The next day, too, I braved the heat and went about buying the things I had been asked to get. When the orders came by letter, they had seemed like nothing at all, but once I was actually at it, I found the whole business dreadfully daunting. Wiping the sweat from myself on the streetcar, I felt a resentful contempt for those country folk who had not the slightest notion of the time and trouble they were costing others.
I had no mind to spend this summer in idleness. Since I had already laid out in advance something like a schedule for after my return home, I also had to get hold of the books necessary to carry it out. I was prepared to sacrifice half a day on the second floor of Maruzen. Standing before the shelves of the department most closely related to me, I inspected the books one by one, from end to end.
Among my purchases, what troubled me most was the women's half-collars. When I asked the shopboy, he would bring out any number of them, but when it came to actually choosing, I was simply at a loss. On top of that, the prices were extremely erratic. When I thought something must be cheap and asked, it turned out very expensive; when I assumed something was costly and said nothing, it was on the contrary remarkably cheap. There were even some where, however much I compared them, I could not tell where the difference in price came from. I was utterly at my wits' end. And in my heart I regretted not having troubled Mrs. Sensei with it.
I bought a suitcase. It was of course nothing but a cheap domestic article, but with its fittings and such shining brightly, it was quite enough to overawe the country folk. Buying this suitcase was at my mother's request. In her letter she had specially written that when I graduated I was to buy a new suitcase and put all the souvenirs in it for the trip home. When I read those words I burst out laughing. Rather than saying I could not understand my mother's way of thinking, the words struck me as a kind of comedy.
As I had told Mr. and Mrs. Sensei when I took my leave, I left Tokyo by train three days later and returned to my home in the country. Ever since the winter, Sensei had given me various cautions about my father's illness, and though I stood in the position of one who ought to worry most, for some reason it did not weigh on me much. I rather pitied my mother, imagining her after my father should be gone. To that extent, somewhere in my heart I must have resigned myself to the belief that my father was already a man who ought to die. In the letter I sent to my brother in Kyushu, I wrote that there was no prospect of Father ever returning to such health as he had once known. At one point I even wrote that, though official duties might interfere, if possible he should manage to come home just to see Father's face this summer. Moreover, I used such sentimental phrases as that it must be lonely indeed for the two old people to be alone in the country, and that we as children felt the deepest regret. I truly wrote what rose in my heart. But the mood after writing was not the same as when I wrote.
I pondered this contradiction of mine on the train. As I pondered, I came to think of myself as a fickle, shallow creature, changeable in my feelings. I grew displeased. I thought again of Mr. and Mrs. Sensei. Especially I recalled the conversation when I had been invited to supper two or three evenings before.
"Which of us will die first?"
That evening I repeated to myself the question that had arisen between Sensei and his wife. And I thought that no one could answer this question with any certainty. But if it were clearly known which would die first, what would Sensei do? What would his wife do? I thought that Sensei and his wife, like anyone else, could do nothing but maintain their present attitudes. (Just as I, with my father drawing near death back in the country, could do nothing.) I saw human beings as helpless things. I saw as helpless the inborn fickleness of human beings, which they could do nothing about.
Middle: My Parents and I
