Cold
It was a snowy morning. Yasukichi, on a chair in the physics instructor’s office, was gazing into the flame of a stove. The flame, as if it had breath, flickered and burned yellowly, and sank into dusky ash. This proved that it was continuing to battle the cold hanging in the room. Yasukichi, with sudden conception of the cosmic cold beyond the earth, felt some sort of sympathy for the glowing coals.
“Horikawa.”
Yasukichi looked up into the face of Miyamoto, a bachelor of science, standing before the stove. The spectacled Miyamoto, hands thrust into his pockets, had a friendly smile beneath his thin mustache.
“Horikawa. You do know that women are objects?”
“Well, I know they’re animals.”
“Not animals. Objects! I’ve discerned this as a result of my recent labors.”
“Mr. Horikawa, you mustn’t take what Mr. Miyamoto says seriously.” These were the words of the other physics instructor, the bachelor of science Hasegawa, whose hairline was receding. Yasukichi turned to the man. Hasegawa finished checking an exam sheet in the desk behind Yasukichi, and a bewildered smile reached his face.
“How rude! Shouldn’t you be overjoyed at my discovery, Hasegawa? Oh, Horikawa, you do know the law of convective transference?”
“Convective transference? That have something to do with moving prisoners around?”
“You literary types worry me.” During this exchange, Miyamoto fed more coal into the stove, off which the flames reflected.
“So, when you touch two different objects together, of varying temperatures, the heat continues to move from the warm object to the cold one, until both of the objects are about equal.”
“Isn’t that obvious?”
“That’s the called the law of convective transference! Now, let’s make a woman an object. Okay? If a woman is an object, then it follows that a man is as well. Therefore, you can conclude that sex is the same as heat. When this man and woman touch together, their lovemaking, like convective transference, ought to continue to move from the more distracted man to the not as distracted woman, until their sex is about equal. Surely that’s how it is in your case, Hasegawa.”
“Hey, it’s started!” called out Hasegawa, rather much happier than would be expected, in a laugh as though he was being tickled.
“E is the amount of heat that moves over S area in T time. Therefore—got it? H is temperature, X is the distance measured from the direction of the heat conduction, and K is the thermal conductivity determined by the substance! So, in Hasegawa’s case…”
Miyamoto began to write official-looking things on the small blackboard. However, he turned around suddenly and, totally disappointed, tossed away the fragment of chalk.
“Really, with an amateur like you, Hasegawa, I can’t even brag about my discovery! Anyway, it appears that Hasegawa, in accordance with formality, has brought up his fiancé.”
“If there really was such a custom, the world would be at ease.” Yasukichi stretched out his legs and gazed out faintly at the snowy world outside the window. Because this physics’ instructor’s room was on the corner of the second floor, it was easy to look out over the exercise grounds, the lines of pines opposite that, and the red brick building beyond those with once glance. And the ocean—the ocean’s dim waves flickered in the space between the buildings.
“Instead it’s the literati who are on the rise. Any prospects for your books, by the way.”
“I can hardly sell a single copy, as usual. Doesn’t seem like there’s any convective transference going on between authors and readers. By the way, your wedding hasn’t happened yet?”
“No, it’s going to be about another month. There’s so much to do for that, and I’m in a state when I can’t study something.”
“So anxious you can’t study, huh?”
“I’m not Miyamoto, and even if first and foremost we need a house, I’m no good when I’m not renting. To tell you the truth, this past Sunday I walked pretty much the whole city. And even then when I found ones that seemed open, they were already promised to somebody else.
“What about me? If you don’t mind taking the train to school every day.”
“I’m afraid you’re a little too far away. I hear there’s places to rent in that area, and the misses is hoping for that area—hey, Mr. Horikawa! Aren’t your shoes going to burn?”
Before he realized it, Yasukichi’s shoes had touched the body of the stove, and along with a hazy mist rising there was the stink of burning grass.
“There’s your convective transference again!”
Wiping his glasses, a grin spread across Miyamoto’s nearsighted face.
X X X
A frosty morning, four or five days later. To catch the train, Yasukichi was flat out running past a resort. It was an embankment of about ten feet, wheat fields to the right of the road, the train tracks to the left. Faint sounds died over the deserted fields. It seemed as though it could only be the sound of somebody walking in the fields, but in truth it was the sound of the frost beneath the ground, collapsing on itself.
