To the Spring Equinox and Beyond (42 page)

Ichizo looked as if my words had actually reassured him. I myself felt slightly reassured. On the other hand, the suspicion arose in me that if consolatory words as groundless as mine were having some effect on so clearheaded a person as Ichizo, it must be indicative of a nervous system that had gone slightly out of tune. Suddenly I imagined something extreme happening, and I began having misgivings about letting him travel by himself.

"How about my going with you?"

"Together . . . well . . ." He came out with an embarrassed smile.

"You'd rather I didn't, you mean?"

"Under ordinary circumstances I'd have asked you to come along. But I myself don't know just when and where I'll go. It's a journey without order that's going to take me wherever my whims lead me, so you'd be inconvenienced. Besides, it would be less pleasant for me if I were restricted by you. . . ."

"Then I won't go," I said, withdrawing my suggestion.

After Ichizo left, I still found myself oddly concerned about him. Since I had branded that dark secret on his mind, I felt I should shoulder the responsibility for anything resulting from it. I felt like seeing how my sister was and hearing from her how Ichizo had been recently. I called my wife from the sitting room to tell her all that had happened and to ask her advice. As one who takes things in her stride, which is rather unusual for a woman, she said that the trouble had come from my talking too much about what was unnecessary. At first she paid little attention to what I was saying, but eventually she assured me. "How can Ichizo possibly go wrong?" she said. "Young as he is, he has a lot more discretion than you!"

"What you say sounds as if Ichizo's anxious about me."

"Of course anyone would be anxious about you, seeing you sitting there with your hands in your pockets and that imported pipe in your mouth!"

Before long our children returned from school, and the entire house suddenly became noisy. I forgot about Ichizo and had no time to think of him further until evening, when my sister unexpectedly turned up. Her visit gave me a sudden chill.

As usual, she sat in the midst of our family gathering, exchanging with my wife long apologies for not calling and offering the usual compliments of the season. As I had been sitting with them, I lost the opportunity to escape. "I hear Ichizo's leaving on a trip tomorrow," I put in during the course of their talk.

"As for that—" my sister began, looking somewhat more seriously at me.

Without letting her finish, I said by way of defending him, "If he wants to go, let him. He's worked hard on his exams. If he gets no rest after racking his brains like that, it'll be bad for his health."

She agreed, of course, but stated that her only fear was that his health might not be good enough to get him through the trip. Finally she asked me if I thought his condition was all right from what I had seen of him. I told her it was, and my wife also thought as much. My sister looked more dissatisfied about something than reassured. I thought her use of the word health did not really concern Ichizo's physical condition but must have meant his mental state, and I felt a private stab of pain. She had engraved on her brow misgivings that seemed to have come from something she gathered intuitively from my look. She asked me, "Tsune-san, was there anything unusual about Ichizo when he visited you a while back?"

"Not at all. It was quite the usual Ichizo I saw. Right, Osen?"

"Yes, he wasn't the least bit different."

"I think so too," said my sister. "But somehow there's something odd about him these days."

"In what way?"

"Well, it's hard to explain."

"It's all because of the examinations," I quickly put in, denying her statement.

"It's only your imagination, dear sister," my wife added.

Both of us having comforted her, she at last looked somewhat satisfied and talked on until she agreed to have supper with us. Later, my children and I saw her to the streetcar stop. I had intended only to take a stroll, but I remained uneasy and sent the children home by themselves. I took a seat beside my sister on the streetcar in spite of her telling me to return. We finally arrived at her house.

Going in, I called out before she did for Ichizo, who was fortunately in his room upstairs, to come down. I told him that his mother had been quite worried about him and had taken the trouble to visit me at Yarai and that I had just now managed to set her mind at rest by having a talk with her. Accordingly, it was on my responsibility that he was being allowed to make his trip. "So to give us as little trouble as possible, you should take care to write immediately on arriving or setting out from wherever you happen to be or from wherever you stay so that we can call you back in case you're needed." Ichizo replied that he was already quite aware of such precautions without my having to warn him. He smiled as he glanced at his mother's face.

I believed I had somewhat succeeded in easing my sister's concern, and I returned by streetcar to Yarai at around eleven o'clock.

My wife came out to the porch to meet me. "How did it go?" she asked, as though she had been waiting impatiently.

"Well, I think we can relax," I replied. Actually, I did feel relieved, so I didn't go to Shimbashi Station the following day to see Ichizo off.

The letters he promised came from all the places he reached. They amounted to nearly one a day, but most of them were no more than two or three lines of simple description on picture postcards of the places he visited. My wife ridiculed me for looking relieved each time I received one. Once I said to her that, judging from the cards, he didn't seem to be in any danger and that it appeared her prediction had come true. She answered bluntly, "It's only natural. Heaven forbid that those things you read in the newspaper and in novels should happen so often!" My wife is a woman who regards newspaper articles in the same light as novels. And she firmly believes both untrue. She's a woman who's that alienated from romance.

