To the Spring Equinox and Beyond (36 page)

One day he casually knocked at his friend's door. There, apparently whiling away the time in idle gossip, he was secretly watching for the chance to pounce upon the man. Picking up a heavy paperweight lying on a desk, he suddenly asked, "Could you kill a man with this?" His friend, of course, didn't take the question seriously. Without waiting for a response, the man put all his strength behind the paperweight and struck dead the beloved husband before the very eyes of his wife. The murderer, on a charge of insanity, was sent to a madhouse. With remarkable powers of thought, discretion, and reason, he vigorously pleaded his sanity, basing his arguments on the circumstances I've just told you about. But then he began to doubt his own self-vindication. Moreover, he tried to vindicate his own doubts. Was he, after all, sane or insane?

With that book in my hand I trembled in fear.

My head seems to have been created to restrain my heart, which seems the normal way of man. Judging from the results of my conduct, I haven't had much to regret in my past. It is, however, enormously painful, as everyone knows, to have your heart, whenever it gets stirred up, kept under the pressure of your solemn head. Obstinate as I am, I'm rather short-tempered in a negative way, so I've seldom suffered the pain you feel when your heart gets worked up and is suddenly restrained by reason, like a wildly careening automobile that's suddenly checked. Even so, I have on occasion felt within me a combustion of vital energy that could only be described as a powerful twist given to the axis of life. Whenever a struggle occurred between these two forces, I used to obey the orders of my head, thinking at times my head could rule because it was strong, thinking at other times that my heart obeyed because it was weak. And knowing somehow that the struggle was an inevitable one for my life, I could not free myself from the secret awe of its being a struggle that would consume my life.

Therefore, the hero of
Gedanke
overwhelmed me. He had thought no more of his friend's life than he did an insect's, and he refused to admit any contradiction or antipathy between reason and feeling. He felt no repentance whatever in using his entire intellect as fuel for revenge and letting it serve as the means for the dextrous accomplishment of a brutal murder. He was a superb actor who with careful control of his thoughts could pour over the head of his antagonist the venomous blood of vengeance. Either that, or he was a madman possessed of a combination of brain power and passion beyond those of ordinary mortals. When I compared myself with him, I envied his ability to act so intently without reflection. At the same time I was so terrified by all of this that I had broken out into a sweat. How thoroughly satisfying it must be to act that way, I thought. But I also thought that after such a deed one's conscience must be put through unbearable tortures.

Nevertheless, I wondered what would happen if the jealousy I had of Takagi took some strange course and grew a hundred times more powerful in consuming me. But I could not imagine how I would feel at that moment. At first I was about to abandon my thoughts simply from the standpoint that I would never be able to follow the novel's hero, since I had not been made that way. But then it occurred to me that I myself might, in fact, be capable of attaining the same degree of revenge. I finally began to believe that only a person like myself who was usually undecided while suffering from the conflict between head and heart would be bold enough to commit such an atrocity coolly, methodically, calculatedly. I myself don't know why I ultimately came to entertain such an idea. But when I hit on that thought, an unusual mood unexpectedly came over me. It was not simply one of terror or misgiving or unpleasantness— it seemed far more complex than these. From the way in which it revealed itself on the whole to my heart, it was similar to the mood of a man who, while otherwise gentle in nature, has become emboldened by alcohol and feels satisfied in being capable of doing anything because of the state he is in, yet at the same time is made aware that he has degraded himself into a being far more inferior than he usually is, but that since the degradation has been brought about by liquor, there is no way of escaping no matter how much he tries to ward it off, so he abandons himself to despair. In this strange mood, I was lost in the wide-eyed daydream of taking a heavy paperweight and striking Takagi from the top of his skull to the bottom, all before Chiyoko's eyes. Suddenly amazed, I stood up.

I went directly into the bath downstairs and poured water over my skull again and again. I saw by the clock in the sitting room that it was past noon, just the time to have lunch. As usual, Saku waited on me. After eating a few mouthfuls of rice, I asked her all at once if there was anything unusual about my complexion.

Saku's eyes opened wide in surprise, and she replied that there wasn't. A pause followed, and then she asked if anything was the matter.

"No, nothing much," I replied.

"I guess since it's become so hot out. . . ."

In silence I finished two bowls of rice. Drinking the tea she poured me, I again said to her suddenly, "It's better to be quiet at home than to be in that muddle at Kamakura."

"But I suppose it's cooler there than in Tokyo," she said.

"No, it's even hotter than in Tokyo," I explained. "It's no good living in such a place. You only get into a fret there."

"Will Madam be staying for some days more?" she asked.

"She'll be back soon," I replied.

