I, who was supposed to graduate that June, absolutely had to finish this thesis by the end of April as per the regulations. When I counted the remaining days on my fingers—February, March, April—and found them so few, I began to doubt my own nerve. While everyone else had long since gathered materials and filled notebooks, looking busy to any onlooker, I alone had not yet laid a hand on anything. All I had was the resolve, renewed with the new year, that I would throw myself into it in earnest. I started out on that resolve. And then I froze up at once. Having until then sketched grand problems in the air and imagined the framework all but complete, I now pressed my head and sank into worry. I then narrowed the scope of my thesis. And to spare myself the trouble of systematically organizing refined thought, I decided simply to lay out the materials found in books and tack on a suitable conclusion.
The topic I chose was close in nature to the professor's specialty. When I had earlier asked his opinion on the choice, he said that would be fine. Flustered, I immediately went to his rooms and asked what reference books I ought to read. Beyond gladly sharing all the knowledge he had on the matter, he offered to lend me two or three necessary volumes. Yet on this point he showed not the slightest inclination to take up the role of guiding me.
"I haven't read much lately, so I don't know the new stuff. You'd better ask the school faculty."
I suddenly recalled then that his wife had once told me how, though he had been a voracious reader, for some reason he seemed to have lost his former interest in that direction. Setting the thesis aside, I ventured lightly:
"Why can't you take an interest in books like you used to, sir?"
"No particular reason... I suppose it's because I've come to feel that no matter how much you read, you don't become all that great. And then..."
"And then, is there more?"
"Not so much a reason as there being more, but before, you see, I'd feel ashamed and awkward not knowing things when appearing before others or being asked—but lately not knowing has come to seem not such a shame, so I suppose the spirit to force myself to read just stopped coming. In short, I've grown old."
The professor's words were rather calm. Precisely because they carried none of the bitterness of one who has turned his back on the world, they did not strike me with much force. I did not think him grown old, but neither did I return home impressed or in awe.
After that I suffered like a mind unhinged by the thesis, eyes red with strain. I asked around among friends who had graduated a year before about how it went for them. One said he raced to the office by carriage on the deadline day and just made it. Another said he arrived fifteen minutes past five, and was nearly turned away, but through the chief professor's kindness was barely accepted. Feeling both unease and a stiffening of resolve, I worked daily at my desk until my spirit gave out. Or else I slipped into the dim library and scanned the tall shelves this way and that. My eyes combed the gold lettering on the spines like a collector digging up some antique.
As the plum blossoms opened, the cold wind gradually shifted south. After a spell of that, cherry-blossom talk began to reach my ears now and then. Even so, like a cart horse staring only ahead, I was whipped onward by the thesis. I did not cross the professor's threshold again until late April, when at last I finished the work as planned.
