It was a time before words like “awakening” or “a new life” had yet come into being. But the reason K did not lightly cast off his old self and run straight toward a new direction was not that he lacked the modern man’s way of thinking. It was that he had a past too precious to throw away. One might even say he had lived up to now because of it. So the fact that K did not charge in a straight line toward the object of his love was by no means proof that his love was lukewarm. No matter how fiercely his feelings burned, he could not move recklessly. Since he was given no opportunity for an impulse that would make him forget past and future, K was inevitably compelled to pause a moment and look back upon his own past. And then he had to walk the path that his past pointed out, just as before. Besides, he possessed a stubbornness and endurance that modern men lack. In both these respects, I believed I saw through his heart well enough.
The night we returned from Ueno was, for me, a relatively peaceful one. After K had withdrawn to his room, I followed him and sat down by his desk. Then I deliberately led the conversation to idle gossip of the world. He looked bothered. In my eyes there must have shone something of the color of victory; in my voice there was certainly a ring of triumph. I spent a while holding my hands over the same brazier with K, then went back to my own room. Though in all outward things I was no match for him, at that moment alone I felt toward him a consciousness that he was nothing to fear.
Before long I fell into a calm sleep. But suddenly I was awakened by a voice calling my name. I looked, and saw the sliding door between our rooms opened some two feet, and there stood K’s dark figure. And in his room the lamp still burned as it had in the evening. I, to whom the world had suddenly changed, could for a moment say nothing, but stared blankly at the scene.
Then K asked whether I had gone to bed yet. K was a man who always stayed up late. I asked the K who was like a dark shadow whether he wanted something. K answered that it was nothing important—he had just wondered if I was asleep or still up, and called in passing on his way to the toilet. Since K had the lamplight on his back, I could not at all make out his face or the look in his eyes. But his voice was, if anything, calmer than usual.
K soon slid the open door shut with a snap. My room returned at once to its former darkness. I closed my eyes again to dream a dream quieter than that darkness. After that I knew nothing. But in the morning, thinking back on the previous evening, something struck me as strange. I wondered if perhaps it had all been a dream. So at meals I asked K. K said he had indeed opened the door and called my name. When I asked why he had done such a thing, he gave no clear answer. Toward the end, in a flat tone, he even asked me in return whether I had been sleeping soundly lately. I felt oddly about it.
That day the schedule happened to have our lectures begin at the same hour, so we soon left the house together. With the previous evening still on my mind since morning, I pressed K again on the way. But K still gave no answer to satisfy me. I emphasized my question: had he meant to say something about that matter? K declared flatly that he had not. It almost sounded as if he were reminding me: didn’t I say at Ueno yesterday, “Let’s drop that subject”? K was a man with a keen pride in such matters. The moment I noticed this, I suddenly recalled the word “resolution” he had used. Then those two characters, which until then had not bothered me at all, began to press upon my head with a strange force.
