It suddenly occurred to me to wonder if there might not be a suitable house somewhere nearby. I immediately crossed the grassy expanse and set off north along a narrow lane. Today it is not a particularly good area, and even back then the houses were fairly ramshackle and run-down. I wandered around, ducking down lanes and into side alleys. Finally I asked a cake-seller if she knew of any little house for rent in the area.
“Hmm,” she said, and cocked her head for a moment or two. “I can’t think of anything offhand . . .” Seeing that she apparently had nothing to suggest, I gave up hope and was just turning for home when she asked, “Would you lodge with a family?”
That set me thinking. Taking private lodgings in someone’s home would save me a lot of the trouble involved in owning my own house. I sat down at her stall and asked her to tell me the details.
It was the house of a military man, or rather of his surviving family. The cake-seller thought he had probably died in the Sino-Japanese War.2 Until about a year before, the family had been living near the Officers’ Academy in Ichigaya, but the place was too grand, with stables and outbuildings, and too big for the family, so they had sold it and moved to this area. Apparently, however, they felt lonely here, just the two of them, and had asked her if she knew of a suitable lodger. She told me the household consisted solely of the widow, her daughter, and a maid.
It sounded perfect for me, being so quiet and secluded, but I feared that if I were to turn up suddenly and offer myself, an unknown student, the widow might turn me down. Perhaps I should give up the idea then and there, I thought. But I was dressed quite respectably for a student and besides, I was wearing my school cap. You will probably scoff at the idea that this was important. But in those days, unlike today, students had quite a good reputation, and my square cap invested me with a certain confidence. And so I followed the cake-seller’s directions and called in at the house unannounced.
Introducing myself to the widow, I explained the purpose of my visit. She asked me numerous questions about my background, my school, and my studies. Something in my answers must have reassured her, for she said right away that I could move in whenever I wanted. I admired her thoroughly upright, plainspoken air—a typical officer’s wife, I decided. On the other hand, she also rather surprised me. Why should a woman of such apparent strength of character feel lonely?
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I moved in immediately and was given the room where our initial interview had taken place. It was the best room in the house. At that time a few better-quality student boardinghouses were springing up in the Hongō area, and I had a fair idea of the top of the range in student accommodation. The room I was now master of was far finer than anything else available. When I moved in, it seemed almost too good for a simple student like me.
It was a large room of eight tatami mats. The alcove had a pair of staggered shelves set into one side, and the wall opposite the veranda contained a long built-in cupboard. There were no windows, but the sun streamed in from the south-facing veranda.
On the day I arrived, I noted the flowers arranged in the alcove, and a koto propped beside them.1 I did not care for either. I had been brought up by a father who appreciated the Chinese style of poetry, calligraphy, and tea-making, and since childhood my own tastes had also tended toward the Chinese. Perhaps for this reason I despised this sort of merely charming decorativeness.
My uncle had squandered the collection of objects that my father had accumulated during his lifetime, but some at least had survived. Before I left home, I had asked my school friend to care for most of them and carried four or five of the best scrolls away with me in my trunk. I intended to take them out as soon as I arrived and hang one in the alcove to enjoy it. But when I saw the flower arrangement and the koto, I lost my courage. Later I learned that these flowers had been put there especially to welcome me, and I smiled drily to myself. The koto had been there all along, for want of somewhere else to store it.
From this description you will no doubt have sensed the presence of a young girl somewhere in the story. I must admit, I myself had been curious about the daughter ever since I first heard of her. Perhaps because these guilty thoughts had robbed me of a natural response, or perhaps because I was still awkward with people, when I first met her I managed only a flustered greeting. She, in turn, blushed.
My imaginary idea of Ojōsan2 had been built on hints gained from her mother’s appearance and manner. This fantasized image of her, however, was far from flattering. Having decided that the mother conformed to the type of the military wife, I proceeded to assume that Ojōsan would be much the same. But one look at the girl’s face overturned all my preconceptions. In their place a new and utterly unanticipated breath of Woman pervaded me. From that moment the flower arrangement in the alcove ceased to displease me; the koto propped beside it was no longer an annoyance.
When the flowers in the alcove inevitably began to wilt, they were replaced with a new arrangement. From time to time the koto was carried off to the L-shaped room diagonally opposite mine. I would sit at the desk in my room, chin propped on hands, listening to its plangent tone. I had no idea whether the playing was good or bad, but the fact that the pieces were fairly simple suggested that the player was not very skilled. No doubt her playing was of a piece with her flower-arranging skills. I knew something of flower arranging and could see that she was far from good at it.
Yet day after day flowers were unashamedly arrayed in my alcove, although the arrangement always took the same form, and the receptacle never changed. As for the music, it was odder than the flowers. She simply plucked dully away at the instrument. I never heard her really sing the accompanying songs. She did murmur the words, it’s true, but in such a tiny voice that she might have been whispering secrets. And whenever the teacher scolded her, the voice ceased altogether.
