Thus it was that I stood frozen, unable to advance in either direction. When one naps while unwell, there are times when only the eyes open and the surroundings are clearly visible, yet the limbs simply will not move. At such moments, I would now and then secretly feel that very anguish.
Then the year ended and spring came. One day the mistress said to K that she was going to play karuta, and asked if he would not bring along some friend. K immediately replied that he had not a single friend, and the mistress was taken aback. Indeed, K had not one person he could call a true friend. He had a few acquaintances whom he would greet on the street, but none of them were the sort to join in a game of karuta. The mistress then amended her suggestion, saying perhaps I might call on someone I knew, but I was in no mood for such cheerful play and gave a vague, noncommittal reply, letting the matter drop. Yet when evening came, K and I were in the end dragged out by the young mistress. With no other guests, it was to be a quiet game among just the few of us at home. Moreover, K, unaccustomed to such pastimes, was much like a man with his arms folded. I asked K if he knew the hundred poems of the Hyakunin Isshu at all. He said he did not. The young mistress, hearing my words, perhaps took them as slighting K. From then on she aided K conspicuously. By the end, the two were nearly allied against me. Had it been another sort of opponent, I might have begun a quarrel. Fortunately K's manner never changed from the first. Seeing in him no trace of triumph, I was able to bring the occasion to a close without incident.
Two or three days after that, perhaps, the mistress and the young mistress left the house in the morning, saying they were going to a relative's in Ichigaya. Since neither K nor I had school yet, we remained behind as if keeping watch. I had no wish to read or to go out walking, so I merely rested my elbows on the edge of the brazier and leaned my chin in my hand, thinking vaguely. K in the next room made not a sound. It was so quiet one could not tell if either of us was there. Yet between the two of us this was nothing unusual, and I paid it no particular mind.
About ten o'clock, K suddenly slid open the dividing shoji and met my eyes. Standing on the threshold, he asked me what I was thinking. I, of course, was thinking of nothing. If I had been thinking, it might have been of the young mistress, as always. That young mistress was naturally tied to the mistress as well, but of late K himself, like one inseparable, circled through my head and complicated the matter. Meeting K's gaze, though until then I had vaguely been conscious of him as a kind of nuisance, I could not plainly say so. I merely looked at his face in silence. Then K strode into my room and sat before the brazier I was using. I at once lifted my elbows from its edge and, as if nudging it toward him, made room.
K began a conversation unlike his usual self. He wondered where the mistress and young mistress had gone in Ichigaya. I said likely to the aunt's. K asked what sort of aunt she was. I told him she was a soldier's wife. Then he questioned why they had set out so early, when women's New Year calls are mostly after the fifteenth. I could do nothing but reply that I did not know why.
