By that time I was already a university student. Compared to when I had first come to the teacher’s house, I felt I had grown considerably more adult. It was also after I had become quite close with his wife. I felt no constraint whatsoever around her. We talked about all sorts of things face to face. But since those were merely ordinary conversations without any particular character, I have now forgotten them completely. Among them, however, there is one thing that stayed in my ear. Before I speak of it, though, there is something I should briefly note.
The teacher was a university graduate. I had known this from the start. But it was only after returning to Tokyo and some time had passed that I first realized he did nothing and simply lived in leisure. At the time, I wondered how he could afford to live so idly.
The teacher was a man almost entirely unknown to the world. Thus, regarding his scholarship or his thought, there should have been no one outside of me—who was in such close relation with him—to pay him due respect. I always thought this a pity. The teacher merely replied, “Someone like me cannot go out into the world and speak,” and would not engage the matter. To me, that answer seemed too modest, and sounded rather like a cold criticism of the world. In fact, the teacher would sometimes seize upon this or that former classmate who had since become famous, and pass utterly blunt criticism on them. So I openly pointed out this contradiction and argued the matter. My spirit was less one of resistance than of regret that the world could remain so unconcerned without knowing the teacher. Then the teacher said in a lowered tone, “It cannot be helped—I am simply a man without the qualification to act upon the world.” Upon the teacher’s face was clearly engraved a deep, singular expression. Whether it was disappointment, discontent, or sorrow, I could not tell; but in any case it was so powerfully felt that I could not find a second word to say, and lacked even the courage to say anything more.
While I was talking with the wife, the subject naturally drifted from the teacher to there.
“Why does the teacher stay at home thinking and studying, and not go out into the world to work?”
“That man is hopeless. He simply dislikes such things.”
“You mean he has realized it is all meaningless, then?”
“Realize or not realize—well, as a woman I cannot say, but surely it is not in that sense. He probably still wants to do something. And yet he cannot. So it is pitiful.”
“But the teacher seems, as far as health goes, to have no trouble anywhere, does he not?”
“Of course he is strong. He has no chronic ailment at all.”
“Then why can he not be active?”
“That is what I do not understand, you see. If I understood that much, I should not worry so. It is precisely because I do not understand that it is unbearably pitiful.”
In the wife’s tone was a great deal of sympathy. And yet at the corners of her mouth there was a faint smile. From the outside, I was rather the more serious one. I sat silent with a troubled face. Then the wife suddenly opened her mouth again, as if she had just recalled something.
“In his youth he was not such a man. In his youth he was entirely different. And then he changed completely.”
“When do you mean by his youth?” I asked.
“His student days.”
“Did you know the teacher since his student days?”
The wife’s face suddenly flushed faintly red.
