The third time I returned to my homeland was at the beginning of summer, a year after that. I was always waiting impatiently for the school year exams to be over so I could flee Tokyo. That was because my hometown was so dear to me. You must know the feeling too—the place where you were born has a different color to its air, the scent of the land is special, and the memories of father and mother drift there thickly. To be wrapped in the seventh and eighth months of the year, and to sit still like a snake gone into its hole, was for me the warmest and most pleasant feeling of all.
Simple as I was, I thought there was no need to trouble my head over much about the question of marrying my cousin. If you dislike something, refuse it; once you’ve refused, nothing remains afterward—that was what I believed. And so, even though I did not bend my will to my uncle’s wishes, I was rather untroubled. In the past year I had never once worried over such a matter, and I returned to the country in my usual high spirits.
But when I got back, my uncle’s attitude was different. He no longer wore a kindly face and drew me to his bosom as before. Even so, having been raised generously, I did not notice for four or five days after my return. I only happened to think it strange on some occasion. Yet what was odd was that it was not only my uncle. My aunt was odd too. My cousin was odd too. Even my uncle’s boy, who had finished middle school and written to ask about going on to the Tokyo Higher Commercial School, was odd too.
It became my nature to be unable to stop thinking about it. Why had my own feelings changed so? No—why had they changed so? I suspected that my dead father and mother had washed my dull eyes and suddenly made the world appear clear to me. Even after father and mother had left this world, I had believed somewhere deep in my heart that they would love me just as they had when they were alive. To be sure, even then I was by no means a man blind to reason. But the mass of superstition handed down from my ancestors lay latent in my blood with a strong power. It likely lies there still.
I went alone to the hills and knelt before my parents’ grave. I knelt half in mourning, half in gratitude. And feeling as if my future happiness were still clutched in the hands of those lying beneath the cold stone, I prayed to them to guard my fate. You may laugh. I think it cannot be helped even if I am laughed at. But I was that sort of person.
My world turned over like the palm of a hand. Yet this was not, for me, a first experience. I was sixteen or seventeen, perhaps, when I first discovered the fact that there was beauty in the world, and was startled all at once. I doubted my own eyes many times, and rubbed them many times. And in my heart I cried, how beautiful. Sixteen or seventeen is, for both men and women, what is commonly called the age when one awakens to desire. Having awakened to desire, I was able for the first time to see woman as the representative of all beautiful things in the world. Toward the opposite sex, whose existence I had until then not noticed at all, my blind eyes were suddenly opened. From then on, my heaven and earth became entirely new.
That I noticed my uncle’s attitude was surely exactly the same as this. I noticed it all at once. With no premonition or preparation, it came suddenly. Suddenly he and his family appeared to my eyes as something entirely different from before. I was alarmed. And I came to feel that if things were left as they were, I could not know what would become of my own path ahead.
