In the hushed stillness of an old house too spacious for its few inhabitants, I untied my luggage and began to spread open my books. For some reason, my mind would not settle. It had been easier to concentrate, and pleasanter to study, up in that dizzying Tokyo boarding-house room, with the sound of distant running tram-cars in my ears as I turned page after page.
I would often lean on the desk and doze off before I knew it. Sometimes I would even bring out a pillow and indulge in a proper afternoon nap. When I woke, I heard the cicadas. Their cry, seeming to continue on from the world of waking, suddenly scratched and stirred the depths of my ears with restless urgency. I listened to it fixedly, and now and then a sorrowful feeling welled up in my breast.
I took up my brush and wrote short postcards or long letters to one friend or another. Some of those friends remained in Tokyo; some had gone back to distant home towns. Some replied, some sent no word at all. Needless to say, I did not forget the Master. I decided to write and send him, in a fine hand on manuscript paper, some three sheets on a theme such as "Myself Since Returning Home." As I sealed it, I wondered whether the Master was in fact still in Tokyo. When the Master and his wife left the house, it was the custom for a cropped-hair woman of about fifty to come from somewhere and keep watch in their absence. Once, when I asked the Master who she was, he countered by asking me what I took her for. I had mistaken her for a relative of his. "I have no relatives," the Master answered. He kept up no correspondence whatever with the people in his native place. The watch-woman of my question was a relative of the wife's, with no tie to the Master. As I posted my letter to the Master, I suddenly recalled the figure of that woman, loosely tying a narrow obi behind her. If the Master and his wife had gone off somewhere to escape the heat and this mail arrived after they left, I wondered, would that cropped-hair old woman have the presence of mind and kindness to forward it at once to their retreat? And yet I was well aware that the letter contained nothing of any real necessity. I was simply lonely. And so I set about it expecting a reply from the Master. But that reply never came.
Father had grown less eager to play shogi than when he had come home the previous winter. The shogi board, left dusty, was pushed into a corner of the alcove. Especially after His Majesty's illness, Father seemed sunk in deep thought. He would wait for the daily paper to arrive and be the first to read it himself. Then he would bring what he had read over to where I was.
"Here, look. Today too there's a detailed account of the Emperor."
Father always called His Majesty "the Emperor."
"It's presumptuous to say so, but the Emperor's illness is much the same as your father's, I suppose."
A deep cloud of anxiety hung over Father's face as he spoke thus. In my own breast, his words flashed the fear that Father might collapse at any time.
"But he'll be all right. Even a worthless thing like me is still getting along like this."
Father gave himself this assurance of his own health, yet seemed to foresee a danger that might at any moment come crashing down upon him.
"Father is truly afraid of illness. Unlike what Mother says, he doesn't seem to have any intention of living ten or twenty more years."
Mother looked troubled at my words.
"Try urging him to play a game of shogi or something."
I took the shogi board down from the alcove and wiped off the dust.
