Around the middle of August, I received a letter from a friend. It said that there was an opening for a middle school teacher in the provinces, and asked if I would like to go. This friend was a man who, out of financial necessity, went around looking for such positions himself. The opening had first come his way, but since he had arranged something better elsewhere, he meant to pass the spare one on to me and had taken the trouble to let me know. I sent a reply at once and declined. I wrote that since among my acquaintances there were those who were going to great lengths to secure a teaching post, it would be better to pass it on to one of them.
After sending my reply, I told my father and mother about the matter. Neither of them seemed to object to my having declined.
"Even without going to such a place, there must still be better openings."
In these words I read the excessive hopes the two of them held for me. My thoughtless father and mother seemed to expect an unsuitable position and income from me, fresh out of university.
"As for suitable openings, nowadays there's no such easy post to be had. Besides, my brother and I studied different subjects and belong to different times, so it's a bit troubling to be thought of in the same way as him."
"But now that you've graduated, at the very least you must be able to stand on your own and get by, or we'll be in a fix too. If someone asks us, 'What is your second son doing now that he's graduated university?' and we can't answer, I'll feel small."
Father pulled a sour face. His thinking knew nothing of leaving the old hometown, long lived in and familiar. Asked by this or that person in the hometown whether one could earn such-and-such a salary after graduating university, or told perhaps it would be around a hundred yen a month, Father wanted to settle me, just graduated, in a way that would not look bad before such people. To my father and mother, I, who took the vast capital as my base of operations, was no different from a strange creature walking with its feet toward the sky. For my part, I sometimes felt precisely like such a creature. Before father and mother, whose distance from me was too vast for me to lay my thoughts bare, I kept silent.
"Why not ask that person you're always calling 'Sensei' at a time like this? That's just the occasion."
Mother could interpret 'Sensei' in no other way. That Sensei was the man who had advised me, when I returned home, to have my father divide the estate while he was still alive. He was not a man who would arrange a position for me after graduation.
"What does this Sensei do?" father asked.
"He does nothing at all," I answered.
I had long ago meant to have told both father and mother that Sensei did nothing at all. And father surely remembered it.
"What do you mean, he does nothing at all? If he's someone you respect so highly, he ought to be doing something."
Father said this and gently mocked me. In father's view, those who were of use had gone out into the world and all obtained suitable positions and worked. He seemed to conclude that Sensei idled about simply because he was a good-for-nothing.
"Even a man like me, though I draw no salary, I'm not just idling about either."
Father said this too. Still I kept silent.
"If he's as great a person as you say, he's sure to find some opening for you. Why not try asking him?" mother said.
"No," I answered.
"Then there's no help for it, is there? Why won't you ask? You could even send a letter."
"Yes."
I gave a vague reply and left my seat.