But I gazed in delight at those clumsy flower arrangements, and I listened with pleasure to the koto’s awkward twang.
CHAPTER 66
By the time I left home, I was already thoroughly disenchanted with the world. My conviction that others could not be trusted had, you might say, penetrated me to the marrow. My despised uncle and aunt and relatives seemed representative of the whole of humanity. Even on the train I found myself glancing warily at my neighbors, and when someone occasionally spoke to me, my mistrust only deepened. I was sunk in depression. At times I felt a suffocating pressure, as if I had swallowed lead. Yet at the same time every nerve was on edge.
This state of mind was largely what had prompted my decision to leave the noisy boardinghouse, I think. True, my financial security meant I could consider living in a place of my own, but my earlier self would never have thought of going to such bother, no matter how much money might be in my pocket.
For some time after my move to Koishikawa, I continued in a highly strung state. I kept glancing furtively about, so much so that I unnerved even myself. Although my mind and eyes were abnormally active, however, my tongue grew less and less inclined to speak. I sat silently at my desk, observing those around me like a cat. Sometimes my keen awareness of them was so intense it shamed me to think of it. All that distinguished me from a thief was that I was stealing nothing, I thought in self-disgust.
You must find all this most peculiar—how on earth did I have energy to spare to feel attracted to Ojōsan, to delight in gazing at her clumsy flower arrangements or listen with joy to her inept playing? I can only answer that these were the facts, and as such I must lay them before you. I will leave it up to your clever mind to analyze them, and simply add one thing. I distrusted the human race where money was concerned, but not yet in the realm of love. So despite the obvious contradiction, both states of mind happily coexisted inside me.
I always called the widow by the polite title of Okusan, so I shall do the same here. Okusan apparently considered me a quiet, well-behaved person, and she was full of praise for my studious habits. She made no mention of the uneasy glances or the troubled, suspicious
air. Perhaps she simply did not notice it, or maybe she was too polite to speak of it; at any event, it never seemed to bother her. Once she even admiringly told me I had a generous heart. I was honest enough to blushingly deny this, but she insisted. “You only say that because you’re not aware of it yourself,” she said earnestly.
The fact is, she had not originally planned on having a student as a boarder. When she had asked around the neighborhood if anyone knew of a lodger, she had thought in terms of a government official or the like. I imagine she was envisaging some underpaid fellow who couldn’t afford a place of his own. Compared with her impoverished imaginary lodger, I struck her as far more generous in my ways. I guess I was in fact more liberal with my money than someone in more straitened circumstances would have been. But this was a product of circumstance rather than any natural generosity, so it was hardly an indication of what kind of person I was. In her woman’s way, however, Okusan did her best to view my liberality with money as an expression of my general character.
CHAPTER 67
Okusan’s warm perception of me inevitably started to influence my state of mind. After a while my glances became less mistrustful, and my heart felt more tranquil and settled within me. This new happiness I owed, in effect, to the way Okusan and the rest of the household turned a blind eye on all my wariness and shifty glances. No one reacted nervously to me, and so my own nerves grew steadily calmer.
Perhaps she did indeed find me generous and open-hearted, as she claimed, but Okusan was a wise woman, and her treatment of me may well have been intentional. Or she may simply not have noticed anything odd, since all my nervous activity was largely in my mind and may not have been evident to others.
Gradually, as my inner turmoil subsided, I grew closer to the family. I could now joke with Okusan and her daughter. Sometimes they invited me to have tea with them, and on other evenings I would bring cakes and invite them to join me in my room. My social world had suddenly expanded, I felt. I constantly found my precious study time frittered away on conversation, but oddly, this disruption never bothered me. Okusan was, of course, a lady of leisure. Ojōsan not only went to school but had her flower arranging and koto study, so she should by rights have been extremely busy. But to my surprise she seemed to have all the time in the world. Whenever the three of us came across one another, we would settle down for a long chat.
It was generally Ojōsan who arrived to fetch me. She would come via the veranda to stand in front of my room, or else approach through the sitting room and appear at the sliding doors that led to the room next to mine. She would always pause in front of my room. Then she would call my name and say, “Are you studying?”
I was usually sitting staring at some difficult book lying open on the desk in front of me, so no doubt I looked impressively studious. But to tell the truth, I wasn’t devoting myself to my books as much as it might seem. Though my eyes were fixed on the page, I was really just waiting for her to come for me. If she failed to appear, I would have to make a move. I would rise to my feet, make my way to her room, and ask the same question—“Are you studying?”
Ojōsan occupied a six-mat room beyond the sitting room. Okusan was sometimes in the sitting room, sometimes in her daughter’s. Neither had a room she considered exclusively her own. Despite the partition between them, the two rooms formed a single space, with mother and daughter moving freely between them. When I stood outside and called, it was always Okusan who answered, “Come on in.” Even if Ojōsan happened to be there as well, she rarely responded herself.
