A Spring Night
This is a story I heard recently from N—, a nurse. N— appears to be rather tenacious. A person whose sharp canines can always be seen beyond dry lips.
At the time, I was bedridden with an inflamed intestine on the second floor of an inn where my brother was summering. Though I had had diarrhea for a week it showed no sign of stopping. So N—, who had originally come there for my little brother, went out of her way to help me.
One rainy afternoon in May, while cooking up some porridge in a pan, N— offhandedly mentioned this story to me.
—-
One spring night, N— ended up at the household of one Ushigome Noda following a nurses’ conference. There was no man in charge of the Noda family. There was an old woman with her hair in a bob, an unmarried young woman, the young woman’s younger brother, and finally a maid. When N— went to this house, she felt some strange feeling of depression. It might have been because both the young woman and her brother suffered from consumption. But it might have been the pitifully small garden wrapped around a room detached from the house and overgrown with horsetail. In truth, the innumerable horsetails were, to use N—’s words, “poking up just like black bamboo through a porch.”
The old woman called the young woman Miss Yuki, and the son was only Master Seitarō. Miss Yuki seemed have a superior spirit, and even when taking her temperature, what N— saw was her looking through the thermometer without acknowledgement of N—. Seitarō, in contrast to Miss Yuki, was not a bother to N—. Not only did he always do as told, he would even blush whenever he spoke to her. The old woman seemed to hold Miss Yuki in higher regard than Seitarō. And yet it was not Miss Yuki who was gravely ill, but Seitarō.
“Well, I have no memory of raising such a cowardly creature as that.”
The old woman always grumbled like this whenever when came to the detached room (Seitarō slept in there). However, the soon-to-be twenty-one Seitarō rarely gave a retort. He just continued looking upwards, eyes closed in embarrassment. And his face would go totally, transparently, white. While N— changed poultices, she said that she sometimes felt the shadows of the surrounding horsetails on those cheeks.
One night, before ten, N— went to buy some ice in a well-lit neighborhood two or three blocks away. On the way back, when she climbed the deserted path on the hill to the residence, something grabbed N— from behind, hanging from her. N— was of course surprised. But what was also surprising was that when she recoiled, cringing, and turned to face the person on her shoulders, the face she glimpsed in the darkness was none other than Seitarō’s. And it was not just the face that was none other than Seitarō’s. The shortly cropped hair, the blue-and-white clothes, they were all Seitarō’s. However, there was no way that Seitarō, who the day before yesterday had suffered a hemorrhage of the lungs, should have been out and about. Not to mention that there was no way he would be doing such mockery.
“Miss, gimme some money!” he called in a cloying voice, still resolutely wrapped around her. It was so much unlike him that N— wondered if it was not his voice. The brave-hearted N—, grabbing her opponent’s hand firmly with her left hand, said, “What is this disrespect? I am a member of this household, and if you speak such things to me, I shall call for the gatekeeper!”
Despite that, her opponent continued with his, “Gimme some money!” N— slowly returned to her position, then once again looked back at the boy. The facial features were still certainly those of the hopelessly shy Seitarō. A sudden feeling of unease overtook N—, and, without letting go of the hand, she shouted at the top of her lungs.
“Gatekeeper! Help!”
At the sound of N—’s voice, her opponent tried to break free of her grasp. At the same time N— let go. Then her opponent, unsteady, took off running like the dickens.
N—, out of breath (later on she would realize that she had a number of wrapped bundles of ice tied to her chest), ran to the entrance of the Noda home. The inside was quiet, of course. Poking her head into the living room, she felt slightly embarrassed by the old woman with the evening paper spread out in front of her.
“What happened to you, N—?” the old woman said when she saw N—, in a tone approaching rebuke. This had nothing to do with her being surprised by N—’s crashing footsteps. No, it was because N— was in stitches, unable to stop her body from shaking with laughter.
“No, it is because when I was coming to the hill, there was someone who played a joke on me…”
“Him?”
“Yes, he grabbed me from behind and said, ‘Miss, gimme some money!’”
“Ah, that reminds me, there’s some good-for-nothing rascal Kobori something-or-other terrorizing the neighborhood…”
Then, a voice came from the next room. It was, of course, Miss Yuki’s. And to both N— and to the old woman, she said, with a surprising sharpness, “Mother, can you keep it down a bit?”
N—, taking light offense to Miss Yuki’s words—no, not offense, but rather disdain—took the opportunity to rise and go out of the room. But the face of the delinquent who so resembled Seitarō still remained before her eyes. No, not his face. Just the outline of Seitarō’s own face.
After about five minutes had passed, N— returned to the porch and took the bags of ice to the detached room. Might Seitarō not be in there, might he have even died? N— was not totally unconcerned by these thoughts. But when she got to the detached room and looked in, Seitarō was sleeping by himself under a dim lamp. His face was as deathly pale as always. All the better for the horsetails growing all throughout the garden to cast shadows on his face.
“I’ll change your ice pack,” N— started to say, before looking behind her.
—-
When the story was finished, I said, looking at N—, some fairly wicked words.
“Seitarō, huh? So you had a thing for him, right?”
N—’s reply was quick, and more wistful than I had expected.
“Yes, I did.”
(August 21, 1926)