would obstruct the Way. When K was living self-supporting, I had often heard his assertions. From around then I had been thinking of the young lady, and inevitably I had to oppose him. Whenever I opposed him, K would always make a pitiful face. There, more than sympathy, contempt was revealed.

Since such a past lay between the two of us, the words “he who has no aspiration for spiritual improvement is a fool” must have cut K to the quick. But as I said before, I did not intend with this phrase to scatter the past K had so painstakingly built up. Rather, I meant to let him keep piling it up as before. Whether it reached the Way or touched heaven, I did not care. I simply feared that K would suddenly reverse the direction of his life and clash with my interests. In short, my words were merely the manifestation of selfishness.

“He who has no aspiration for spiritual improvement is a fool.”

I repeated the same words twice. And I stared to see how those words would affect K.

“A fool,” K answered after a while. “I am a fool.”

K stopped dead in his tracks and did not move. He was staring at the ground. I involuntarily started. In that instant K seemed to me like a robber who had turned at bay. But then I noticed that, for such a one, his voice was woefully lacking in force. I wanted to take a cue from his eyes, but he never looked at my face to the end. And then, slowly, he began to walk again.

“Stories of the world, in your language.”