In time Ojōsan developed the occasional habit of coming to my room on some errand and then settling down to talk. Whenever this happened, a strange uneasiness beset my heart. It wasn’t simply a nervous response to finding myself alone face-to-face with a young woman. Her presence made me oddly fidgety and ill at ease, and this unnatural behavior distressed me as a self-betrayal. She, however, was entirely at her ease. It was difficult to believe that this unabashed girl and the girl who managed to produce only a timid whisper when practicing her koto singing could be the same person. On occasion she stayed so long that her mother called her from the sitting room. “Coming,” she would answer, but she continued to sit there. Yet she was far from a mere child—this much my eyes told me clearly. And I could see too that she was behaving in a way that let me know as much.
CHAPTER 68
I would sigh with relief after Ojōsan left my room, but I also felt a certain dissatisfaction and regret. Perhaps there was something girlish in me. I imagine a modern youth such as you would certainly think so. But in those days this was the way most of us were.
Okusan rarely left the house, and on the few occasions when she did, she never left me alone with her daughter. I can’t judge whether this was intentional. It may be out of place for me to say this, but after careful observation I could only conclude that Okusan wanted to bring us closer, yet at other times she seemed secretly guarded. I had never been in such a situation, and it often made me uncomfortable.
I needed Okusan to make her position clear. Rationally speaking, her attitudes were clearly contradictory. But with the memory of my uncle’s deceitfulness still so fresh, I could not repress another suspicion—that one of her two conflicting attitudes must be fake. I was at a loss to decide which was the real one, and I could make no sense of why she behaved so strangely. At times I chose simply to lay the fault entirely at the door of womanhood itself. When it comes down to it, I told myself, she’s acting this way because she’s a woman, and women are stupid. Whenever my cogitations arrived at a dead end, this answer was the one I reached for.
Yet although I despised women, I could not find it in me to despise Ojōsan. Faced with her, my theorizing lost its power. I felt for her a love that was close to pious faith. You may find it odd that I use a specifically religious word to describe my feelings for a young woman, but real love, I firmly believe, is not so different from the religious impulse. Whenever I saw her face, I felt that I myself had become beautiful. At the mere thought of her, I felt elevated by contact with her nobility. If this strange phenomenon we call Love can be said to have two poles, the higher of which is a sense of holiness and the baser the impulse of sexual desire, this love of mine was undoubtedly in the grip of Love’s higher realm. Being human, of course, I could not leave my fleshly self behind, yet the eyes that beheld her, the heart that treasured thoughts of her, knew nothing of the reek of the physical.
My love for the daughter grew as my antipathy toward the mother increased, and so the relationship among the three of us ceased to be the simple thing it had once been. This change was largely internal, mind you. On the surface all was the same.
Then some little thing made me begin to wonder if I had misunderstood Okusan. I now revised my idea that one of her two contradictory attitudes toward me and her daughter must be false. They did not inhabit her heart by turns, I decided—they were both there together. Despite the apparent contradiction, I realized, her careful watchfulness did not mean she had forgotten or reconsidered her urge to bring us closer. Her wariness surely sprang from the worrying possibility that we might become more intimate than she considered proper. Her anxiety seemed to me quite unnecessary, since I felt not the slightest physical urge toward her daughter, but I now ceased to think badly of Okusan’s motives.
CHAPTER 69
Piecing together the various bits of evidence, it became clear to me, in a word, that the people of this household trusted me. In fact, I even found proof enough to convince me that this trust had existed from the very beginning. Having come to suspect others, I was oddly moved by this discovery. Were women so much more intuitive than men? I wondered. And did this account for women’s tendency to be so easily deceived? In retrospect, these thoughts seem ironic, since I was responding just as irrationally and intuitively to Ojōsan. While swearing to myself that I would trust no one, my trust in her was absolute. And yet I found her mother’s trust in me peculiar.
I did not talk muc
h about my home and was careful to make no mention of recent events. Just recalling them filled me with distress. I spent as much of our conversations as possible listening to Okusan. But she had other ideas. She was always curious about my home and the situation there, so in the end I revealed everything. When I told her that I had decided never to return, that there was nothing left for me there except the graves of my parents, she seemed deeply moved, and her daughter actually wept. I thought then that it was good to have spoken. It made me happy.
Now that I had told her all, it was abundantly clear that Okusan felt her intuitions confirmed. She began to treat me like some young relative. This did not anger me; indeed, I was pleased by it. But in time my paranoid doubts returned.
It was a tiny thing that sparked my suspicion, but as one insignificant incident was added to another, distrust gradually took root. I began to suspect that Okusan was trying to bring her daughter and me together from the same motives as my uncle. And with this thought what had appeared to be kindness suddenly seemed the actions of a cunning strategist. I brooded on this bitter conviction.
Okusan had always stated that she had wanted a lodger to look after because the house was forlornly unpeopled. This did not seem a lie to me. Having grown close enough to become her confidant, I was now quite sure it was true. On the other hand, she was not particularly wealthy. From the point of view of her own interests, she certainly had nothing to lose by cultivating the relationship.