Saku's figure before me looked like a morning glory drawn with one stroke of the brush. My only regret was that the drawing was not by the hand of a master. And yet to me her mind could only have been composed as simply as that kind of drawing. You may ask what possible use it is to compare her character to a drawing. Probably not much, but the truth was that while she waited on me, I was comparing myself, who had just read through
Gedanke
, with Saku, who was now sitting quietly, a black-lacquer tray on her knees, and I was jolted by the thought of why my own mind was as complicated as a painting done in thick oils. I had to confess that until then I had been proud of my mind working in a way more complicated than that of others, evidence of the high education it had received. But somehow the functioning of that mind was exhausting me without my having been aware that it was. As ill luck would have it, I found it sad to realize I could not live without analyzing everything minutely. As I put down my ricebowl on the table, I saw in Saku's face something sacred.

"Saku, do you sometimes think over various things?"

"I have nothing special to think about, so . . ."

"You say you don't think? That's good. It's best not to think about anything."

"If I do, I don't have the brains to put things right, so there's no point in trying to."

"How lucky you are!"

My outburst startled her. Perhaps she felt I had ridiculed her. I was sorry I had spoken in that way.

To my surprise, my mother returned from Kamakura that evening. At that moment I had been sitting on a rattan chair in the shade of the open hallway upstairs watching the sun setting and listening to Saku, barefoot in the front garden, sprinkling the grounds. When I went down to the entrance, I was even more surprised to see Chiyoko instead of Goichi, whom I had expected to accompany my mother home. She was just coming up from the stepstone behind my mother. I had been sitting on that rattan chair with no thought in mind of Chiyoko at all. And if I had actually thought of her, I couldn't have done so without linking her to Takagi. I believed that for the time being these two couldn't possibly leave the stage at Kamakura. Even before exchanging greetings with my mother, whose sunburned complexion had slightly darkened, I wanted to ask Chiyoko why she had come. And those actually were my first words.

"I came to bring my aunt home. Why? Does it surprise you?"

"That was very kind of you," I replied. My feelings toward Chiyoko after my trip to Kamakura differed considerably from what they had been prior to the visit. And there was a considerable difference between the feelings I had during the visit and those I had experienced since returning home. Furthermore, there was quite a difference in my feelings on seeing Chiyoko together with Takagi and having her here before me separated from him. Chiyoko said she had accompanied my mother because entrusting her to Goichi's care would have been too great a worry. While Saku was washing and wiping her feet from working in the garden, Chiyoko acted the faithful niece she used to be by taking a summer kimono from my mother's dresser and helping her change out of her traveling clothes.

I asked my mother if she'd had a nice time since my deparature.

"Nothing particularly eventful happened," she replied with a satisfied look on her face. "Yet," she added, "it's been a long time since I've had such a good time, thanks to all of you."

It sounded to me as if my mother were acknowledging to Chiyoko, who was beside her, the kindness owed her. I asked Chiyoko if she planned to return to Kamakura that evening.

"I'll stay overnight."

"Where?"

"Well, I could go to Uchisaiwaicho, but the house is so big that it would be too lonely. I wonder if I should spend the night here—it's been such a long time since I stayed over. May I, Auntie?"

It seemed to me that Chiyoko had left Kamakura with the definite intention of spending the night at my home. I confess that in less than ten minutes I had been compelled, while sitting before her, to observe, estimate, and again interpret her words and behavior from a certain angle. My awareness of this made me feel uncomfortable. Moreover, my nerves felt too worn out for that kind of effort. Was I being unavoidably obliged to make my mind work in spite of my desire not to? Or was Chiyoko forcing me to move against my will? Whichever it was, it annoyed me.

"Chiyo-chan, you didn't have to take the trouble to come when Goichi could just as easily have done it."

"But it was my responsibility. I was the one who invited my aunt down, wasn't I?"

"Then I ought to have asked you to accompany me home, since you invited me too."

"Then you ought to have listened to us and stayed longer!"

"No, I mean the time—at the time I was leaving."

"Well, I would have looked like a hospital nurse then. Of course I wouldn't have minded looking like one. I'd have come with you. Why didn't you speak up at the time?"

"Because it seemed that if I had, I might have been turned down."

"I'd have been the one most likely to have been turned down if I had offered to accompany you, wouldn't I have, Auntie? When, on this rare occasion, you finally accepted our invitation, you looked sullen and serious the entire time. You really are a little sick."

"Maybe that was why he wanted you to accompany him," my mother said laughing.

Until just about an hour ago when my mother had returned, I hadn't in the least expected Chiyoko to be coming with her. I don't have to repeat that here, but I had expected that the information my mother would bring me about Takagi would almost certainly be about Chiyoko's future. I had also anticipated the sorrow of seeing the mild face of my mother darkened pitifully with anxiety and disappointment. But at that very moment I actually saw the opposite. Unchanged before me were aunt and niece, as intimate as they had always been. Each of them added her warmth and freshness to the other's and, to my own pleasure, to me as well.