Eventually the eight o’clock outbound train, blowing its long whistle, passed the embankment with not much speed. Yasukichi’s inbound train should be about half an hour later. He took out his watch. However, somehow it was 8:15. Yasukichi blamed the time discrepancy on his watch. “No need to worry about missing the train,” he of course thought. The wheat on the side of the road was gradually becoming hedges. Yasukichi produced an Asahi cigarette and started walking more casually than before.
The road, littered with coal cinders and the like, built to a crossing at a mound—by chance Yasukichi found himself here. Yasukichi noticed people crowded on both sides of the crossing. He suddenly thought of one of them being run over. Happily, along the fence by the crossing, stopped on a bicycle laden with goods was an acquaintance of his, the butcher’s son. Yasukichi tapped on his shoulder from behind, cigarette in his hand.
“Hey, what’s up?”
“Somebody got run over. The outbound train just now,” the boy said rapidly. His face, held by rabbit-fur earmuffs, was glittering with a strange liveliness.
“Who?”
“The crossing guard. He got hit thinking he would save one of the students who looked like he was in the way. Oh! There’s a bookseller named Nagai in Hachiman-mae, right? It was his daughter who was about to get run over.
“But he saved her?”
“Yeah, she’s crying over there.”
‘Over there’ was a crowd of people opposite the railway crossing. Indeed, there was a girl there, being questioned by a policeman. Beside him was some minor official-looking man occasionally speaking. The crossing guard was—Yasukichi saw, in front of the guard’s hut, a body laid under a straw mat. In truth, it caused him to feel, along with disgust, a curiosity. At a distance, it seemed all you could see from under the mat was just the shoes.
“Those people took the body away.”
Beneath the signal pole on this side were two or three railroad workers, huddled around a small fire. The small yellow flame produced neither light nor smoke. It was just that cold. One of the workers was warming his breech-covered rear.
Yasukichi passed the railway crossing. The tracks, being close to the station, spanned any number of crossings. Each time he passed a crossing, he wondered if it had been this one where the crossing guard was hit. The blood, still on the tracks, spoke to the tragedy of two or three minutes ago. Yasukichi, mostly by reflex, moved his gaze to the other side of the crossing. This, however, had no effect. He was taken aback by the sight of the gobs of red collected on the tracks glimmering in the cold, and in the same instant it seared his heart vividly. And furthermore, that blood was faintly ascending as it evaporated…
After a while, Yasukichi continued his unrelaxed pace towards the train platform. His head was full of the grisly spectacle he had seen moments ago. In particular, the vapor ascending from the trail of blood was stuck firmly in his head. It was then that he recalled the convective transference they had discussed. As the law which Miyamoto had taught said, the heat of the life within that blood, with no thoughts whatsoever of behaving unnaturally was cruelly passing into the train tracks. And furthermore, it makes no difference whose life it is; the crossing guard who sacrificed himself in the line of duty or a hardened criminal, their life cruelly departs. Yasukichi understood that these thoughts were pointless, of course. The faithful child must drown, the chaste wife must burn: he had tried to persuade himself of this many a time. However, the facts he had seen before his very eyes left such a deep impression that it could not easily be explained away with logic.
And despite all that, the people on the platform, independent of his feelings, were all making happy faces. Yasukichi felt frustration at this. The booming voices of the navy officers, in particular, were materially unpleasant. He lit his second Asahi cigarette and walked to the platform. From here there was a place where he could see the railway crossing, two or three blocks down. It seemed that the groups of people had dispersed at this point. There was just the tiny point of the railway workers’ fire, yellow flame flickering.
Yasukichi felt some kind of sympathy for that distant flame. However, there was no doubt that seeing the crossing made him feel uneasy, of course. He turned his back to it and returned to the crowd of people. But before he could walk ten steps, he discovered that he had dropped one of his red leather gloves. When he had lit his cigarette, he had held the right glove he had removed. Yasukichi turned around. There, before the platform, the glove had tumbled out of the palm of his hand. It was as if it was silently telling him to stay put.
Beneath the frosty sky, Yasukichi sensed the soul of that one left behind red leather glove. And at the same time, he felt the faint rays of warm sunlight coming into the freezing world.
(April 1924)