I was quite satisfied with the postcards, but my brows relaxed even more when letters in envelopes began reaching me. For in them I found no trace, as I had originally feared, of a hand dyeing the rolled letter paper with melancholy hues. Unless you actually read them, you couldn't possibly know how those phrases on stationery indicated with so much more clarity than those postcards did his change in mood. I have a few here that I've kept.

Among the various things accounting for this change in mood—for example, the air in Kyoto and the water in Uji—what seems to have given our Tokyo-bred Ichizo the greatest stimulation was the way of speech of the people who live around Kyoto and Osaka. To those of us who have frequented that area, this probably sounds ridiculous, but the smooth, quiet drawl of their speech may have had a much more soothing effect on Ichizo's nervous condition than sedatives would have. What? Such an accent from the lips of young women? I don't know about that. Of course, words from a pretty young mouth would probably have a much greater effect than those from any other. And since Ichizo is young, he might approach such a woman on his own. But, oddly enough, what he's written has to do with old women:

To hear people of this region speak makes me feel as if I were submitting myself to a slight drunkenness. Some say they dislike that way of speaking for sounding too clammy, but it seems just the reverse to me. What I dislike is Tokyo speech. Tokyoites are unduly proud of speaking in tones as angular and rough as confetti, and they swagger, jarring their listener's mood. Yesterday I came to Osaka from Kyoto, and today I called on a friend who works for the
Asahi
newspaper. He took me to Mino'o, famous for its maple leaves in the fall. Of course I didn't see any colored leaves at this time of year, but the place was splendid, with mountains and rills and waterfalls down a precipice where the path ends.

To give me a rest, my friend took me into a two-storied building he said was his newspaper clubhouse. Inside was a wide dirt floor extending the entire length of the building. The floor had been entirely tiled, so that it gave me an impression as tranquil as if I were in a temple in China. I was told the house had first been built as a villa but was later bought by the
Asahi
and turned into a clubhouse. Even if it had been a villa, what was the use of this broad area all paved with tiles? It looked so odd that I asked my friend, but he had no idea about it. Actually I'm not really that much concerned. Only I thought that since you're versed in such matters, I'd add this superfluous detail.

What I really wanted to tell you about is not this wide floor but rather about the old women who were there. There were two of them, one standing, the other sitting on a chair. Both of them had their heads shaved. The one standing greeted my friend as soon as we entered. "Oh, sorry," she said, "I was just shaving granny here. She's eighty-six. . . . Sit still a moment, dear. There's only a little to finish. . . . There now, you're clean-shaven, not a hair left. There's nothing to worry about." The one sitting passed her hand over her head and said, "Why, thanks!" My friend looked back at me and laughed. "Quite a rustic scene, isn't it?" he said. I laughed too. Not only did I laugh, but I felt as much at home as if I had been born a century ago. I want to take this feeling back to Tokyo as my souvenir.

I too hoped he would bring to my sister this feeling as his travel gift to her.

The next letter, from Akashi, is somewhat more intricate and therefore indicates more distinctly Ichizo's character.

I came here this evening. The moon is up and the garden is bright, quite a contrast to my room in the shade, which seems gloomy. I had my supper and I was smoking and looking out toward the sea—it's just in front of the garden. As it's a calm evening without even a ripple of wave, the beach looks scarcely distinguishable from a riverside or the edge of a pond. One of those barges people sit on to enjoy the evening cool came drifting by. The figure of the boat was hardly perceptible in the darkness, but with its broad flat bottom it had so gentle a shape that I could hardly imagine it was floating on the sea. I suppose it must have had a roof over it, for hanging from its eaves were a number of painted paper lanterns. Beyond the faint light from these lanterns some people seemed to be sitting. I heard the sound of a samisen too. But on the whole it was very quiet and slid away before me as if it were enjoying its smooth movement.

As I quietly followed its shadow with my eyes, I was reminded of an anecdote about my grandfather in his young days. Of course I think you must remember it, the story of his having gone boating to enjoy moon-viewing as men about town are said to have done during the Edo period. My mother told it to me a few times. It went something like this, didn't it? He had a boat with a roof over it rowed up the Sumida as far as the Ayase. Standing in the midst of the perfect harmony of the silent moon and the silent water reflecting the moonlight, each enhancing the other's beauty, he hurled up into the light of the moon an unfolded silver fan he had brought along with him especially for that purpose. The fan turned round and round on its pivot, its silver-painted paper gleaming until it dropped onto the water. What a beautiful spectacle that must have been! And not only that single fan, but each of the others in the boat tossed up his own flickering glimmer, each fan competing with the other—a scene of weird beauty even in imagination.